Fan Expo part deux

Lol; to my commentor Slurm, yes; its kinda a tease to write about girls in bikinis but then don't post pics.. so here... its a girl atleast.

Honestly tho, my main goal of Fan Expo this year was to get prints of arts such as these:

I spent 90% of my time at artist's stalls looking, admiring and buying prints.. My friend that went with me didn't seem too interested or knew exactly what he liked and we got separated every 2 seconds. By time I had time to take photos, my feet killed, was hot from the lack of central air and there was alot of BO going around. But there was quite a few examples of:

Damn people walking infront of me :P
But really; we can find things like that..*cough cough* online

Fan Expo 09

Went to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's Fan Expo today.
Some highlights included:
Girls in bikinis, fat master chief, the soup nazi from Friends, smelly guys, wushu girls, Tron movie!, scary horror stuff, Live actors.

This week, ill show a print I bought from various artists there.
Gonna give this one to my buddy Capo :)

Review: Armored Core: For Answers

yes yes.. I know.. how long ago did this game come out? loll
I don't really feel engaged with any of these games that I probably would have alot of fun with because it feels like the achievements don't mean much since the game has been out for so long. There is something about.. Halo.. that i've never liked.. maybe you truly became a console gamer if you liked/played that game. Even if it did come out of pc, it plays like a console game. I'll add this to the list tho:

Halo ODST.. "why J, why for the love of g0d??"

It seems more modern than futuristic which is what i like.. you're more human than super human. More realistic guns (it seems from vids); tho I guess aliens will still have futuristic guns.. :S I never liked futuristic guns, give me Modern Warfare 2! I'm really excited as the Bungie team are fans of Firefly and 3 voice actors are from the series! Not to mention the blonde cylon from Battlestar Galactica I think plays your navigator..

But anyways; thats off topic; lets talk about Armored Core:

I've always been a rabid mechwarrior enthusiast, which reminds me to possibly try mechassault 2 and borrow it from my best friend Hunter, so I thought when I had the chance to try a game that had a more japanese lean to it, AC4a would be pretty great... uh nope.

Now i remember, it reminds me of the bandits from Samurai7 (be prepared to crave simple white rice after)
I remember reading a long time ago that one of the drawbacks to the AC series was that there was very little guidance in the game, that unless you played it for hundreds of hours or from the very first one, that you would be very lost. And I was.

There was the basic tutorial which included movement, shooting, boosting. But that was it. Didn't really let me know what was my damage meter, whether i could get it back, that if you panic, you could actually drop all your weapons... i learned that the hard way.

One of the nice things about the game was there were 4 different factions you could join which may dictate how the story progressed, but in particular it dictated the type of robot you started off with. (reminds me of Mechwarrior Mercenaries 2 and picking a sponsor.. Wolf's Dragoons, Kell Hounds.. or something else) I've always liked getting nice and close, so when I saw there was a faction that specialized in lazer swords, I jumped on....

.. and was highly disappointed.. the attack was always a lunge attack and left you vulnerable for a few seconds.. sure I could kill things in mostly one lunge, but my armor was torn to shreds easily. Lol; there was one mission that i took so much damage, that I owed the contractor money b/c my repair bill was so high!

Then I rerolled and tried a more sniper approach. It worked out slightly better... slightly.. with so many numbers on the spec screen, I couldn't remember how far each weapon's range was..
And when it came to the 1vs1 arenas.. i blew crap.. my opponent destroyed me.... I couldn't get enough distance with it to snipe or damage it enough.. i took it to maybe 60% health.. bah

shoot right arm weapon
switch right arm weapon
shoot alternate right arm weapon
shoot left arm weapon
switch left arm weapon
shoot alternate left arm weapon
shoot shoulder weapon
boost up
boost forward
boost up then forward
quick boost
super boost
farrrrrrrr too many buttons to be pressed :P

Its like street fighter (the multiple button combos) but big robots.. with actually slightly kind crappy graphics..I would stay away from this game..

Flawed System?

If Mythic did anything right, it was the Tome of Knowledge.
Can anyone agree with that?
It tracks everything you do, every little thing there is a reward and gets increasingly harder to achieve the next level.
They reward you for finding special things and putting time into it. Its all for your own personal glory, and nothing is 'that' special that everyone will seek it as well. If you don't want to, you don't have to do it. You're not stupid if you don't want lots of unlocks.

Now the achievement on the 360 system I personally don't like it.
You want to have a high score compared to other people and you always can see how many points they have; its not something you guess that they have alot of.
Case in point:

I bought Loderunner on xbox live yesterday. I used to play the computer version AGES ago on my uncle's computer.. it was really fun. I found that I was so obsessed with getting achievements that I wasn't having fun. I was getting really far in the game, but no achievements.
If there wasn't any achievements, I would be having tons of fun, killing baddies, getting gold, completing complex puzzles.
Instead I spent my time distraught that I only got 2 of 12 very hard unlocks [ie. get all the gold off enemies you trap... meaning you can't touch any of them and are blocked from most of the map]

Sometimes the achievements come from just doing what you're doing. Sometimes they're really freaking hard to get; you gotta time it perfectly.
And you dont' get anything with these points. Couldn't you use it to get additional games or map packs or it translates into microsoft points?
Worst thing is, just because they have a low amount of achievements, doesn't mean that they suck. The may be leet, but just don't play every single game that comes out.

I tip my hat to you Mythic on your Tome of Knowledge; be proud. You got something right.

Hiatus

I feel bad not blogging, but it was mainly for WAR, and now that I don't play it, its hard to be motivated to write about it. It sounds like some of the changes have made the game even better than before. I'm also not as talented as people like Overly Positive, being able to write about other gaming news. So I'll leave it with this last entry, and once fall begins with the slew of games, ill post some entries with greater frequency. Take a look at gametrailers, there are trailers for most of these games.

Keep it up tho everyone, I continue to read everyone's blog that are on my list while waiting for my shift to end at work ;)

I intend on keeping it the same, reviews, ideas, pictures (somehow being 360) and achievements.

I'm currently awaiting:

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2- Sept 15th

Borderlands - Oct 20th
- fps with experience! (think Huxley, i suppose), with randomly generated lvls, questing system, and a software that generations millions (yes) of types of guns
- unless totally screwed up, i think this will occupy a TON of time

Dragon age - Nov 3rd
- fantasy rpg, hailed the spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate
- i'm guess atleast 3 playthroughs (already on my fouth playthrough in fable2)

Modern Warfare 2- Nov 10th
- countless slaughtered (stabby stabby!)online.. but lets see how good i am on a console shooter

Left for Dead 2 - Nov 17th
- brainnnnssss

Mass Effect 2- Early 2010
- futuristic third person view action rpg, will take the decisions made from the first game affect things in the second
- the first 360 game I ever played all the way through without losing interest

Easy Mode

My brother's friend's 360 gave the red ring of death the other day and while it'll take forever to get it fixed, he started playing WoW. *gasp* At which point my brother and the rest of his friends followed.


"I will never play WoW again."


Lol; I told Jaggy and Capo that.. i think quite a few times when they took it up again.

I can't say I don't have anything against them, b/c i do.
I was watching my brother play, and he wasn't even playing that long and he already had a mount.. at 31.. "31 is the new 40." I hate games where they make the game purposely easy to get to max lvl b/c they keep raising the lvl cap. I don't really need fluff(little pets), nor like grinding as one's own means to lvl. I hated collector quests ("get those bear paws that only falls off every 5-10 bears"), whether they changed it or not.


Maybe it was Barrens chat that was filled with little kiddies making Chuck Norris jokes the whole time
/leave general chat 1
/leave trade chat 1

I didn't like how at the end, it was just dueling, grinding for purples(which by the way were freaking hard), or spending 3-4 hours doing dungeon raids which usually resulted in nothing gained.

Or maybe its just b/c you play a game so much that eventually you just get sick of it. How many hours have we played WAR/WoW? lol Too many.

New Look!

Hey all

Sorry for the delay, been on vacation for the past week and was at the cottage most of the time.. it didn't stop the gaming tho ;) Oh, I hope you like the layout now.. it looks better on my screen atleast, lol. Had to tinker with the actual coding to get it to stretch.

I've been mostly been playing this:

Fable 2:
- still love how you can buy almost every property in the game and even when the game is off, you get rent money from them; currently my character gets 10k (seriously) per 5 minutes.. its sick
- I won it as a Good&Pure character, saving/ressing the Albion populace
- this time, i'm Evil but Pure... its an odd combination.. normally if i had normal purity, i'd have white skin (think the sith), but the purity gives me a blue tinged skin.. weird

Gears of War 2

I used to hate this game when I was at friend's place; how boring...
Until you have your own acct, play online coop campaign mode OR better Horde. I know it sounds noobish ("Gears 2 is soooo last year" lol), but i've been a pure PC gamer before and never touched console games.

I dislike... scratch that.. HATE the original heatset that comes with the 360 console.
Hence I bought this:

The Turtle Beach X1 (wired; X3: wireless) headset.
- compatible with the 360 OR PC via usb port
- don't listen to the Best Buy guys (sorry), the wires that the X1 comes with IS long enough (i think like 14 feet; heck i keep 50%+ of the cords tied up)
- as you can see, it covers both ears and you get both voice and sound music
- ranges from 59.99$ (sale) to 79.99$ Canadian
- no batteries needed b/c it connects to the system via usb

- its freaking amazing
- i can hear everything, (adjusting sound and voice separately via manual scrollers)
- I can hear where monsters are now (behind, left or right)
- it doesn't hurt your ears/head; my old PC headset hurt like a b!tch; and only after half an hour; take my advice, I work at a callcenter and take calls for 8 hrs of the day, this is a good headset :)

Finally, last night my brother bought this game (yes yes, old, and the new one is coming out soon)
Marvel Ultimate Alliance

What more to say? Be the hero of your choice. Get the villians.
Build your charge meter to release super attacks.
Gain lvls and get different skills. (my fave: Ironman's aoe! taptaptaptaptaptap... rinse repeat)
Only drawback: You can only have 4 special moves via skill wheel at one time. So knowing what you want to use when is important.