miffy495

Grats man, had a great time playing Rigby and it's nice to see it get a bit or publicity.

I'm not so sure. As much as I love the Wiimote for shooters and (if I were into the genre) probably would for RTSes, I don't think I'd be completely ok with having the pointer/motion-sensor/remote design become the standard and be adopted by Sony and Microsoft. It has it's place, certainly, but so do the more traditional controls. I can't see myself feeling entirely comfortable playing something like Earth Defense Force, Crackdown, or even Forza 2 with a remote setup. Bioshock on the other hand would have been great, especially with the dual hand mechanic being supplied by the remote and nunchuck. While I wish the Wii was a bit more powerful and could handle the upper end graphical stuff, I also think we'd lose a lot of playability on the sorts of games that I got my 360 for were the interface brought in to them. Some styles of gameplay just aren't meant for pointers, ditto for controllers. While it's fantastic that we have the option for it, widespread adoption of the wiimote mechanics would do more harm than good in my opinion.

Can't... look... away...

Seeing this suddenly scroll up on my screen gave me the best laugh I've had in a while. Well done to the both of you.

Yeah, I just caved and ordered the buttons. On the plus side, they should look awesome on my schoolbag.

Yeah, I was pretty shocked to see Prince of Persia 3D on there. Sands of Time, sure, but 3D??? Why? I just finished my last exam of the semester today. While most people got their 5 courses worth of exams spread out over a two week period, I lucked into the registrar putting all 5 of my exams into the first two days of the exam period. Testing started Monday. Two days, 5 final exams, and no sleep later, I now have a month and 3 days until the next term starts in which to spend some time with the girlfriend and finally catch up to some games. Christmas also means I have no cash to buy new games for myself so I actually need to play the older stuff if I'm going to play anything. Oddly, I just spent an hour and a half playing Halo 2. Don't know why. Got it free second hand from a friend who didn't care anymore now that 3 is out about a month ago, played up until the start of the first Arbiter section, and then didn't look at it again. Actually kinda fun. Not the best thing ever, but I may be motivated to finish it during my time off. Especially since it's one of those games that people tend to complain about the short length of. That gives it some bonus points in my books.

You bastard.

P.R.O.J.E.C.T. O.R.I.G.I.N. you say? I guess we'll have to see what they have in store. I've actually never been much of an enthusiast for the horror games, but when they're standout examples of their genre they catch my interest. RE4 and what have you. F.E.A.R. definitely gave me the heebie-jeebies now and again, but then I only played the first couple of hours before getting sidetracked and never going back to it.

In intend to. Every couple of nights I sit down an play a level or two and really enjoy it. I think that may be the best way to enjoy EDF. After tomorrow, I have a school break until mid-January, so I intend to do most of my catching up there.

Oh man, Colossus. Thanks for reminding me to plug in my PS2 again. I beat the first 9, but still have 7 to go. Haven't played that in almost a year, and really want to see it through.

I just looked at the front page for the first time in a while and noticed that there was actually some new-er content up. I hadn't been aware of the E4 article. Thanks to the article, I now know that I can cancel a chain. Expect my scores to skyrocket in the near future as a result, with only a little resentment for the game not informing me of this itself.

Yeah, I've seen quite a bit of Kenny vs Spenny. Not really my thing most of the time, but occasionally bloody hilarious. Mostly what I find Canadian TV does really well is the darker, deadpan comedy stuff. The Newsroom is one of my favorite shows. It's a genre that doesn't require a big budget and compared to the American TV that we're subjected to all the time, is incredibly intelligent and genuinely witty. If you have the means to check it out, I'd say you should go for it. Also, if you want to continue talking about stuff like that, we do have a thread for it, so feel free.

Yay! So free achievement if I play with Thunderpeel. Only catch is I'd have to drag myself away from Rock Band to get it. That's something that might be tricky in itself. Harmonix really is amazing. I still have love GHIII's tracklist, but the game itself is just so much better. I'd say I'm pretty confident your girlfriend will be happy with creating a player for herself though. Pretty much every gamer of the non-male persuasion who I used to play GH with has now given up on it entirely and moved over to Rock Band. The only real advantage GH has now is slightly better feeling guitar peripherals and brand recognition. That second one should change shortly though.

Man, I caved and ordered a copy off eBay for a little bit above retail. Much less awesome story.

Decent list there, good variety. I'll admit to including the earlier Tony Hawk games among my guilty pleasures, and including Grim Fandango in there either means that you'll fit in fine or you really want to and have done your research. Don't see why you'd need to give up gaming to make films. Most of the people I know who work in film (cameramen, costume designers, the odd actor/writer/director, but they're mostly small-time Canadian) manage to fit in whatever other hobby they want. Quite a few are avid gamers. Some act as well as preform in bands. Others spend hours a day painting. Hobbies don't often seem to be that hurt by the film industry in my experience. I don't follow your logic in needing to forsake one for the other. Anyway, hi. Welcome. Etc.

Just really the one, as far as I can tell.

Just for DLC. But as the xbox originals games are DLC, you have to download a full image of the original disc. I bought Crimson Skies (at 4.3 GB) and have the other games that I want to play around the Xbox in disc form so I didn't have to worry about it. Still, with demos around a gig and DLC packs for games like Crackdown about that size as well, it it a bit much to ask of the original 360 HDD. The upgrade would be remarkably simple. You just press a button to detach the current one and click the new one into place. The problem is that MS is charging ridiculous prices for the 120 GB HDDs. I'd still do it if I weren't unsure if I'd be able to keep the offline rights to my XBLA games. I heard somewhere that if you aren't using the original HDD, you can only play your XBLA games if you're logged into live. With the instability of my wireless connection, that just wouldn't do.

Yay! Now have the 100% achievements for both Guitar and Bass! Got the Bass co-oping with myself on vocals in Say it Ain't So after getting home from work because everyone I could play with was asleep. The guitar one I got about two songs after starting the game for the first time, so whatever. I then tried to do a random setlist to see what the game would throw at me while I co-oped solo. First one up was Highway Star which made me weep a little the first time I saw it. Hard song on guitar, and I don't know all the lyrics off by heart, so I felt kinda hosed. Amazingly made my way through. Feeling triumphant, I made my way to the second song in the random two song playlist. The random is important here. Odds were very much in my favor that the next song would be easier than Highway Star. And then despair. As the words Green Grass and High Tides appeared at the top of my screen I was overcome with dread. Rightly so. Failed it at 92% (!!!) I was about 30 seconds from escaping the craziest bit and celebrating maniacally at my success, but it was not to be. Still, an impressive effort considering I was trying to pull off two things at one. If it had let me activate Overdrive on the vocals, I probably could have saved myself and finished the song too. ...And no, I am a drum rookie. That would be why I am looking forward to it so much. I plan on practicing an insane amount (as I did with GH) and actually getting quite good over a period of a year or so. Took me 8 months to beat Bark at the Moon on expert after starting GH, and I am not afraid to commit the same sort of time to getting good at the Rock Band drums. Start on easy, work my way up. I do have pretty solid innate rhythm, so I hope that I will be able to start to feel the flow and get into the game fairly quick. I guess we will have to wait and see.

I prefer to call it "musical masochism."

Another night of Rock Band down and I'm seriously considering spending the extra $70 it would cost me to get it off eBay a month early so I could play me some drums. Beat the solo tour for guitar tonight, with the only song I couldn't get 5 stars on my first time through being Run to the Hills. (Triplets aren't too bad, but put a long string of them in and I'll eventually get thrown and lose my multiplier. Damn Iron Maiden.) It was a close one on Flirting With Disaster though, as I only made it to my fifth star thanks to some spectacular end wankery on the open solo at the end. I'm currently ranked two hundred eighty something on the career leaderboards for guitar. I know you've been pretty exceptional in Guitar Hero as well, Tommy. I can't compete on drums yet, but how am I for guitar? It was nice to see that my completing the solo mode on expert also unlocked all the achievements for the easier difficulties. I was pleasantly surprised to see "Achievement Unlocked: 4 for 140 gamerpoints" instead of the 50 for expert that I was expecting upon completing Green Grass and High Tides. By the way, that song: Harder than Free Bird. My five stars hides how much of the second solo I was blinking red for. I honestly don't know how I survived it. I think it was a rather miraculously lucky bit of hammer-on that I didn't expect to get right. The solo is long and ridiculous, the rest of the song is kinda tricky but repetitive enough that it's not challenging. I actually had 5 stars before the solo started (that notifier in the top corner is cool, as a side note) and then had to sweat, fumble, and curse my way through the agony. Also played through all the bonus songs (DLC isn't available in Canada for whatever reason) and got 5 stars on all except Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld which has a ridiculous phrase that repeats over and over. Although I think that Outside may be one of my favorite songs in the game. Fantastic guitar, and the rest sounds really good too, though I couldn't see that for myself. My goal now is clear. While waiting for a Canadian release, which will bring me drums, a good mic, and downloadable content, I must get 5 stars on those last two songs. Also, while playing in world tour, I should start taking on Bass so I can get that perfect bass achievement. The one for getting 100% on a song on expert using all up-strums. Sounds like fun.

Well done sir. I look forward to competing once Harmonix and EA see fit to finally let Canadians in. Newest estimate from EB's website is January 2nd. Bastards.

I say Avalancha is the best of the bonus. A few of them aren't that great, but if you play none of the other bonus songs, make sure you get that one and Ruby played.

Yeah, it seemed a bit off on a few things. My voice isn't that bad, and times when I thought I had the singer emulated spot-on it told me I was down on the lower end of the note registries when what I was singing was up high. Didn't stop me from getting 99% on a few songs, but I thought I'd nailed it on the ones that I've known really well for years. The one that weirded me out was Sabotage, which is entirely spoken. I said every word, and I said it in time. Why only 3 stars? Bah, I say. A real mic will be a lot of fun, and honestly the whole reason I'm buying this game is for the drums so playing it without seemed a bit hollow. Guitar is still great, but damn do I need to play me some skins.

Wow, I think I just played for something like 7 hours straight. I'm hoarse from singing, and my wrists are cramped, but damn did I have fun. We started off with myself on Guitar (expert), my buddy on Bass (also expert), and my roommate on the Xbox Live headset microphone (easy, then medium as we didn't know what to expect at first) and Hobocide started rolling onto the new frontier of Rock Band. Don't get me wrong here, Say It Ain't So is one of my favorite songs, but I think I've had my fill of it for a few weeks now. When we were starting out the world tour, it seemed like that and In Bloom were all we played. Both are great songs, but too much is too much. Eventually started unlocking more goodness as we went and we finally started making some real advances towards the end of the night. Friend crashed here, so the game is still in my Xbox. After he went to pass out, I started a new character so that I could try out the vocals for myself. Kind of a dumb idea that you can only have one character per instrument (well, ok. Guitar & Bass can be played by the same character) but I'll just have to create a couple of dupes to go along with it when my copy arrives. I then took my duped character up to the 7th tier of the Medium vocal difficulty in one sitting, hence the sore throat. Most of the time I got by by imitating the singer as best I could. My singing voice is kind of like Scott Weiland's, so Vaseline was incredibly easy for me to get through, but I can't imagine anyone easily pulling off all the songs. There's simply too much variation in singing styles. Only failed once, mostly because I'd never heard the song by OK Go before and had no idea what I was doing. Good fun, but using an Xbox Live headset mic instead of the pack-in one was a bit awkward and I'll hold off any complete assessment until I've played it with the equipment that I'm actually supposed to. The only problem I had with the game at all (even the guitar tracks were a bit more challenging than I was expecting on some of the higher songs. I actually got my ass handed to me the first time I played Highway Star) was that the downloadable content is not available in Canada yet. I know the game isn't out here yet, but if someone managed to get a copy, why the hell shouldn't we be able to give EA money to play more songs? Our dollars are worth more than theirs right now, don't they want some of them? Grumble Grumble. I wanted to play the Bowie pack... (also, the Fallout Boy song was terrible. Sounds like the music I listened to for a few months back in Junior High School when I didn't know any better. We called them Blink 182 then, but for all I could tell the band was the fucking same. Wanted to claw my ears off, and then rip my tongue out for singing it.)

Yay! Tommy lives again. That's too bad to hear. I'm still waiting on a Canadian release myself, but a friend who picked up the disc-only version from the States is coming 'round tonight so we can at least get some dual-guitar on. 'Course, I'll be using the 360 wireless guitar, so unable to provide a verdict on the pack-in, but there it is.