this is my blog, rant area, general chat and most importantly........................urm, i forgot.
bugger.
that link for the halo 3 review from yhatzee at zero punctuation is http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2304-Zero-Punctuation-Halo-3
also watch his other reviews their as funny as hell. saying that, im going off to watch the halo 3 review again, tat ta!

• 12Aug 09

  New Update 11th August 2009 - Yay or Nay?

  Yesterday, a new update for XBL was released.

  the features that this new update brings are as follows:

  - new avatar system that allows items to be bought or awarded through games.

  - new addition to gamercard indicating the amount of years to have been a Live member (with some possible rewards for milestones hinted)

  - marketplace has now got a rating feature allowing people to see whats hot and whats not-so-hot.

  - overall improvement of speed of the dashboard (of which i massively approve of) and some sounds have been filtered through the headset if one is attached (such as invites etc)

  - Games on Demand. whole 360 games can now be downloaded onto you console (hard drive size not withstanding) and played just the same as the old, disc inhabiting game.

  while i approve of all of these things there is only one problem that has ticked me off. that is the pricing of the GoD games.

  now we all know that Oblivion is a massively sucessful game made by an awesome company. we also know that it has oodles of DLC for it. so why in the name of all thats holy has it got a price tag of £20? thats not including any DLC, you have to get that seperatly.

  now, i fully support the notion of supporting good companies by paying for thier games and any DLC they strive to release (though activision has been cast from this list to join EA in the pits of hell) but i can go down to my local GAME which takes all of 10 minutes, and be bakc with the GoTY edtion of Oblivion with includes Knights of the Nine and Shivering isles, for.........wait for it.......£15. plus i have the option of trading it in if i so choose. with DL games you haven ot got that option, you pay for it and you can never get rid of it. thats not so much of a problem when you think that the game is now yours for all eternity as long as you can remember your account details and obtain immortality.

  but that is still one great stonking price tag for a game that i can get out of currys now for 99p.

  on a brighter note, avatars are now useful! sort of. ish.

  i loved the avatar idea, there is so many paths that microsoft could have gone when they released it, making minigames, making a Home-esque mini world to relax and chill while chatting to your mates, or play paintball or footy.

  but no, they just bolted it on and left it there, no real use and got mocked for their nintendo baiting.

  now they are finally doing something about it. while the step is a very small one, the new buyable items for your avatar wil finally make them properly unique. the gears uniforms and ODST stuff are a step in the right direction (though the shirts are a bit unuseful). the next big step was rewards from ingame play. before hand thsi was totally upto the devs whether or not they allowed gamer pics to unlock or not.

  now, you can get something that you can put on your avatar to show you've done something. hopefully the industry will pick this up and use it effectivly (like borderlands or MW2) and make something good out of it.

  im still waiting for a chill room though.

  while some of the features are put down by lack of sensible pricing, lack of more avatar stuff and a few various other things (like having to red-download all my content due to maybe the command paths being deleted) it is a step in the right direction for expanding the service and being more worth the dosh we fork out for it.

  im going to give the new update a Yay.

  thanks for reading.

  • Posted Aug 12, 2009 5:28 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 28Jul 09

  Modern Warefare 2 to cost 55 pounds. jog on Activision!

  i mean seriously? what the hell?

  this just proves that you're a load of greedy son-of-a-biatches who dont give a damn about your fanbase.

  if they dont bring out free dlc for it after release, they will be replacing EA games as the "greedy buggers of 2009-2010".

  i hope to god no other company jumps on this bandwagon or blood will spill.

  • Posted Jul 28, 2009 4:57 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 17Apr 09

  Oh god the humanity!

  My god am i bored!

  have come back from Uni for a 3 week holiday and all ive got to do is work! its like i never left.

  and i have a correction to make on my last post. the january slump is no longer from january to march. it stretches all the way into may.

  though there is light at the end of the tunnel. operation flashpoint 2 and prototype come out in may/june so at least the wait wont be for nothing.

  the subject for this post is one that i think most xbox 360 users will run into at some point. "adicto-achievementus" otherwise known as the achievement junkie. these are the people that play games, not for enjoyment, but for the sole purpose of getting the highest possible gamerscore, either on particular games or as the total sum of gamerscore.

  i have run into a few of these over the years and must say that the experience was not enjoyable. the first true AJ that i ran into was in shadowrun (godawful game) where we were, truth be told, padding some of the more impossible achievements on the game, i was just pissing around the map because i had been invited and saw that it was a padding match and so went around with the sniper and seeing how many i could kill before i was kicked. then the AJ sent me a message saying in essense "do you want some achievements easy?" so i said yes and got a few achievements. he then went on to make another match due to the other one being a bit annoying due to bad connections and asked me to help him get a few achievements then he would do the same. so i helped him out but when i came to my turn, he immediatly quit and started on another game. i tracked his gamercard for a single day and in that day he got over 2000 gamerscore. how? he had basically bought or rented almost every game for the 360 (there werent that many out back then) and got all the easy achievements on them. at that point i assumed he was an achievement junkie and deleted him off my friends list.

  there were a few in between, on chromehounds and GRAW2 but none compared to one of my old school friends. it arose in a match on gears when my friend came into a player match with the full gamerscore on gears(including all the map pack ones) . considering he had only had the game for about 4 months, this was impossible so we asked him how he had got them. he had glitched it but he said that he didnt know how to do it so he had contacted someone who could do it and paid him in microsoft points (sent him the code in an email) to perform the glitch which did involve giving this completely random guy/gal his email account and his password. all for the sake of a few achievements. it then became apparent that he was indeed an AJ. so far this year he has bought and sold over 80 games, including the likes of monopoly (who the hell plays that?), BAJA (which he himself said was a load of horse s**t) and HAWX (which was a good game but he played it for a sum total of about a day, got all the achievements he could on it and never played it since).

  now, i play for fun. achievements are a way for me to see what sort of progress i am making on a particular game. and the numerical value of the gamerscore doesnt concern me in the slightest. i go for specific achievements that would make me say "hell yes, that as good" like the completionist achievement in mass effect (that takes dedication) or any achievement in dead rising (they are mostly all hard).

  the main problem is that due to gamerscore giving you nothing other than a sense of progress, there is no real reason why achievement junkies exist. if gamerscore gave you somthing, like a new profile picture after every 10,000 gs then i would fully understand but it doesnt. its completely useless and i cant see any reason why people would become obsessed with getting achievements. one of the less shining examples of what the xbox 360 does to people.

  right thats all for now but i will try my best to get another blog up by the end of the month. ciao!

  • Posted Apr 17, 2009 3:19 am GMT
  • Category: General
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