Yea verily my friends we gather once again to take notice on Daemon's most recent ability to acquire ethereal goals in pursuit of an empty dream. Aye, there is the occasional passerby that puts forth a tasty tidbit of apocryphal information from the Gods on high at Microsoft that perhaps someday, in some fashion, we will all be rewarded for our constant acquisition of these points.

Aye...someday mayhaps.

But the Gods are spiteful beings full of remorse and anger towards their followers and rarely will they allow the sunlight to truly shine upon those willing, but wholly undeserving, masses. And so we toil and struggle to make ourselves appear and feel that we are truly an accomplished gathering of humanity and attempt to keep going forward. Many games have helped me in my goal and here are a few of the most recent.

Fable 2 - I really wasn't sure what to expect from this game. I never got around to playing the old XBox iteration of this title but all the online reports I received from my friends sure made it seem like a good time. With that I jumped at the chance to literally dive into this game (no really, I actually jumped onto the box in my living room. Don't look at me like that!) and I had a blast for most of the way. I didn't really like having everything taken from me at one point but other than that it was pretty damn fun.

Hey guess what? I actually got all the achievements for this baby as well! 1100/1100 which was very sweet! Sure most of them weren't hard, but a few involved online antics which, if you note my star rating, is not something I do very often. A few also involved those damn gambling games and at one point I was fairly settled into the fact that I just wouldn't get those. But guess what again? I bore down and attacked the pub games and played those damn games and it turns out it wasn't really that hard! What a big silly goof I had been for avoiding them like the plague! Silly Daemons!

The last piece of the puzzle was finished by a postively lovely gentleman floating around the Fable 2 board whose name I wish I could recall in order to thank him once again. He allowed me to mooch the thrice-damned doll collector achievement off of him and I couldn't be more happier for hitting that goal. He even danced a little bit with me to get me the last co-op achievement and that was that. Did I mention that the online community around Fable 2 is really a nice bunch of folks?

Afro Samurai - I was really looking forward to this game as I'm always happiest when I'm wailing away with a nice run around beat-em-up game. The aesthetic is there, the music is unbelieveably great, and the fighting engine is rather bloody and fun. The problem is the boss tactics are very boring and/or random so you don't feel particularly skilled when taking them down, and the little bits of platforming are painfully bad.

Those facts coupled with my atypical literal diving technique (there I go again) of gaming made Daemon a very angry boy on his first playthrough of the game as my friend can well attest to. But now that I've looked into matters and found out that I wasn't alone in my anger (as well as a few tips that proved useful) have now helped me to calm down and enjoy all the slice n' dice action attributed properly to the various types of cannon fodder available in the game and just have fun. I still haven't got all the achievements but I've gotten quite a few and I was just about to finish them up when...

F.E.A.R. 2 - Project Origin - Yet another game in which I never played the original game! This game came out of nowhere on the XBL and I had such a blast playing the demo I quite literally ran out (well...I biked out to be specific and actually literal) of the house...er, tiny studio apartment, and reserved it right away!

Currently I'm about halfway through the game and I'm really enjoying it. I really like the mix of traditional 1st person OPS firefights mixed with really messed up freaky scary horror stuff hitting you suddenly like a cannon messing with your ability to control your surroundings and keep your zone comfortable...but in a good way if that makes any sense.

From what I've seen I guess the first game had mainly nigh impossible achievements so, if that's true, it's nice to see a large assortment of more obtainable goals. There are a decent amount of online dreary deathmatch achievements though so I suppose I'll never get those.

Wall-E - Confession time. I get a lot of these license games for free as I know folks who actually put a lot of these games together. Some I do buy as I'm a rather impatient type of person and I actually enjoy playing silly license titles, but many I receive as gifts. I received this game as just such a gift and as it was handed to me the person winced just a bit and noted "It...it's not very good.". Undaunted by this comment I sallied forth...and put it on my wall of games neatly in the "W" section.

What?! I just got Saints Row 2 on the same day and do you know how awesome that game is?! Do you!? It's like somebody took all the story out of Grand Theft Auto IV and replaced it all with insane fun!

Some time later I finally got around to watching the Wall-E movie and lordy I was surprised as to how much I enjoyed it. This may sound surprising to some of you that don't know my movie tastes but other than The Incredibles I don't really like most Pixar films. To me they are just characters on a constant fetch quests running back and forth on the screen yet accomplishing very little in terms of story or character development. So delighted was I by Wall-E however, that I decided to sally forth (for realsies this time no foolies) and play the damn game.

*wait for it*

Hey! I actually liked the game! What the...hell? I guess my friend was just pulling a trademarked Daemon attitude and just demonstrated some grade-a lack of satisfaction with everything they've accomplished. Well life is pretty hard for developers of official license products -- unreal deadlines, sudden last minute changes demanded by the licensee, little room for improvisation and creativity; quite difficult conditions to work under indeed. I assume that he just wished they had more time to fix things up to their satisfaction before release time.

Regardless, I had fun playing it. The only problems I had were in the last level in which there were some odd little platform puzzles involving a auto-magnetic strip whose physics engined didn't always work correctly and occasionally you would be hurled to your doom. Now if you're just playing it for the heck of it then you wouldn't have a problem as you would just respawn very close to your area of demise. But there's an achievement for not getting killed for every level so it made some areas very...tense to say the least. But overall I had fun reliving parts of the movie and listening to those funny voices once again.

Hey...it made me smile.

EVVVVVVEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!