no one cares

It seems like an eternity since I wrote my last blog and even longer since E3, but I suppose it hasn't been my normal week with things revolving much more around exams than gaming, through some miracle I haven't been entirely distracted by video games and I think I've actually done okay on my exams so far. I'm still playing Elite Beat Agents in my free time and as with any rhythm game it's great to see how much better you get over time just with practice, indeed I've come a long way from playing Walkie Talkie Man on Breezin' difficulty. Now if I can just get through Sweatin' difficulty I'll be very happy with myself.

As I promised a couple of weeks back I have spent a little time during E3 playing the copy of Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise my brother picked up. I must say even expecting good things from the game I was surprised myself by quite how much the few simple additions in Trouble in Paradise expanded on the original Viva Pinata and it was great fun to play. In fact I'd become quite forgetful of exactly how frantic managing a garden full of pinatas could be and it was good to get back to the crazily-paced gameplay, colourful graphics and enchanting music of Viva Pinata. Unfortunately the unruly nature of preowned Xbox 360 games struck again as within a week or two the 360 had already begun to refuse to play both the preowned Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise and the preowned Saint's Row. My brother decided he'd cut his losses and have the discs repaired and traded in as he'd lost the receipts for them but although GAME were willing to repaiir the discs for £1 but as I predicted they really tried to rip him off on the trade-in and would only give him £10 for both. So as I type this there are two non-working 360 games sitting on my coffee table.

My search for a collectors edition copy of Halo 3 stretches into yet another week as well and although I almost never buy games off of the internet I may have to consider it in this case, as long as I can find somewhere which isn't selling it for too much and will ship it to the UK. However my brother still seems to be purchasing games as his new fix this week is Red Faction: Guerilla and I do have to say it's a very good game. I didn't think I'd be so into this game but running away from exploding buildings and hitting enemies in the chest with sledgehammers is a very satisfying experience and I hope to spend a lot more time on Mars demolishing bridges and running down EDF soldiers.

I guess this is just about the end of things for another week. I'd like to give a quick shout-out to Jeb800e who has started a new Gamespot union for Metroid fans, Distress Signal 4. Also a big shout-out to someone who I think is a very underappreciated Gamespot user, the Best Buy employee turned Navy recruit (no really), CmdrMcNeil. Thank you all for reading and hopefully there'll be more from me next week. I'll just leave you with this amusing real-life Elite Beat Agents parody from Mega 64.

-Gamer_152