I decided to stop by because I've been doing a lot of writing lately and i thought the site may be able to benefit from some reviews from me. Right now I'm playing through Alan Wake so expect a review of that in the coming days.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it was going to allow beta for the series of new features that will be coming to all 360s sometime in November. I was actually really excited about this because I'm a huge fan of Twitter, and I'm on the site daily. I was also enthused, although not quite as much, about the ability to browse facebook on the console. I have a facebook, although I don't use it as much as most other people. And the last part of the update, the Last.fm section, I wasn't interested in at all, because for some reason I was under the impression that you would have to pay for the service.
Anyway, so I booted up my 360 after the update and hopped on twitter, a pretty easy process. You just input your username/password and you're in basically. The twitter hub on the console is alright I guess, It's nothing special and it's not exactly easy to maneuver through it using a controller, it's kind've irritating. I'd imagine that I won't be using it very often, as it's much easier to just hop on the nearest PC. It's REALLY stupid to try to type out a whole tweet using the controller if you dont have the keyboard addon for the 360 controller, it actually gave me a headache after only a few tweets.
Next, I decided to try out facebook, (which you must download a small file in order to use, its something like 26 MB or something). The facebook hub is fine I suppose, It'll be nice for pictures, etc because it allows a fullscrean slideshow of photos on your television. The actual browsing of the site, works like you'd expect, nothing really grand, but it's not too bad. Once again, the only problem comes when you actually need to TYPE something, it fails terribly...
Lastly, the most impressive part of the package is Last.fm. It's kind've hard to explain what last.fm is, but basically it allows you to stream music from your 360, ANY music that is on Last.fm's database. It has an interesting feature where you put in an artist name and it compiles an entire 'radio' station comprised of that artist's music AND music that sounds similar. This is incredibly useful for discovering new music. And once you have listened to enough music, Last.fm will begin making suggestions of what music/bands/stations you might also enjoy which is pretty nifty. I have a feeling that this feature is going to keep my 360 on basically 24/7 and will probably end up causing me to have the RROD... but oh well, its worth it.
It's official! A couple days ago I completed the Call of Duty: World at War single player, and it wasn't the worst thing in the entire world though it was pretty bad. At the moment, I'm trying to unlock most of the game's achievements which requires me to go back and replay many of the missions. The only achievements that I'm nervous about going for are the ones for completing various missions on the veteran difficulty, which I have a feeling will be quite challenging. Lucky for me, I bought the second map pack on a splurge, I don't even like the game, but it will allow me to get the new nazi zombie achievements which will be nice.
I finally got my 360s disc drive to start working today so I put in CoD: W@W and although I'm pretty experienced with the games multiplayer (first prestige level 37), I've only completed a little less than half of the single player, and apparently for good reason. Now, by this point, most people know that the multiplayer side of World at War is decent, its fun to play but it copies nearly everything off of the previous game, so there isn't much new content. I've always played the game's multiplayer on and off whenever I had nothing else to play but I was never too interested in the single player but lately I've been wanting to start getting achievements again so I headed straight into single player, from where I had left off previously.
And let me say... this game sucks. I encountered a lot of issues with the hit detection when I was using a scoped rifle and the enemy AI was awful, some of the worst I've seen in recent months. And the fact that sometimes enemies could shoot you from incredible distances away and hit you but at other times be a few feet away and miss many...many times is just unreasonable. After seeing things like this in just the regular difficulty, I can only imagine that veteran will require no skill on outsmarting the AI but instead will be about, camping a spot and learning to throw back grenades with incredible dexterity.
So I guess yesterday the demo for Star Wars: TFU was released on the xbox live marketplace (and maybe PSN, but I don't know) so I downloaded the demo which was nearly a gig. I booted it up this morning and I simply loved it. Let me say that I'm not some huge star wars fan, I have seen the movies a long time ago and enjoyed them. When I was little, I had Full Throttle and it had a demo of this star wars game in it, and I played the demo every day. More recently I got Lego Starwars: TOT, played through it and liked it, and I also used to have the game based on the 3rd of the new star wars movies.
So today is the last day of my summer break. Tomorrow is officially the first day of school, and I got some summer homework that I still haven't done. So I probably wont be playing very many games today. I should be getting TMNT from gamefly really really soon, in fact, it should be in our P.O. box right now, but we just haven't gotten around to going and checking. (we use a P.O. box because we don't have a mailbox) I'm basically just renting TMNT for the easy 1000 gamerscore that the game has. I haven't been playing a lot of Bionic Commando Rearmed lately because I've been sticking with Call of Duty 4, but I think once I finish this homework that I have to do, I will probably start it up and try to beat it ASAP so I can write a review on it. So far I'm loving the gam, it's my favorite XBLA game.
Other than that, not much going on. I made myself a new profile picture and avatar, it took like 2 minutes and I think it looks pretty good. I really need to get some "friends" on this site so that I can get more people reading my blog, I sent a message to everyone on my xbox live friends list telling them to sign up and add me, but no one did. :O its crazy! That's pretty much it, I'm really anxious for Jeff and the guys to put in a user upload video section so I can do some video blogs and video reviews like everyone at gamespot used to do. HOPEFULLY SOON!!!
Peace
Being a gamespot user for a long time, I found it a big shock when Jeff was fired and began having withdraws when I was not able to see new videos from Jeff, so yesterday when I stumbled upon Giant Bomb after watching a video blog from a random Gamespot member, I was amazed to find Jeff posting video reviews. YAY! So anyway, I like the site a lot and hopefully it will continue to grow, I will try to promote it whenever possible because I really like it. I've watched Jeff's Soul Caliber 4 review and you can see that he has not lost his humor from his old Gamespot days. So anyway, this is my first blog, I guess I'll tell you guys a few things about me.
I started gaming with a handed down NES from the brother, I mostly played a lot of Bionic Commando (and now i have the XBLA version which is awesome) and I think we had duckhunt or something because we had the light gun. Then I got a SNES and played a lot of the Mario games and zelda. After that I got a PS2 in 2000 for Christmas. I loved my PS2 and kept it until 2006 when I sold it to buy a Xbox 360, which now I regret not keeping my PS2 and my games. I also had a PSP which I sold in order to buy Guitar Hero 2 when it first came out. Now I'm a very avid 360 gamer, as of now I'm over 50,000 gamerscore, I'm a big Gears Of War fan as well as a CoD4 fan. Hit me up on Xbox live, my gamertag is zi jok3r iz.
On a more personal note, I'm a 15 year old Sophomore (at least during this writing) at Vanguard High School. I'm in the IB program which is quite challenging. I live on a Therapeutic Horse ranch in Ocala, Florida and I have 3 yorkies. I will have more blogs coming soon whenever I get a chance to get around to it. Peace.
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