Booshka

The Souls series is one of the best things to happen to gaming in the past 10 years. Really saved this console generation for me, something I could sink my teeth into, and play for hours and hours (days and days actually). Souls games respect your intelligence and skill as a player, and they demand your attention. You get out of them what you put into them, they are by far the most rewarding and fun games to play this gen. With Dark Souls 2 coming out for current gen in March, it could be an even better series for this gen than it already is.

Voted for Dark Souls of course.

Umbasa...

You are on a leveling path considered "Qualtiy build" where you have high strength and dexterity, so the best weapons for you are weapons that scale equally with both skills. Longsword is one of those weapons. With your stats, you should be upgrading weapons to +10, then +15 if you have the ember and materials, Slabs are rare, so +14 for most weapons. Claymore, Halberd, Zweihander, Composite Bow and several others are excellent "quality" weapons because they have decent scaling with both STR and DEX. If you want to get the best gains for scaling quickly, level your STR to 27 then Dexterity to 30. Your 2 handed scaling will be boosted by STR and Dex scales equally either 1 hand or 2 hand.

If you really like that Longsword, stick with it and upgrade it to +15, it will do plenty of damage and is one of the most versatile weapons in the game. If you want something similar but with more oomph, the Claymore is one of the best Quality weapons in the game. The best thing about a Quality build is that you can experiment with nearly all weapons and if you upgrade them to +14/15 they will all do very consistent high damage.

No, that won't work, you only get to see the cutscene once, after you die, you just enter the boss fight with Sif already aggro'd and ready to fight. No cutscene whatsoever. This is how most of the boss fights work. If you want, just watch the original on youtube, then check out the DLC alternate in your game. Or, if you plan on playing this game a lot more, just do it on another playthrough.

Yes, Shadowrun still has a dedicated and active little community. I've been playing the game consistently for over 5 years and usually play several hours of Private Matches every week. There are still Public Matches going on all the time as well, the game is free to play online on PC, so there are a good amount of PC players (game works with Windows 7, don't know about 8) and then plenty of Xbox 360 players as well. It got 3 updates before FASA closed down, so it runs well, and was already extremely balanced out of the box, but now the balance is near perfect. You can probably find it used for $5 online or at Gamestop. Pick it up and try it out. There is a demo as well, but I think it may no longer be on the Marketplace. It has a pretty steep learning curve, especially for a console shooter, so play the training, bot matches and if you can, find someone to teach or learn it with a friend. If anyone picks it up, message me and I'll help you learn the game.

$250 sounds very cheap...going head to head with the 3DS.

As for the name, I like it, people bitching about it should get a life.

Shadowrun, it has always had a small dedicated community playing, but it deserves a lot more players.  I think it is the best multiplayer shooter on 360, and hardly anyone plays it.

Shadowrun for 360 or PC My favorite multiplayer shooter
 
Carcassone for XBLA

Shadowrun, since you've mentioned shooters, I assume you'd enjoy it.  Buy it, play it, love it.  It's like $10 now, and plenty of people still play everyday.

That's considered an article?  It read like a rant someone would post in a thread, or a conversation you would hear over voice chat in-game or on a podcast.  None of his points were well supported, nor well written, and he had a glaring bias that tons of people latch onto; Microsoft sucks.