I've been promising myself that someday I'd beat the hard drum tour since I started it more than three months ago. Well, that has finally happened. I finally beat Run to the Hills today and the Heavy Hitter achievement became mine. I'm still very good at hard or expert by any means, but I have come a long way since I first got the game way back in December. Back then I could only three or four star the first tier songs on medium difficulty. In a little over seven months I have gone from that to being able to five star some of the songs in the fifth and six tiers on expert. So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with myself. I'm currently stuck on one song in the sixth tier on the expert drum tour, but hopefully with a little practice I'll be able to beat it and move on to the seventh.
[Update] I just gold starred my first song on drums as well.
It feels good to be a heavy hitter.Aww yeah! 2 Comments
One night when I was bored, I decided to look through my 360 collection for a game I haven't played in a while. I chose Project Gotham Racing 4, of all things. With the (at the time) impending release of Geometry Wars 2, I wanted to play a bit of Geometry Wars: Waves. After about a half an hour of that, I decided I should actually play PGR4 while it was in my 360. I had beat the career mode a few months ago, so I decided to start going through all the Arcade events. Even after the hours upon hours I put into finishing the career mode, I still have a lot of fun playing it.
I've also been going through Call of Duty 4 on veteran, and oh man, is it some bullshit. If you're out in the open you'll be dead in a split second, because all the enemies are deadly accurate. You're probably thinking, "Well, stay behind cover, stupid!" but that doesn't work either, because the enemies will just keep respawning unless you run out of cover and move forward. Not to mention if they can't shoot you with bullets they'll just throw a grenade a hundred yards or so and have it land directly at your feet every single time. Sometimes I have three or four grenade indicators on my screen at the same time. It's fucking ridiculous. Veteran is as much a test of luck and patience as it is a test of skill. Despite how frustrating it is, I feel compelled to see it through to the end.
DAMNIT, STOP KILLING ME! Now that it's a greatest hits title, my friend went out and bought Resistance: Fall of Man, so I've been playing through the campaign with him. It's a pretty good game so far. I'm not blown away by it or anything, but I guess that should be expected, considering it's a launch title and all. I played a little bit of Geometry Wars 2 multiplayer with him too. Multiplayer is pretty fun, but since the ships are various colors in multiplayer, it's really easy to lose track of where you are in the huge cluster of enemies.
Besides all that, I've been playing some more Okami. I'm currently in the Kamui section of the game, and I'm pretty sure I'm only a few hours away from the end. I'm also getting close to the end of Pokemon Ruby. I just have one more badge to get, then I have to train my Pokemon until they're ready to take on the Elite Four. After I'm done with these two games I think I might finish God of War. I started that game sometime last year and got sidetracked about halfway through it, and now that God of War III has been announced, I want to finish this and buy God of War II so I'm all caught up on the main series.
Actually, that might be a lie. I'm trying to find Skate for a decent price on eBay, but I think I might just suck it up and pay full price for it, because it's hard to find it used for a price I want to pay.
I think I've about emptied my mind by now, so I'm off to play a little Pokemon Ruby.
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Xbox Live announced their Xbox Live Arcade lineup for August a few days ago, and I was pretty blown away. Geometry Wars 2, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Braid, Castle Crashers, and Galaga Legions all in the same month (kinda)? They really have a great lineup. Possibly one of the best months for Xbox Live Arcade ever. I bought Geometry Wars 2 already, and the rest are definite buys as well, with an exception of Galaga Legions, which hasn't sold me on it yet. Perhaps the demo will change my mind.
I can't think of anything good to put here, so I'm just going to keep typing until this box looks filled. So, Geometry Wars 2... what can I say? It's pretty much exactly what you'd want in a Geometry Wars sequel, besides online multiplayer, but I can completely understand why it wasn't included. In a game as hectic and fast-paced as Geometry Wars, even a tiny bit of lag would completely ruin the whole experience. I'd rather have no online multiplayer mode at all than a broken one. But yeah, Geometry Wars 2 is pretty awesome. I'd go into more detail, but I'm planning on writing a review for this one, so I'll just say this for now: if you haven't bought this game yet, go buy it!
In more Giant Bomb related news, I finally reached 1,000 points today, which means I can now make live edits to the site. Half of my points actually came from uploading Okami concept art, which there is a ton of. In fact, I just counted and there are now over 350 images in the concept art gallery alone. Holy shit, that is a lot. Now that I've got my 1,000 points, I think I'll actually start contributing to the big articles, rather than just changing basic information, writing blurbs, and uploading screenshots. I didn't want to write a big article, wait for it to be approved, and have some guy with live edit capabilities beat me to the punch while my submission was pending. And considering just a few days ago the approval times were over 4 days, the chance of that happening was pretty high, and actually did happen to some of my submissions. Either way, approval times are getting closer to the 24 hour mark and now that I have 1,000 points, it's all water under the bridge anyway. 5 Comments
Some of the first images I uploaded to the site were screens for Alan Wake. I added them to the Alan Wake page and they went into my queue, awaiting moderation. Later in the day I read the site's FAQ page and under the images section it said , "Do not submit images with watermarks!" Oops! I guess I should have read that page earlier. Roughly half of the screens had big alanwake.com watermarks on them, so I figured they'd be denied. But no, all the images were approved, even the watermarked ones! This gave me the impression that perhaps watermarks were okay, as long as they were from a game's official site and not a gaming website like IGN, GameSpot, etc.
A few days later I submitted some images for the games Sly 2 and Sly 3 from the official Sucker Punch website. They had a small copyright watermark in the right hand corner, and I figured since the Alan Wake images got approved these were okay. Wrong! Those images were denied and I got a PM from a Giant Bomb staffer explaining that the images were denied because it was site policy to not accept any images with watermarks in them. He said that if I took the time to crop out the watermarks and reupload them they would be accepted. I did so, and sure enough, they were accepted. Okay then, no watermarks. Got it.
Since then I've been uploading screens without a problem. Some screens I uploaded for inFamous got accepted today, so I went to check out the game page and look at all the screenshots, and found that not only had my images been accepted, but some other guy's images had been accepted too, and on them was the same watermark that had been on my denied Sly 2/3 images (if you're not following me, inFamous and the Sly Cooper series are made by the same developer, and every image on their website has a copyright watermark on it). Huh?
Now don't get me wrong. I love the site. I understand that it's new and they're still working things out, and I'm not angry that this guy's images were accepted or anything. I just think the site is currently a little confusing. It's not just image uploading either. For example, a character is supposed to be one person or thing with a fully fleshed out, unique personality, while a race of creatures should fall under a concept page. You would think the goomba page would be a concept page, but no, it's a character page. Goombas are surely a race of creatures though. There isn't just one goomba. You stomp on tons of them throughout Mario games. Either the help page is not specific enough to help me understand the site's policies, or the people accepting all these entries don't understand the site policies.
I'm sure they're working on it, but they really need to flesh out the help page a little more to make things clearer, and then get all the mods on the same page so they know exactly what should be accepted and what shouldn't. I love Giant Bomb and appreciate all the hard work that everybody is putting into site, but man, you guys are confusing the hell out of me.
Okay, I'm done ranting. Now onto the normal boring shit I usually type. When I got my new Rock Band bass pedal yesterday, I plugged it in and played all day. I finally managed to get the Flawless Drumming achievement (get 100% on any song while drumming on expert). That took a while, but I really only started playing on expert last month, so I suppose it's not too bad. The song I FC'd was Pain and Pleasure by Judas Priest. It's a really easy song and nothing to brag about, but hey, at least it wasn't Silver. I always seem to choke near the end of all songs I'm about to FC. In fact, on the run of the song I did before I FC'd it, I missed on the last note. Oh man, was I pissed. I'm normally not one to throw controllers, but I was about one second away from throwing the drum set across the room. I managed to settle for the drum sticks, though. I've also been trying to beat the two songs I have left on the hard drum tour. I finally narrowed it down to one song: Run to the Hills. Right now, I can roughly get to the solo before failing, which is a big improvement over a few weeks ago, when I could only get to the beginning of the second verse before blowing it. I think with a bit more practice I could have this one in the bag.
As you probably know, E3 was last week, and as you would expect, most of my blogging that week was E3 related. I finished two games that week, but I never got around to talking about them because my E3 blogs were already pushing 15-20 paragraphs, and I didn't want to make them any longer. So I'll talk about those two games here instead.
The first game I finished was Sly 2: Band of Thieves. I had originally started this game back around 2006, stopped playing it for whatever reason, and somehow bought and completed the other two Sly games in the meantime. I promised myself this summer that I'd finally get rid of some of the games on my monstrous backlog (actually, I originally said I'd get most of them, but I quickly realized that is not going to happen), and Sly 2 was one of them, so I had been playing it for the past week or so.Anyway, I finally beat it. I'm not really sure what caused me to stop playing it back then, because it really is a great game. The game is very nice to look at, even by today's standards, due to its colorful and original cel-shaded look. The gameplay is tons of fun as well, and the objectives are extremely varied, so it's almost impossible to get bored of. There are some mission types that repeat themselves a few times, such as Sly's recon missions at the beginning of each episode and Bentley's hacking minigame, but it does a wonderful job of keeping things fresh, unlike some games that involve running around on rooftops (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed!).
Sly 2's plot is really well constructed. There are some pretty big twists in the game that help keep you interested in the story, including a pretty big one at the end (but of course I was stupid and played Sly 3 before finishing this game, so I already knew about it). When it's revealed exactly how each Klaww Gang member fits into the grand scheme of things during the final episode, the story really comes together, and that's when it claimed the title of my favorite Sly Cooper game, just barely edging out Sly 3 for the crown.
I also beat The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I already gave my impressions on the game a while back, and my opinion on the game hasn't really changed since then. The game was pretty damn great. The only thing I really didn't like about it was the repeated trips to the Temple of the Ocean King. It was really annoying having to go through the same exact floors and solve the same exact puzzles over and over again. To be fair, the items you gain throughout the game do open up new shortcuts, and about halfway through the game, you even get a warp point to the sixth floor of the temple, so it's not as bad as it could have been, but still. Never make me visit the same exact dungeon six times in a row again, Nintendo! Apparently I'm not the only one who can't handle Keith Moon's drumming. In other news, I bought The Who Track Pack on Rock Band last Wednesday, and while playing through one of the songs on drums my pedal snapped in half. I was a little pissed because I had just spent $20 on those tracks and now my only option was to sing to them (I'm garbage with the guitar). I was also a little worried that support would say I "abused" the pedal and refuse to replace it, but when I called them up yesterday I had no problems ordering a replacement. I went with the express replacement option, which means that they will send me another pedal immediately, and ship the old pedal back in the same box I got the new pedal in. However, choosing this option means they place a $125 hold on your credit card, which is am absurdly high amount for a pedal. You can buy an entire Rock Band drum set for less than 2/3 of that price. The hold amount should be no more than the part that is being replaced costs. I really hope that pedal doesn't get lost during shipping.
Fast forwarding to the present, I'm currently playing Pokémon Ruby, and even a little bit of Pokémon Diamond. Why? I have no idea. In the six hours of Diamond that I've played in the past few days, I have done absolutely nothing worthwhile. I'm trying to get a Milotic in Diamond, so I rode my bike up and down the same stretch of road for 2 hours hatching a ton of Feebas eggs until I got one of a certain nature. The reason I need one of a certain nature is because its nature determines what kinds of berries it likes, and different kinds of berries increase different stats, and Feebas evolves by maxing out a certain stat, and now I feel like a nerd for knowing all this so I'm going to stop talking about that now. After I got the Feebas I needed I spent a half an hour mixing the necessary berries and feeding them to Feebas. But of course my berries weren't strong enough, so the stat didn't get maxed out and I had to turn my game off. Since then, I've been trying to find and grow more berries, hoping to find a combination of berries that will max out the stat I need and finally cause Feebas to evolve. But I've been at it for six hours, and I still don't have a Milotic. Pokémon is the only series that can make me run around the game world and do absolutely nothing for six hours. At least I'm actually playing through the story in Ruby, though.
I've also gone back to playing Crackdown. There are only a few key criminals left to defeat, so I should probably finish that up soon. After I finish either Ruby or Crackdown, I think it's time to finaly finish Okami. I say this every month, but I really (maybe) mean it this time! I don't think I've ever procrastinated on a game that I love this much before.
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For those of you that already know me, 'sup? For those that don't, they call me David, and I hail from the great land of GameSpot. I've been there for three years or so, but only really started participating in the community earlier this year. Over here I plan to be a part of the community from the get-go, and look forward to seeing Giant Bomb develop into something huge.
Wow, that sounded a little robotic. I can assure you I am a real person though, so if you haven't done so already, feel free to send me a friend request. I'm not that mean, I swear!
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