General Update 15: Only A Ninja Can Sneak Up On Another Ninja (or Assassins!)

So this is really my first post of 2011, but before I get into the New Year I do have one thing to clear up and that is my Christmas gift list. I received Nier, Gears of War 2, Assassins Creed Brotherhood, and Dead Rising 2, I also picked up FEAR and Dead Rising in the Game sale. I completed my First play though of Nier before returning home, I then moved onto Gears of War 2 which I completed on Saturday evening.

I started the game on hardcore and managed to get to the last chapter of act 4 on hardcore and then when I loaded up to finish off the game for some reason it changed the difficulty back to casual so when I completed the game I didn’t get the achievements for the other difficulty settings. I do aim to go back and play the remaining levels again in order to get the outstanding achievements.

After completing Gears 2 I tried Dead Rising, the original, as I want to know the story first before playing the sequel. Unfortunately I’m not sure if I am actually playing it right as I keep dying when trying to save survivors. It could just be that my getting the priorities wrong and I should just try and focus on the story until I get more experience.

After dying several times I moved off that and started Assassins Creed Brotherhood. While I’ve not get very far I have changed my mind about something. uPlay. I touched on uPlay in my post about Online Play for all, but it would appear I had it a little wrong. The points you unlock for completing certain tasks in the game allow you to download certain rewards related to that game. For example in Assassins Creed 2, the rewards are an xbox dashboard theme, a new map to explore, a new outfit and an increase on the number of throwing knives you can carry. I like this idea because the amount of points you earn from the game is the same amount that you can spend.

For Assassins Creed Brotherhood which has the same system and number of points available, there are more rewards than there are points available, which means you need to choose which rewards you want but can’t have them all unless you buy a different game and choose not to download the rewards you unlock for that game but it seems to me like a fair trade off. I’m not everyone wants the theme for the game they are playing. If you’ve completed the game you might not want to increase the number of throwing knives seeing as you’re probably not going to be playing it again.

Demos: Ilomilo & Raskulls

Over the weekend I tried a couple of demos from XBLA. I’ll admit now that I never actually finished the Raskulls demo, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was cooking my dinner. I enjoyed what I played, it’s an action-platformer that plays well, and looks great.

Ilomilo is a puzzle based game where you play as both Ilo and Milo who are two characters that you have to work out how to get them to meet. The premise is simple enough; get the two characters to meet and the game looks great as well.  

Out of the two my money went on Ilomilo, and while I’ve still not finished the prologue it’s defiantly one I will play, when I get some time.

Previous GamerScore:  51555

Current GamerScore:    52270

Increase:                         +715

General Update 14: Merry New Year!

So there we go another year gone and another one stretching out in front of us, but before I rush headlong into the new year and decade I’m going to take a little more time to look back at the year 2010.

What did I achieve? Well I suppose the main thing would be breaking the fifty thousand gamerscore mark. I’ve also started playing games on the harder difficulties rather than starting on easy or normal, I’ll jump straight in on hard. What else? Completing Mass Effect 2 on Insanity, it took almost 8 or 9 months, to do and that was with a 6 month hiatus!

However looking back 2010 hasn’t been all good. Probably one of my major sticking points was the news that Mass Effect 2 was to be released on the PS3. I know that the original was published by Microsoft so I know that will never be released on the PS3. I’m just a little confused as to why they would release only a portion of a series. My other big disappointment with the year was E3. I know Microsoft had to show off Kinect and give it a full reveal. But it didn’t seem to show much of anything else. Don’t get me wrong they showed a lot of stuff, but aside from the Kinect stuff there wasn’t a whole lot of Exclusives to be shown.  I’m hoping this will change in this year’s show.

What do I want to achieve for 2011? I guess my main goal is to reach the seventy five thousand gamerscore mark. But I also want to try and make more of an effort to get into the online community. So I’ll try and make some posts on some forums and try and get involved.

What am I looking forward to in this new year? Two major events, the first one being E3. Although I’m not actually going I will be watching the live keynote speech as I have done for the past 2 years. The second event is the Eurogamer Expo. Or E2 as I think I’m going to call it. It will be over 4 days this year and be around the same time. Hopefully they will have Mass Effect 3 there and I will be able to try it out as it’s due to be released this holiday season. The other game that should be good to see will be the next game in the Elder Scrolls series. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as that is released 11/11/11. See what they did there?

Current Gamerscore: 51555g