Friday LOL 09: If Only. . .

No posts for nearly a month and then two in the same week, what'g going on?

Seeing as I've been playing Fallout New Vegas, I thought I would keep with the theme of that. 

Enjoy!

General Update 11: We Don't Talk Anymore. . .

I suppose I should be grovelling to you for forgiveness due to my being absent so long, no blog entries or twitter tweets and you are right of course, but I blame my friend Mags, who is getting married in a couple of weeks, she got me hooked on the telly series House. I am now all up to date with the series and can hopefully focus on my writing. I did plan a few entries but never got around to write them the plans are still there and while I do still plan on writing my second entry about the EuroGamer Expo, some of the news stories I want to write about are long gone. But I could use them for writing practise.

So things that I’ve been up to in the past few weeks, I got the Fallout New Vegas Collector’s Edition, and I’ve taken photos of it being unboxed so that will get its own special dedicated post. I didn’t get Fable 3, I was financially short that month and I have plenty to be getting on with games wise, I’ve also got the Awakening DLC for Dragon Age:Origins as well as Ironman 2 on top of this I want to add the Borderlands Game of the year edition for all of the DLC.

As far as actually playing goes, I’m only about 20 hours into Fallout New Vegas and I’ve only completed the first mission on Ironman 2. You may also remember that in General Update 10, I mentioned that I had 3 more achievements for Mass Effect 2 DLC. It just so happened that the following Mondays Deal of the week was on Mass Effect 2 DLC, so I was able to pick up the last one for the last few achievements, making Mass Effect 2 the newest entry to my 100% Club. 

General Update 10: In Space No One Can Hear You Shout "Wohoo!"

So this is my first post in a little while, but I’m back now. I’ve been semi busy, what with having a full time job but I was also in London last weekend for the Eurogamer Expo. I managed to get a look at some of the top new titles that will be coming out in the next 10-12 months and being my first Expo I wasn’t disappointed.

Before I went away for the weekend I started a new run through of Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. As I said in a blog post earlier this year I was giving up as I didn’t want to hate the game. This week has seen my plough through the point at which I was stuck and all the way through to the end. Yes i have now got the 1000g avaliable for the main game. I have also done the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC. So I only have 3 more achievements to get for me to have the full compliment of achievements for the game, but they can wait.

The one think I thought I should mention about the Expo, before I do my full write up which I will try and put up during the week, was that I found a game that I didn’t originally think I would be interested in but after trying it out at the expo I decided that it’s worth a go. The game was Castlevania Lord of Shadows. I’m not entirely certain what it was about the game that I liked, the graphics are pretty awesome, but it also looked like there would be plenty to do as well. It was released last Friday and I did pick it up on the day of release. I tried it Friday night but then I was called off to save the galaxy!

I almost wasn’t going to get it as Fallout 3 is released next week and Fable 3 the week after that, and with the fact that I have just ordered Dragon Age: Awakening and Iron Man 2 I’ve got plenty to be getting with for the time being.

Weekly Round Up 01: Week Commencing 13/09/2010

Last week was a quiet one for me gaming wise, purely because I got into a couple of TV series that I’ve started watching the box sets of, but that’s now why you are here. I did have a good weekend before last week in that I managed to gain the last few achievements for The Secret of Monkey Island. Last week I did get an evening on the Xbox on the Wednesday, a mate was over and I showed him a couple of indie games including AppleJack, which got voted OXM’s best Indie game, so it’s not just me that thinks it’s great. The other Indie game I should him was The Impossible Game. A really simple to pick up and play game that is very addictive but as I only had the trial it didn’t take long for us to reach the end.

I did get some more time on Dragon Age: Origins towards the end of last week. I’m still working on my second full play through and I’ll admit I’m starting to get a little bored of it, weather that’s because I’m playing as a Mage or because it’s just the same over and over. I know that you can go either way on some of the major decisions in the game, but I’ve completed all of the origins stories so I know which origin will make the story more interesting when I come to make those decisions. I think I’m going to have to complete this play through and have a rest from it and pick up Mass Effect 2.

What else has been happening? The Tokyo Game Show 2010 was last week and while a few new connect titles have been announced, I can’t think of any major that was announced, but then again I can’t say I was paying much attention. I’m still looking forward to the EuroGamer Expo which is in a couple of weeks. With Fable 3, Fallout New Vegas, Brink, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, Crysis 2 and Dead Space 2 all playable on the show floor, I’m very excited. Nothing has been announced for Kinect yet, but I’m hoping they do so I can see for myself how well it reacts to your movements.

Another thing worth mentioning is the fact that Microsoft has announced that it will be raising the price of some Gold Membership options at the start of November. For where it matters the most, here in the UK, we get of very lightly the price change only affects the 1 month option. And raises it from £4:99 to £5:99, so an extra 12 pound a year, which makes a full year’s subscription out right cheaper but about 20 quid. So what are you waiting for?

Curiosity

While reading some of my news updates I saw one that I left, and I now wish I hadn’t. The title on the RSS feed was “A Mystery USB Drive Arrived Today”. I assumed that this was to do with the recent update that is coming to the Xbox to allow USB drives to be used as additional storage. However upon ready this story it would appear that it’s a viral marketing campaign, much like the Bioshock 2 something in the sea website, for a new game that has yet to be revealed. A USB drive was sent to various gaming sites, such as IGN and Joystiq as well as some COD fan sites, in a plain manila envelope with no return address, however there was a post mark from Maryland, America.

The drive contained 2 items. An audio file with a man’s voice reading out a quote, "What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also", as well as "Don't believe everything you see." followed by this sequence of letters:

MOD ZZZ JNQRYD3FRP

The other item was a text document with the following words in “Cryptography; Isotope; Philanthropy; Hydrogen; Ember; Rebirth”.

The Quote was by Julius Caesar and applying a Caesar cipher, with a shift of three, to the letter sequence reveals it to spell WWWGKNOVA6COM which does in fact lead to a website, with a television set which can be tuned using the dial. The set appears to repeat a message, a quote and then “NOVASIX” repeated along with various images.

Some clever bod, over at joystiq.com has found that the quote is from Francis Bacon, and he like Caesar has a cipher named after him. Bacon’s cipher uses different type faces to hide a message in plain sight, like some robots I know of ;). In the case of this message the “NOVASIX” is spelt by two voices, one male and one female. With the bacon cipher the repeated spelling of “NOVASIX” becomes “April Week Two”

So what does this mean? There are several opinions on which game this might mean, the first is that it’s for the new Fallout Game, Fallout: New Vegas, with the nuclear references it’s possibly and with Maryland being the home of Bethesda it’s defiantly possible. However others seem to think that it might be a reference to the new Call of Duty title this year. The text in the text file seems to contain a Google analytics code use by Activision. But there is a third possibility, and it’s a game that I’ve been looking forward to since I first read about it, and that is Singularity. However it may also be something completely different. I guess we’ll have to wait and see but I will be watching the website and I will update if I hear anything else.

What Have I Been Doing?

I know I said I was going to try and write an entry every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but I let it slip a bit this week but thats probably due to playing Mass Effect 2. However with posting this update, then there will have been 2 updates this week so it's only one that has been missed, which isn't too bad.

As I said in a previous post I recently bought Mass Effect 2. I've now completed the story, however I'm still working towards 2 more achievements. I've only got Warp Specialist - Warp the barriers of 25 enemies, and the biggest one Insane - Complete the game on the Insanity Difficulty. The latter I am finding a lot more difficult than when trying to complete the first game on Insanity, but as was pointed out earlier today, when you were continuing a game you already head decent weapons, but this time round you have to wait for the upgrades to come, although you do start with the main weapons.

I have seen the teaser trailer for Fallout: New Vegas. Although it's only a teaser trailer and not designed to give anything away, I'm sure there will be plenty of speculation as to what it will include. I'm guessing the figure at the end is either someone from the Brotherhood of Steel or it's the character that you will be playing.

So what does the near future hold for me on the gaming scene? Well, I'm hoping to finish off Mass Effect 2 to the full 1015G (go Figure!), and as the neither pick up Dragon Age: Origins again or maybe go back and pick up The Saboteur. However we are only 4 days away from Bioshock 2 being released, and I'm really interested in that as well, but what with my birthday coming up I've already decided that I'm not going to be getting any games as I already  have a large back log of games.