Free Candy For Everyone

I’ve claimed it before, but that was almost two years ago. I haven’t played World of Warcraft in maybe two weeks, and I don’t miss it. In fact, it’s been kind of glorious. I’ve been playing all sorts of different games on my Xbox 360.

I started up Phantasy Star Universe this weekend. It’s not a great game. But there’s something really lovely about playing a role playing game that has an end. I’m playing through, I’m making progress towards goals, and I know at some point I’ll wrap up the story and move on to something else. I kind of love it.

Let’s be honest, I’m sure I’m not really done with WoW. I still have a group that plays every Sunday night (we’ve missed the last week, hence the hiatus). My main is still only level 69 - I have one more level to go before I max out. But maybe I’m done with the constant alt-rolling any time I’m bored. There are so many other games out there! So much I’m missing that could be awesome and fun. I need to get back to playing all those other games.

Maybe I’ll pick up Final Fantasy XII again… That was a good one that I never managed to finish.

I’ve been slowly making my way through Guitar Hero 2 and I’m wondering if I’m the only person who has problems with the game. No, my problems aren’t a lack of skill. I’m wicked awesome at GH, seriously! My problem is that playing the game causes my physical pain. Mostly it’s in my right shoulder, my strumming arm. But sometimes, I get pain in my left wrist too. Maybe this is for the best, since it only allows me to play for a maximum of 30 minutes or so. I can’t possibly play longer or the pain gets too much. But that can’t be normal, can it?

And an update on Operation Hoodwink. It would be good to read the terms and conditions of return on the back of the receipt. Turns out you cannot return opened video games to Best Buy, you can only exchange them. But ah, I’m wily and cunning and rather loud, so I succeeded in my ploy, though at perhaps a downgraded level of success. I walked out with store credit.

Another digression - one of the things I love most about the Xbox 360 is the achievements system. I talked about it and why it’s great when I first got my Xbox a while ago. Today I was playing GH2 to acquire achievements. There is an achievement for playing a song without missing a single note, an achievement for beating the game on easy, one for getting 5 stars on every song easy, etc. I thought I’d start out trying to knock some of those out. I’ve been playing the game on hard and slowly making my way down the list, but I’m stuck in a venue where I don’t like any of the songs. So I have to play through 6 songs to move on and I don’t like a single one. Seemed like a good time for a side quest.

I started with the first song of the game on easy. And I didn’t get 5 stars on it! It was so easy that I was falling asleep. That’s my only explanation. I decided to press on. The next song was better. I was hitting every note. I thought I would make it all the way without missing anything! But then on the last few measures, I mucked it up and missed 2 notes. That was infuriating! 3 minutes of perfect play, messed up in the final 10 seconds. *sigh* But the song after that worked it out. I hit every note. I didn’t miss a thing. I was a rock star! And for my pains, I unlocked not one, oh no, not one, but TWO achievements! I got my perfect song and I got an achievement for hitting a 500 note streak. Oh, that was nice. I played a few more songs and decided to call it a night.

You can go online and see all the achievements available. I just went and took a peek at the Guitar Hero 2 ones. There’s some funny ones, like “Refuse an encore” and “Fail a song on Easy.” I should do that failing one. Free points! I love points.

The other night I had internet access, but there was no WoW to be played. My server was down for a hardware upgrade. So I watched some TV and read a bit. But I wanted to game! I booted up my Xbox 360 and decided to download Uno from Xbox Marketplace. One of my co-workers has been talking about how great it is, and since it only cost $5 I thought, “Why not?”

I ended up playing for over an hour. It’s a simple little game, but the implementation is clean, you can choose from many popular different variants of the rules, and it’s quick.

One of the benefits of working at a big company seems to be commerce. There’s a constant murmur of item trades and sales in the background. Well, ok. That’s an exaggeration. But there does seem to be someone selling something everyday. And I’ve availed myself of this opportunity twice now. The first time was during my first few days at work. My stuff hadn’t arrived here from Massachusetts yet and I lost my iPod during a regrettable loose purse incident on a flight a few weeks ago. This means I was completely without music at work. It turns out I get grumpy when I’m in music withdrawal. But then a large bin of CDs appeared outside my office door. “For Sale!” they shouted. I purchased 7 CDs from that stack and was soon happily listening to music while I worked. Some of it wasn’t quite what I would have chosen myself, but beggars/choosers and all that.

Then today someone offered up Rockstar’s Table Tennis game for Xbox 360. This was a game that I remember scratching my head about. Why would the creators of the Grand Theft Auto dynasty make a Ping Pong game? The answer is simple: because they could, and they could do it darn well. I had a few minutes of play time during a lunch hour at my old job and had been impressed with the game. It looks fantastic and it has great attention to detail. It’s fun to play with friends, and I’m always looking to add a few titles to my meager 360 game collection. So this was perfect - I picked the game up at a low price and finally dragged my 360 out of its box and hooked the system up today.

I played for way longer than I had intended to. My hand aches a bit from gripping the controller so tightly! But they make it really easy to jump in and get going. I felt like a champ for a few matches until the computer started getting tougher. But I still managed to slaughter everything the game had to throw at me. On easy mode. With the easiest player character. But I said, “What the hell” and threw caution to the winds and jumped online with Xbox Live. With about 2 controller clicks I had a match set up. Someone joined within about 5 seconds. It was so easy. Well. The game setup was easy. My practiced opponent then proceeded to completely clobber me in no time at all. The only point I got in the entire game was one where they hit the ball and missed the table. I can maybe take some credit for that. Maybe. The really cool thing was I could then go and look at my opponent’s gamer tag and see that they had unlocked everything possible in Table Tennis. Obviously they’re gonna be a lot better than some n00b who had put in about an hour.

All in all, I’m continually impressed with the Xbox 360 online integration. They make it so easy and quick that you hardly even have to think about it. And Table Tennis is certainly a mighty good Ping Pong game.

Been playing my Xbox 360 a bit. So far I’ve tried a bunch of downloads for free on the Xbox Arcade. It’s really easy to use. It’s probably all too easy to spend money too, since they know my credit card number. I fear that all you need to do is click to buy something. That’s not good. But I haven’t tried yet, fortunately.

I put about an hour or so into Oblivion - haven’t played anymore since that first session. We have a bunch of 360 titles floating around at work, so I took a stack of them home and I’ve been playing Kameo:Elements of Power, which is surprisingly good. It was a launch title that was originally going to be an original Xbox title, so I didn’t expect it too look all that great. It looks awesome. The graphics are good, and it looks really good on my big screen HDTV. It’s a platformer-type game, and I tend to be bad at those. It usually takes me a while to figure out what they want me to do in a puzzle situation (Prince of Persia was particularly irritating for me in that way), and then a bit longer to execute it. Don’t know why, but I’m just not good at these things. Despite that, I was able to appreciate it. It’s really sharp, the gameplay is interesting and unique - you are a cute little flying elf girl, but you can transform into a bunch of really different beasties, including a giant rock slug thing, a yeti-type-thing, and a walking-Audrey II. I’ll keep playing a bit I think.

Another thing to note is how crazily effective the Achievements system is. Basically, the Xbox platform has this built in achievements system. Any game has a set number of points (it seems to be 1000 for most titles, and 200 for arcade titles). These are doled out however the game designers wish through accomplishing tasks in the game. These points add up to your gamer score, which you can see above displayed on my gamer card. I want to play games that will give me points so I can see them catalogued (because I’m like that, ya see, loving the tallying and organizational type stuff). I kept playing Kameo past the point I might have stopped because I wanted to get at least one achievement. And I probably will go back to try to get more. Good system design there.

I have a few other titles to try, but right now I’m pretty happy with my 360. It’s kind of funny, since just before GDC I posted about how I wasn’t excited about the 360 at all, and couldn’t wait for the PS3, and yeah yeah, whatever MS. And hear I am, spouting MS rhetoric left and right. I guess that full day tutorial on Microsoft technology I attended at GDC must have sunk in a bit too deep!