buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

Gaming

Achieving Satisfaction

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As anyone who’s been in a “Lone Wolf” Free For All match in Halo 3, you’ll know that a lot of players would like your assistance in getting a few of the tougher achievements that can only be earned in ranked FFA matches. BS Angel talked about this earlier. I’ve been spending the majority of my Halo 3 time in Lone Wolf matches, so I’ve been hearing this a lot.

I usually ignore the pleas to help out. “I’ll get in the Ghost, then you hijack me, then I’ll hijack you, then you hijack me back.” This was an actual conversation I heard as a game was loading. More often than not, I’ll head to wherever these guys are and mess with them. Then I’ll leave them to their business. Sure, I want the achievements, but I want to earn them, man!

One of these achievements is called “Two for One”:

Two for One

Recently, I was in a Lone Wolf match on Snowbound. It wasn’t a Slayer match, however, it was Oddball. I snatched the Spartan Laser and started chasing after a guy, training the laser on him the whole chasethe whole time, trying to time his movements to the charging laser. As luck would have it, another bad guy (with the skull, no less) came in the other direction. I charged the laser, blasted at guy #1 one and the nudged the laser ever so slightly and caught the other guy. Two for one, baby!

Here’s an in-game screenshot:

Two for One

Not the best shot, but you can see my name there in the background, in the little tunnel there, with the laser blasting the Ghost and the two bad guys as I earn my achievement the hard way. That was most satisfying.

In my hands

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The Orange BoxYeah, I’m about a week behind here, but I know you’ll forgive me. I’ve read so many positive things about Portal (our man Nat here, Michael has a good Orange Box round-up here) that I’ll be starting with that game.

Impressions will follow after I get around to it. I have to consume tonight’s episodes of Prison Break and Heroes. And a little Halo 3 multiplayer, too. I’ll get to it eventually!

Update: I got side-tracked the night before by some Halo 3 multiplayer action, so I didn’t get a chance to through the Orange Box disc in until last night. I originally thought I’d jump right into Portal, but decided to give Half Life 2 a look first. I may lose some gamer cred admitting this, but I never experienced the original Half-Life. So I was pretty confused for the hour or so I played HL2. It’s off to Wikipedia I go for some answers!

After a bit of wandering around in HL2, I jumped right into Portal. Fun fun fun. It’s one of those “holy crap, I’ve been playing for two hours?” game. I can’t wait to get back to it.

Portal: The Entrance

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Probably the most unique, shortest, and downright coolest game to come across my path in the last couple of years is Portal. In order to explain it a little more effectively, I’m going to use the web as an example.

Jump through the entrance.

I hope Tony doesn’t shoot me for this.

Crazy Capcom!

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If you’ve been a longtime reader of buttonmashing, you’ll note that there is a lot of love for the Capcom zombie games, most noteably Dead Rising and Resident Evil 4. Today in London Capcom announced the following games at their Gamer Day:

Street Fighter 4
Development has just begun and the release of the game is more than a year away. No platforms are yet confirmed – a highly stylised animated concept trailer of Ryu and Ken fighting was shown, but no game footage.

Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice
A new character and new series starring a rookie lawyer. Phoenix Wright makes an appearance but is not the lead character. Made specifically for DS.

Lost Planet (PS3)
Available early next year and will include all bonus characters from the PC version and extra downloadable content from the 360 version making it the complete package. Made possible with Blu-ray. 16 player online over the PSN.

Dark Void
A new sci-fi action-adventure IP. Trailer showed third-person and air-vehicle gameplay with a character wearing a steam punk jetpack, skydiving and landing in the cockpit of a gyroscopic aircraft, and then jumping and climbing through airbase fortesses.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD (Xbox Live Arcade)
The game will feature a spectator mode and is scheduled for a 2008 while the team try and get zero lag for the online mode. Also features stat tracking and widescreen. Original music from Street Fighter 2 will be used, plus remixed versions of all those tunes.

Wii Love Golf
From the Everybody’s Golf team comes a cutesy golf sim, that looks slightly more technical than the PlayStation versions. Players can fade or draw the ball by twisting the Wii-mote when taking a swing.

Notice anything missing? Yep, I don’t see it either. Now, you think that they would possibly want to cash in on one of their better selling games in recent years. However, they see no need (at this time, hopefully) for Dead Rising 2.

Many (heh) of us on the staff here at buttonmashing firmly believe there needs to be a sequel or spirtual successor for Dead Rising. Co-op would be a bonus.

Also, I like Lost Planet for the 360, (On the finish list!) but I don’t see how PS3 gamers are going to be clammoring for it next year. Of course, I may be proven wrong because Resident Evil 4 has done something similar with new platforms and performed reasonably well in sales.

From this list, it’s clear that Capcom views their buttonmashing (ha!) Street Fighter games as the true breadwinners.

Thanks to Evil Avatar and Games Radar for the info.

“Made possible with Blu-ray.” That’s subtle. I wonder how muchthey got from Sony for that?

All Good Things…

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Have you played Portal? After exactly one hour and thirty-seven minutes I finished it. I feel inspired. Motivated.

What I’m about to do may be the most difficult thing I will ever do when it comes to playing video games. I’m not going to increase the difficulty, not going to play blindfolded, and not even play with the controller upside down.

I’m going to finish a game. I’m going to finish a couple of games. Actually, it’s a slew of games. A list.

A plethora.

You see, I think most gamers harbor a deep, dark secret. One that’s hardly mentioned in everyday conversation, internet chatter, or even done for video game reviews: gamers don’t finish games. The video game industry itself has created this festering monster. Too many games, too many systems, and too much street cred is at stake for a gamer to fall behind the times. Everybody has to be playing the latest and greatest.

At the time of this writing Bioshock was released just over a month ago. It’s old news. Halo 3? Two weeks. Are you still playing? Regularly? Like most 13 year olds on Live? Gamers jump from one game to another riding the waves of one release after another. In 2007, I was no different. Or 2006, 2005, 2004…

This fall…this next year it will be different for this gamer. I’m going to finish every game I own that I have not finished. Every last one. Tony’s “playing now” post a couple of days ago really struck a cord with me. I have too many games that I spend too much money on that I hardly ever finish. All to often I fall prey to the current fad. I’ve tried this once before and I failed after only 2/3 of a game. One game.

The games I’m going to list cover every game I own that I have not finished. Now, some of these games don’t have an endgame and others have various difficulty settings. I’ll list what I consider to be game finishing requirements for each title. There’s now a moratorium on new games and the battle with old begins. On to the list.

[Read more…] about All Good Things…

Blogging updates (and what we’re playing)

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Just a quick note that I’m currently in the process of upgrading all the blogs I maintain and host for friends, so things around here may get goofy, but I think it should be pretty painless.

If you run a WordPress blog, I cannot sing enough praise for the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plug-in. Instead of manually downloading the new files, unzipping them and FTP’ing them to my server, this plug-in handles it all. This is very, very cool.

I know we’ve been a little lax in the blogging department around these parts, but with Halo 3 dropping on us and everything else going on, we’ve been busy. Busy playing games, that is. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For me personally, I’ve been spending a little more time back in Norrath with Everquest 2. I joined a guild, but haven’t done a ton with them yet. I’ve mostly been working on my tradeskills. That’s always fun, especially if you like mindless button clicking. We’ve been enjoying Halo 3 a bunch around these parts, co-op’ing and multiplaying whenever we can. There are a bunch of good games on the horizon. I think the Orange Box and Puzzle Quest are in my near future.

What about you guys and gals? What are you playing?

Joining the Party

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Halo 3 (spending shells)I mentioned last week that I wouldn’t be hopping on the bandwagon with the rest of the game playing world (correction: North American game playing world). In a moment of weakness, I’ve proven myself wrong.

I kept forgetting that I had this $50 Best Buy gift card burning a hole in my pocket. Well, I did set a record of hoarding it for almost two months and that’s only because I detest Best Buy. A need arose for me to pick up a TOS link cable (and I didn’t because Wal-Mart is much cheaper), and I got Halo 3 instead. Oh, and did I fail to mention that it was three days after launch and I didn’t have to wait in line?

If you look at my Bungie stats, you’ll see that I’ve played less than ten games. Every one of them has been a blast. I was even able to hook up with Tony and another online friend for a couple of hours of co-op.

Oh, and why would I have only played less than ten games? That’s because I did a massive game trade-in at my local Gamestop and got Stuntman: Ignition. It may sound weird to the average gamer right now, but I’ve had more fun with that game.

You can start breathing now.

Halo 3 Stats and Stats Galore

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Stats!I am getting a lot of Google searches for people wanting all the Halo 3 stats info they can find. Google is directing them to a post I did about the Halo 3 Beta stats going live. That doesn’t help out much, so since I am a huge Halo 3 stats whore (I love love love them), I’m more than happy to provide people with additional information.

Right now, the pickings for a comprehensive, one-stop shop for your Halo 3 Stats are slim. The best is still going to be Bungie’s site. That’s not a bad thing, as it’s quite easy to use and well designed. They have a boatload of stats and just about everything you can ask for. Of course, that’s not enough for some people. They want, crave, and desire more. So I went looking for more.

The site StatsReloaded.com is the first stop you should make. While it’s not perfect, there is a lot of potential. Give it a try. (Please note that their site is “in Beta” and the stats may be reset a couple times before the site launches for real).

The first thing you’ll have to do is “register” your gamertag with their site. It’s simply adding your gamertag to their database. After you’ve added it, they create a page that is reminiscent of your Bungie.net page, but will a little more data (you can see mine here). I like the “Most Feared” and “Most Killed” stats. I expect most of my friends to appear in the “Most Killed” column!

I like to compare my stats with people on my friends list (and the random people I play) but it’s a little clunky with Bungie.net. StatsOverloaded comes through, with the ability to compare up to 16 players. (Again, the players you want to compare have to be in their database.) I went ahead and added my co-blogger Dark Reyule into their system (hope you don’t mind, DR!) and compared our stats. You can see the comparison here. Not too shabby.

For those of you that love your forum signatures, your bases are covered.

StatsReloaded Halo 2 News & Stats

StatsReloaded.com has a lot of potential. It seems like their servers are a bit sluggish and their site isn’t the most usable one out there, but for those of you looking to do more with your Halo 3 statistics, on October 8th, StatsReloaded.com looks to be a one stop shop. There will probably be A LOT of these types of sites that pop up. Heck, Bungie may even do something on their site. But whatever you’re looking for, there are going to be many ways to have fun with Halo 3 stats.

Halo 3 is going to break the Internet

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I mentioned that when the Halo 3 beta was available on Xbox Live, it would bring Live to its knees. I was mostly right, as it took forever for some people to download the beta. But now something even worse is probably going to happen: I’m pretty sure that Halo 3 is going to break the internet. It simply cannot support the demand for bits and bytes that the millions of denizens of Halo 3 demand. There are many reasons for this. Here are a few:

When it’s all said and done, there will have millions of multiplayer matches played. As we speak, thousands are going on simultaneously. (There were 500k+ Halo 3 players on Live when I logged off to post this)

With the most excellent playback feature now part of the package, players can review and obsess over every little detail of each one of their matches. They can also share and upload videos and take thousands of in-game screen shots. Of course 95% of those screen shots and videos are boring and crappy, but a few gems shine through (see below). But with all these tools at the disposal of millions of players, the internet is going to be worse for the wear. Videos galore being uploaded to YouTube (almost 50k at the time of this posting) and thousands of screenshots being uploaded to Flickr (12k+ at the time of posting)

Of course, I’m part of the problem, not the solution:

The Buckeye Spartan

That whimpering sound you hear are the servers, switches, and routers around the world.