31/08/2010

Red Dead Redemption - Bounty Challenge $5000

Oh this is fun !!, when on multiplayer you have various challenges to complete. Not sure if these are the same lust if challenges you can complete on single player or different. I have yet to start the single player campaign. Anyhow I strolled into Armadillo and walked into the doctors office. BANG ! My first victim then I just took cover behind the counter and blasted anyone who walked in through the door. Law enforcement, Cavalry or any cowboy who was foolish enough to enter. After approx 10 mins challenge complete, trying to make it out of the shop & I was met with gunfire raining down on me. I met my end on the doctors porch. But I did enjoy having a bounty on my head & look forward to playing RDR again soon ...

30/08/2010

Wii - Dust Off

I blew the dust off the wii, gave it a polish & turned it on. It's been over a year since it's last been used . After setting up the wireless, system updates & configuring a new 8gb sdhc card. It was time for the kids & me to have some fun. First the kids wanted to alter their mii characters, after all they have grown in a year & favourite colour choice is important. Then to test the new BBC iplayer channel Charlie & Lola obviously, works a treat & very impressed by the ease of use, I can see the kids using this a lot. Next Everybody Votes, why? Don't know but the kids enjoy it so a few questions answered & then onto actually playing a game TV Show King wiiware download. We were lucky to find enough batteries to configure all 4 controllers & opted to play a 3 round competition. Your usual quiz type affair except the majority of questions are for Adults. Needless to say I won. In summary then it was enjoyable experience playing with all the kids together, it is a family console & for that reason it might get played when we are together as a family. I now have a list of games to buy & some rechargeable batteries might also be a good idea. Feel free to recommend me any titles Retail or Wiiware?

Army of Two 40th Day - You have a choice

Throughout the game at various points you will get asked to make a choice on your actions. Do you let someone live or die? Do you go down one route or the other? These moral choices have some impact on the game, you will only be able to access certain areas if you have made the correct choices. Now I wish I had know about this before then maybe I would not have made the bad choice to get some extra money for upgrading weapons. If you are going to play the game more than once then I suppose you can go through it playing evil & good. But I'm only going to play the game once, I need to finish it off before Halo Reach. Looks like I've missed out on a new weapon then, now I wish I had let that tiger loose in the zoo just to see what would have happened? The achievements are still glitchy on this game with actionabbas missing out on the end of chapter 4 achievement. We might have to go back and do the chapter again because I don't want him to miss out on the end of game achievement.

28/08/2010

Red Dead Redemption - Co-Op Missions

Have not played this in over a month so a UGVM PMG (Planned Multiplayer Gaming) had me get the game back out again. I have yet to start the single player campaign because I was too busy playing Final Fantasy XIII. Not much in the way of turnout for the PMG only Stefcha & Lufferov so we decided after a few gang hideout events to try the co-op missions. There are six co-op missions for upto 4 players to try and complete. We went for The Kidnapped Girl, rescue the girl from Fort Mercer & get her back to Ridgewood Farm. Then Walton's Gang, Fight through the mine to grab the gold and run out of Gaptooth Breach. The the Herd where you need to get a herd of cattle from Pike's Basin to Armadillo, not as easy as it sounds but we managed to save 19/20. Great fun & thoroughly enjoyed playing these missions.  The co-op missions are a FREE dlc download so if you don't have them already get them. If you are going to play online, give me a shout & if I'm around I'll join

Words with Friends - Futz


Just played my highest scoring word Futz 111 points.

Computing Dictionary
futz definition
jargon
("futzing around") To waste time on activity that is often experimental and may or may not be productive. Not normally used for game playing.

Well they got that wrong then I used it for game playing :)

25/08/2010

Chain Link Pro

Downloaded this freebie recently from the appstore, my daughter has been playing this game quite a bit. So I thought I would give it a try. A simple game in that you have to tag the same shapes & then send them to the centre warp circle.






Obviously it starts off easy with very few shapes for you to tag & complete. But a few levels in and you get quite a few different shapes and you have to make sure that when you send these to the centre circle you must not touch any other shapes along the way, you have 3 lives & you will lose 1 of these if you touch another shape. There are also power-up's you can collect for score multiplier 2x or 3x but also an hour clock to pause the time & others you can unlock throughout the game. The biggest challenge is you have a 10 second countdown timer to tag the shapes & get them to the centre circle.


After a few poor attempts I ended up with a decent high score of 88,825 to set my daughter a new target to aim for :)

23/08/2010

Carcassonne - UGVM Top 5 Challenge

I'm never one to shy away from a challenge (in fact I set the challenge up) so I sent an invite to the top 5 players in the Carcassonne leaderboard inc me :)

Let's see who will win?
Round 1 FIGHT !!

Words with Friends - Dr Dolittle responds

In response to my longest word Dr Dolittle (Colin) responds with villages but check the points 143 !!

Words with Friends - Longest Word

Just played my longest word in Words with Friends. Emotionalist for only a measly 32 points.

There seems to be a lot of traffic to this post so let me add if you fancy a game of WordswithFriends my username is gospvg

Also add your wordswithfriends username to the comments section

22/08/2010

Army of Two 40th Day - Hostages & Ammo Crates

In each chapter you always have a certain number of hostages to save & ammo crates where you can collect either money or unlock weapon parts but, there is always a BUT !!

When saving hostages you must kill all the enemies before they assassinate the hostage, not always easy however. You can go in all guns blazing & hope you kill all the enemies before they kill the hostages, this may work but usually the hostage ends up dying either by being assassinated or caught in the crossfire. The best tactic is to use mock surrender which buys you a few more seconds for your co-op partner to get a good spot to start picking a few off & then finish off the left overs.

Similar scenario with ammo crates you have to kill all the enemies before they can get to the crate to lock it shut. Once it's shut you cannot open it.

Luckily today Abbas & I managed to complete Chapter 3 saving all the hostages & collecting all the loot from the ammo crates (Yes we did have to try a few of them again & again & again .....& again)

I had fun trying to get 100 sniper kills (cue quote from Abbas "Wow !! you are really good at headshots dad") to unlock that achievement, whilst Abbas went for the 400 kills with Assault Rifles.

Carcassonne - An Experiment

Becky (http://www.spritesandbites.net/) wanted to experiment with creating the largest city & road possible on a game without placing any people, so the experiment began. Initially it was quite easy to place the pieces and then we doubled back on ourself & had to wait for the correct tiles to show up whilst trying our best not to place a tile that would destroy the city with the dreaded 'X'. We done very well but with about 14 tiles remaining we had no choice but to complete the city or risk leaving it unfinished.

Screenshots below for the finished city.






















If my maths is correct if a person was placed on this city then the total points would have been 64 points? Is that right? does not seem like much?


























Anyhow the finished map looked like this with a road going off to the right.


So what happened in the endgame you ask? Yes I have a screenshot for that as well.


How did Becky get +16 for that? I don't know? Anyone care to explain?




I'm now need to win a few more games to catch up Lufferov who is now back at the top of the leaderboard

Carcassonne - Battle of the Titans


The Battle of the Titans. Lufferov vs gospvg, Carcassonne is as much a game of skill as luck. You need the luck to get the city tiles early on and then correct tiles to complete those cities. The final result was won by Luffers due to the placement of his farmers. Well done, rematch?

Alpha Protocol

The cover says Espionage RPG on reality this game is a test your patience RPG. How long before you are sending foul mouth abuse at the game for it's poor design be it either the erratic camera angle, the dreadful graphics, the poor enemy AI or the infuriating mini games. Obsidian are no newcomers to making RPGs but even I fail to understand how they could make such a poor game. I could only manage 40 mins of gameplay before I ejected the game in disgust. Beaten by another annoying mini game interruption which I failed to understand how to complete in the small time limit given. Failure then sets off the alarms which result in enemies swarming on your location. I have read many reviews that say if you persist, there is a game somewhere in this mess but for me I do not have the patience or the willpower to carry on. This purchase is a lesson learnt don't buy any games from Play.com sales just because they are cheap & you hope they are good. If you are looking for an action adventure rpg then Fallout 3 or Mass Effect (which will be my next purchase) when I get rid of this pile of poop. I'm now praying like every other 360 gamer that Obsidian do not screw up Fallout New Vegas but I do not hold out much hope. If I don't buy Fallout New Vegas then the games I will be buying for the rest of the year is beginning to look thin with only Halo Reach, Assassins Creed Brotherhood for the 360 & Civilization V for the PC.

Army of Two 40th Day

The advantages of having a 12 year old son is that I can now enjoy local co-op gaming, this brings with it unfortunately some disadvantages in that in some games he is much better than me most notably Halo 3 & any driving game. We have now completed quite a few Xbox 360 co-op games ( I will post a complete list another day) the most recent being Gears of War 2. Having completed that we had Army of Two 40th day ready to unwrap & install to the 360 hard drive.

Warning this game has glitchy achievements which have not been patched by EA, especially the softcore (50g) achievement. I did not get this on our first run so after debating with Abbas we started the game again on 1 save file ensuring we did not select chapters but just using the continue option on the save file.

Upon starting the game you get to choose your character I'm Rios & Abbas is Salem & then the difficulty. Do we go easy, normal or contractor (Hard)?  Contractor it is then because we are only going to play the game once so we might as well get as many achievements along the way. After basic training session we get let loose to customise our weapons I'm happy with my pimped out Scar, whilst Abbas chooses a M4 assault rifle. There are some collectibles in the game Radio's & Neko cats, get these all (2 in each chapter I think) to get some easy achievements.

Back to the game we have played Chapter 1 & 2 on our first attempt so this time we ran through these again quite quickly but I forget to pick up the cats in Chapter 2 (something to maybe come back to later). If you have played the first Army of Two game then  this is more of the same but in a different setting. We have just completed Chapter 2 killing the Big Boss on our 4th attempt !!

Carcassonne


Sometimes you just do not have to write anything to post a blog entry, an image is more than enough. The mighty Lufferov has fallen :)