Call of Duty: Black Ops
After playing through it at launch on my Xbox 360 and finding it to be a lot of fun, I figured I would use Black Ops as a kind of bone up on my FPS skills. Based on my performance in multiplayer this was an incredibly poor idea. I think I managed to finish a map once with a Kill/Death Ratio over 1.7 but that must have made me cocky because my next finish was a .5. The game is a lot of fun, and the graphics are pretty, but I find myself a little unhappy with the frequency in which I see "Press F to respawn".
I suppose a lot of it has to do with being badly out of practice with such things, and more to not being able to actually pick a game to play. A friend of mine from work likes to constantly make fun of me for the number of games I have on Steam. I shudder to think what he would think if he saw my game cases. I think my current count is somewhere around 500 games across the systems I own. That, of course, is not including all the old PC disks and such I have sitting around, or the digital copies of games on Steam. I find myself just looking at my game folder wondering what it is I want to play right now.
My experience so far has led me to a lot of Nuketown in multiplayer, which kind of fits learning to run and gun, since the entire map takes about 10 seconds to run across. I did try going back and doing the Combat Training to get myself ready, but the bots are either absolutely retarded or incredible based on the difficulty setting. There is no "Don't kick my ass, but don't stand there and let me shoot you" on the difficulty select.
Czuga prolly said it best when he said "well if you enjoy it keep plugging away at it". Which I suppose I will do now. If nothing else it gave me a moment to share something on the ol blog.
Halocraft
As everyone knows, I'm a huge fan of Minecraft. I'm also a big fan of the Halo series so Imagine my surprise when I found out that a guy from Sweden had modified Minecraft to... well just watch.
A pretty amazing recreation of the Lockout (Halo 2) / Blackout (Halo 3) map. I'm gonna need to up my game.
Once more into WoW
So here I am, once again, working on a blog I haven't updated in months. I figure the first step to actually updating it should be updating the content so here it is... a post.
Most of my time as of late has been dedicated solely to World of Warcraft with it's wonderful new Cataclysm expansion. A metric ton of changes in the game like reforging, new glyph system, guild changes, a ton of class changes, and even a return to graveyard button I mentioned wanting back in vanilla. The sheer amount of new stuff pretty much means that anyone can find a reason to be excited by all the new things and start to feel the urge to return to the fold.
I actually don't have much to say about the new high level zones as I haven't seen them yet. Rachel and I have followed our typical pattern of rolling a new char for an expansion pack and began leveling a pair of Goblins (Me a Shaman, her a Hunter) to right around level 70 at current. I’m not so sure of how I feel about the Shaman class, I know I should like it but the totem mechanic isn’t much to my liking and that kind of poisons the class a bit I would think. The sad tradeoff is most of the early content never made me take out my totems at any rate. A quick cast of three spells and everything ends up dead.
It’s actually almost alarming how easy the 1-60 path is. My memory isn’t good enough to actually remember my Vanilla leveling days, but I’m going to assume it took me a lot longer than a couple weeks of relaxed playtime to get to endgame.
At any rate, we have been enjoying it, and I’m hoping to do something of an instance group for dungeons just for giggles. With my schedule and that of my friends I’ll have a slightly better chance of updating this blog within a week than actually getting a group together though.
It’s friggin here!
I jumped into my Walmart to pick up DJ Hero 2 at release. I've gotten it and enough Mountain Dew to keep me awake for the next week, though in all honesty I imagine it would be pretty hard to play the game if my hands were shaking so bad I couldn't use the turntable controller.
I brought it home, popped it in, and started my empire... at least I think it's my empire. It's not like there's anything explaining what's going on, just straight to a half empty club to try my hand and making Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five 'The Message' vs. Kool & The Gang 'Jungle Boogie' sound like something I'd want to hear. I tried to make it a point to not spend too much time looking at the set list so some of the songs would still be a surprise to me when it came out, but I wasn't expecting the second song. The first mix was going really well when I started hearing Snow in the background.
Not the white noise, mind you, the Canadian reggae artist! Snow ' Informer ' vs. Jackson 5 ' ABC ' is pretty much the first hint I'm really going to love this game. It was like a blast from the past, made huge in no small part by the fact that I was the only person in a 200 mile radius of my hometown that had any friggin clue what he was saying in that song when it first came out.
I've made it through the first club now and I have to say I love the mixes for the most part. They even made me not mind hearing Soulja Boy and Chamillionaire. Two artists that I can't usually stand, on the same song... and sounding not half bad.
Now to hope it sells a couple hundred thousand copies and they make a DJ Hero 3. 
Still waiting for the DJ
I think I may have mentioned about a dozen times how excited I was about DJ Hero and how it was the only one of the music games that, despite me buying all of them, really made me get into the music and the game in a way that felt like I was living out a fantasy.
Thus, part of the whole "I'm excited as all hell about DJ Hero 2!" thingy that has been going on in my house the last few days. Sure, I have Civ 5, Halo Reach, Vindictus, all games which I've had fun playing, but I'm really looking forward to that feeling again. I even have my favorite hoody clean and ready to roll when the game comes out.
October 19th I get good with the new tracks, and some of them look damn good. Track list after the jump.
DJ Hero 2!
So in news that quite honestly I find at least a little surprising, Activision will be sticking with the DJ Hero franchise to release a sequel later on this year. Although for some that may not mean much, for me it means a ton. I absolutely LOVE the game.
You see, I never grew up wanting to play the guitar, and although I did stints as both a drummer and singer in my youth, I don't have a huge amount of interest in those either. So Guitar Hero and Rock Band were great, fun games to play, but didn't give me that spark that made me sit in my living room in my underwear strumming to the hits.
It wasn't until I found myself sitting in my living room with my hoody on, hat tilted to the side, bopping my head with the beat and putting genuine flourish into my hand movements that I realized that the game had me. The music is great, far from the cheesy stuff I was expecting... Good enough, in fact, that I am listening to the soundtrack as I write this post.
Absolutely cannot wait!
How to even start?
The problem really with doing anything with this site is that I'm far far too random in the things that I do and far far to grand with the plans that I make.
Wanting to have my list of video games / movies / books here has been a goal for a while but is something I've never gotten done. A plugin for wordpress / collectorz apps would be nice. (Hint?) But even with that I think I'd rather they make an Android application for my new phone. 
So naturally it is one of the things that is on the back burner and I'm wanting to get done but it won't yet.
Saying what I'm playing? That's a mish-mash as well. I play a lot of WoW, but that's mostly because that is what Rachel, Sky and I seem to be able to play together. We tried Aion, but it just bored me to tears. Which is a shame. Beautiful game. I'm also playing DJ Hero on 360, and it's a really wonderful game. More on that later we'll hope.
So.. I will try to post more. Even if they are mini-updates. And we will see how this turns out.
Facebook Gaming
Mushroom in Farmville
Black Mage in Farmville
Although I had intended to spend a lot of my vacation gaming I hadn't really intended to do it with titles such as Mob Wars, Farmville, and Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures.
I've spent what really evens out to an insane amount of time on those titles, surpassing most of my friends who had been on them for weeks. Most of my time I spent... well... farming. It's not glorious I understand, but I decided to make the game my own by using Farmville hay bales to make my own art out of. It turned out better than I thought it would, first on my mushroom, then on my rather funky Black Mage from Final Fantasy. I even went so far as to make myself a spreadsheet in excel that let me do the images in the spreadsheet first and it would calculate the number of bales and the cost of it for me.
In my Xbox 360 news I did pick up Wet and Marvel Ultimate Alliance II on Tuesday. They both seem like good games but I'm going to wait a while before commenting on them too much. Wet seemed very much like one of those games you either despise or love. MUAII seemed like more of the MUA that I had loved in the first place, and the Deadpool silhouette pretty must was all I needed to let me know I was going to like at least something in it.
Which reminds me that for that very reason I hated at least part of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Those who have seen it know of what I speak... The pain. 
I did manage to bring myself to finish up Guitar Hero 5 Career Mode. Getting another 95 points of achievements in the process. Good times there. I seriously doubt I'll get the rest of the achievements in the game, they require a little too much concentration on my part.
Vacation Fun
Most of my vacation thus far has either been taken up by Guitar Hero 5 (thanks a lot Michelle) or trying to code together a database for my video games.
Guitar Hero is pretty much, well, the same thing you would expect. Rock Band/Guitar Hero seem pretty interchangable at the level I play, so I just have fun with the songs. There seems to be a pretty good selection and you can port in the previous Guitar Hero songs as well. There also is a tie in to the Guitar Hero community site, where your songs and band can be tracked and you can show off to all your friends, etc...
This is purely theoretical to me mind you, as when I tried to sign up and put in my VIP code it said it was already taken, and the support address has had absolutely no response. Not a game changer but I don't know why you would possibly put up a support link and never bother replying to anything sent to it. That seems pretty pointless and silly to me.
There was a living social question on the games that stole the most of your life away and of course I had to put Ultima Online on that list, which when my friend Tammy saw it she had to comment on it, bringing us back into a bit closer touch, and hopefully getting me another playing friend in MMOs, as Bobby is mostly MIA and Sky is still doing the time away thing. The possible benefit for this is of course if Rachel and I pick up Aion and convince Tammy to do the same we may actually get ganked just a little tiny bit less. Good times!
