Ty’s Weblog

Microsoft announce Halo 3: Recon today.  I’m pretty phsyced about it.  It has a lot of potential to be good.  I’m looking for good game play, of course, but I live to the story in Halo also.  I’m among those rare few who liked the ending of Halo 2 though.  I’ve read a lot of the extended world of books for it and have enojyed them all very much, so I’m looking forward to the story in Recon about as much as the game itself.

So Puzzle Quest hasn’t been played much yet, due to time constraints with work and the fact that I try to play that when Xander and enjoy it with me.  I play so many games that aren’t child friendly, that I tend to hoard the ones that are for playing with/in front of them.

Picked up Rainbow Six Vegas 2 today for multiplayer fun this weekend with the group I play with.  Played through a little bit this evening and they’ve done a really great job improving on the game.  The first one was great, but from what I’ve played so far, this one looks to be even better.

I also picked up the new Gears of War set, which includes all the downloadable content available so far.  I’m going to try to get around to playing it before Gears of War 2 comes out.

In order to do that, I need to finish my way through GTA IV.  There is just so much to do in that game though, I keep getting distracted from the main plot.

The Puzzle Quest expansion comes out today, so the fact that I’m writing this from work is pretty impressive, I’d say.  Xander and I are both looking forward to the new content.  More info after I’ve had a change to play it some tonight.

We picked up Rock Band today, and it is awesome!  Kate, Xander and I all had a great time playing.  Kate was on vocals, Xander played guitar, and I tried my hand on drums.  We all had a really good time and we are looking forward to playing a lot more in the future!

Gamespot has up a preview for NASCAR 09, which looks fairly encouraging.  I’ve skipped the last few versions, since they didn’t offer much of an improvement over the version I own.  This one looks like it might be a nice graphics upgrade, as well as some interesting game play.

I finally managed to get 5 stars on all the songs for Guitar Hero 3 on Medium.  Knight of Cydonia and Raining Blood were the two that took me a lot of practice before I could do them.  That’s done now and I’ve moved on to playing through career on Hard.  I made it through the first stage already, but boy is my hand tired.  Not all 5 stars of course, at this point, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to manage that.  I guess it’s just a matter of practice though.

I finished Assassin’s Creed last night (mostly, I still have some achievements to finish, but I finished the main part of the game).  It was quite an amazing game.  The only complaints I have about it are that it was a little repetitive at times.  I would have like more variety in the information gathering parts of the missions.  Also, I would have liked the guard to have been a bit smarter.  I could do some pretty extreme stuff right in from of them and they would only make snarky comments about it.  Still, those things aside, the game was amazing.  It had a great feel and the controls worked very well most of the time.  The combat system, while starting out a little simple, does develop a little depth as the game goes on.

It is also a game that is what you make of it.  You don’t have to be super stealthy with your kills if you don’t want to.  I chose to go the stealthy/planning route, and I think the game was more fun because of it, but you don’t have to play it that way.  I also took a lot of time to explore the story of the game.  The game has a very strong plot and an ending that provides lots of fuel for speculation for the hoped for Assassin’s Creed 2.  I had a great time playing it.  Now I just need to finish finding all the flags so that I can get all my achievements for it.

I went back down a level to finish Guitar Hero on Easy to get the achievements involved.  I finished that on the 16th and finished them all with 5 stars a couple days later.  Now I’m trying to get all the songs with 5 stars on Medium before I make a serious effort on trying Hard, which in my experiments has been an ego crushing experience.  Hopefully I’ll get better with practice.  Xander is starting up trying the Medium difficulty today.

In other Guitar Hero related news, today the Halo Theme was released for free on Xbox Live.  A very nice surprise for those of us that are fans of both games.  It’s a lot of fun to be able to play.

Just finished Guitar Hero 3 on medium.  It was a ton of fun.  I’ve still got to try to get 5 stars on all the songs, which is easier said than done.  Then I’ve got to ramp up for Hard.  I might go ahead and play Easy first just to get it out of the way for the achievement.

I broke down and picked up Guitar Hero 3 yesterday (for the 360, of course).  I had a ton of fun with it last night.  The only down side of it is that my left wrist and fingers are a little bit sore today from all the playing I did last night.  It is a tough game, and I’m only playing on the Medium settings so far, which uses 4 of the 5 frets on the guitar.  When I finally decide to go to Hard, that’s going to be a huge adjustment.  The game is a lot of fun though, and the kids are enjoying it quite a bit as well.  I’ll likely let Xander give it a try this weekend, and see if he likes it.

Three friends and I finished the fight on Legendary last night! It was a lot of fun to play through the game at that hard level with a group of friends. I highly recommend the experience to anyone who has finished the campaign on their own. It really gave a different feel to the game. Great job Bungie on finally giving us this awesome feature!

I just finished the fight!  No spoilers.  My reaction to the ending is mixed though.

I’ve played my first few minutes of Halo 3. I’ve got a migraine today, so I only played for about 30 minutes. I played a brief bit of single player just to see how it looks (it looks great in 1080p, by the way). Then I took a quick jaunt into multiplayer to try that out and won my first game! It looks like it is going to be lots of fun! Feel free to check out my service record.

Speaking of Halo 3! A music video called Halo Nights is out on the net, which I thought was pretty funny.

Just finished BioShock a few minutes ago.  It was an awesome game!  The atmosphere they were able to maintain throughout the game was amazing.  It was an excellent mix of excitement and creepiness and an excellent story to go along with it.

I’m all clear now for Halo 3 next week!