fistful of gamerpoints
The middle of this week has been pretty good for game playing, I suppose. After watching The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters on Tuesday night, I awoke wednesday, energized and all-around pumped enough to manage a whopping twelve million points in Dolphin Olympics 2. After that, I decided to pick up Lost Planet from where I left off some months ago, and beat the crap out of the tail end of it. Then I started up Space Invaders Extreme for a bit, and was finally able to finish off the boss in Area 5, unlocking the Extreme Mode. Extreme Mode is basically the same as Arcade Mode, except instead of the branching difficulty paths, the game automatically picks all of the hardest stages possible. What fun!
I was also rooting through some Xbox Live Arcade and XNA games, the other day. Wednesday saw the release of a new free Arcade game called Dash of Destruction, which is a big (small) advertisement for Doritos, in which you play a dinosaur (or truck) and try to eat trucks (or avoid being eaten by dinosaurs). The game isn't all that bad, considering it's free, though it is very short. It's fun enough, for about 15 minutes, which is about long enough to beat each game mode and unlock all of the achievements for an easy 200 gamerpoints.
In the XNA games, most of it was total garbage, though I was intrigued by one title called Weapon of Choice. I had some extra Microsoft Points, so I put down the 400 for it, and it's actually a fairly competent Contra-like game with a few little differences. For one thing, the aiming/firing is done Geometry Wars-style with the right stick, making for a play experience similar to the old DOS game Abuse, with more colors and also some robotic limbs sticking off your back that let you climb on walls and ceilings.
So far, I've seen one ending after the.. third or fourth stage. I suppose that's one of the bad endings, because there was at least one more stage after that on the overworld map. The game info mentions four different endings, and I only rescued one POW on my way through. POWs are extra player characters you find somewhere in each of the stages. If you manage to bring them to the end of the stage, they become selectable at the outset of any given stage. It's pretty cool.
What else, what else..? Oh, I finally went and bought the Secret Santa gift for a girl at work, this week. That's pretty exciting. I feel sorry for whoever got me, because if I don't know what I want, how will somebody else have any idea? I'm really not crazy about Secret Santa, but maybe it'll turn out well. I think we exchange gifts tomorrow or something. I'll have to figure this out.
The end.
I was also rooting through some Xbox Live Arcade and XNA games, the other day. Wednesday saw the release of a new free Arcade game called Dash of Destruction, which is a big (small) advertisement for Doritos, in which you play a dinosaur (or truck) and try to eat trucks (or avoid being eaten by dinosaurs). The game isn't all that bad, considering it's free, though it is very short. It's fun enough, for about 15 minutes, which is about long enough to beat each game mode and unlock all of the achievements for an easy 200 gamerpoints.
In the XNA games, most of it was total garbage, though I was intrigued by one title called Weapon of Choice. I had some extra Microsoft Points, so I put down the 400 for it, and it's actually a fairly competent Contra-like game with a few little differences. For one thing, the aiming/firing is done Geometry Wars-style with the right stick, making for a play experience similar to the old DOS game Abuse, with more colors and also some robotic limbs sticking off your back that let you climb on walls and ceilings.
So far, I've seen one ending after the.. third or fourth stage. I suppose that's one of the bad endings, because there was at least one more stage after that on the overworld map. The game info mentions four different endings, and I only rescued one POW on my way through. POWs are extra player characters you find somewhere in each of the stages. If you manage to bring them to the end of the stage, they become selectable at the outset of any given stage. It's pretty cool.
What else, what else..? Oh, I finally went and bought the Secret Santa gift for a girl at work, this week. That's pretty exciting. I feel sorry for whoever got me, because if I don't know what I want, how will somebody else have any idea? I'm really not crazy about Secret Santa, but maybe it'll turn out well. I think we exchange gifts tomorrow or something. I'll have to figure this out.
The end.