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Posted on 05.31.07 by A 47 Danger @ 8:15 am
I will always wait for game reviews before I buy games. With $60 at stake, it would be foolish to rush into purchases. With that being said, where the hell are the Shadowrun reviews? The videos for the game have looked fun, but you can’t base purchases on the pretty pretty press. Give me something! Someone! Metacritics? You haven’t found anything either? Filed under: A 47 Danger and Rant and Xbox 360 Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.25.07 by A 47 Danger @ 8:05 am
A few months back, my Xbox 360 gave me the dreaded ring of death. The counsel, which has not been moved from my entertainment center since I got it, decided to pass away with no warning. Being an early adapter, I was out of the recently extended warranty. Repairs costs, from the horse’s mouth, would be $140. There had to be another way! Periodically, I would turn the 360 on, hoping that elves had snuck into my home at night and fixed it much like they cobble the shoes of tired old men. They did not. Lousy elves. I believed really hard in you! Doesn’t that make you real? Next, being skeptical yet desperate, I wrapped my 360 in towels as so many on the internet have promoted. Aside from whetting my appetite for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the towels did nothing. I was out of easy options. The paths left to me were a huge repair bill or actually opening up the concave white box. Being opposed to bills of any sort, it was time to pry the sucker open. Under the watchful eye of Skintari, expert PC messer-arounder-inner, we opened the Xbox 360 in a couple simple steps. Part of that sentence was a lie. There is nothing simple about opening up a 360. Hidden latches and screws are your twists and turns in the maze to the heat sinks you wish to remove. After a billion steps, the motherboard can finally be revealed. But before you can remove the heat sinks, you have one last bit of peril. The design flaw. The “X” clamps that must be pried off with brute force and patience. It has taken you a minute or two to read this far, but you’ll spend about an hour and a half getting to this point in the repair process. Our arms were tired, but we continued forward. Heat sinks and chips cleaned with Q-tips and alcohol. Arctic Silver 5 applied to said chips. Flawed “X” clamps replaced with $3 worth of hardware from Lowes. That was all the tinkering we needed. Replacing some stupid clamps that were putting too much stress on the motherboard. It was time to put the motherboard back into the Xbox 360 and overheat the system so it could solder some items in place. Skintari and I plugged everything in, and started the system up. And just like that, there was joy in the air. The red lights had already been fixed. A rainbow made entirely of green lights pierced our eyes like the noon day sun peeking out from behind a cloud. No overheating was needed. Patience and $15 in materials fixed what Microsoft had messed up. The instructions used for this fix can be found RIGHT HERE. Of course, you should only do this if your 360 is broken, obviously, and if you are out of warranty. This fix might not work for everyone who is experiencing the three red lights, but it worked like magic for me. Welcome back, Xbox 360! I must make up for wasted Halo 3 beta time.
Filed under: A 47 Danger and Xbox 360 Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.22.07 by skintari @ 9:43 am
Here’s a little game that came out, courtesy of D3. It’s the Americanized version of “Genocide Grand Prix” (Japan). This game costs about $10 and you can find it at just about any local game store with a tad bit of looking. I definately recommend picking it up for the sheer thrill of it! So, what is Drive to Survive you ask? Well, it’s not a very good game. The graphics are dull and common, the camera can mess you up, and the AI can be “too good”. But the fun of this game is the multiplayer! It’s your basic 3rd person racing game. The difference is that you have weapon pick ups that you can use on your “enemies”, ala Twisted Metal. The cars handle like a wet sock, but that sometimes works to your advantage. The game is not very deep either. There’s 3 tiers of single player racing with about 15 different tracks. Once you beat that, there’s not much else. But the multiplayer is the meat of this game. With 3 friends over, you can spend hours blowing each other up. Every time I have played the multiplayer, I have ended up in tears from laughing so hard. It is that much fun! Overall, this game is a 2/5 for single player. But the multiplayer is definitely worth a couple extra points…..so it gets a 4/5 for that. My recommendation is if you see this game, it’s worth the few bucks to pick it up!
Filed under: PS2 and Review and skintari Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.15.07 by skintari @ 9:57 am
I know, that title prolly doesn’t seem like something you can wrap your head around, but wait! don’t skim past this article! I’m talking about a new game called Puzzle Quest. This game comes a referral by Beuks, so you know it’s gonna be classy. The basic premise of the game is a combination of the online fan favorite, Bejeweled. The difference is the rpg twist that it has incorporated. Now, this may seem a little absurd, but the game actually flows nicely. You start off by creating your “character”. The choices are pretty basic, warrior, knight, “magician”, and druid. You really only pick the sex and makeup, no additional features can be changed, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about gameplay! So you start off in the center of the map with a standard rpg story line. Go see your father, go check out different towns, and so on. Once you begin, you can stop at the tavern and get some helpful clues. Then you start the training. It takes awhile to understand everything that’s going on, but once you do…..look out! The battle sequences look something like this….  If you notice the different colors, those are for your spells and weapons. Once you have collected the sufficient amount, you can cast damage or protection. Each character also has it’s own unique set of items that they can use. During this battle, you can also collect mana (money) and the purple bursts are used to boost your experience. The skulls are what inflicts damage onto your opponent. That’s pretty much the jist of the battles. Once a battle is over, you can return to the castle where you can spend your money on various weapons and upgrading you castle. You can purchase things like a forge which gives you the ability to make “super weapons” and specialty items. Some buildings also let you capture creatures after beating them in battle 3 times. The way to capture a creature is buying completing a puzzle. Some of these are easy and some of these are hard. But they are pretty fun. The only negative is that the game can get pretty overwhelming on some of the battles. Some of your enemies cast spells that gives them like 8 turns and the whole time you just sit there and watch your life drain. Other times, there will be only one move you can make, which then opens the board up for the enemy to make 4 in a row. I wish the AI would have been a little more forgiving with this. I can’t tell you how many times I had an enemy down to 6 or 7 hit points and mine was above 20 and I still lost the battle. But overall, a very fun little time waster, especially if your a fan of rpg’s. So, all in all, I’ll rate this little guy a 4/5. I think it has a ton of replay value with each character and, of course, it is bejeweled! Filed under: Nintendo DS and Review and skintari Comments: None |
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Posted on 05.11.07 by skintari @ 10:14 am
As you can see, it’s a very basic principle and that’s what makes it so fun and addictive. I never spent more than 5 minutes on any one puzzle and there was enough of a challenge to keep me wanting to play one puzzle after another. Not to mention that we’ve just started playing the game and are already up to about 130 puzzles. There are also a few different types of challenges. Each day you can do your daily fortune, which gives you 4 categories you have to complete. Health, Work, Romance, and Money are the fortunes. Each one gives you a different response based on how well you perform the challenge. There is also a Rapid Play. This is a timed game that you have to find one difference between the pictures. At the end of each round, it assesses your judgement, intuition, concentration, recognition, and stability. It then rates you at the end of each round on how quickly you completed the challenges and how well you drew your circles. The head to head function is good for a few laughs as well. In the download play, if you find yourself behind, quickly tap the lower right corner to cover your opponents screen with frogs or other wacky things. This gives you a chance to catch up, not only by screwing up that round for them, but also the next one as they will still be laughing over the giant frogs. There are 2 other multi-player games, yet both people would need the game so we didn’t get to try that out. All in all, this is a great little time waster that’s a lot of fun. Think a WarioWare puzzle game. The only real downside to this game is that there is no hint or help function. While it doesn’t degrade the game at all, it would have been nice to include as some of the puzzles can be quite busy. But, after a try or three, you can usually pick out that one thing you looked over for the past 5 minutes! My score on this is a solid 4.5/5. Definitely, worth picking up and extremely hard to put down once you do! Filed under: Nintendo DS and Review and skintari Comments: None |
So I got my copy of Quickspot yesterday, thanks to Gamefly. Let me tell you, this is a must have, folks! This game is about finding the 10 differences between two identical pictures. There’s really not much else behind it, but the game never really gets stale. The artwork is fantastic (with quite a bit of humor thrown in). I’ve seen everything from hidden “pac-man’s” to the Prince from Katamari.| previous posts » |
