hex65000

I used to have a massive list o' stuff that I was selling on G.G. / CTCW, but then the rest of my life demanded attention. Just a few auctions for now, but there's plenty more where that came from. My GG auctions The usual fare applies, I'll combine shipping, shipping cost is always actual cost, if you have questions, ask em'. Hex. [ Has too much and more is on the way.... Eeep! ]

What scares me the most is the comments section. For the most part the trend I see is: "The publishers aren't seeing anything on the resale, that's why they are going all DLC. This kid can't read since he paid for something that comes with a NEW copy only. -- duh." Don't mean to jack the thread too badly here. It just proves to me that the general population is being incrementally convinced that pure DLC is A-OK. What physical copies we have are eventually going to be it. I maintain that I'll probably stop supporting modern-gen games completely when this occurs. It flat out shouldn't occur anyway. The publishers are getting multiple payments for the same license over and over again. That is crap. And think, this could have been solved with him either buying a "new" copy at Gamestop or Gamestop just refunding his money as credit towards a new copy. It's so difficult that even a non-legal type like me can figure it out. Hex. [ Wants the new Transformers game that's coming out, but I'm not supporting Gamestop and I'm hesitant to support Activision too. ]

DING! You are correct sir, but sometimes we all fall into the trap of, "I can't stop typing now. Someone is _WRONG_ on the Internet!" The Wii is a good machine as are the other two. Buy what you like and get on with your life. Hex. [ Has a 'wishlist' for the Wii. Some of which Nintendo is solving, and some of which you may not expect... ]

It's Dangerous out there, take this free bump! With optional LOL-Cat attachment. Seriously folks, I've bought a couple of good-sized lots from Kevin he did stuff right. Hex. [ Has fixed at least a couple of minor things. That's good right? Right?!? ]

I really didn't like Red Ninja. I had picked it up and played it for a couple of hours. Realized that it was just too annoying to play and that I would never desire to pick it up again. This may be a function of the annoying camera / difficult move set that Stan mentions. I eventually sold it off on the Chuckwagon and don't really regret it. Graphically it is well done and don't recall any glitches -- other than the wacky camera angle problems. As a side note, this game also was done on the original XBox. Hex. [ Just is not one for stealth I suppose. Explains why I just am passing on the Metal Gear series nowadays. ]

Hate to say it, but based on the comments concerning this game has relegated it to the "wait to find it on sale" category. If I'm not at least a little sucked in after an hour, something is wrong. I'm playing Eternal Sonata right now on XBox360 and I'm intrigued by the direction things are going. I told a friend of mine that I had just started it after I noticed he had a "Polka" faceplate on his console, he said I was in for a pretty good ride with the game. Not SMTensi wild, but that other than the combat quirks and linearity it was a good game. I look forward to playing through it now. I've logged a little over an hour and have just met four characters and completed the prologue chapter. I'll play FF three on my DS instead. FF 13: Pass until I spot it on sale. Hex. [ Doesn't recall being an RPG connoisseur, but I know what I like. ]

Dante's Inferno for 360/ps3 is on sale at Amazon for $39 today, and it looks like there will be some lightning deals worth looking at today too. Hex. [ Dislikes it greatly when his puzzle pieces keep moving around on him... ]

Another heads up, Today it's "Sonic and the Secret Rings" for Wii. Price is at $12 The link in the first post works just fine so I'm not reposting the deal of the day link. Hex. [ Two lab reports and some B.S. UML diagrams and the quarter ends YAY! ]

While Activision is on a lot of people's crap list right now...and rightly so. Amazon has Guitar Hero 5 (game only) for a hair under $29. Amazon GH link OT: Why can't I edit my own posts? <grump> ; Was gonna recycle a previous thread I posted. Since I couldnt, I made this one more generic. Hex. [ Is the bane of his local postal worker... ]

Finally got through General Knoxx. At first I thought I was gonna nail him on the first try... But then the Badass Devastators and medics started popping up and resulted in me dying about 5 times. Got a couple of nice weapons out of the deal, but not much worth noting. Finally realized a basic strategy of: Fire SMG the medics first, Corrosive the devastators, Shoot Knoxx in the face with a sniper/revolver. Run a lot! I really liked Knoxx too. He wasn't a bad guy really. Also noticed that you can farm the buried treasure mission provided you don't complete it. Open some of the chests, quit, repeat. Got a Dahl Bulldog that way. Gonna try to pick up the remaining side quests in the next few days. Hex. [ Is amazed at how tough this expansion is... ]

Today's Amazon Deal Is Elder Scrolls 4 GOTY Ed. for $18. I grabbed the Platinum Hits Gears of War 2-cd as well to round out the buy ($20)... Too many games to play... Aigh!. Amazon Link Hex. [ Notes this does not include th four used 360 games he picked up last night... ]

Snagged it! Thanks for the heads up. Mind you, it's gonna be a while till I get at this game... Currently the Queue is: -Finish Borderlands expansion. (Just addictive for me. Kill things. Get stuff.) -Red Faction: Guerrilla (This one was loaned to me so it's on a schedule to play.) -FEAR 2 (Started it, got stuck, just wanna clear the single player see the story, and probably move on.) Hex. [ Makes a motto out of "Wait. What?" ]

PM sent concerning Persona 2... Hex. [ Yes? No? I'm the guy with the 10 year old PDA... ]

Hey Shawn, is there any chance of an 'unlimited release' of this in the future, or is that it for this game? Hex. [ Is not surprised that he's not the only one who missed out on this... ]

And Cebus for the win Clark. ;v] I know I've just spent too much on games period lately with little end in sight. At least I'm not flea-marketing like I used to. ;v] Hex. [ Is not playing Hollywood Squares... I mean seriously... who is Clark? ]

I think Stan has hit this topic pretty spot on with his article. I've personally done a bit of DL content to extend games, but then I will always, _ALWAYS_ select the physical media over a download if given a choice. Right now I am seriously considering re-buying the two Borderlands expansions that are slated to come out as a physical release just to save myself the grief of not losing that content. I also am hesitant to go crazy with the downloads because I know that I may lose it all when MS decides that the 360 is dead or heaven forbid, the machine is banned for whatever arbitrary reason MS has in mind today. I think the reason that this stuff continues to be accepted by the public as a whole is that your typical gamer is used to getting nothing at the end of the day. (Hint: We as a collective on AA are probably not typical in this description) The typical gamer shops and trades in their games at GameStop. They pay full price for a game and trade in their old games for a paltry sum of money -- roughly zero. You can most likely blow smoke at this demographic already in a 'throw away mode' pretty easily by saying things like "Dev costs are more expensive than ever", "Downloadable content will help enhance your gaming experience", "Media-less distribution will help keep costs down", "It will be good for the consumer..." etc. etc. <yawn> And they'll go for it. It's been an incremental thing for a while anyway and it is simply the logical progression of things. Of course you can nickel and dime through 'microtransactions' or create fictional 'points' where the company gets your money up front and all you have are points that are worth... points? I admit that I've tried to be smart-ish about my purchases and have tried to keep my eyes open for specials here and there. For example, I bought 8000 live points for about $83. Not a huge savings, but not terrible. I also only activated one of the two cards since I don't need the other one yet, but it's trivial to break it out if I ever need it. I also bought 12 months of Live for $35 recently; my fist 12 months was $40. I'll break the second card out (note not online codes in any case) when I absolutely need to. Since I don't play online a ton, I may even let the current gold subscription lapse for a little bit before renewing. Of course, with the introduction of the 'independent games' you can get screwed by supporting what is really a homebrew community. I bought one so far personally "I mad3 a gaem with ZomBiez in it!!1!" Is it fun? Yep. Good? For effectively $1, Yep? Did I get my money's worth? Sure did. Can I play it if 360Live goes away? Nope. >:v( That. That right there is the thing that bothers me. It has made me VERY hesitant to spend any more on Indie Games. Essentially, I am glued to the live service by doing the right thing in supporting original games made by homebrew programmers, and since I don't like that gluing action, I don't want to buy the games, which in turn hurts the independent programmers. Do you see why this bothers me? What needs to happen, and I am somewhat loathe to say it. Is that since MS has _CHOSEN_ to abandon the XBox 1 live support that the system is now free game and deserves to be blown completely open. (IE: Open Live servers/hosts) downloadable content should be 'liberated' and devkits released to the public. I know it won't happen of course. My hope is that the same thing will eventually happen with the 360 download content. (Not the going away part) I hope that as the 360 hits end of life that the architecture and copy protection associated with it will be broken. It's the only way some of this content will be usable after it goes offline. And even then, things like Live servers will be gone too (as those who play Halo 1 will soon experience). What will happen then? Will we have all just moved on to the next XBox product? Will there be a "Offline forever" patch that simply disables network support making the physical media all that's left? Time will tell. Hex. [ Has been all gloom and doom on this, and it's depressing. ]

Broke out General Knoxx last night and played effectively for about 10 hours. Quick notes: Story ties some character stories together. Stays with the theme of overbearing corporate giants and the insanity that is Pandora Some of the enemies are freaking tough! I have died a lot. It's a pretty big D/load 1.6 gigs. More as it happens. Hex. [ Makes un-magic happen. ]

I know it's an unpopular stance, but I found the multiplayer in Halo 1 to be, well, boring. There was just no sense of urgency when I played it. The single player for Halo was fun. I hope to go back and finish it sometime. Never even got around to breaking the shrinkwrap on Halo2 and don't even have a copy of Halo3. Now if you want to throw down on say the original Unreal Tournament or even Quake 3, I'm in. Both are still solid games in my mind even if they aren't as pretty as current FPS games. Just too much to play nowadays. Even if I sat in front of the TV for 12 hours a day playing, I'd still just put a dent in my game queue. Hex. [ Just keeps going back to Borderlands... go figure. Curse you addictive shooter gameplay! ]

Congrats Mike! Other than the usual troll action it looks like the feedback is overall positive. Hex. [ Stupid Youtube ate my comment... Bleah. ]

INTERVIEW: Lance Ringquist Looks like a development/debug cart of sorts. Neat, but not my cup of tea. Hex. [ just has not gotten into the Atari dev scene... I guess I lack the programming chops for it really. ]

The Warriors uses a medkit style substance referred to as 'Flash' FEAR 2 has you hunting around for some kind of stimulant to increase the duration of your slow motion 'reflex time' System Shock 2 was loaded with modifications and chemicals. I've not played Bioshock yet, but this may also fall into this category. (???) Obscure also is a survival horror that involves exotic drugs. Hex. [ Forgot about the drug angle in Silent Hill... ]

And that's pretty easy to fix too. Just get something with a bit of weight to it, fishing sinkers or something. Put the weight in the bottom 2 carts, pot the carts with epoxy so they don't move around or potentially conduct electricity. They are insulated with the epoxy so you are good to go. Another thought on keeping the assembly under control might be a bit of conduit. A metal rod will keep the stack together and somewhat lined up during gluing. You probably wouldn't need as much glue either. Only need enough around the ring to immobilize the cart and stick it to the next piece. Neat project! Hex. [ Doesn't do cool projects anymore... ]

Grump! I can't edit my post... Additional notes: -Multiplayer: In short there is no multiplayer in Eat Lead. You get a 'gift' achievement at the end of the game that pokes fun at this topic. Obviously Xbox Live isn't too useful for this title. -Difficulty: I admit it. I played through this game on easy. When you clear the game once you can backtrack and play any level you want at any difficulty setting. So you can clear it on Easy, then go back and play the last level on medium and hard to 'clear the game' (I assume) at those levels too. I bumped it to medium and was promptly owned by the game. I managed to slog my way to the final boss fight only to die repeatedly for about an hour and a half. Some of these fights lasted 2 minutes before my death. In short, I died a lot and it makes me sad. No, I didn't clear it either. It was 2am and my wife told me to go to bed. This getting stuck was really frustrating. In retrospect, I'll try and bring better guns next time to see if that helps. Hex. [ Was seriously annoyed by getting killed a bunch of times in such a short interval... the wenches with submachine guns chew you up fast. ]

-Why did I buy this? Okay, This game is a bit dated, but I grabbed it on Amazon for less than $20 new and it just seemed to be an over the top tongue-in-cheek poke at the video game industry. The premise was not-serious enough that I broke this out immediately on receiving it in the mail. That and I was hopped up on coffee that night. -Capsule: A fairly straightforward "over the shoulder" 3rd person shooter. A nice variety of wacky enemies. A couple of boss fights that are near perpetual cheap-shots. The gameplay is overall solid, but doesn't require a lot of heavy thought and the levels are linear. What makes this game worth looking at and playing is the humour and writing that makes fun of itself and the game industry in general. Recommended buy at the $15-$20 mark. -What stood out during the game? The voice acting, the amusing parodies and references to existing video game characters, the entertaining writing, the handful of just annoying legs of a chapter (mostly boss fights) that seemed to need near-dumb luck to pull off. Good action music score with lots of big hair metal guitar. -More thoughts: In the world of Matt Hazard, Matt is a washed up action video game character for the company 'Marathon' and after proving that he has no marketing and business sense, runs the company into the ground. Until 'Marathon' is resurrected by a guy with a lot of cash and the company is renamed 'Marathon Megasoft' Matt is tapped to stage his comeback in the next generation game platforms. But wait, he was scripted to die at the end of level 1. Forever. Why? Stay tuned true believers... That's the basis of the story right there. A bit wonky if you consider that a video game character managed to make business decisions for a "Real-life" company. This over analysis isn't good for you in Eat Lead... just smile, nod, and let the story keep rolling. This is honestly the strength of this game. The story. Not that it is epic. It's not. It's that quirky movie story like Ferris Beuller's Day Off where the fourth wall gets broken to possibly make fun of what you're already thinking. "Oh. Great. A tutorial. It's not like I need one of these to tell me how to move around and shoot a gun after 25 years.", grumbles a slightly annoyed Matt at the beginning of the game when you say "Sure, do the tutorial". There are references abound in the form of cliché enemies, and some occasionally amusing parodies of other popular figures. For example, there's "Master Chef" Who is a dumpy-looking short-order style cook who waddles around in some kind of futuristic space armor. Captain Carpenter is a burly blue overalls wearing kind of guy who knows how to fight nasty turtles, and poisonous mushrooms, but can't handle a gun to save his life. Altos Tratus which looks and behaves like your typical final fantasy character. One of my favorite moments was with this character before the fight. "..." (Matt Paraphrased) "An elipsis? What the hell is it with you Japanese characters and ellipses? What does that even mean?" I've talked about the writing and how it's amusing for what it is, but not the gameplay. In short it's good, but nothing too original is happening here. The game uses a find cover and shoot system. At first I found this annoying, because when I typically play FPS type games I just ram may way through enemies and once the body count is high enough go exploring the areas I've cleared out. This is not something I can do in Eat Lead. The cycle is pretty much the following. A checkpoint save will occur. You will get to an area or room and you will wind up trapped in that room until everything but you is dead, or deader if you want to be picky about the zombies. To survive, you have to hide behind cover and pick at enemies this way. Sometimes just standing behind cover works pretty well too. Regardless, you just can't stand there and shoot for long. You also have the option to run up and melee attack most enemies (there are exceptions and some can fight back rather well). In some cases it was more effective for me to run up on opponents and slap them around versus shooting them and wasting precious ammunition. There was some thought put into what your options are regarding the use of cover and for this I am grateful. It's not Time Crisis for crying out loud. The cover aspect covers a majority of the notably linear format of the game. There are exceptions such as selected fight scenes where you have to hit certain button/stick combinations to put the beat down on an special enemy. There is also a level where you have sniper stations where you have to pick off enemies with said rifle before one of your friends is killed. Neither of these events are plentiful enough to be annoying. There is also a few sections where you have to avoid the lasers of your in-game nemesis 'Sting Sniperscope' These rounds force you to run and find cover, but is thankfully only in a handful of places -- because these are 1-shot kill events, and it can be frustrating at times. The weapons are pretty varied, but not particularly amazing. If you have ever played "Armed And Dangerous" with its vast collection of wacky weapons, this would have made things a bit more amusing. Sure you get classic 6-shooters, laser pistols, sniper rifles and the like, but none of the guns are stand out awesome. Not a crucial complaint, but worth noting. Also of note is that you can only carry 2 weapons at a time. Since you can't backtrack, sometimes conserving ammo is crucial -- and a little annoying when your'e sloppy in a fight. Enemies are fairly diverse and some are imaginative. The 2D sprite enemies are the standout among them. They run around in the 4-5 frame sequence, shoot at you with their 2D rifle then turn sideways so you can't hurt them. Honestly, the only enemy that made me super frustrated was the boss with tentacles. In the beginning you have to run around and avoid the six tentacles that lash at the ship, and each one has a pretty good reach. Now you have to run around and wait for one to get stuck in the boat so you can shoot it. After the first tentacle is taken out you now have enemies spawn periodically too. This lead to me dying... a lot. fortunately, the checkpoint system is pretty forgiving overall because if I had to fight that first round again after clearing it and then getting killed at stage 2 with the same boss I would have been super unhappy. I died at least 20 times fighting those tentacles. That was annoying. I can't think of anything meaningful in terms of graphics and sound. They met the requirements in that characters and the environment looked reasonable for the context of the world being presented, and other than the action music having occasional big hair metal guitar riffs in it set the tone adequately as well. I'm not saying the A/V experience was awesome nor was it bad. It did the job and I wasn't seriously annoyed by odd glitches or music that made me need to kill some aspect of the audio experience. The Achievements on this game (for Xbox360) are in some cases outright gifts. There are a couple of tricky ones too, but you can get a pretty good score just playing through in a competent manner. Some people may be annoyed by the freebie achievements, but at the same time, it's not that big of a deal -- it's not like achievements _do anything_. -Errors: There were a handful of times where blasts and enemies hands would pop through a wall or cover. I can only think of 2 or three instances of this happening, and in all but one of them I was able to quickly recover from the problem without dying. In all cases the game never lost its mind and had a hard lockup or freeze. That's it! Comments? Hex. [ Should try to do DAH: Path of the Furon too in the near future... ]

Out of curiosity, has anyone picked up the third downloadable installment "The Secret Armory of General Knoxx" yet? The expansion was released in the evening on the 23rd. I think. It looks interesting in terms of new enemies to take on and some new vehicles to play with. Hex. [ Decided to take a break from Borderlands a couple of days ago... we'll see how long that lasts... ]