Tag Archives: Game Journal

Attack of the Games I’ve Been Playing

Again I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft. My priest is now now level 77. I did my fourth raid – Karazhan. What a fantastic dungeon! It’s as if our party just showed up at a fancy ghost party. Each room was different and interesting, and the dialog was nice. Being on stage as part of Romeo and Juliet was awesome, and playing chess in WoW was a lot of fun. I also did For the Horde, got 25,000 honorable kills, and obtained my Brewmaster title. For Brewfest, I managed to get both pets, the goggles, a Brew of the Month membership, and the keg. The keg is fabulous! I’ll never have to buy in-game alcohol again!

 
I also started a druid to play with my friend, Pat. I named him Calamik in honor of William’s druid, Calabrand and his warrior, Amik. So far, I’m enjoying it. I’m not sure on professions yet. I picked up herbalism because it should be awesome with flight form. I was thinking about getting leatherworking, which would force me to purchase leather. I could also grab skinning instead of leatherworking and just have two gathering professions. Engineering is also an option, using Devee’s mining, but I think I’d rather have engineering on Devee so he could get the PVP advantages. Lastly, there’s alchemy. Alchemy would go well with my herbalism of course. I’m pretty torn between herbalism and leatherworking. I’m also not sure on what build to use yet – either moonkin or feral.
I’ve unlocked all songs from Samba de Amigo’s arcade mode and played all the ones I’ve unlocked. There are still two songs I can unlock from challenge mode, but I got stuck in challenge mode. I’ve been playing Jet Grind Radio as well, which is a lot of fun. It’s pretty hard though.
Mafia Wars has taken over my iPhone. I think it works really well as a phone game because it’s something I check often but spend little time actually playing. It’s basically a time management game with a ladder system. It reminds me of Battle Faeries a bit.
Harvest Moon DS has been fun so far. It still feels like class Harvest Moon, which is great! I don’t have any animals yet, but I have a good amount of plants in the ground!
Other than that, I played Monkey Island SE a little on my iPhone, inFamous on PS3 a bit, and some random Dr. Mario for DSiWare.

Battleground Queues

I’ve been queued for Eye of the Storm for 4 hours 14 minutes and Isle of Conquest for 6 hours 20 minutes. Isle of Conquest was my daily yesterday. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to actually play it. I was actually queued for more than 6 hours, but I logged off for a little bit, resetting my queue.
I’m not happy with this.

Game Update

As usual, I haven’t made a Game Journal post in a while. I’ll try to keep this brief. Most of my time has been spent in World of Warcraft. I’m one bar away from 70 now, and I managed to pick up Save the Day in Warsong Gulch. I had the very best gear I could get at 68 before turning on XP again, so I was really kicking ass. I’ve also managed to do Magtheridon’s Lair and Onyxia’s Lair as well as some other normal instances.
I started Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. It’s fun, but I’m in no rush to complete it. Scribblenauts came out as well. It’s a really interesting game, and it’s fun in small doses, but it doesn’t really hold my attention for long. I’ve been playing a bit every night in bed. I went back to Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and managed to finish it. The story really picked up toward the end. Of course, it wasn’t an amazing story. The dialog of the whole game could be read in a couple minutes most likely. Still, I kept wanting to push forward to see what happens next, and that’s what a good story in a game should do.
After the Dreamcast party, I’ve played a lot of Samba de Amigo. It’s really fun! It won’t load my save file though, and I don’t know why. I also beat Three Dirty Dwarves for Saturn, which I made a post about a few days ago.
Lastly, I started Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 recently. Nothing really new there yet. I do find it strange that they mention that Angie is a really great nurse, but all she seems to do is hand Derek objects and do his paperwork for him. It seems degrading to the nursing profession. In general it seems that people aren’t very aware of nurses really do.
And now my computer’s done copying a file to my flash card so I can get on with what I wanted to do. Time to go play games in bed.

Missing .exe files

After finishing GTA: Chinatown Wars, I went to play the original Grand Theft Auto. I keep in a folder called “Program & Games,” which is where I store all my games that don’t need to be installed. In other words, this folder can just be moved to another computer if I get a new one. Anyways, i couldn’t find the .exe, so I looked at a few other games I had in there. No .exe’s. None. I did a search in the folder and all subfolders, and there isn’t a single .exe in there. What happened? I could have run a script that deletes them all, but I don’t think I’d do that. Also, if every .exe was infected with a virus, I suppose they could have been quarantined. I think I would have noticed either occurrence, but I don’t have any other explanation.
Update:
(7:36:49 PM) TheUser04: what’d you do with all my .exes?!?!
(7:43:20 PM) Linh-Nam: i ate them
(7:43:36 PM) Linh-Nam: they were .execellent

Dreamcast Party

Yesterday was my Dreamcast party, and I had a blast. I started the day by playing Sonic Adventure by myself. I love how beautiful the game looks even today. When I first saw it, I was amazed. It was Sega’s blue skies at their best! I played up to the point where Sonic finds Tails. I just love that first love, complete with loops and a whale that chases Sonic.
Soon after the guests began to arrive. There were eleven people at the party counting myself – Gemma, William, Edward, Pat, Tony, James, Antonio, Linh-Nam, Collin, Duncan, and myself. We had chili dogs in honor of Sonic and cupcakes with Dreamcast swirls on them. We also had a variety of soda, juice, chips, and dip.

 
We started the multiplayer with Power Stone 2. It’s definitely my favorite 3D fighter, and one my favorite fighters in fact. Then we played some Samba de Amigo, which Pat brought. That game’s fantastic! I played the Wii sequel, but the maracas work so much better on the Dreamcast. There’s mat that you put down with a sensor bar that attaches via velcro. It plugs into the Dreamcast, and the two maracas attach to the bar. It senses the height of the two maracas, and the maracas have one button each. It was fun, and now I’m borrowing it from Pat. Thanks!
We also played Chu Chu Rocket, one of my all-time favorite games. It was great to bring that game back out of my closet. Some guests played Crazy Taxi 2 while I took care of food. Then we played San Francisco Rush 2049. That game’s crazy. It was hysterical, but I think it’d be pretty boring in single player. What got crazy was the wings that the cars have. When you’re airborne after driving off a ramp, pressing a particular button causes wings to extend. I’m sure they do something useful, but for me, they just seemed to cause me to spiral out of control before exploding. Every time you run into anything, your car explodes. Crazy, but fun.
Ooga Booga, a game designed to be a party game, was strange and not that fun. After only a few minutes we moved to the next game. Bust-A-Move 4 was fun, but I’m sure no one was surprised. I think we’re all familiar with Bust-A-Move. The guests played Looney Tunes Space Race and Armada while I did other things, neither of which seemed very interesting. They also played King of Fighters for a bit.
Then it was time for KISS Psycho Circus! This game was ridiculous! You play as a member of a KISS tribute band. Apparently the members of the tribute back one day have super powers for some reason. It seemed like a bad Hexen or Heretic clone. The coolest thing about this game was the enemy known as the Arachnoclown, part spider, part clown. Picture a centaur. Now replace the horse part with spider. Now picture the human part very overweight, wearing a stupid shirt and clown make-up. Ta da! Arachnoclown!
Then we played 4×4 Evolution, which to our surprise featured a variety of real cars. I played against William in a pitch black match with rain, although for some reason we couldn’t really see any rain. It was a bit buggy, and for a while William was dragged slowly around the track after driving too far out and getting stuck. After something similar happened to me and he was teleported back on the track, he was able to win.
We tried some Alien Front Online, which allowed us to blow up the Capitol. That game wasn’t that great, but I remember enjoying it when it came out. Then in Ready 2 Rumble Round 2 we tried beating on each other for a while. The character models were pretty strange, and I never really figured out any strategy. It seemed like whichever character had the greater reach would win.
Finally we played Sonic Shuffle. I bought it three years ago and never had the chance to play it until now. It definitely feels very similar to Mario Party, but was still different and fun. By this time the only people left at the party were Collin, Duncan, and William. We played for a while before William had to leave, and then we switched his character to computer controlled. The map was a train level, and different cars of the train would disconnect or reconnect. At one point, the car with Knuckles, the computer player, disconnected and stupid Knuckles was trapped for a while. There’s a helicopter space that can be landed on which causes a helicopter to pick you up and take you somewhere else. Unfortunately for Knuckles, it dropped him back on the same car the first time he tried to use it. Eventually I won, but I was pretty surprised that actually. I hope we get a chance to play it again. Unlike Mario Party’s dice system, Sonic Shuffle uses cards. Each player is dealt a hand of cards, and you pick a card and move the number of spaces corresponding to which card you pick. You can see your own cards and now your opponents, and you can pick anyone’s card. This means you might want to try to remember what cards they have, although they can shuffle their hands so you don’t know which card is where. I’m going to try and unlock some new characters, but I don’t know how much fun single player will be.
The party was a lot of fun, and it was great to honor the Dreamcast. Hopefully everyone who came had a good time. Thanks for coming!

Happy Birthday

Happy 10th birthday Dreamcast! I look forward to celebrating with you today!
I’m also looking forward to hitting 1000 hours played on Devee in World of Warcraft and playing bob’s game!

What have I played…

…this week?
I’ve been playing a lot more WoW now that 3.2 hit. I think most people who read this knows already, but this patch allows characters to disable all experience gain. This allows them to go after better gear without leveling so that they can stay in the current PVP bracket yet still become stronger. I went to Northrend and have been getting a lot of cool gear. I have a lot of haste gear now, which I’m looking forward to trying out. After getting a new belt and wand I’ll have all new gear besides rings and trinkets. I also got a flying mount for the first time. Pretty fun!

 
I had some awesome games of Team Fortress 2! I found all the sniper weapons, which is pretty cool. Using the bow is weird though. I also managed to get the “With Friends Like These” achievement for playing with seven friends. It was hard to coordinate, plus the match has to actually end with seven friends playing. I played with Collin, Andy, William, gem, Linh-Nam, Jon, and James. It was one of the coolest nights of gaming ever.
As for console games, I haven’t played much. I played inFAMOUS and enjoyed it so far. I don’t think it’s as amazing as the hype, but it’s pretty good. I also played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled on XBLA with gem, William, and Collin. It was a lot of fun! It was based on the arcade game, not SNES game, so it was a little different than what Collin and William expected. gem and I didn’t notice at all anyways. Like a lot of cooperative four-player games, I lost track of my character at times, but overall it was a ton of fun.
I also managed to finish the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D Classic on the iPhone. I had died on the last level, and I only respawn with a pistol. I had no idea how to defeat the boss with only a pistol, but as it turns out, there’s a secret room in the level with a chain gun. The boss was easy with a chain gun!
Lastly I’ve been playing Pokemon Platinum! I managed to pick up my third badge recently. Also, my Ralts evolved into Kirlia, and my shiny Magikarp finally became a shiny Gyrados!

Dokapon Journey, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and more

This week I played quite a bit of Valve games. I played through the rest of the Left 4 Dead campaigns, which were all very cool. Next I’ll try versus and survival. I’m pretty behind, I guess. I’ve also been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2. I actually played with Linh-Nam, Collin, Andy, and gem. It’s pretty rare that I actually play with people!
I also played a fantastic little jewel called played Dokapon Journey with gem and William. What a fun game! It’s basically a multiplayer board game in which landing on most spaces leads to a JRPG style battle! It’s made by Atlus, and the sprite art is pretty nice too. It’s a really fun game.

 
Of course, I’ve also played World of Warcraft some more, but I haven’t really done anything. I’ve been playing more Ninja Gaiden 2, but I’m kind of stuck. It’s a tough game! (Or I just suck.) I’ve been neglecting BlazBlue, but I’ll get back to it soon. I also haven’t been playing Bit.Trip Beat or Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. There’s so much to play!
I finished adventure mode in Peggle World of Warcraft Edition and Peggle for iPhone. Fun stuff! I tried out The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. It seems pretty well done! I’m sure it’s easier to control on the PC, but I went with the iPhone version so I could play it on the go! I haven’t played it too much though because I’m leaving it for my vacation next week to Vegas. I also just started Space Invaders Infinity Gene for the iPhone. Space Invaders has been really awesome lately! Taito’s pretty awesome. I wonder if it has to do with being owned by Square-Enix.
I’ve been pushing more into Rhythm Heaven this past week too. It gets really hard sometimes though! I can’t complain though because it sure is fun. I’m also stuck in Wolfenstein 3D Classic for the iPhone. I got to the boss of the first episode, but I died. Now I just respawn with a pistol and 16 ammo. What am I supposed to do?
Oh, I almost forgot a game! I played dess’s new game, When Pigs Fly, on Newsground. I’ll edit this post later on my computer to provide a link. You control a flying pig through multiple caverns avoiding ceilings, walls, and spikes. It’s simple and fun, with appealing, low resolution sprites, which is a look I like.

Game Journal!

I used to make weekly Game Journal entries, but I haven’t written one in a long, long time. I guess I’ll just talk about what I’ve been playing this summer. First of all, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft all the time. I’m trying to get the PVP achievements. A lot of them will occur on their own eventually (win 100 times), but others are more difficult. I’m trying to get the difficult ones before moving into the last bracket. The achievement for getting twenty killing blows without dying is really the last one I’m worried about, although I’d like to wait for Mooglegem to get Alterac Valley All-Star too. Other than that, I’m still working on tower defences in AV, killing enemies in the Hall of the Frostwolf in AV, winning AB 2000 to 1990, killing the enemy fc in their fr while they control their own flag in WSG, and the 100 wins and reputation achievements.

 
I also beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game on Xbox Live Arcade with gem, Corey, and Corey’s cousin Dylan. Then I beat Mirror’s Edge for PS3, Ghostbusters The Video Game for 360, and Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? for PSP. After Michael Jackson’s passing, I played through Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker on a Genesis emulator. Next I played through Space Invaders Extreme 2 and Arkanoid DS, both for DS, to finish all the DS paddle controller games. I’ve also been playing Everyday Shooter, but I still haven’t been able to finish it.
At Anime Expo I picked up Guilty Gear XX ^ Core Plus for Wii and BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Limited Edition for PS3. I started playing BlazBlue pretty heavily when I got home. I’ve finished the story mode with Noel, Ragna, Jin, Rachel, and Taokaka, getting 100% in each of their stories. I have seven characters left to do, plus a “final” story.
I tried Half-Life Source again and got pretty bored. It just isn’t good. I don’t know what people were thinking. I guess I should just skip to Half-Life 2. I’ve been playing through Trine on PC as well. I’m not sure how far I am, but I’ve really enjoyed it.
I went back LocoRoco 2 for PSP, thinking it’d be good to finish it up. Turns out, I was on the last level, and it wasn’t very difficult. Then I finished all the remaining puzzles in Professor Layton and the Curious Village for DS in preperation for Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box!
I beat Call of Duty: World at War for 360 after borrowing it from Corey. As for some more casual games, I beat all levels in Peggle, the World of Warcraft Addon. I also beat adventure mode of Peggle World of Warcraft Edition, the stand-alone Peggle based on World of Warcraft.
Right now I’m still working on BlazBlue. I’m also playing through Ninja Gaiden II. I had mentioned earlier in the day that I started NG2 that I wanted another Devil May Cry to come out so I could play it; I sort of got my wish in Ninja Gaiden II. I’m still trying to 100% clear all levels in the Peggle World of Warcraft Addon, and I’m fooling around in Peggle World of Warcraft Edition also. I’m about half way through Bit.Trip Beat for WiiWare, which is fantastic but difficult. I also completed the second campaign in Left 4 Dead last night. Only two more to go!
I played The Sims 3 pretty heavily early on in the summer, maxing one characters life long dream and getting that character and another character to max their careers. I had that second character get married, so I’m still working on getting him his life long dream as well as his wife’s and getting her to the top of her career. After that, I’d like to successfully raise a kid. There’s more to do in the game of course, but I would be pretty fulfilled if I could do those things.
As for handhelds, I’ve been playing Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Hopefully I’ll finish up soon. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars a bit but not so much lately. I’ve also been playing Call of Duty: Roads to Victory on PSP. It’s… fun but not that great. You use the stick to move and the face buttons to aim. Those should be switched.
Basically the only two big games I’m playing are Ninja Gaiden II and BlazBlue. After I finish NG2, I plan on playing inFamous because I’m borrowing it from Edward. After BlazBlue I’m going to go through Guilty Gear XX ^ Core Plus.
I’m not sure what I’m going to play after I get through NG2 and inFamous. I recently picked up God Hand, killer7, and Odin Sphere so I’d like to give those a go. Other games of high interest to me are God of War, Metal Gear Solid 3, Psychonauts, XIII, Half-Life 2, Blue Dragon, and Bioshock. Some less important or handheld games that I’d like to get through are Space Channel 5, We

Castle Crashers with Corey

I was finally able to play Castle Crashers with Corey last night! It took four actual tries! Soon after Spring quarter ended, we tried to play. Trying to remember what happened just leaves me confused. All I know is that I only brought my memory card with the game on it. I don’t remember if my profile was there or not. It should have been, but I’m kind of mixed up thinking back. Games are tied to the original console to which it was downloaded and the profile that downloaded it. We could only play it as a demo; I guess we didn’t have my profile. Then I brought my console over only to find that I couldn’t use Corey’s power cable because they were different. I also remember thinking that redownloading it on Corey’s would be a fix. (This is where I get really mixed up. Why? I thought we had the game. I don’t know. I might be mixing up attempts to play it.) We couldn’t do that because I have an old version of the game with a bug in it that I still want to use.
For that night, we called it quits. We tried to find another day that worked for everyone and was unable to until last night! Guess what? I forgot my memory card with my profile on it, so I had to go pick it up. But then we were finally able to play! We made it to the last couple levels, but it got late, and we had to call it quits. Corey and Casey are going to Europe for a month soon, so that’s that for a while. Still, it was fun to play something multiplayer. It doesn’t happen enough!