Viva Pinata is a sims type of game for the xbox 360, in which you have a garden and you try and attract, mate, and keep lifelike pinata in your garden, and try to improve your garden with better pinata and more valuable items in it.

It's a game for all ages, and actually pretty good, and you don't finish it too fast.  I've been playing it for a while and still haven't got probably half of the pinata in my garden.

Highly recommended.  It may be a little to hard for some kids but maybe not others.

I still haven't got Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the 360 from gameznflix.  So I rented it from blockbuster so I could play it with my brother since he is visiting.  I have to take it back on Wednesday, so hopefully I'll get it from them by them then.  The game is pretty awesome though, I can understand why it is so popular, many of the rental places had all of their copies of the game checked out. 

So I have gameznflix, and I have had Marvel:  Ultimate Alliance on my queue waiting for them to have it available so they can send it to me since it was released.  Well actually a few days since its release as I thought there was an error and I took it off my queue and put it back on.  Of course that was stupid I guess maybe I would have had it by now, but I didn't realize that "short wait" can be up to 14 days (or longer).  That doesn't sound like a short amount of time when you pay money per month for the service.  Anyway I'll be ok when I get it, until then I'll just keep playing Saint's Row I guess.

So I've had Saint's row for a few weeks, via gameznflix, but just now started playing it. 

It's pretty fun, it seems to correct a few problems that Grand Theft Auto series has had, and has a great storyline.  The main thing that seems to be fixed is the money.  If I remember right you get a ton of money early and especially later in the game in that you have so much that it doesn't mean much.  I think part of it is that you have to buy all of your ammo, except about 50 bullets for the cheapest pistol in the stash.  Maybe that changes later in the game, but there are no hidden items that give you tons of stuff in your safehouse.

I'm thinking about writing a review for the game, but there are over 500 community reviews and I've said what I have to about that.

I used to love making reviews, and as I have said a few times here I am not as into reviews as I once was because there are so many and mine probably gets lost in the fray.  I'm glad to hear some encouragement from some of my friends about making reviews.  I want to start writing reviews again, but I haven't been playing much and when I do I play a bunch of different games and I haven't finished many or gotten very far.  I also have only really played the 360, and it doesn't have many games out for it that I like enough to play.

However, maybe I'll write a review for Lord of the Rings, the battle for middle earth, I've played that one pretty well.

I used to regularly contribute reviews here on gamespot and got a fair amount of recommendations, now there are sometimes so many reviews that mine gets lost in the fray, and I feel like my contribution isn't even worth the 10-30 minutes I spend on each review.

A lot of the reviews are worthless garbage, a lot of times a small paragraph, or even just a short one liner that is either extremely positive or negative that goes along with a 1.0 or 10 review score.  I have said this time and time again, but Gamespot hasn't really said anything, I guess because the average score by users is a really good indication of how good the game is, even better than the reviewer I think.

So I think they need to have mods for reviews, the report abuse is not enough, as I think some of them aren't really abuse, they are just not helpful at all and should be removed.  Or something like that.  And after that, and only after that, they should bring back the reviewers emblem, as I think people need to be recognized for contributations.

What do you all think?

Who else watched the Lord of the Rings:  Battle for Middle Earth II on the Gamespot Tournament TV? 

I thought it was pretty cool, but it was only one battle.  I thought it was a little early to have a tournament, since the game only cam out a month ago.

http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2006/07/27/536422.aspx

I have been posting in the xbox.com forums for a while now saying we need this and now we have it!  Awesome.  :)  Now we just need more backwards compatibility.

I signed up for Gamefly about 2 months ago, it's a rental service like netflix where you can rent an unlimited amount of video games, and have either 1 or 2 out at a time, depending on your plan.  It's $15 a month for 1 game, $22 for 2 games.  They take 2-4 days to ship after they have been shipped, usually a day to do the shipping process.  I didn't have them for very long, but one of my first 2 games mailed to me didn't arrive.  I got another sent to me, but that didn't give me faith that they would be good in the future.  However, that may have just been my luck, I can't say for sure how reliable they are.

However, recently I discovered gameznflix, it's like gamefly, but you can rent from 1 game to 8 games (or MOVIES) a month out a time, for a lot cheaper.  Unfortunately you can't rent DS or GBA games, but if you don't rent those, I think it's a lot better deal.  You can have 6 out at a time for $20.75 a month, although you pay it yearly, all of one year up front.  Besides that deal the other good deal is 3 out at a time for $15 a month. $7 cheaper than gamefly and you get one more game, or you can include movies in that.

Just thought I would pass along this bit of information.  Let me know if you want to sign up and I can give you a referral, just give me your email address, but don't worry if you don't want to do that, just think it would be nice, since I did refer you if you are getting it because of this.

Anyway, I haven't posted much in my blog in the past few months and this sounded good enough to put in it since I didn't have much lately.

I'm bad at most video games. Maybe it's because I don't play enough. That could be it, I usually play a bunch of different games, not one game a lot. But playing online sometimes it's just not fun to be so bad at a game. It's no fun dying 90% of the time and not being able to have a good team game because people don't want me on their team. I wish I could figure out a way to be better at games.

I think I could possibly be good at DOA 4 which I just started playing because you need to memorize moves and be able to counter enemies moves. I can't effectively counter yet, and I haven't learned all the moves but I'm learning.

I really suck at shooters because I panic so much. It feels like there is so much pressure to do well especially on teams. Also the trash talk is so bad I feel like I try to hard to not show them I don't suck. Oh well, I'll get better sometime hopefully.