I've been combing through what is enjoyable to do in terms of 'out of story' missions in GTA: Chinatown Wars, not taking into account finding all the hidden cameras or unique stunts, which I probably will not go after. Here's the rundown so far:

• Story missions complete (duh);
• Firefighter Missions - GOLD MEDAL, thus unlocking 'fire proof', which speaks for itself;
• Mail Delivery Missions - GOLD MEDAL, thus unlocking 'bigger pockets' for drug carrying;
• Noodle Delivery Missions - GOLD MEDAL, thus unlocking 'marathon', giving me infinite sprint;
• Taxi Cab Missions - GOLD MEDAL, thus turning all cabs bulletproof;
• Vigilante Missions - GOLD MEDAL, thus giving me double armor points;
• All 21 safehouses bought, earned off a random person's mission (Wilhem) or won off lottery scratch off cards;
• All 80 drug dealers found;
• 2 golden lions found, thus unlocking both Xin missions;
• Both bonus 'Xin' missions finished - great little mayhem situations, by the way;

I still have to find the gun club and get the gold medals there too, then I might be giving this one a rest.

Oh, and a note to all cops in Liberty City P.D: stop running over my accident victims while I'm trying to pick then up. It's annoying when I'm on the 14th pickup in a 15 pickup run, OK? Thanks, jerks!

Bullets might not suffice for this week, 'cause I want to comment a bit more in depth, so think of these as mortars, ok?

• Finished GTA: Chinatown Wars during the weekend. What a great, fun game, loved it. It totally took me by surprise, since I barely followed it after the announcement - something I've been noticing has improved how much I appreciate a game when I don't follow it religiously and just play the darn thing when it's out. I liked it so much, I went out of my way and discovered all of the drug dealers, got all but one of the safehouses and found both of the bonus items for the Rockstar Social Club bonus missions. I have yet to play those, since I just activated them early this morning. The touch screen support seemed a bit too much at the beginning, and it is at some points, but the implementation is mostly very creative and does not feel tacked on at all. One of my favorite DS games, by far.
• Also closed the lid on Fable 2's See the Future DLC, or how I like to call it: See-the-future-for-about-two-minutes. Doesn't last long at all, and... well, you might want to read my review once it goes live. I got all of the achievements for it on the way, including the ones that are related to Fable 2's main story mode. So now once Knothole Isle drops price, I'll be able to nail that 100% completion. Fable 2's achievements are fun to go after, just like Fallout 3's, otherwise I wouldn't bother, but it's a good measure in order to finally feel like the "book is closed" for some games. It is certainly for me in terms of this DLC.
• Started playing Space Invaders Extreme for XBLA as well, even though I own the DS version, and you know what, it's still Space Invaders, and very Extreme at that. It's cool to get to play it on a bigger screen. Should be finishing my review of it today.
• Played UNO online with some On the Spot folks after the show. It definitely brought back a lot of fun memories playing cards with Donkeljohn, Dave_Petrucci, Caddy and Kevin. That game is still fun to play with friends!
• Finally beat Gruntilda (yet again, ten years later) in Banjo Tooie - I am, in no way, ever going to go after all of the jiggies in that game. I did it in 1999/2000, thank you very much. Still, a very good platformer, specially if you never played it back in the Nintendo 64. Review of that forthcoming (it's taking a bit longer than usual but it is on the way). The lid for this is closed, bolted, stapled and duct-taped. Agh.
• Tried to get the final achievement in Banjo Kazooie, the puzzle one. No one in heck I was able to do it this week, since I only picked the game up before going to bed after spent the day hunting pixels on my computer, texturing models. I don't think I'll go back to that, too much...
• Got the rest of the treasures in Lego Indy. Young Indy's level was pretty fun, albeit short, and the warehouse bonus stage was thankfully easy - and quick - to beat. For some reason I don't like the Lego town type of level in these games. So random... Anyway, that's closed as far as I'm concerned, I have no desire to activate thugee statues 50 times or disarm 250 enemies with Indy's whip, thank you very much...
• Might start Pokémon Platinum this week - haven't played a single one since Pokémon Blue in 1997 (98?), should be funny to go back to it. I heard Pete (Ryvvn, from R.I.P Gameslaves and now TriGames.net podcast) and Al (the_antipode, also from TriGames.net) talk soon much about this I decided to take a plunge buying this at discount price. Hope it's good.

It's been a busy week, but I got to play plenty of games!

• Played a whole lot of GTA: Chinatown Wars on my DS. Very fun game, and the drug trading money flow a lot of the reviewers talked about is no joke. I had some crazy return on such short drives to get the cheap drug from a seller and taking it to the buyer. Still, the game's fun in the missions as well, most are quick to do, great to play between renders on my PC, and through backouts. Yeah, I had a couple of those this week too...
• Started Resident Evil 5. Just started. Haven't played for more than 15 minutes. I don't know if I'm into it, gotta find someone to play co-op with, I guess.
• Finished my reviews for both Wallace & Gromit's Last Stand and Banjo Tooie. Both great games in their own right. 'Tooie is a much improved version of the N64 game, and plays much better. Still a bit annoying in spots, like its dumb checkpoints that put you all the way across a level when you die. Since levels are pretty big in this game, it makes it a tad ennerving.
• In order to finish the Banjo Tooie review, I went back to 'Kazooie and collected the rest of the eggs. The Stop 'n Swop feature is kinda nice, kinda not, really. Still, the eggs are easy to find, so if anyone's thinking about jumping into that, it doesn't take too long, so long as you unlocked all the worlds.
• Lode Runner review went live.
• Lego Indiana Jones... I got the treasures for all of the Raiders levels expecting to play the Young Indy scenario, but apparently the person who wrote the guide I looked at got the unlocks mixed up, so I ended up playing the Lost Temple section, which is nothing more than a Lego stud collecting level. Spent almost 30 minutes on that, got it done, thankfully. Pretty boring, in my honest opinion.
• Played a bit of each of the Genesis collection games. Boy, for people who like achievements, that game is a gold mine. I mean, come on, talking to a dolphin in Ecco is an achievement? Anyway, there's still a lot of games there I have never played, so I'll keep coming back for quick plays. Golden Axe is more fun that I remembered...
• Have not played much WoW, at all. Trying to find a new guild in order to play through Ulduar (the new raid instance introduced in the last content patch) at least once.
• Posted my ECTO-1 in yet another CG site, CGSociety. The 'big one' in my opinion. Good response, which makes me happy. I'm still working on that application of the car in a background and scenery, but I'm going to slow down on it to start working on other things too.
• Watched a couple of Mythbuster episodes, to catch up a bit - the McGyver gunpowder on a lock one was pretty cool but the tar swimming thing was just silly. That show is very hit and miss, but the episodes I watched were good overall.

As requested in my last bullet-riddled post, here's my car:

I'm changing the bullets this week into something more dynamic. Since I'm horrible remembering specific days, I'll just mention what I did, to be considered DONE in the past week! I know, crazy stuff, but my mind reserves stuff to be rememberd in weird ways.

• Finished Lego Indiana Jones' story mode. Great, fun game, I had a blast with it. I'll probably go back to it at some point to get all the treasures and unlock all the bonus levels. Neat game for the price I payed: FREE. :)
• Played through the beginning chapter of Condemned. Looking good so far, pretty scary. I can safely say I'll have a hard time getting through this game since I am horrible dodging and parrying melee attacks. The CSI stuff in it is pretty dumbed down so far, but interesting nonetheless. I am a big fan of Monolith from way back in the Shogo days, so I'll press on with this game. With it I also picked up Condemned 2 for a ridiculously low price, so I'll surely play 'em back to back. If I am not too scared, that is.
• Took part in WoW's Children's Week event, and was able to finish all the activities (read: achievements) in three log ins between two days. The PVP one was a pain in the neck, but I finally shot it down with a very friendly group of battleground goes in an epic Eye of the Storm flag capture. The rest of the BGs weren't so easy, though. I got the last two vanity pets from the orphan escort missions, now I have all six Children's Week pets. Crazy, considering my long periods of not having an active account, and still being able to take part in the event for three years straight. Got the 'Patron Edrebrann' title, which is nice.
• Played an hour or so of Sonic 2 on the Sonic Genesis Collection, much further than I ever had before, thanks to save states. I was never into old Sonic games before Sonic Adventure, but it's easy to see why they were popular back in the day.
• Still played GTA: Chinatown Wars on my DS. Very fun, yet cumbersome game - holding a stylus and using the buttons is very awkward for me, but the missions are keeping me interested.
• Chrono Trigger was hardly played, I only got past the first "dungeon" section... I'm now at a very desolate location after dropping from a portal.
• Published more images of my finalized Ecto-1 in some CG forums, got a pretty good response. Now I'm working on a final action shot so I can put the car up at CGSociety and the rest of the major international CG websites. In one particular local website, I got inducted as a candidate for 3D artist of the month among some other people, which was awesome. Even if I don't win, it's still awesome, after all this hard work on the car.
• My review for Flock! went up. Check it out here. Lode Runner's still in the publishing queue.
• Last, but not least, I started two games for review at GameRevolution - Banjo Tooie and Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures: The Last Resort. Banjo got reworked from the ground up, and it shows. No more slowdowns or blurry textures, which is great!

EDIT: My Lode Runner review has gone up! Read it HERE!

Yay, Dead Rising 2 info...

Hey, wait... what the effe is this?

Seriously, everything was fine up til his mouth, but going down, what is that thing?

Talk about some weak design... his jaw looks fractured half way on his face as well. And don't get me started on that nostril...

I hope they change those. No. I pray for it.

Very true to the word "bullets" this time... promise.

• Spent most of the week putting the finishing touches on my Ectomobile - published an article on it in two CG websites, positive return all around. Plan to finish it this week, Friday the latest.
• Didn't really plan much of anything 'til Wednesday - a friend of mine came from abroad and brought me some games. Among them was a free copy of Lego Indiana Jones/Kung Fu Panda and Arcade Titles/Sega Tennis bundles that he scored at the store. Pretty nice.
• Lego Indy is fun, I played up 'til the final level of Temple of Doom.
• He also got Marvel Ultimate Alliance for super cheap, and Sonic's Sega Genesis Collection for a dumb low price with mail in discount. In the discount bit, he also got me Chrono Trigger DS and GTA Chinatown, for 15 bucks a pop. Still have to crack GTA open but Chrono trigger is just as good now as it was back then. I got some more good deals that will be played in the course of the coming months.
• Played a fair bit of WoW yesterday, as chronicled in the blog post below. Noblegarden was activated at 12 AM, and since I play on a Pacific Time server, I was there fairly early, and got the good drop on the Easter eggs. Got everything I wanted. Including the drop on the cow. That took some effort - had to run to Mulgore, the part of the continent where Horde tauren hang out, and found a "cow" there, luckily. Note, this was done at night here, I had attempted the same at an earlier time, near lunch, and was sadly murdered by a mob of angry level 80s! Anyway, that was done, my character is happy... I guess. You'll have to see for yourself.
• Finished my Lode Runner (XBLA) review, should go up soon I hope. Good game, overall. Dead online, four days in. *sigh*
• My OutRun Online Arcade review went up on Friday - check it out here, if interested.
• Downloaded the new SFIV content, played a couple of player matches - game's still great!
• Touched on Vesperia for oh-so quick, I'm kinda stuck in an annoying boss fight...
• LOTRO is still on free play week, and I still have to try it.

... for making yet another crazy holiday inspired event in WoW that... works! Noblegarden, a.k.a WoW's Easter, dropped today, a bit later than the actual real world holiday. And it's safe to say it's the best implemented event in the game, bar some of the pre-Wrath of the Lich King world events. You run around collecting eggs, that in turn, spawn other eggs somewhere else. Instead of having a twisted 1 hour cycle like in other season events like Valentine's Day, you can keep looting eggs to your heart's content and get the items contained within them. Out of the five or so items needed, I already have four, after a couple of hours playing (including the vanity pet rabbit), which is great. There are some interesting things to do with the items collected, like planting flowers in Azeroth's many deserts and hunting down female characters in order to 'bunny ear' them (18 or older! *chuckle*). It's random stuff that will probably take everyone a short time to complete, but it's fun nevertheless.

I am glad Blizzard made this event fun and relatively frustration free, that is worth playing my last few weeks before I freeze my account in hibernation.

Now, to find a dwarf female...

UPDATE: I have found a female dwarf! Now the hunt for a female tauren, affectionally known as a "cow", begins.

Oh boy. Last week was pretty crazy for me. Kinda still dazed now to be honest. Working on my ECTO-1 project has been taking so much energy and time out of me - mainly because I REALLY want to get this thing right for portfolio and job hunting purposes, that I can hardly recall what I did besides that last week. I'll try to recall everything, but it is highly possible I'll miss a lot of stuff done, and for that, I apologize.

• I still played some Street Fighter IV online in irregular spurts during the week. Managed to rack up 100 online wins overall, five ranked match wins and shortly after, 200 total online matches. I'm not an OMG-WTF-FTW-BBQ sort of player, but I tend to learn a lot about the other player if we play more than two or so fights. I'm starting to regret using Zangief too much online since people tend to complain about him being cheap. It's not exactly the way I use him, but the timing I use his moves tends to make a few people think I'm being cheap. One way I can analyze is to just set it aside as whining, since hell, the guy's slow but powerful, I like using his "psycho" punch to get close to speedy characters and surprise them and that for me is a way of subverting a character's weakness in order to make him useful in fights that otherwise would be highly unlikely he'd ever have a chance.
• On the other hand, I can see their point, and how a way of playing a certain character might feel cheap - i.e, I ran across a guy fighting as Abel, and all he did during the fight was that spin kick that works as an armor break and has a rather far reach across the screen. That was all he did, and surely enough, I lost. Did I send him a private message to tell him he was cheap and call him names? No, I kept playing for a while until I beat him with another character. And PMs bring me to another comment - rage quitting. I ran across a couple of folks who just ragequit after losing fights (not just to Zangief), right before the K.O text appeared on screen. This is not a type of behavior I condone, so I tend to send a message asking why they quit like that so a win wouldn't be registered. Some didn't even answer, one gave a dumb excuse like "it's RE5 time" - but he jumped back to SF4 right after. In the end, I just feel that's really childish to do and annoying. If you lose and want to leave, fine by me, but wait til we get back to the lobby. One loss is not going to destroy your stats, kill your chances at getting achievements or whatever. On stats, I'm at around 74% ratio for wins/losses. Do I care much about that so much as to gloat about it in a blog post? Honestly no, it'd be easy for anyone to check on that by visiting my gamercard.
• Last bullet on SF4, promise. Started training Chun-Li as another character option to play as - strangely enough I don't remember her being a charge character in past games, but to be honest, in those games, when I played as her, I didn't use special moves, just her speed, which can be the reason why I focused on Cammy right off the bat. Until now, it's been a good change of pace. Playing on a normal controller with some odd control changes doesn't feel weird anymore, it's just fine. Some moves don't come out 100% of the time, and I don't mind to be honest. I don't think I'll invest on anything special, mainly because I don't have space at home to store that big of a hunk of plastic, plus, that thing's expensive (double/triple the price here, especially). If there was some way to convert my Dreamcast arcade stick for other uses, I would.
• Didn't play as much Vesperia as I wanted, just because of lack of time and energy to invest in an RPG. The game's great, don't get me wrong. I'm just past the colosseum section of the story. I mainly played this yesterday after taking a much needed break from everything. Annoyingly enough, I tend to be the sort of person that can't completely shut my mind off from something I'm working on and tend to feel guilty if I'm not doing it, which made me jump back to texturing my car during the night. Argh. I hate that trait.
• I'm about to lock my account on WoW for the time being. Early in the week the new content patch hit the game, and when I had the urge to just log in and check the fishing daily quest, I had to update it. Obviously, it took me a day to update the darn thing, and when I logged back in, the daily quest I wanted wasn't there. Either way, I'll hold until the first week of May to freeze my account, so I can play a bit of the Children's Week event and get the two vanity pets I am missing on my main character. With WoW settling down for me, I plan to play that last LOTRO card I mentioned way back when, and keep playing my characters, the ones I made during the free play weekend a while ago. Hopefully I can level them up to a point that they can reach the Mines of Moria content, but I'm in no hurry. Either way, I hardly touched WoW this week, maybe an agregate of five total minutes were spent there?
• Oh yeah, I did play something else - OutRun Online Arcade. It came out on Wednesday, and I got it for review. Having not played much of the Xbox versions (I do have the discs for those here), I was mildly surprised at how fun this version is, simple, dumb fun. Wrote the review on Sunday, hopefully it should be out soon. My The Pitt review is out, though, so check that out in the meantime. I still have a Flock! review in the publishing pipeline, that should be out before OutRun's, hopefully.
• Haven't been reading anything since I've been really put off after so much concentration on one thing. I did however watch the so-called final version of Blade Runner on Saturday. Didn't care much for it, I think I enjoyed the director's cut I own on DVD more, but to be honest it's been so long since I watched that. Anyway, the film still looks great. On the other side of things, I got to watch Die Hard 4.0 yesterday night before bed, and I have to admit, it was pretty darn fun, but super silly. I don't know if it's me getting older, but I thought there were a lot of times poor Maggie Q should've died *SPOILERS!* before she actually did. First she got a shelf dropped on top of her, then a car hit her head on at a relatively high speed, after that, the car hit a concrete wall which led to the scene which ultimely results in her death. Oh well, maybe it's just me over analyzing. I was already aware of the F-35 jet vs. truck scene from Jeff and Ryan talking about it in their podcast, so I wasn't shocked to see it happen. In the end, a pretty fun movie, just have to turn off (or on, I don't know) my disbelief. Great special effects!
• Might not be much, but I rendered a little turntable video for my Ectomobile-1 project on Thrusday and friday, and posted that here and in a couple of other places. I got a pretty excited group of comments, which made me happy. Thank you to everyone who wrote in, and to people who just checked the video out. The final textured version is coming along nicely - I am almost done with the car's my body work, like hucaps, tires, and body. Bump mapping on Adobe Illustrator is bringing me back to those oh-so far four years ago in college courses retracing stuff! Hopefully I can show everyone the final final final version soon, the one that takes freaking five hours to render.

Owf... so that's it. Man, I ranted a lot about SF4. I apologize for that, but it needed to be said. I promise I'll stop using Zangief, even though he's one of my favorite all around characters in the game! Back to work for me, have fun everyone...

[video=KiFikTX75bIJuzLb]

So, many people - I'd wish - may be wondering what I've been teasing about in my bullet point posts. That "nostalgic" piece is none other than the Ectomobile-1, the "ECTO-1" from the movie Ghostbusters. That along with the DeLorean from Back to the Future, always held a place in my heart as my favorite movie ride. The original Ectomobile-1 was born off a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance, turned into the iconic ride that the Ghostbusters drive around New York City in the 1984. Later, for Ghostbusters II, it turned into ECTO-1A, with even more equipment on its roof, more decals and the infamous marquee scrollers a'la the Wall Street stock exchange's. Personally, I always liked the first version better, and this was the version I focused on for this project. The hardest part, by far, was finding reference photos that did not stray off the original car. Luckily, I hit a good source of great pictures after a couple of days of maddening searching, and thankfully I did not have to go much anywhere else for most of the details.

For those wondering, I've been working on this for about two months now, on and off at the beginning, then dedicated mid-way in.

The video embedded on this blog post is the turntable of the model with three runs: wireframe, wireframe/s.shader and simple shader. Big thanks to my friend Rapha for the big help with 3ds Max. Final, fully textured version coming very soon.

Not that much to report this time...

• Finished Onimusha 3: Demon Siege on Monday - wow, feels like such a long time ago. Fun game, much improved, lackluster ending.
• After Onimusha 3, gave the last go on The Pitt (sans Jolie, sadly) and finished the main quest. Great expansion, read the review soon-ish! Got all the bloody ingots too. Used a video for the last few, they were hidden exactly where I thought they were but couldn't reach. Not as bad of a search. Sweet reward, though.
• The Pitt brought back my love for Fallout 3, so I decided to go back to that and clear out the last achievement missing - Data Miner - or, hacking 50 consoles. Took me a couple of tries to find the 25 or so I was missing, explored a lot of discovered locations on my map that I just breezed through on my main quest game save. Managed to find some Nuka Colas too... ha, wonder where they were when I was actively looking for them! Anyway, got that done early in the week. 1200/1200. I don't care a lot for achievements, but hell, this game deserves it. Ready for Broken Steel in a couple of weeks!
• Speaking of reviews, finished mine for The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, review got published some days later. Check it out here.
• Instead of ICO, I dusted off Tales of Vesperia. Enjoyable so far, but a bit annoying at spots. Can't skip cutscenes, some boss battles early on are incredibly punishing, thus requiring multiple attempts, multiple watches of the multiple unskippable cutscenes in between. Good voice acting, though, brilliant graphics. Might try Sonata again after this one! Love the dog's attitude.
• Went back to Left 4 Dead on Tuesday for Game Night, played with some GameSpot peeps, added a bunch to my friends list on Live. Multiplayer on that is fun! Went back to it yet again on Saturday, for online co-op with an old friend - this time, we played Death Toll on normal, barely made it out on the boat. Yeah, we both stink.
• Also jumped back to Street Fighter IV - Zangy and Cammy loved my return. Finished racking up 100 online games yesterday morning, then some more wins then... shockingly enough, braved ranked matches and won five in a roll! Might try five more just for the achievement sake, not sure. This game is so fun, great buy, in my book. Best online play since Jedi Knight in my opinion.
• Activated the Penny Arcade Episode One trial I had on my 360 before I forgot about the price cut. Played about ten mintues of it. It's Penny Arcade. Woot, I guess.
• Oh yeah, almost forgot about Flock. Fun game, but some odd problems with the camera and the sheep getting invisible and/or stuck on the environment. Still in review stages, good impression so far.
• Worth mentioning - finished watching the Clone Wars yesterday, now I want to watch the full length version. I enjoyed the series a lot, it got better as it progressed, for sure. Popped in a new series, Castle, onto my hum... player. Not a bad show, fun seeing an actor from Firefly in another setting. Not as much witty dialogue, and... don't think it'll last.
• No, did not watch the Terminator season finale, totally forgot about it on Saturday, I will go back to it sometime this week. I had a complete computer lockdown on Saturday, taking a day off. Sooo worth it, have to say.
• Work-wise, the week was pretty full, with lots of hours in front of my computer screen - I'm making the leap between XSI and 3ds MAX and back, and that's been a pain for the most. MAX is pretty finicky to deal with compared to XSI. I've been getting a lot of shortcut cross-over between the two. Well, gotta endure 3ds MAX if I want to get that great render on a particular thing I've been working on.