Hello!

Bought Shivering Isles the day it came out here in Europe, and damn!!!, it made me realise what a great game Oblivion is and forever will. It's one of those games that'll live beyond its time, it'll be remembered for a long, long time.

Shivering Isles, IMO, is even better that the main game, per se. Loading times improved, deep surrealistic plot with a landscape that stays loyal to the main game and fits the new universe like no other... Check my review if you like.

After completing Shivering (including a lot of side quests - my char. is lvl 46, wich I think is fairly good), I finally started playing Icon. It's an ok game, well above average. Again, check my minimalistic review.

Started playing (lightly) Saint's Row again. I have these three friends from UK who are nice, funny guys. Trustworthy, wich is almost priceless these days => Gamer; Senior and Agent.

On a personal field: Girlfriend went to NY to work at the UN. Allthough I'm quite proud, it'll be some lonely 9 months, and a major change in my life, as I was/am used to have her near. I talk to her almost every day, and she allready rented an apartment on the Spanish Harlem (??!)... I have no idea what that means, but she seemed happy with it, so it's cool, I guess...

I asked her to send me Virtua Tennis 3 (VT3), as there aren't many region-free games, and I think VT3 is nice. I also want to take advantage of her stay in the States to buy one of two things, a 360 Elite or a Zune. What would you guys prefer ? I sometimes think I decided for one, but then I start thinking about the other... Decisions.., decisions!!!

 

Well got to go... say something..., and thanks for reading.

 

360 Rocks!!!!

 

 

:) Miguel :)

...Def Jam: Icon !

Yes, Crackdown arrived on time, as usually Amazon UK provides a trustworthy service, at a reasonalble price. Well, actually, compared to Portugal, there's an huge difference on video-games prices. That's mainly due, IMO, to VAT wich is 21% here, plus, and unfortunatly, in Portugal you can still see a lotta piracy, and therefor, legits (as myself, and a few more - kudos to them) have to pay for their titles and for the pirated ones, I think. I wish MS banned 360 pirated-software users from Live, that would tech them.... But no..., I still can see some of them, I know them, they brag about it. They have every single game, and they play none. They're no gamers, they get their kicks out of pirating and bragging about it. How sad...

So, what about Crackdown ? Is it worth it ?

Hell, yeah! Check out my review below. Not much of a regular review, it's more like a conceptual comment on a piece of software that excels mainly in its aesthetics, rather than in gameplay.

The game, as everybody knows by now (well, not really by now, since it went on development, more like it), it's a GTA-like game, but with quite a few differences. For instance, it almost skips a plot, allthough not entirely. Even in this field, where I thought I could somewhat feel a bit disapointing, I didn't. It manages to "throw" us a few bossed with a very distinct mini-movie introducing them, almost like a TV-series. Quite well made, it works! It works also in an aspect, that makes the game, apparantly, easy expandable. They can put more bosses, using the same format, as a downloadable content (and I think they'll do it, as there's only 900gs so far).

As I mentioned in my review, the game's a true sandbox game, the sense of freedom gained another level, with the protagonist super-powers, and his ability to climb to almost every roof top. A true 3d sandbox, go anywhere, and everywhere!

Other aspect quite nice of Crackdown, is its Achievements. It captures the essence of the system, by awarding players for ridicule action stunts, that otherwise few would remind of doing. This is what it's all about! As I noticed from my friends, and some foruns, it even lead for people to push it further, and doing even more out of place weird stuff, like trying to put a car on top of the Agency..., wicked!

And the greatest part of the game, for me: its aesthetics! Pure brilliance. The very first playable comic book!

Ok, enough about Crackdown...

My current pre-order is Def-Jam Icon. I loved FFNY, and even knowing that the latest installment has few things in common, I usually reward devs and publishers with my money when they improve my free-time quality. The benefit of doubt.

I have a meeting now with my boss , got to go.

Thanks for reading.

Later.

Been a while since I post something in here. Well, since World Cup...

What's going on in my side of the Planet:

- I'm still dazzled with the 360, whata great system! Countless hours of quality ludic time.

Been playin: Saint's Row (multiplayer); Bionicle Heroes (bought it, mainly 'cos it was on 'nice price', very easy game, did all the Achievements!); Amped 3 (late aquisition, but it's actually a great game! Huge mountains, great sense of freedom, no draw distance problems, very nice Achievements, currently going for "Supreme Snow God", and I will get it!).

Bought a new car! Sold my Clio 1.2 75HP, and bought a new VW TSI 140HP!, amazing power! (well I wasn't used to this amount of "horses"..., so plz uderstand some over-reation.

Pre-ordered Crackdown, but just for the sake of it, not for the Halo 3 "thing" - I don't dig demos.

My GamerScore stands at 22040, and I currently have 88% of game completion. I also hate gamesavers with passion, I wish MS ban them, but we, true gamers, allready disrespect them (read: spit on their gamertags, /spits/), so it's cool. I have some fun episodes with a guy with a huge gamerscore that got raped by me and every friend of mine (legit gamers), in every single game he had 100% completion on. On many of them he didn't even know the controls. It was embarassing... . In the end nobody wanted to keep him as a friend - disrespected!

I'm also thinking of giving PSP another opurtunity, I have it since launch day in  Portugal, and haven't played it for about 1/2 year now. Tried to sell it but lost contact with the guy who was iterrested in. I'm looking for Tales of Eternia here in Lisbon but can't find it. Does somebody know if this game is worth it ?

Anyway, really, really looking forward Crackdown, but until then I'll be tryin to do some Achievements from some games such as Amped 3(allready mentioned it); Kameo and PDZ.

When Crackdown arrive, I'll post again to say if it stood up to the expectations.

C ya.

First of all I want to express my excuse to Nox0pt, because I bothered him to help me do some Achievements @ Burnout but then I got busy with Oblivion and Table Tennis - mate, if you still up to, I would really, really like to do it, if you're up to, and again, sorry! - I'll have a 360 harcore session this weekend, as girlfriend is out of town, so I'll try to reach you. If anyone up to it, it's welcome. the more the easier...and merrier.
I've been watching FIFA2006 World Cup, and my thoughts on this are:
- The game is getting a bit too "musculated", there's little to no room for creative playing, not good.
- The teams with bigger "credentials" are getting through, there's no "surprises", no new teams winning. That's not good for the game to expand further.
- Players are playing rather fairly, I haven't seen a real stupid aggresive foul yet, well, I've seen..., in the game Italy-USA, an Italian guy almost crippled an US player, it hurted just for watching..., of course he got the red card. But in general it's beeing played pretty fairly, and that's good.
- Best teams I've seen so far:
- Portugal ( of course... :) )
- Germany
- Brazil
- Spain
- Argentina
- Netherlands
- Deceptions:
- Servia & Montenegro
- Poland
- France
- Ukrain

Well, my guess is there'll be the "usual" final, Germany-Brazil.

Today I found a very neat "thing", the XUG (XBox 360 Users Group) this kind of term was kickstarted by the Open Source community, and it's a very nice way to improve the already existan bond with 360 users. Give it a try, it has many cool features, better look for yourselfs:
http://www.xboxusersgroup.com

Well, I have much more to say, but I have to do some work now.
See you soon!
-

Ok..., Tokobot came, at last! The problem was with the deliver address - LikSang.com truncated the address, and the street number didn't appear, so there's this tip - carefull with the number of charecters to put in the address (and the invoice address it's not a reliable check source, as in it, it was correct).
Meanwhile I bought Megaman Maverick Hunter X - I sorta liked it, but I found the last level to be too difficult (I didn't play an old-skool 2D platformer, for a long, long while), and I'm still at it, on the other hand the previous levels were a joke - I went through them in one game. Many games suffer from this problem, the difficulty raises abruptly, instead of using a "stable curve".
I'm experiencing another problem, wich is a lack-of-time one. I realised that I don't have time to play my whole PSP and X360's games - for example, I didn't play Tokobot, not even once!, I'm considering the use of PSP, I wonder... should I sell it ??, because I get a much "better kick" out of X360 games.
X360 games are trully amazing! Yesterday I connected my PS2 to play Devil May Cry a bit, I missed it, but..., man!, it's so passé... . I can't go back to old-gen, it feels old... .
X360's achievements: I love getting them, but this weekend I played a bit of my new purchase - Burnout: Revenge (oh man!! so much fun!! hilarious game!) - and I was trying to get some achievements, but as I was playing with my girlfrend she asked a pertinent question: Are you having fun or are you just trying to get achievements and putting fun elsewhere ? I got to think of this, and try to mix the both things - this is not a job, it's an entertainment machine.
Anyway, my next target to buy is marked to be "Rockstar presents Table Tennis", but I really wanted "Oblivion", but I , for now, don't want more FPs - I'll head for another, after a purchase of a non-FP one, to keep things even.
Thanks for reading.

"Hello world".jsp! :)

Hi, I'm a systems administrator in Portugal, for a government institution, and mainly work with Unix machines (flavours are: Solaris; HP-UX and some Linuxes <got to love SuSE>).
I'm also a very commited video-gamer.
The main issue I wanted to talk about is in the topic, but I must say something first that really annoys me:
How can someone (lot's of people, anyway...), spent many hours of their lifes bashing a machine, ans praising a non-existant one - yes, I'm talking about the X360 vs PS3 "thing". I even read somewhere, someone saying "I don't know why, but games look better to me in PS2 than in X360" - how can someone come to be like this ?
I mean..., I love my X360, but I also love my PSP, and if PS3 (when it starts to exist) come to be a good machine, I'll try with the best of my efforts to buy it, and I will love it as well.
Back to the topic: I live in a small European country (proud to be European, let make that clear), and I feel quite disconsiderated for the late game releases most games suffer in Europe. For instance, Psychonauts, praised by the critic (Eurogamer.net even awarded it the best of 2005), was released this week!!!, how late is that ? One year, that's how!  That was just an example, release dates also "slips" like never seen in Japan or US.
Ok, I have an option - import. But there's a drawback in that too, for once, if you import, let say from Liksang.com, and you take advantage from free deliver, expect 1-2 months to have your item, if you choose to use DHL or any other personalized delivery method, expect to pay almost as much for it as for the game itself!
Oh well..., I guess I'm particularly annoyed, as I'm waiting for Tokobot for 1,5 month. I hope it's worth it!
Thanks for reading.