Happy Thanksgiving!

I went to see Dragonforce; you know, those guys who made the hardest song in a Guitar Hero game "Through the Fire and Flames" (aka TTFAF). That was two days ago. My memories are still fresh and available for all to read (and comment on!!!) at my music blog. I know, I haven't really posted anything new about my guitar training, and that's because I work too much right now. Big changes will come in 2009.

I bought quite a few games on the cheap these past few days, and I hope there's an end in sight. My wallet loves the low dollar amounts but of course, it adds up. Let's see what I've gotten and where I've gotten them from - maybe you can follow suit if there's something you like!

Newegg.com (Black Friday sale)

Dead Rising $10
No More Heroes $15
Burnout Paradise $20

Amazon.com

Last Remnant $40 (pre-order sale, but will be same price on B.Friday)

Gamefly.com

Army of Two $18

Circuit City

Bioshock $10 (this week only)

That's a lot of game there! I'm thinking about getting the Crysis Collector's Edition from Gamestop tomorrow for $20, and I saw that Crysis Warhead is $20 somewhere... Too much!

EDIT - 2 minutes later...

OMG Titan Quest Gold is $9.99 on Steam!

I've got nothing but praise for the game right now. Everything from the intense action and the incredible difficulty to the wonderful audiovisual experience makes this game the one to play. A MUST have if you've got three friends with itchy trigger fingers.

I managed to hop in some games on the final part of the first "film," No Mercy. It's a rooftop escape where you must survive waves of zomb0rz. They throw everything and the kitchen sink at you and it makes you say things with messed up spellings like "this is rediculous" and "this is ****ing imposible" but when you actually succeed, you feel the ultimate sense of accomplishment. Just running like hell from an unending swarm of Infected (of all types) to catch the rescue "choppa" is an adrenaline rush. It took me about an hour with one human and two AI on Normal difficulty and another hour (maybe a little more) with three humans (one was a Steam friend, two are now friends) on Expert difficulty. Although it took ME an hour to finish the level with them, the game session lengths were completely different. The normal difficulty game was on for about 4 hours. The Expert difficulty game was on for 10 hours! The same three guys were playing that whole time! I'm sure that once strategies are perfected, the duration will go down, but the AI director (that dynamically generates the enemies in the game) will always go for the jugular.

In other quick news, I hope to finish FFIV tonight, if I can find an hour or two to play at work.

Anyone else have interesting L4D stories? Sound off!

1. Finished Gears of War (thanks to edubuccaneer for fun co-op).

2. Fell in love with Left 4 Dead after 3 minutes of gameplay, pre-purchased via Steam.

3. Bought Overlord over Steam on a whim... what's $9.99 anyways?

4. Very close to finishing Final Fantasy IV on schedule (by Monday).

5. Reached level 71 with my Mage in WoW, about 75% to level 72.

I also played a little Mercenaries 2 with Edu; the co-op is pretty fun in my opinion. Hopefully I can get through that game for the most part in co-op... other games have been taking priority and I think Mercs 2 is a good game to spend some time with. Eventually I'll pick up Gears 2 but I am waiting for a deal to pop up. I'm still kicking myself for not getting that Circuity City deal on launch!

Edit: Overlord is very much worth the price of admission for this weekend only! It's $9.99 on Steam until Monday. To put it plainly, it's an evil version of Pikmin. You're a human (or so I think) who commands imps in an effort to restore the former glory of your predecessor's wasted castle. The controls are pretty simple, if not a bit strange for a third person action game. If you like Pikmin, I think you would enjoy Overlord, especially for the low price.

So everyone, how was Gears of War 2 over the weekend? I actually took the time off to stay home and play some games and my entire friend's list was occupied on the Epic shooter. I, unfortunately, didn't take advantage of the Circuit City offer featuring a 1600 point MS card with Gears 2. Now I'm just gonna sleep on it until the holidays. Over the weekend I did manage to finish the Normal mode of Castle Crashers and unlock a bunch of songs in Rock Band 2 with my real bandmates. I'm also nearing the final hours of Final Fantasy IV DS, which are absolutely amazing (and difficult!).

This week is going to be a busy one for me, game-wise. I wanna finish, or at least hit some milestones, in a bunch of stuff before Wrath of the Lich King is released. After Thursday, that'll pretty much be the only thing I'm playing for the rest of the year, I fear. I hope I can get a Vacation day on the 13th!

My friends, sound off on Gears 2! Also, will you face the Wrath?

Oh my... has it really been 2 months since I last posted an entry? Far too long, I tell you. I've been pretty much working day in and day out since I've gotten my new job, and watching TV can't be much better than this! It's great, but hopefully I can clear up some bills and start living a normal life again. I'm trying to fit some games in my schedule - as you can tell if you listen to the Trigames.NET podcast I can pretty much count the number of games I play per week on one hand. BUT...

The holidays are approaching and that means all the hot games of 2008 should be dropping soon! Only question is, what are the hot games? If you've got a game coming out between October and December that is really worth your while, discuss it! I'm definitely looking forward to the Warcraft expansion (obviously) but on the non-MMO side I can't really name too much that I'm dead-set on spending my money on.

I've been doing a lot of music-oriented stuff, mainly going to concerts and working with my band. A couple of weeks ago I went to see Yngwie Malmsteen. If you don't know who he is, he's one crazy dude who has pretty much mastered many elements of guitar playing and practically introduced shredding. I've got some pix and videos at my guitar blog for the world to see.

To close out this post, I'm almost done with Final Fantasy IV DS and I'm trudging through the end parts of Baten Kaitos. I just bought Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles and Order of Ecclesia so the queue just got a bit longer. I believe that I will be playing some Apollo Justice on my DS next while exploring Xenogears (yes!) when I get the chance. Please also stop by MrCHUP0N's blog and send in some mail for this weekend's podcast! I miss all of your wonderful questions!

Boy, have I been busy! Working overnight and living a day life can surely take away hours from doing other things, like sleeping and gaming. I manage to get some kind of progress in from time to time but I must admit, it's been much slower. To add to the mess, I did go and buy some more games to add to that backlog *ahem* collection. Recently, I bought Mercenaries 2, Castle Crashers and Bionic Commando Rearmed and have been playing them all with some kind of gusto.

I'm really enjoying Mercenaries and if anyone's got it and wants to play between 4PM and 8PM (randomly) during the week, send me a message on XBL! That also applies to Castle Crashers, which I did play with jimb0 and two of his friends. That game is LOADS of fun! Bionic Commando is simply classic gameplay and a wonder to play solo. I haven't tried multi yet.

On to the backlog: I believe I'm about 3-5 hours away from finishing Baten Kaitos and I'd love to finish that this week. I'm still chugging away at job points to make my one Dark Knight character is Final Fantasy Tactics PSP before I finish the game and I haven't touched Contra 4 in a while. Also haven't played WoW in weeks, but I'll probably jump back in once the new content patch releases.

So... upcoming releases: Rock Band 2 next Sunday (9/14) and the new Metallica album the Friday before (9/12). SW: Force Unleashed and Dragon Quest IV the following Tuesday (9/16). My wallet and my backlog will hate me. They see me, "Hi haters!"

Also, if you like dudes with long hair who play guitar, visit my blog at http://xlm2k.blogspot.com and leave a comment to show your love. I'm gonna start putting up some more videos and will be going to many rock concerts this fall and winter. That means pictures galore!

When I close my eyes
I come to take your life..."

Finally, a Megadeth song on Rock Band, and it's a great one!

...of playing some strategy games against the CPU? They already know everything about what you're doing and put themselves in the best position to foil your pre-determined plans. There's a word for this kind of activity, and it's cheating. Honestly, for what other reason would a player deliberately place its own unit into what initially looks like harms way, but would benefit in the chance scenario that the debuff (disable, in this case) would deactivate on it? Once moved into said position, the debuff is erased "miraculously" and the tide of battle turns in none other than a planned fashion. That's predetermination based on information that would normally be hidden, and it's cheating! Shame on you, Square Enix, for programming your Final Fantasy Tactics AI in such a way!

Although I have known this for at least 10 years, it's just not something I like to see from my opponents. Of course, this isn't the only kind of game that has omniscient and abusive AI, but I just had to vent about this, recently finishing Chapter 2 of War of the Lions and being upset at the CPU's clairvoyance.

After all these years, the ol' gray mare just ain't what she used to be. My Wavebird now locks up on the right direction of the analog stick. It happened very suddenly; I know that this thing can take a beating, but it seems to have related to a really short fall off the top of a Gamecube. I was thinking about getting it repaired but I'm not sure if that's cost-effective. I might just buy a new one as I sit entirely too far from my Wii and my Cube doesn't have component cables (shakes fist at Nintendo - !!!). I duno. I also hear that Wavebirds might be banned due to a lawsuit, so I should probably act quickly.

Finished Zelda Minish Cap yesterday. Pretty entertaining, esp. at the end. I do most certainly hate the way they set up blastable walls in this game, as I have been genuinely stuck for hours trying to get past two parts of the game because it wasn't visually clear that a wall (or part thereof) was susceptible to bombs. Remote bombs do rock, though!

As of this writing, I am playing Tactics PSP (Chapter 2, grinding job levels), Contra 4 (Stage 5 on Normal), Baten Kaitos (8 hours in), and am kinda stalled on my other games. Those would be Ninja Gaiden Black - i'm taking a hiatus on badass beat-em ups - and Star Wars TCS for 360. I was playing Chapter 3 in Episode 4 and somehow ran into a point where I could play no further because C3PO can't jump. I'll probably give it a whirl later today.

The Summer of Finishing Games continues!