Where The Grass Can Kill And The Online Is Shitty

I finally finished Burnout Paradise. Got through all of the offline achievements. Some of the achievements required the Xbox Live Vision Camera which I do not have.

I actually preferred the sandbox style gameplay compared to the "select a track" version. It further differentiates Burnout from the "normal" racing games. Having an event at every intersection and being able to showtime and road rule every street made it feel like I was really racing in a city.

The online how ever was less enjoyable. You have lists of challenges that require a specific number of people but people can join your party at any time making them unavailable. If someone leaves while a challenge is in progress it might be canceled, depending on which challenge it is. And the challenges require participation from every member in your party. So if someone isn't helping out,which in my experience is around 60%, you have to kick them and end the challenge. Which means everyone who was working on the challenge gets punished for their hard work. If the host leaves everyone gets kicked out of the game and you have to search for another match.

Those are mostly complaints about the community so I'll separate my technical problems here. You can't track challenge progress while doing challenges, unless you're the host, which I think is weird. That means you can't request specific challenges because you can't see which challenges you have completed for that specific number of people. When creating a "room" you can't specify that you want to do challenges or races. It only displays the last thing you did, which is nothing if you just started.

To be fair, I often complain about the online aspects of games but I rarely play online games when they first come out. That means the online community is smaller and the online experience will be different than someone who played the game when it first came out.

All in all I did enjoy the game. The amount of vehicles and the customization were definitely pluses. People complain about DLC but this game did offer a lot of options. None of which were required to enjoy the game. *cough* Halo. *cough*.

I ended up with 780/1250g. Pretty good if you don't count DLC.

Suicide Missionary Accomplished

I got my 360 back. I got a new 360 back. I got a refurbished used 360 back. Set it up. Played some trials and demos I missed.

You can't use any content you downloaded when your offline unless you re-download them. I have a 120g hard drive with less than a gig free so that's gonna take a while.

And apparently you can't play games from the hard drive unless you re-download that as well. So I have the game on my hard drive and I have the game on the disc but can't play it because the 360 is different? Exactly what "crime" is this even supposed to prevent? And unlike the downloaded content they don't even tell you about this. I found out because I heard my disc spinning.

So I deleted and then re-installed Gears 2. I was pretty close to the end so it took me about a day to finish. I had one achievement left that I wanted to get. And with it came a new gamerpic.

I had this game for 4 months and Burnout Paradise for 2 months which means I payed 60$ for Games I couldn't even play.

790/1750 g. Online Achievements Suck. DLC Achievements Suck Worse. Back to Burnout Paradise.

Metroid Frustration

Here's the story:
I'm working on completing Insane Difficulty in "Gears of War 2" when "The Ballad of Gay Tony" comes out. I gotta run through that. Then I realize I don't have 100% in "The Lost and Damned." So I finish that first then get 100% in Ballad. I still need 100% in the missions but decide to come back to that later.

Instead of going back to Gears 2 I decide to put in Burnout Paradise. I've been wanting to play it since it came out and I've had it for a month. It's better than I thought it would be. The demo doesn't do it justice. I play it all day long. Next day I fire up the game again but the disc isn't reading. I take it out and it looks fine, not at all like the first Gears 2 I had to send back. Try a few more times, it still doesn't work. I decide to clean it, still nothing. I pop in Gears 2 and it works fine. So I'm like "What the hell? I have to send another game back?"

I start playing Gears for a few hours then I shut it down to do something else. I come back and now Gears isn't reading. Now I'm freaking out. I try Halo 3 ... nothing. Orange Box? No go. So I realize it's not the games. My disc drive is dead. My 360 is past warranty and I can't pay to fix it at the moment. I have these games installed to the hard drive by the way. I just need to read the disc for a second and I can play. But no. And of course it didn't Red Ring so I wouldn't have to pay for it.

So here I am driveless and can't play disc games. Peggle goes on sale. I buy that and have been playing it since. A friend asks me what I'm going to do about Gamefly and I say "I don't know. I can't find any info about freezing the account." His question gets me looking again and I find out you can't freeze Gamefly accounts, only terminate them. So I'm stuck paying $20 a month for games I can't even play.

Which brings me to Metroid Fusion. See, I was getting there. If I'm paying for games I'm playing games. Emulators FTW. Played through Fusion. I found it harder than Super Metroid. There were a few times where I had no idea where to go. I had to watch a speedrun to get through parts. I thought the bosses were easier once you knew how to beat them: Spam Beam or Spam Missles. A good sequel over all. Next up Zero Mission, which should be interesting since I never played original Metroid.

Full Tag List:
360, Gamefly, games, Gears of War 2, GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, xbox, The Ballad of Gay Tony, Burnout Paradise, Halo, The Orange Box, Peggle, Metroid Fusion, Super Metroid, Emulators, Red Ring of Death, Bill G can S my D