Images And Links

I updated all of the images to higher resolution and fixed the links to xbox.com. Apparently, some games have been removed from the site.

Mass Effect 3 - The Reblogening

[Preface] Look who came crawling back to the internet: Me. After an almost two year hiatus I have returned. I got lazy and stopped writing for a while (a year). Then my 42" plasma television blew up and I couldn't play anything at all. Then I moved. But now I'm settled in and ready to start this thing up again. And to help make sure I actually post this thing I will be writing this as I go instead of writing 3 weeks after I finish playing. As of writing this first installment I have yet to play one second of this game aside from the demo.

[Day 0] I've been wanting to play Mass Effect 3 for a while. It's been hard keeping away from all of the ME3 spoilers but I think I've done a pretty good job. I know about Javik but that's about it so far.

[Day 0.1] I've been doing some research on the DLC. Since I am playing this game after all of the DLC has been released I was worried about the cost of buying it all. Especially after buying the ME2 DLC on sale.

There are 9 DLC Packs available:
-From Ashes - 800 Microsoft Points
-Extended Cut - Free
-Firefight Pack - 160 Microsoft Points
-Leviathan - 800 Microsoft Points
-Groundside Resistance Pack - 160 Microsoft Points
-Alternate Appearance Pack 1 - 160 Microsoft Points
-Omega - 1200 Microsoft Points
-Citadel - 1200 Microsoft Points
-Online Pass - 800 Microsoft Points (because I'm renting from Gamefly)

That gives us a total of: 5280 Microsoft Points or $66 (more than the cost of the game at full price)
Removing the non-story DLC gives us: 5 DLC Packs for 4000 Microsoft Points or $50
Removing Omega (the least acclaimed DLC) gives us: 4 DLC Packs for 2800 Microsoft Points or $35
Removing Extended Cut & Leviathan (which make the ending better; I want to be mad like everyone else;
  I'll probably YouTube that stuff later) gives us: 2 DLC Packs for 2000 Microsoft Points or $25
Removing From Ashes (because I'm not paying $10 for a character that should have been in the game anyway)
  gives us: 1 DLC Pack for 1200 Microsoft Points or $15
Citadel I will probably get because I've heard it's amazing and is fine to play after the game is over.

Mr. Bear If You're Naughty

This is a game where you play a teddy bear that stalks and murders other teddy bears using various weapons and traps. It sounds awesome. It is not. I thought it would be stealth-action murdering from the shadows. What it actually is is popping out from the grass and yelling boo. You can just take a weapon and mash the attack button but you don't get very many points and this is a high score based game. What you want to do is sabotage objects around the world and scare the bears when they try to fix them. If you scare them enough they will become insane. Scare them again and they will commit suicide. Scaring bears over and over again gets repetitive fast. Even though the game is really short, the repetition is obvious. The game is only 7 chapters and depending how you play you can finish a chapter in about 10 minutes.

On to what I liked about the game. This is kind of weird but I liked the achievements. Some people don't like achievements but Naughty Bear shows off one of my favorite things about them. There are achievements in this game that instruct you to do things that you wouldn't normally think of doing. Ironic Kills are when you kill that levels "boss" bear with a specific object. Secret Missions are special things to do surrounding that levels theme, like getting the Ninja-Bears in level 2 to kill themselves (Harakiri). Costume Shenanigans are killing a specific bear with a specific weapons while wearing a specific costume. And Challenge Challenges are completing the challenges in a certain way, like not killing anyone during the Insanity Challenge.

After completing the main story levels I got sick of this game. Later I tried to get back into this game. I was playing "4-1 Untouchable: Night of the Dodging Ted". A zombear was attacking a bear and hit me during his windup, when I was behind him. That was the end of that game for me.

If I was downloading anything while playing I would get this message. "A new package has been installed, would you like to activate it now?" If you hit YES the game restarts even if the thing you downloaded has nothing to do with Naughty Bear.

Edit: While deleting the install for this game I found out that this game is 757 MB. That's smaller than Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. They could have put this game on a CD. My largest trailer is 516 MB

Despite my raving for the achievements I don't have many.

Hulu Minus

I've heard people complain about this since it came out so I decided to test the availability of content on Hulu Plus.

I had 29 items in my queue. By items i mean shows or movies not episodes. So the first season of Arrested Development I have counts as one. Out of the 29 items, 15 are available on Hulu Plus.

The selection is weird. The shows aren't consistent even within channels. For example, I can watch Fox's Bones but not Fringe. I can watch ABC's Cougar Town but not Better With You.

The UI is messed up as well. There is a fixed amount of characters that you can see for the titles of episodes. At the top layer (while browsing) the show title is included. For a show like TDS it appears as (the full title of the show)(colon)(space)(three letter day abbreviation)(comma)(first letter of the month)(ellipses) like this:

"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, A..."

When selected it shows the episode title without the show title so you have a little more room. This is fine for TDS but the titles for some of the TEDTalks can be quite lengthy.

For example at the top layer you can have: "TEDTalks: Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned Wh..."
When selected it shows: "Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned Whil..." (you lost 10 characters and gained 2)
When selecting it again it shows: "Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My ..."(you gained another 5)

There is no way to show the entire title. I had to go to hulu.com to find what it was:
"TEDTalks: Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed"

On the website the title is word wrapped. And that is something they could easily show at the bottom of the picture on either of the "after selected" pages.

Lack of content and UI problems aside. I will say one thing in favor of Hulu Plus, it looks amazing. Not the program but the actual shows. Speedtest usually shows my download speed at around 3Mbps. And I was streaming full HD in seconds. It actually looked better than my cable connection. My cable box is component while my 360 is HDMI. Still, when I watch a video on Inside Xbox it buffers every 10 seconds. I didn't buffer once after the initial loading on hulu and the quality never went down.

If I had never tried it I would have brushed it off as hulu trying to take peoples money. As a person who has tried it, it's starting to appeal to me. Not $8 a month appealing though. Mostly because I use hulu.com so I don't have to watch TV on my TV. I can watch a show while gaming. What they need is a picture in picture mode.

All you need to survive a Zombie Apocalypse is a little duct tape.

As I was playing Case 0 I was thinking "Man, I'm really in the mood to play Dead Rising again'. For some reason I forgot they made a sequel while playing the prologue to the sequel. You play as Chuck Greene. A man that I can only assume hasn't covered any wars at all. He can however build a motorcycle with just duct tape. The game is pretty much a demo for Dead Rising 2. It's short at about 2 hours a playthrough but I did it about 5 times before I finished. Not having a jump kick by default was jarring since it's a go-to move for running around without using up weapons. My second to last playthrough was devoted to rescuing survivors. I thought that collecting all of the survivors would be time consuming and come down to the wire. In fact the opposite occurred. I was waiting around for survivors to become available. None of the achievements were very hard. For $10 I wouldn't have bought it. For $5 it was an okay deal. For $2.50 it was a definite get.