Pagoda of Gaming

I just can’t work today, which is bad, considering I have until 4pm Wednesday to hand in my portfolio. Sort of. It’s like I’m stoned on not working. I’m happy just sitting here doing nothing but listening to 1upYours and waiting for ebay Auctions to end.

My week past wednesday has been planned to the max. I’m heading home Wednesday, back to Fraserboring to do some R&R, which is more like Rest&Worklaxation when I’m home. But I’ve got a tonn of Magic: The Gathering stuff to do. Decks to build, Cards to dig out, stuff to buy. All I can do better at home than here. Plus Futuresight is released on Friday, and I’m still contemplating buying a whole Booster Box to my little self, in addition to the shared box and fatpack I’ll be buying anyways. I’ll probably be posting up decklists in the latter half of the week.

About the best news to come out today would be the Burnout 5 stuff, now named Burnout Paradise. You can check out the very pixelated video HERE. This might be Burnout game that I actually get round to buying and playing. I can’t quite wrap my head around a free roaming Burnout, as soon as you add free-roaming to the mix in the racing game, you also get the annoyance of taking wrong turns and having slower cars. We’ll see.

Tomorrow will be the April Pickup Post, which will involve a bunch of digging around, because I really cant remember what I bought last month. Maybe I should write it up tonight incase I get the work bug tomorrow. Plus I bought a shitload of cards on E-Bay, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

I think I’ll go watch Serenity.

‘Nin Out!

This might contain a bit of spoilers.

So I’m about 3-4 hours into the game, I played the hell out of it last night and so far I’m just entering the Island where the fates are, after killing the three Cyclopses in the courtyard. I’m loving it so far. The game’s sence of scale is awesome, there’s always some huge backdrop behind you, even inside a cave there’s decent sized backdrops behind it. My favourite moments so far being the fight with the big statue dude at the start and the fight with the guy with the ice lance, simply for the way you kill him (which is putting his head between two epic doors and banging them on his head until it explodes. The flying section was awesome too, I found myself constantly taking my time to not inta-kill all the enemies so I could enjoy the quicktime events of me cutting off the wings of griffins in mid-air.

Combat’s pretty similar to the first God of War. Though it’s easier to pull off some stuff. The game want’s you to look cool doing anything. Though I was pretty annoyed when Kratos looses all his god-powers, and you’re reduced to a combo-less noob. Though you can power up quite quickly, from your basic form. Story-wise it’s pretty similar. a God screws over kratos, Kratos heads on epic journey to screw over god. This one has time-travel. Weird thing is that he’s going after Zeus, the king of the gods, and considering he got the powers of the last god he vanquished, will he end up with Zeus’s powers. Will the nex game be called “God of Gods”

The changes I mentioned yesterday to the game are effecting me in one way. Because the game has no 60hz mode, I’m getting weird anomalies on the screen from time to time, like a weird bar about 2cm thick going across the screen. Which brings me to my next point…

I will buy a PS3 if they take this francise to the next generation. I know that it’s in the works somewhere out there, but it seems they want to push a PSP version on everyone beforehand. Christmas would be an awesome time to release it. Though going by SCEE’s current track record, we’ll have to wait until the game’s watered down enough and has 6 more languages shoved into it. Which will take them about 3-4 months. Maybe they won’t need to with blue-ray. Actually now that I think about it, PS3 games are region free i think, so I can just get the American version. Looks like sony’s done something right after all.

‘Nin Out!

I’ve got two games that I’ll be focusing on this weekend.

First off we’ve got God Of War 2. It’s been delayed since forever, and I finally got it today. I was so close to not caring about it anymore. I just heard today that the infamous “jacussi scene” that’s in every other version of GoW2 won’t be in the PAL version. I’m quite pissed off. That and there won’t be any hidden 60hz mode or HD mode either because they had to load the game up with all those stupid european languages (i.e. not english). Should be a kick ass game though, It hasn’t hut the drive yet though.

Secondly, I imported Pokemon Diamond for the mere price of £27 including P&P. I just couldn’t be bothered waiting the two months for it to turn up over here. It’s been good so far, Just got past the Second Gym Leader, and I’m surprised at the actual size of the game so far. I think for the next generation I’ll just import my console from america so I can buy games 3 months earlier and at a lowered price.

Yes I’ve checked out all the Halo 3 stuff that’s turned up this week. It brought with it some horrifying and disturbing news.

I realize that I’ve not posted in about a week. I’ve been busy. Not really. So what are you guys up to?

‘Nin Out!

This is the deck that I managed to pull together (you can find out what the cards do HERE:

Land x18
1x Grove of the Burnwillows*
1x Keldon Megaliths*
1x Fungal Reaches
1x Terramorphic Expanse
6x Forest
5x Swamp
3x Mountain
Creatures x15
1x Tombstalker*
1x Street Wraith*
1x Baru, Fist of Krosa*
1x Imperiosaur*
1x Kavu Primarch*
1x Cutthroat il-Dal*
1x Tresspasser il-Vec
1x Nessian Courser*
1x Storm Entity*
1x Thornweald Archer*
1x Scryb Ranger
1x Ashcoat Bear
1x Auger of Skulls*
2x Llanowar Augur*
Other Spells x9
1x Dark Withering
1x Death Rattle*
1x Rift Bolt
1x Ghostfire*
1x Grave Peril*
1x Emblem of the Warmind*
1x Disintegrate
1x Weatherseed Totem
1x Chromatic Star

cards with a * are from Futuresight

I was quite lucky with my pulls, mainly the destruction spells, Disintegrate especially. It helped me kill someone with 13 life left on one particular occasion. The demon acted well as my big bomb, If i ever drew him at all he usually hit the board about turn 5. I came out at 12th place out of about 28 people, which I thought wasn’t too bad. Might’ve been better if my deck didn’t get screwed for black mana every so often. Also there weren’t any really annoying people there none of the usual offenders from the Aberdeen releases. Everyone was really friendly and easy to get along with. I was surprised.

I’m loving the Delve ability, it works really well in limited, since you never usually use your graveyard at all for limited. I really hope that is sticks around for the next couple of sets. I never played blue yesterday, but the counter X spell that uses delve could be really popular amoung the blue mages. It also seems that Wizards are preparing for the rotation of Ravnica out of standard. The new rare lands, in comparison to ravnica’s, suck. But that doesn’t mean that people won’t be forced to use them. The only one that seems totally unplayable is the U/B one. I actually prefer the uncommon lands better, the ones with the ravnican keywords on them. New Tolaria would be my favourite, the one with transmute, you can fetch a lotus bloom with that thing. The big thing that they are all missing is the land subtype for their respective generated mana. I saw a possible replacement for remand. Delay, Counter’s a spell and Suspends it for three turns, much like remand on the timing side, but I miss the card draw. Mmmm, lots of tasty blue spells in the set.

I came away with a couple of good rare’s from the tournament. Shapeshifter’s Marrow looks nice for the 2008 edition for Sharingan. Tombstalker might make it into a future deck of mine. Baru’s pretty shit hot too, might be nice for my Hulk deck. But then again, I came away with alot of crap. I got the stupid 8/0 creature, like I’ll ever try to play that. Venser, meh. Sliver Legion, snore. Pyromancer’s Swath, I don’t ever want to try.

I want to build two decks coming out of this tournament. Firstly, I want to build a mono-black deck. That’s about as far as I’ve got with that one, except that I want Korlash, Heir to Blackblade and Damnation in it. Maybe some zombies. Secondly, I’m after a U/G Saproling deck, using the thelonite+Vesuvan combo. Think I’ll have to deconstruct my old Sliver deck for that one.

So how’d you guys get on? How many people who put their land above their creatures did you play?

‘Nin Out!

So I’ve been a bad blog owner. I’m sorry that I haven’t updated in a couple of days.

I’ve been busy washing the dirt that is Fraserboring off my body by playing tonns and tonns of 360 games on a sweet assed internets connection, where I go to sleep at 5am and wake up at 12pm and eat my weight in food that’s bad for me. Gears has become fun again, as I slowly toil away at getting the ranked achievements, interlaced by hour-long bouts of Annex, where I usually kick more ass than usual. Crackdown has been almost exhausted on me, I’m simply waiting on the patch that will make some of the Achievements (that totally drive the gameplay) easier to get and reset all the game’s bosses.

Viva Pinata has been the shining star of the week so far. The game has been going inbetween me and Geo all week, since he refuses to buy his own copy, he bumms off of me. We’re neck and neck as it comes to player level, something that I think is actually pushing us to play it, though maybe me more than him.

It all really Clicked when I found THIS SITE. A Viva Pinata wiki of all things. It’s making the game more interesting by introducing all these awesome pinata (like Dragonache) that were so vaguely hidden in the game prior to the wiki. So much more interesting that I got two Chewnicorns today.

So there I was about to wind up my game for the day and I see this weird-assed symbol hovering above the affectionately named “Chewnicorn 2″. I was freaked out, so I pulled out my spade (which is much like a sword) and redied to whack something. Out of nowhere spawns “Professor Pester”, this cunt of a being that is the game’s main antagonist. I hover my spade over his head and begin to whack furiously. But I was to late, his animation had already triggered, with a swing of his bat, Pester had Murdered my Chewnicorn. I was annoyed. Annoyed enough to write this post.

It’s the drama like that, which makes Viva Pinata a great game, well deserving of the high scores it got all accross the interbuts. Pick it up if you haven’t… and then send me a Chewnicorn to replace poor “Chewnicorn 2″. *Snif*.

‘Nin Out!