Dactyl is by far the most addicting iPhone game I have ever played. It all started on my friend Sean's phone when he showed me a game called Dactyl. In the game, there are 9 black bombs on screen and what you have to do is touch each bomb as it turns red in order to deactivate it. If you mess up, it explodes and you lose. It sounds lame but it is far from it. Upon playing for the first time, I got the new high score (refer to previous blog post when I said I am just nice like that with some games).
Over the past few weeks, my little circle of friends has been competing for the highest score whenever we get our hands on that phone. Since I kept getting the high score, Sean banned me from the phone until someone could beat me. After some time, my score was beat, then I beat it again, then I was beat, etc. Finally I was able to get way higher than what the highest score was but of course, it wasn't on that phone. Whose phone was it on? My brother's because I had downloaded the game onto his phone too because its that addicting. By no means was I going to let this go unnoticed so I took a picture of the screen with my phone and sent it to them so they can see my score. Of course they would say it doesn't count but whatever, I beat them.
Currently, the high score is 476 set by my friend Nicky. The last time that I tried to beat it, I got the closest of everyone with 436. Just as I was about to play again, his mom comes by and asks what we were playing. We showed her and she wanted to try...worst decision ever. She ended up taking the phone with her to the couch and played until the battery died. She got really good too. Her first few tries she couldn't get past 20. She now has one of the top 10 scores with somewhere a little over 330. Anyway, if you can get your hands on an iPhone or iPod Touch, I highly recommend downloading this game. You have nothing to lose since its free anyway.
When I first heard about DJ Hero earlier this year, the first thing I thought was "wow, they're really trying to milk the Guitar Hero franchise." Then as I started to see screen shots and videos of game play, I got a little more interested but still not enough to make me want to go out and buy the game when it was released. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when my brother asked me if I heard any good things about DJ Hero. I told him no and that no one I knew had it. About two days later, my parents and I were in Best Buy buying my birthday gift (a new video camera, yes!) and I started to hear some good music pumping nearby. I followed the sound and there it was, DJ Hero, all set up with surround sound and a big HDTV. I figured I would give it a try to see how it is, and it was soooooo good! I immediately texted my brother telling him it was awesome and told him to get it right away. That weekend, he did.
So this week, I went and slept over his house on night and of course we spent the whole night playing the game. At first, I was horrible. Usually I tend to be really good at most games the first time I play them because I am just nice like that but this game was really hard. Guitar hero requires one hand to move about the fret buttons and the other hand to strum, pretty simple. DJ Hero requires one hand to not only press the buttons but also "scratch" when told to do so. Also, similar to "star power" in Guitar Hero, there are points in the game where instead of getting star power, your turntable becomes "rewind ready" and in order to use that, you actually have to spin the turntable backwards and the last 10 seconds or so of the song is rewound and played again. Now, that's just one hand. The other hand is used to control the crossfader in order to switch between the 2 songs playing or to play them at the same time when told to do so. There is also a nob that adds effects to your music such as sound bites, horns, and a warping-type thing that distorts the song. The last thing done with this hand is pressing the euphoria button. Euphoria is another bonus you get just like rewind, but this is actually just like star power. When you have euphoria, the button glows red and when you press it, point value is doubled for a short amount of time. After hours of play on medium difficulty, I got really good. The song choices seem to be endless, but I know it isn't unfortunately. We had already unlocked a good chunk of the set lists which contained between 2 and 5 songs each and when I went to count how many more we had to unlock, there were at least 15 more. Eventually we had to go to sleep, but the next day was Thanksgiving at Grandma's house so of course we brought it with us and unlocked a few more. Sure, we felt kind of anti-social, but whatever, the game was that fun. Bottom line is that this game is like one of the best games I've ever played and it is super addicting. Here is a video of one of my favorite songs in the game, just so you can see how it works:
Oh and one more part I forgot to mention. Since the game is technically a part of the Guitar Hero franchise, some of the set lists have the option of letting you or a second player play the guitar controller in addition to the turntable. Obviously you can only do one at a time, but if there are two of you, then there shouldn't be a problem. That would look like so:
Earlier this week, Microsoft released a few add-ons to its XBox Live. These include Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm, all of which are accessible via XBox Live. I was initially excited to try these new features out but to my dismay, you had to be a Gold subscriber while I was only a Silver. Then, while browsing a website that I usually visit, I came across an article saying that this weekend starting Friday at 12pm, all XBox Live SILVER subscribers will be able to access Gold features for free until Sunday.
So today I connected to XBox Live as usual but nothing seemed different. Everything said that I was still a Silver subscriber but I decided to give facebook a try anyway. Surprisingly, it worked. I was able to put in my facebooklog in info and there it was, facebook on my TV. It wasn't your average facebook either. It was highly customized to make it an entirely new experience rather than just facebook.com on your TV. It is integrated with your XBox Live account which means you can request facebook friends or are on XBox Live or vice versa.
Twitter is also customized but considering Twitter isn't all that exciting anyway, it wasn't that different. Each "tweet" shows up in a cloud, as does everything else. I'm actually playing around with it for the first time as I am typing this and everything seems to be clouds and birds, which makes sense I guess.
The final add-on (that I know of) is Last.fm. The best way I can describe this is with Pandora. It is basically Pandora on a TV. You can type in an artist or song and it will give you a station for what you searched. Surprisingly, it sounds really good. The quality of the music isn't nearly as bad as I expected. I can see people using this as their primary radio at home especially for those who have surround sound hooked up. Again, I am using this as I am typing this entry. One of the featured stations is Lady Gaga Radio. I just clicked it and the first song to come on is "Boys Boys Boys" by, of course, Lady Gaga. As the song plays, pictures of her are appearing on screen in a slide show fashion. Since I am not the biggest Lady Gaga fan, let's see whats next when I skip. It's a song by Heidi Montag from "The Hills" on MTV, another artist I am not a fan of but you get the idea.
Aside from being able to try these features out, I am also given the ability to play my games online until the end of the weekend...which is probably what I am going to do now. Maybe I'll try that social game, 1 vs 100.
By the way, the next song to come on after I let the Heidi song play through is "Kiss The Girl" from The Little Mermaid sung by Ashley Tisdale. This station really isn't winning me over too well...
So, my birthday came and went and one of the gifts I got was Batman: Arkham Asylum (woo!). Later that night, I popped it into my Xbox for the first time and ended up playing for over 2 hours without realizing. The reason I felt like I wasn't playing for as long as I was is because the beginning of the game is very slow. The entire first 8 minutes or so of the game, you're pretty much just walking and watching opening cut scenes. After that is when the game starts to train you on all of the controls and whatnot. Then, the game really starts.
Of course, there is the main story about the Joker taking over Arkham Asylum and releasing its inmates, but there was so much else to the game that I didn't know about. One thing was the Riddler challenges. Throughout the game, the Riddler hides small trophies shaped like question marks. For those, all you have to do is find them using several upgrades and gadgets that you get throughout the game. This makes it impossible to get many of the trophies until you are near the end of the game and all gadgets have been unlocked. He also hides patient interview tapes with Arkham's inmates such as Poison Ivy and Scarecrow as well as actual riddles that you have to solve throughout the game. Below is a picture of the Riddler's cell after his breakout:
Another portion of the game is Challenge Mode. During the game, certain riddler challenges unlock certain things, one of them are challenge mode maps. Each challenge is either a combat challenge in which you have to fight henchman in order to reach a certain amount of points, or a predator challenge which is better scene than explained. You pretty much grapple from gargoyle to gargoyle above peoples heads without being detected and taking out each enemy one by one without getting shot. Here is an example:
With all of these aspects combined, a percentage meter is shown before you start your game. The more you complete of each mode and riddler challenges, the higher percentage you have of game completion. After about 2 weeks of play, I am currently at 82% game completion. Overall, the game is really addicting once you really get into it. There have been several days over that 2 week span that I started playing at any given time and ended up playing for hours. I remember one day, I actually played for about 5 hours straight.
A few years ago, before I could get my hands on my own Guitar Hero, I was looking for some way to download it and play on a PC. Little did I know, there was a free program that allowed you to add a seemingly endless list of tracks from the Internet and use keyboard as a guitar by holding it sideways and using the F-keys as the frets and the enter button as the strum. This game was called Frets on Fire. I downloaded it immediately.
Eventually, I got bored with the 3 custom tracks that came with it so I was in search of new music. I stumbled upon "song packs" for download. Each song pack contained at least 200 tracks. I sifted through it and got a bunch of tracks that appealed to me and soon enough I was jamming out to songs no one could even play on an actual Guitar Hero game. Over time, the game started to get old and I was getting tired of the lack of accuracy and overall bootleg look of the game so I went out and bought Guitar Hero 3 and forgot about Frets on Fire, until now.
I was watching an episode of South Park with Lauren Haley where Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny were playing "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga on Rock Band. I had no idea that a song like that would be on Rock Band so we did several google searches and YouTube searches and decided it wasn't real, it was just for the show. While doing that, I came across this YouTube video of 5 soccer players. In this video, they had to kick balls to hit the fret on a giant version of Frets on Fire. Each player wore the color shirt of the fret they were hitting: green, red, yellow, blue, and purple. At first, they sucked and it seemed like the idea was a complete failure but as time went by, they became a lot better. This made me want to download Frets on Fire again and see if there were any new tracks available considering I haven't played in years. There are tons and I played for a bit before getting frustrated because of accuracy issues. I'm sure there is a way to fix it but I really didn't feel like spending time figuring that out. I guess I'll stick to my real Guitar Hero.
This Halloween, my friends and took the ferry into the city to participate in all of the chaos. While I was waiting to meet them at the ferry terminal, I saw plenty of your basic costumes such as witch, doctor, etc. What I actually found really cool was the amount of video game characters I saw there and would see throughout the night.
Standing there waiting for my friends to arrive, I came across Link and Zelda from The Legend of Zelda series. Seeing them walk together was actually pretty cool because generally you only see Link. The Link costume wasn't anything to write home about but the Zelda costume was beautiful. It didn't even look like a costume, it looked as though she could have been an actual princess. Once arriving in the city, we came across tons of Lara Crofts from the Tomb Raider series. Some girls were really good while others clearly shouldn't have been wearing the tiny shorts that come with being Lara Croft. No one was surprised at the amount of Marios, Luigis, and Marios & Luigis together. People generally can't pull that one off because Mario is supposed to be a little short and chubby looking while Luigi is tall and lanky. As the night went by, we got pretty hungry so we went to eat at this little bagel place we walked by. It was here that I saw someone in a Toad costume for the first time in my life. Remaining consistent with the rest of the night at yelling out the costumes that we recognized, and being that Toad is one of my favorite characters, I of course yelled out "TOAD!" and instantly received a high five from him. The best video game costume of the night definitely has to go to Bowser. I couldn't tell if he made his costume or bought it but it was awesome. He was walking alone and this made me think of a similar situation last year. A girl I know was Harley Quinn for Halloween last year because she anticipated the amount of Jokers there would be after the Dark Knight came out. Everyone is always Mario and Luigi so why not be their ultimate villain, Bowser.
Overall, the night was a success and I didn't arrive home until after 5am and by that time everyone's costumes looked horrible because it rained on and off all night. My makeup was smeared and washed out. Either way, that Bowser costume was really cool and makes me wonder if I should be the less popular Wario or Waluigi for Halloween next year.
In a recent assignment in class regarding game genres, I talked about several games in the "adventure" category which happens to be one of my favorites. The two games I talked about were Super Mario 64 and God of War. After talking about these games, I really got in the mood to play them so I dug out my Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2 and I'm really glad I did
New games come out all the time but after you play one so much, you begin to have an attachment to it. For example, Super Mario 64, I haven't played that game in years and talking about it in class brought back many memories of playing with friends when I was no older than 8 years old. Now, as I pick up that oddly shaped Nintendo 64 controller, I am having just as much fun playing now as I did when I was younger with the added perk of actually being able to complete many missions I was unable to complete as a child because they were too difficult. I am currently in competition with my friend Lauren Haley to see who could get the most stars in the game. She is winning (for now).
With God of War, unfortunately I do not own the original because I failed to remember that I borrowed that from a friend years ago. However, I own God of War 2 which is just as good, if not better. A few years back, I made a deal with my friend Danny that we would only play the game together because it was just that awesome that we didn't wanna miss anything. After playing for about an hour, I sent Danny a text telling him I started playing again. He suddenly really wanted to play. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up playing later today. Sadly, God of War 3 will only be available for Playstation 3 which I do not have. I need to find someone with one asap. Until then, this trailer will have to hold me over:
With that said, the games of today will probably have the same effect years from now. I can already imagine me popping in Arkham Asylum 5 years from now and being just as excited to play as I am now. Now, I am probably going to go play some more God of War 2. Greek mythology for the win!
My name is Chris. I'm 18 years old and I'm currently a Sophomore at St. John's University. I'm majoring in TV/Film production which isn't surprising considering I'm a movie buff.
