jill of all tirades

Hello and welcome to the New Xbox Experience (NXE)!  I have been waiting for this update for about 3 months now, and I am loving it.  The new interface and avatars seem to put the 360 somewhere between the Wii and the PS3 when it comes to target audience.  Microsoft is deffinately trying to get that crowd of casual gamers on board.  Jack does not like the avatars, being too Mii-like for him, but I spent about 2 hours working on mine and his.  I only wish that they had more clothing and hair options.  There is a predominace of straight hair styles, which does not work for those of us who have curly hair.  There are 2 true curly hairstyles, and both of them look like frizzy triangle heads.  The current hairstyle on my avatar is as close as I could get, and my hair is about twice as long as that.  There are not many long hair styles either.  I am anxiously awaiting the first pack of DLC for the avatars.  I am hoping that it will be free, but i highly doubt it, knowing Microsoft.

The Netflix capabilities of the NXE are simply awesome.  Now I can watch something on my TV even if my discs get delayed in the mail!  Boo for Sony not taking the higher ground and allowing their movies on the Netflix Watch It Now.  The only irritating part of this is that you have to set up a queu of movies to stream to your 360.  No browsing from the console.  Oh well, this is not a major issue, and I always have a computer on in the house for one reason or another. 

Another feature that I am enjoying is the ability to delete the 0 Gamerscore Games.  This has really helped increase my completion percentage, and has asthetically improved my gamerscore.  Those 0’s just looked ugly!

I have not had a chance to try out the party capabilities with my friends yet.  Nor have I been able to play a game that utilizes my avatar.  I am looking forward to playing the new Scene It: Box Office Smash with my avatar.

All in all, I think that this was a good move for Microsoft.  It gives their system a whole new look and feel, without them having to produce a new system!  Even though people have been complaining about the themes not looking great on the NXE, my favorite old theme looks great (Think Blue by Disruptive Publishers).  With avatars to play with, and a faster, easier to navigate interface, I give the NXE 4.5/5 stars!

The new Viva Pinata is HERE!!  The first weekend that I had the game, I played until I reached level 40.  That sounds impressive, but I had to share the 360 with Jack, who is still playing Too Human.  There are good things and bad things about the game.  Mostly good things in my opinion.

The good things:

• Co-op play : Jack and I can play together, and he gets some really cool bonus skills like healing and maxing out candiosity.  This helps with the new challenges format.
• Challenges : Now you have a choice of three challenges, and you can choose to do them whenever you want.  They just sit there and wait for you to accept them.  This is much better than another annoying window popping up when you are in the middle of doing something else!
• New pinatas and plants : I love trying to collect all of the pinatas and grow all of the plants to max growth.  Some of my favorite plants are: garlic, snowdrops, cactus, and tiger lily.  My favorite new pinatas are: Tigermisu, Geckie, Pengum, and Tartridge.
• New variations : Now it is easier to get the special variations of the offspring and twins.  The romance game has been changed, and now after you get the Master Romancer award for a species, it is harder to not get a variant or twins than it is to get one!

The not so good things:

• Co-op play controls : The second player has a severely limited set of basic skills.  Use a shovel, plant seed, water, sprinkle short grass.  No buying, fertilizing, or even selecting pinatas.  The camera in co-op follows the main player, swinging around so that the helper is always behind the player.  ANNOYING!
• Requirements change : Some of the mating, variant, and evolution requirements have changed.  This bothers me because I remembered most of them from the old version, and now they don’t work.
• Graphics : The look of this game is better and more detailed, but really?  Does it really take that long to make minor changes to the graphics?  I was expecting more, personally.

I have not had the opportunity to try the Pinata Vision cards, so no opinion on that front.  I am hoping that I can find a friends with a 360 camera I can borrow to try it; I am not buying one for just this game!

All in all, I am enjoying VP:TIP and I will be for a while yet.  It is a game targeted for children, but it is strangely addicting for adults.  I wish every problem could be solved by starting a new garden and ignoring the bad one.  It would also be nice to gain thousands of monies by harvesting bird-of-paradise flowers.

Viva Pinata is a family game for the XBOX 360. While it looks like it was created for children, it is strangely addicting. You entice pinatas to live in your garden, romance them to make more pinata, and accept challenges to gain happy candy.  This game was one of the original launch titles for the 360.

Currently in the game I am still trying to get a Roario and a Dragonache (the secret pinata).  I have most of the achievements in the game, but I am having difficulty getting the ones where you use an ex-sour pinata to distract Dastardos (the helper that kills your sick pinata).  One of my favorite in game tricks is to grow chili peppers to get money.  You plant the seed as close together in groups of 3, then fertilize them with the any-color fertilizer.  Because they are planted so close together you can fertilize 3 for the price of 1!  A planting of 27 chilies will net you about 10,000!  I am determined to get all of the achievements in this game!  I am at 3100-ish GP now.

I am looking forward to the Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise game that will be coming out 9/1/08.  There is supposed to be a co-op mode where 2 people control 2  cursors.  Jack and I are looking forward to being able to play this game together.

I am back from my month long hiatus! Some of that is due to finishing up the semester, but a large part of the absence is due to video games. Yes, I admit it, I played video games for weeks at a time. Since I played games so much, I figured I should write a mini-review of the ones that I played and enjoyed and why. As the title of this post indicates, Lost Odyssey is my favorite, followed by Rockband, Mass Effect, and Oblivion. (I was only playing my XBOX 360 during this break)

Lost Odyssey – This is a “traditional Eastern RPG”, whatever that means. My understanding is that means that the fighting is turn-based, with random battles popping up with no warning and a long and emotionally involved story line. I like this game because of the turn based fighting, but the random battles can be annoying (esp when you get 3 and you are about 5 seconds from leaving an area and you need to save cause you are about to die). The graphics are very nice, and the character costumes, while not something you would really wear in a fight, at least follow the rules of gravity (this natural force has been lacking in FF women’s clothing). There are these dream sequences that are supposed to be a big emotional development part of the story, but I just skip them because they are not well written and very boring. The bosses are not too hard, if you figure out their weaknesses, but if you are the run in and start fighting type . . . good luck! This game is 4 discs in length (which is pretty astounding) and I am just starting disc 4 with over 45 hours of game time logged. If you liked Final Fantasy 12, you will probably like this.

Rockband – This is probably the best game I have ever played! It ranks as second place only because you need friends to play with you to really enjoy this game. You can play as either the singer, guitarist, or drummer of a rockband in solo mode, but if you have 3 more people to play with you, your band can have a singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer. Way more fun! What makes this game different from Guitar Hero and Karaoke revolution (other than having drums) is the massive amount of song downloads. Every week there are at least 3 new songs to download and every month a whole new album! With that kind of variety, anyone can find a song they like (if you are willing to spend the points). I am partial to the vocals and the drums in this game. I usually stick with the vocals though, cause I am not afraid to sing in front of people and the drums are REALLY hard! I am working on finishing the game on vocals on Hard and Jack and I are doing the band world tour as guitarist and singer respectively. This past weekend, I brought the game to my parent’s house and we played Rockband with my bro for about 26 hours over 2 days. It was awesome! If you liked Guitar Hero or Karaoke Revolution, you will like this game!

Mass Effect – This game is one that I only picked up for a few hours during my break. I like this game because it has a great storyline with multiple different paths that can be taken. The fighting is real-time and you only control a team of 3. The AI on this game has been great to work with (I hardly ever end up cursing at the other members of my team) and the target help is a life-saver. I have already finished this game on “casual” level and am working on “hard” difficulty. Unfortunately, I played this game under Jack’s gamer-tag, so now I am playing it from the beginning again on my tag. I want those achievements! If you liked Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you will like this.

Oblivion – Technically, the full name of this game is Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It is the fourth game in the Elder Scrolls series and by far the best of them all. It is a highly detailed RPG with real time fighting that you see before you encounter. It sounds like the standard hack and slash where you pick up your sword and magic and go and kill some rats/spiders/zombies, but it is far more than that. The character classes are much more detailed that a normal RPG and there are guild that can be joined. I have spent about 10x more time moving up in the guilds that I have on the main storyline. My favorite guild to be a part of is the Dark Brotherhood, a guild of assassins. They have the best equipment and the most interesting quests. I actually use the guide a lot in this game, simply because there are so many locations and so many people it gets really frustrating to try and find a specific one. The NPC characters have schedules that they follow, which differ by what day that it is and they interact with each other fairly well.  If you liked Morrowind, you will like this game.

I hope that you have enjoyed my quick summary of my summer vacation games.  My goal this summer is to get 10,000 GP by the end of August.  I started in the beginning of May with only 800 GP and I am now up to 1535 GP.  Lets see how close I can get to my goal with the sever limitation of no FPS, Racing, or Sports games (I can’t stand them).