Monthly Archives: August 2010

What are you Playing? (When you aren’t getting ready for a CON)

Hey all, it’s time for another rousing round of What are you Playing! The last few weeks have been mostly occupied by me procrastinating getting things ready for DragonCon. In just 2 small weeks I will be living it up in Atlanta rubbing elbows with some of the best costumers and sci-fi geeks on the planet. I am also really excited about the Guest list this year. So excited that I have been trying to think up questions that would be game related that I could ask some of our favorite celebrities. Info that I would bring back and post here on the site. So I put it to you, there is a huge guest list over on the website Http://www.dragoncon.org. If there is anyone in particular that you would like to know what their gaming habits are, or any questions you think I should toss out there. I plan on using my phones voice recorder to grab some sound bites from the folks there. Please feel free to drop questions you want asked into the comments. (P.S. Apparently, Paul Dini, the writer for the Batman Arkham games will be there, you KNOW I am going to be talking to him!)

As for what I am actually playing…. I finished up Crackdown 2, I bought another new Xbox 360S to replace the E-73 Error-ed out one downstairs so the Rock Band setup is back to normal. I am hoping to knock out Alan Wakes “The Signal” here soon, but mostly just getting stuff ready for vacation. What are YOU playing?

Risk Factions, where Zombies rule the earth.

Posted by Steve on August 11, 2010 No comments

I know it’s been a while since I picked up this game but there has bee a ton going on. It does help that I keep playing it and thinking “Man, I really need to write up the review”. As a kid we always liked to play various board game. I always kind of feared the nights where we would play RISK though because of the massive involvement of the game. A good RISK game could last for hours of hours, and when it’s done there is so much clean up. Not to mention the RISK of stepping on one of those like roman numerals in the middle of the night. Once again, the Xbox steps in to simplify the board game genre and add a little spice to it at the same time.

RISK Factions brings all the fun of territorial control and conquering that the original game had but with no clean up, simplified scoring and much faster game play. The “Factions” portion of the game come in assigning different cartoon characters to the colors of Risk. Black becomes Zombies, Red for Robots, Yellow for Cats, Green for Humans, and Blue for Yeti’s. The Single player campaign takes you through the story about how these characters interact, but mostly it’s there to provide a little more eye candy for the grueling dice rolling game play. They have also added a form of “Fast attack” where the rolls are all done in the back ground and you keep attacking until someone wins.

For those purists who don’t want any taint on their precious game, they preserved the original game play in a “Classic” mode that includes the original cards and structure. Honestly, I tried to play this way once, and it seemed slow. I much enjoyed the newer style better. The turns are faster, the scoring is much easier, and when you are done, no clean up. This is one of the best family board game ports on the arcade and I highly recommend it! I give it an VIII out of X

Belkin can suck my butt.

Posted by Steve on August 5, 2010 4 comments

Well, last night the rest of the family was out doing what they do on a Wed. Night which left me to putz around the house and do my own thing. Since they were all out I figured it was a good time to work on the network issue I had been having. To recap, I recently bought a Belkin Play dual band wireless N router for the house. It was much more powerful than my netgear wireless G router so it would cover the whole house. Now I do a lot of odd things on my network. I love to stream movies and music to the xbox or ps3 from my pc, I also picked up the software package PlayOn from Media Mall to stream Hulu and YouTube to the consoles as well. Ever since hooking up the Belkin, all that stopped. So last night poured over the settings inside and out, tested every scenario and flipped every switch. Nothing worked.

I googled the heck out of my situation and found a few posts about how the Belkin routers block the DLNA media streaming protocol. But nothing on how to fix that. So, off I went to the Belkin support site. Still no mention of blocking the DLNA protocol, except that the router itself will stream using DLNA, but only directly from the router. I tried to “Chat with a support representative” only to learn that they had no clue what DLNA was and was fixated on the ports of the xbox and the ip of my PC, even though I explained what the issue was. I gave the person (assuming it was even a human) 10 min to explain before I scrap the router and buy something else, she couldn’t even explain what DLNA was.

Needless to say, I then set out to Best Buy and purchased a new Netgear Wireless N Rangemax router. 10 minutes later my whole network was up and I was streaming again with no issues. Because of this, I will never buy another Belkin product again. Be Warned!

p.s. I am in training all this week (if you hadn’t seen the twitters) so reviews for Limbo and Risk will be put next week.