Here is a fun mix of photography, gaming, and cars all bundled into one post! Now, as you all know I picked up my new MINI just over a week ago and couldn’t help but get out and take come cool shots of it. I have some ideas of some other shots but those will come along soon.
On kind of a whim I picked up the Forza 4 game for Xbox 360. (ok not so much whim but I learned that there is a MINI in the game). On top of it being a great racing game, I learned it has a cool photo mode that allows you to take great shots of the cars in the game. Of course, I couldn’t resist.
Lastly, wanted to post that my work travel plans have changed and this means I will be able to join in on the MINI’s take the Beltway charity drive!! The money all goes to the Wounded Warrior project and it’s 50+ MINI’s gathered to do a Lap on the beltway! It’s this Sunday so if you are in the DC area and want to see a ton of MINI’s check it out!
Tag Archives: Xbox
Photos, Games, and Cars
Portal 2: The Gateway drug
As we get ready for L.A. Noir to be released, I have finished up playing Portal 2. (Still haven’t finished Dead Space 2 yet, man I need more time in the day). So, impressions?
Loved it!
No, really, I don’t know that I could love a game more. This was just what I needed to pull me back to my xbox lovin world. From start to finish, the dialogue and environment of the game where astounding. There were breaks in the story in all the right places for the casual gamer to know when to pause and step away, and the puzzles were infinitely more enjoyable than Portal 1. Now, the reason I say that is because there were certain puzzles in the original Portal that involved so much twitch style of playing that if you didn’t nail shooting that portal from 30 feet in the air while you were flying from another portal and now you have to start all over. That sort of gameplay is Ok, but can wear on you. Plus, and this was one of the reasons I loved it as well, Sarah was able to play Portal 2!
Thus the reason I call it the gateway drug. After I finished up the single player side of the game I asked Sarah if she wanted to try the Co-Op. She agreed and we both had a great time. She is awesome at puzzle games so she was wired for this sort of thing. Sure enough, when we finished up, she wanted to play through Single player.
Warning!!! If you have played through the single player, DO NOT WATCH YOUR SPOUSE PLAY!! Seriously, it could lead to a nervous break down for one or both of you. I had to do my best to refrain from “Oh, put that portal there!” and “No, use the gel over here”. I thought she might kill me. Thankfully we both made it through unscathed.
I have also heard from friends that the same scenario is playing out in their homes! (The playing part, not the kibitzing part). So I would HIGHLY suggest this to you, Go get Portal 2 and play it with someone you love!
(and them do your best not to crush them with spike plates)
I’M IN SPACE!
Busy weekend
This weekend was pretty damn packed! Spent some time with Louis and Jen helping them move. It was practically just across the street but still managed to smash my face on a box, rack my knee on the concrete and jam my thumb to the point where it flipped the nail up. Came home and finished up adding the divider to Sarah’s planter so she could finish up her herb garden. We also had a small visitor emerge from his cocoon. The butterfly from the previous post got some garden time before taking off (or being eaten by a bird, we aren’t too sure about what happened with him, but we will hope for the best.)
Battered and accomplished I set in for some Portal 2 time. I will do my best to get a full review of it up sometime after I finish the single player and start in on Co-Op (and whenever I can stop laughing!).
Sunday I managed to replace the kitchen sink disposal too! Thankfully Lowes was open and had a great plumbing expert on hand! Install of the new one was done in about an hour and they were an awesome help, despite the kludge that is my kitchen sink plumbing.
All in all, a very fulfilling weekend!
Obsessions
I have a bazillion hobbies. I have always found myself wanting to try out something, and if I like it I will get really into it. Because of this I have started to become quite the jack of all trades when it comes to hobbies. The other day, an idea popped into my head to take artistic photos of my various hobbies. It’s kind of along the lines of “Do what you know”. I am not even going to attempt to list all of them, you will just have to wait and see.
I have a gallery posted for my Obsessions and all of the pictures will be loaded there. You can also find them on Flickr. Here are a few that I have doe so far:
One month later…
Click to Embiggen
Yeah, it’s been about a month since my last post and the reason that it’s been forever since a post is because I had some major changes in my life. Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad. I found my self looking for some new experiences on the job front and a few friends of mine that work downtown had the best opportunity for me. As of the end of September I am now a Senior Functional Analyst working for, yet another, agency in lovely downtown DC. I am in charge of designing, building, and maintaining a lab environment for a number of different applications. It’s a huge responsibility and a big advancement for my career. It’s also an ass load of more work and because of it my free time has started to dwindle. I am really hoping to continue posting, but it may not be once a week like I had been trying to do before.
So to catch you up on some of the various gadgets and games in the life of Steve, a number of games have hit my shelves in the last month. Shortly after DragonCon an eagerly anticipated game was released. Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions! I am a huge Spidey fan so this was a must for me. I hope to write up a full review on it soon (even though I know it’s kind of late for it). I also picked up Halo Reach. Believe it or not, I have not yet finished the campaign! I have been playing co-op with my friend Lee and haven’t wanted to spoil it. Lastly, just today I downloaded Comic Jumper from the XBLA.
Click to Embiggen
For gadgets I have only one real big toy purchase but it’s something that has been a long time coming. I picked up a Nikon D3000 DSLR camera. Many many years ago I used to be rally into photography. I was the primary photographer for my school newspaper and yearbook, and that was back before digital! I have always loved photography and have been yearning to get a decent SLR. The D3000 is purely an entry level DSLR camera and that works fine for me. Since it’s been a good 20 years since I did any work with F-stops and aperture I am just fine with having the camera hold my hand a little. I am very very pleased with it and have been having a blast taking pictures of damn near everything. It even got me to update my gallery linked here on the site (over there in the right hand side of the screen).
So until next time….
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.
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.
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.
What are you playing? or….The Risk of Cracking Down on your Limbo Skills
It’s that time again to run down what you are playing! I am slowly but surely working up a review of the XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) game Risk Factions, which I managed to finish the campaign on. The nice thing about it is that it’s such a great Family game that we find ourselves playing it as a group all the time. Also mixed in lately has been Crackdown 2. Initial impressions of CD 2 are not that great. I just get the feeling like it’s too much all at once and it’s REALLY hard to focus on the ga…oooo Agility orb!
The latest add in to the library has been the XBLA game Limbo. This came out for the Summer of Arcade promo that Xbox does every year. The game is a hell of a lot like Braid, and if you haven’t played Braid you need to go check it out. Both are side scrolling puzzle platformers that will twist your brain in loops. I love it! Review for Limbo will be after Risk and Crackdown 2 will probably be a while still. Don’t forget that the first DLC for Alan Wake is out now, The Signal. My copy of Alan Wake is out on loan right now so I will be getting to that as soon as it comes back.
Outside of that, the workouts are going great, I can already feel a difference and only 36 days left before DragonCon! I am hoping to maybe squeeze out an interview with one or two celeb’s to see their take on gaming. And with that I leave you with the amazing Music video from the Guild: GAME ON!
