The blog has stagnated a bit, but if there’s three things you can count on us probably making a post about, it’s birthdays, giving each other video games, or excellent deals on games we like; and this post has all three!

The most recent Humble Bundle is a bit of a controversial one, [...]]]>

The blog has stagnated a bit, but if there’s three things you can count on us probably making a post about, it’s birthdays, giving each other video games, or excellent deals on games we like; and this post has all three!

The most recent Humble Bundle is a bit of a controversial one, ditching DRM Free Indie games in favor of Steam-only games from a major publisher, but in my book, any time you can get a group of good-to-amazing games for a six dollar donation to a worthy cause, its fine in my book. Also, one of the games in it was Saints Row The Third, which is not only Game of the Year 2011, it is also Game of the Year 2012, 2013, and all years in the future – you can pretty much retire, game developers, because perfection has been attained.

Check out the deal here (for the next day or so, it expires soon!): https://www.humblebundle.com/

Anyway, when I realized that A) Matt doesn’t have Saints Row: The Third, B) it is his birthday, and C) I had pretty much run out of terrible steam games to gift him (Where’s my Nancy Drew and the Crystal Skull Review?) it became pretty much a no-brainer what his present would be.

Happy birthday, buddy. Check your email.

DRUNK SKYRIM! Rose and I drink far too much and I get lost. Then she belligerently yells at me. These are some of my favorite videos I’ve ever made.

If you like this, be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/frorunner9

More Skyrim Let’s Plays! In this set of videos, we do some chores then continue the main quest through Bleak Falls Barrow and attempt to punch a dragon to death!

I’ve been meaning to play Skyrim on the Xbox 360 for some time, but wanted to get all the achievements in Oblivion first (It’ll probably be a while before I play Borderlands 2 for much the same reason). Well, I finally finished off Oblivion and decided to dive right in, and figured, “hey, [...]]]>

I’ve been meaning to play Skyrim on the Xbox 360 for some time, but wanted to get all the achievements in Oblivion first (It’ll probably be a while before I play Borderlands 2 for much the same reason). Well, I finally finished off Oblivion and decided to dive right in, and figured, “hey, why not record my journey”.

Rose and I will be making videos of me playing (hopefully) the ENTIRE game. Every quest, and every step of every achievement. Some minor stuff will be edited for time, probably, and stuff like me chopping wood for several hours to grind out some money will be cut as well, but the actual “gameplay” portions will all be on camera.

Subscribe to my channel on youtube to see them all as they come out or wait, and I’ll be making several “digest” posts here.

Without any further ado – the first 5 parts of LET’S PLAY SKYRIM.

The first thing you need to know is that work has been really stressful for me for the last few weeks. The second thing you need to know is that PlayFit support in Your Shape 2012 can be REALLY finicky sometimes – best case scenario it’ll grant you about [...]]]> Wow, this week was a rollercoaster.

The first thing you need to know is that work has been really stressful for me for the last few weeks. The second thing you need to know is that PlayFit support in Your Shape 2012 can be REALLY finicky sometimes – best case scenario it’ll grant you about 80% of the calories you burned in game; worst case is that it’ll give you about 10 calories, regardless of whether you worked out for 2 minutes or 30 minutes. While I’ve noticed some things that tend to lead to shit calorie tracking sometimes, there’s still an inherent randomness to it.

So I’d go to work, come home tired and exhausted, and attempt to do some Your Shape pacing to get my minimum to keep the streak going and wind up spending three or more hours. On a good day, this should take about 30 minutes of Your Shape, but it was consistently 3-4 hours instead – and incredibly frustrating hours, because I had no idea if the work I was doing would actually contribute to me finishing. Frustrating because I had just worked 8 frustrating hours and I wanted to fucking relax, not wrestle with PlayFit. I was too exhausted to do Dance Central – that one requires full cardio, not half-assed pacing (more of a sprint rather than a walk). And “frustrated” is not the mindset you want to play Kinect Sports in, since the tracking can be a bit spotty there (playing baseball it would sometimes track my belly fat as me swinging the bat, which is crazy frustrating). So I was stuck pacing in Your Shape hoping against hope that it would be a short evening, and it never was. “Fitness” had consumed all my free time.

Something had to change. I didn’t want to cycle down the required calories or give myself clemency to skip or modify the program. I know myself well enough to know that once I miss a day or break the streak I’ll use that as an excuse to be lazy forever after that. That said, I didn’t want to continue doing what I had been doing since it had absorbed all of my free time and ramped up my stress level in an already stressful time of my life.

So, on a whim, I decided to buy a new game. A new game would freshen up the experience right? Or it could be just as stressful as the games I have. Ultimately though, I decided that it was worth it to try something new to keep it going – if the new game continued the problems I was having I could reevaluate the plan and goals, but for now I would try getting a new game first. At the very least, it should be a new, different, fresh kind of horrible that would be a change of pace.

The list of PlayFit enabled games is pretty short – the two games I was sort of interested in were Kinect Star Wars and Just Dance 3. I wound up choosing the one that was ten dollars cheaper and came bundled with free Katy Perry DLC.

Just Dance 3 is not a game without its flaws – especially when compared against Dance Central 2. That said, it is exactly the game I needed. The game doesn’t track “calories”, it tracks “sweat points”, so it’s a bit unclear what the ratio is there; that said it seems like every time I play, no matter what, it gives me a fair (and perhaps more than fair) allotment of calories. Things that make Your Shape twitchy – not being recognized by Kinect ID, playing in low light, leaving the play space or becoming obscured at any point, people walking in or out of the play space randomly – none of them seemed to have any detrimental effect on my calorie count. There were a couple times this week where I played for 3-4 hours anyway (more on that below) and was rewarded proportionally for my time. “Working as intended” may not seem like a huge deal, but in this case, it was. It really was.

Using the magic of Just Dance 3, a three day weekend, and a new sense of invigoration, I racked up almost 5,000 calories in PlayFit this week. What started off as the worst week of PlayFit I’d had turned into the best. Crazy times.

I should probably check in on my (totally intact) goals.

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all PlayFit enabled games I own.

Well, I didn’t get any achievements in PlayFit or in any of the games I already owned, but I did get fifteen achievements in Just Dance 3, including some fairly impressive ones:




This is every achievement that requires me to play at a specific time, or for a specific amount of time, or to do things in one session. I was able to overlap these into one 4.5 hour session, one 3 hour session, and a few normal length session.

There’s still a lot of cumulative achievements, but I’ll be able to work toward them in normal play at whatever pace I want.

There’s also some 4-player skill based achievements that I probably won’t be able to get with chairs wearing shirts or cardboard cutouts of gollum. I will probably need some actual human beings. You know what that means: DANCE PARTY!

Goal 2) I will be number one in the world on the PlayFit leaderboards.

I have hit number 22 in the world. TWENTY TWO in the entire world. My goal of getting to number one seemed like a nice thing to aspire toward, but I always sort of felt like I would hit some upper bound. Thus far I haven’t.

I don’t know what it is about the number 22, but it’s flipped a switch in my brain. I’ve gone from “that’s impressive” to “HOLY SHIT THATS IMPRESSIVE”. I’ve gone from “maybe I’ll be able to get to #1″ to “I CAN TOTALLY DO THIS.”

Goal 3) I will lose weight.
I gained back just a bit since last week, but that’s likely the result of Rose and I going out to pizza to cap off the three day weekend. A bit of an anomaly that should bubble back down to where I was.

Goal 4) I will burn 250 calories every day until I achieve at least one of the above goals.
I hit my goal every week, but also had a few days where I went over, including one where I went WAY over, hitting 2400 calories.

It’s likely worth noting that a “calorie”, the electronic unit PlayFit tracks is not the same as a calorie, the unit of energy. There’s no way a camera, no matter how advanced, can accurately track calories, so it tracks “calories” instead. Sometimes this count will be lower, sometimes higher. But know that while some people may put a chair in front of the kinect and rack up the “calories”, every “calorie” I burn from this is from me moving in front of the screen, so the numbers aren’t meaningless.

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all PlayFit enabled games I own.

Probably coolest is that I hit the 15,000 calorie mark in PlayFit:

This means that if you are my friend, [...]]]> Lots of exciting milestones this week, so lets get right into it!

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all PlayFit enabled games I own.

Probably coolest is that I hit the 15,000 calorie mark in PlayFit:

This means that if you are my friend, you can get FIVE GAMERSCORE FOR FREE just for logging into PlayFit. YOU’RE WELCOME.

In Dance Central 2, I made a bit of progress toward 5-Starring every song on every difficulty, but more importantly, I got the last fitness-based achievement.

Most impressively, though, are these two achievements in Your Shape 2012:

That represents a solid FORTY HOURS of working out, so I’m pretty proud of it. All that’s left to do is burn 200,000 calories in-game! EASY!

I did some stuff in Kinect Sports Season 2 as well, but nothing so impressive, so I’ll probably touch on that next week.

Goal 2) I will be number one in the world on the PlayFit leaderboards.
Number 31 – still moving up.

Goal 3) I will lose weight.
I’m the same weight I was last week. No gain, but no loss either. I really have not changed my diet AT ALL, but I feel like having a solid base of exercise in place could make me lose weight really quick. My metabolism has changed, I think; at least that’s the theory.

I’m pretty sure my body type has changed drastically, I feel thinner, and Rose says I look thinner. I think some of my fat is being replaced by muscle. But you can’t really quantify that.

So, the goal has always been to be healthier – not necessarily thinner, so this was a way to quantify that. So even though I’m not quantitatively achieving any real progress here, I am qualitatively.

Goal 4) I will burn 250 calories every day until I achieve at least one of the above goals.
Still on track! 49 days in!

Homefront is a bad game – no beating around the bush there – and I knew it was a bad game. So why did I buy and play it?

Well, long story short, it’s because Saint’s Row: The Third was AMAZING. One of the top five video [...]]]> Long story short, I made another video:

Homefront is a bad game – no beating around the bush there – and I knew it was a bad game. So why did I buy and play it?

Well, long story short, it’s because Saint’s Row: The Third was AMAZING. One of the top five video games of all time, IMO. Unfortunately, THQ, the publisher, made some poor decisions and is in some financial troubs.

Their most recent release, Darksiders II, might make or break the company. I enjoyed the first Darksiders enough, and will almost certainly play the sequel at some point, so I decided I would buy Darksiders II now, new and at full price to help that be a sucessful launch and put some bucks back into the company.

Around this same time, a friend was complaining about how dumb and bad Homefront was, and I realized that it too was published by THQ.

So, I went to the store and dropped 80 bucks on THQ games for no reason other than to do my part to ensure the company stays solvent long enough to make Saints Row Four. And, since I had it, I then decided to PLAY Homefront, which was my real mistake.

Homefront, in theory, is a knockoff Call of Duty game with an absurd plot about how North Korea has taken over all of America – and it is. But it’s also so much worse than that.

We run into problems almost immediately: there isn’t a difficulty selection (at least not that I could find), so you’re dumped into the game on a difficulty that is probably halfway between Hardenend and Veteran (to use the equivalent CoD difficulties). This is probably fine for the hardcore gamers, but has already alienated people like me who want a relaxing fun experience or just aren’t very good at games.

It starts the game with a 5 minute cutscene “explaining” just how Korea took over the world. The problem is, it doesn’t actually have any explanation as to how things happen, it just pops text up over stock footage – “2015 – North Korea invades South Korea”, “2020 – Unified Korea takes over Japan”, “2025 – Korea takes over all of Asia and oh yeah also the U.S.A. teehee”. It’s just absurd on its face. Sure, North Korea could do some serious damage if provoked, but the odds of them leading a full-scale invasion of the United States is about the same is Lithuania leading a full-scale invasion of the United States. So, the setting is established, but it’s so absurd and just flat out dumb on premise, it’s hard to get immersed.

It then launches into the tried and true “you sit in a vehicle and look around for a bit while we establish the setting” intro. The problem is, one, they don’t do a great job; two, they already established the setting in that dumb overly long stock footage cutscene; and three, the setting sucks. So this bit just feels like you’re sitting in a bus not playing the game. This portion of the game is about as much fun as ACTUALLY SITTING ON A BUS. To be fair – “sit in a vehicle and look at stuff” is a really hard intro to pull off. Skyrim did this and the intro was just as painful – but the game improved once you got past it and it won several Game of the Year awards.

Luckily, eventually, the bus crashes and you get to start playing the game. This is where the game goes from zero to sixty, and when I say “from zero to sixty”, I am referring to the number of enemies you face. It’s the game equivalent of being pushed into the deep end of the pool and being told “hope you can swim, bye”. And, as mentioned before, there is no difficulty slider, so this can be quite challenging.

Now we get into the game’s biggest flaw: it’s just not very fun. Shooting dudes is the core experience of the game, and they failed at it. Even if they got every other thing right (which they didn’t) having a core mechanic that doesn’t work would ruin the game. The AI you are fighting against is brutal – and not in a fair way. Whether you are visible or not, they know where you are. If even the slightest part of your body is exposed from cover, all the enemies on the battlefield will shoot it with deadly precision. Additional enemies spawn seemingly out of nowhere, and you are almost always severely outnumbered. Gameplay basically boils down to hiding prone behind a barrier, popping up for one second to fire two bullets and in the process get shot to near death, then going prone again, and staying prone for five seconds to heal. One second playing, five seconds hiding. One second playing, five seconds hiding. Repeat, repeat. Do this three or four times and congratulations, you will have successfully killed one of the twelve people shooting at you. But be careful, if you stay up for 1.5 seconds instead of 1, you will die and restart at the checkpoint, which, by the way, was 10 minutes ago.

It’s not fun. It’s frustrating. I understand that while I generally go in for a story and some light activity, challenge is a form of engagement people enjoy. But for challenge to be fun, it has to be fair – when you fail, you need to feel like its your fault, not the game’s. And it doesn’t. Playing this game feels like the game is punching you in the face. Can I go back to the part of the game where I sat on a bus?

A bit later in the first level (after the footage from the video) you defend a house, and the difficulty seemed much easier here, I cleared that area on the first try, I think, and there’s another bit where you control some sort of armored car which was a nice change of pace as well. Unfortunately, these bits came at a time when I was VERY frustrated with the game, and couldn’t properly appreciate them. If the whole game was like this, it might be salvageable, but the whole game isn’t like this.

I only managed to struggle through the first level. I suspect the game will never come off my shelf to attempt level two – it was just a wholly irritating, frustrating experience. My game time is too valuable to waste on Homefront – and so is yours.

Final Score: zero out of ten.

EDIT: After posting this, I discovered that Homefront DOES, in fact, have multiple difficulties. Rather than being asked when you start a new game like pretty much every other game with multiple difficulties, you have to set it manually via Options -> Game Settings -> Difficulty, and THEN start a new game.

This is an important feature, one that would potentially resolve many of the issues I had been having with the game, and it’s buried in a menu. If something is obfuscated to the point that I don’t know it exists, that’s functionally identical to me as not existing. So all the previous problems I was having REMAIN VALID.

That said, with the difficulty cranked all the way down to “Easy”, it’s a much better game: That is to say, it is elevated from “heinous” to “meh”. It still has all the problems it had before, but without the frustration of dying quite so quickly and having to replay large chunks multiple times, it’s much easier to look past them.

It’s still more difficult than I would like – the difficulty described in the original article as “between CoD Hardened and Veteran” was in fact “Normal”, with at least two difficulties selectable HARDER than that. Easy was the only difficulty that was easier than what I had been playing so the difference between the two was not as steep as I would have liked. Even on Easy, there was still a part of the first level where I died three times in a row due to eeriely accurate AI and an abundance of grenades.

At this point, armed with the knowledge of how to play on easymode, I will likely go back and finish the game. It seems like a game that if you enter with sufficiently low expectations, it can meet them. If, say, you just played through the story of Spec Ops: The Line (which was AMAZING, BTW), and need something less heavy, something mindless to entertain you for a bit, this can do that. That said, if you are expecting “good”, you will be disappointed, and while I can justify finishing a game I already purchased, I really can’t recommend buying it yourself.

Adjusted final score: two out of ten.

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all affiliated games I own.

PlayFit itself is coming along well, I’m at 13,701 which means that I should have the 15,000 achievement this time next week.

On [...]]]> Six weeks sounds impressive, but the real milestone is DAY 42.

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all affiliated games I own.

PlayFit itself is coming along well, I’m at 13,701 which means that I should have the 15,000 achievement this time next week.

On the Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 side of things, nothing exciting to report – slow progress. Again, might hit a milestone sometime this week, but maybe not, we’ll see.

I booted Kinect Sports Season 2 back up, and played some. On top of that, I made myself a handy, color-coded checklist of all the remaining achievements, sorted by sport. This way I can easily see what I have left to do all in one place.

ANd with Dance Central 2, I only got one achievement, but I’ve made quite a bit of progress toward 5-starring everyithing:

Goal 2) I will be number one in the world on the PlayFit leaderboards.
38 this week, still making progress toward the top, though it has slowed a bit.

Goal 3) I will lose weight.
Back on track with this one, down 3.2 pounds from last week.

Goal 4) I will burn 250 calories every day until I achieve at least one of the above goals.
I only just barely hit this one this week. I did hit 250 every day, but I never crossed 300. However, with work as crazy as its been, and having social events every day of the weekend, I’ll take it.

This became obvious to me as I watched the Season One episode “Hide and Q”. The episode isn’t really about Worf, [...]]]> Fans of Star Trek: TNG know that Worf is a pretty awesome character. Unfortunately, like many of the characters, in Season One of the show, they didn’t really know what to do with him.

This became obvious to me as I watched the Season One episode “Hide and Q”. The episode isn’t really about Worf, but every time he’s on screen he’s either astoundingly over the top or just casually doing nothing in the background. As I said, later on he gets to be a pretty cool character but at this point he’s either a caricature or set dressing.

To illustrate my point, I edited out every bit of that episode without Worf, and what remains is a supercut of Worf transitioning randomly between 0 and 11. It’s pretty hilarious:

I could seriously watch that all day.