No GRID video-review.

Unable to get anything working.

On a side note, a friend of mine is leaving for a month on holiday and leaves me all of his X360 stuff. No-life GTA4, here I come!

Just done capturing

I've been capturing the footage for a GRID video-review, so you can expect it in a few days. By the way, a small tip: Don't try to make lemonade at 01:45 in the mornign without the lights on.

EDIT: Adobe Premiere is not willing to work and WMM doesn't want to import my movies. all other programs still open the unedited movies... It's gonna take a while.

EDIT2: Converting the files to a format WMM hopefully does take.

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!

Blizzard's new game is Diablo III! I loved both the games (and Hellgate: London) and speaking of which, I still have to complete all 3 >.< Too bad I lost my Diablo 1 cd. But still... Diablo III f*ck yeah!

Headline: Team Obunaji wins Le Mans! (In GRID that is.)

Le Mans - Today, Team Obunaji won with their Audi R10 TDI in the LMP1 class. After a long 24 minute race, with their lead driver, Joey Schouten, usually in the lead, they were victorious. A huge cash prize was awarded.

Now, the newspaper snippet above may seem unrealistic, because it involves me winning in a racing game, but GRID is actually very good. After the countless Need for Speed and urban racing games, I kind of got sick of the whole "urban-gangsta-tuning"-stuff. Like after NSF:Underground 2. That game was okay, but the whole thing just pun out of control. Then you have the driving sims, which are too hard for me to like. Then there is GRID: It takes the cool things from both, makes it doable, gives it a nice shine and I'm sold.

Seriously, I love it. You're not a gangsta trying to race, you're a racedriver. None of the tuning crap, just race. You start out in a race in San Fransico, which you only need to finish. No winning, just make it to the finish line. You then get your license and you're off to save money for your own team. Before you can go racing with your own team, you need 60.000 euros to buy a car.

As long as you don't own a car, you can only race with other teams' cars, by doing Driver Offers. These are kind of like missions. You get paid for finishing the race, along with money for objectives. I had one in which I needed to drive 249 km/h. The only straight part is at the start/finish line, so that's where I needed to go fast. Short circuit, 6 laps available to you. At lap 5/6, I realised that I needed to get the objective fast. I kept going straight till it said my objective was completed and then braked. Hard. About 2 metres from the boarding, after going straight through the gravel, I came to a standstill.

Such missions give it a different feel, other racing games want you to finish first, or you lose. I raced a mission, and ended in last place, but still got the money needed to buy the car. Great.
The car is a Ford Mustang. I dislike muscle cars. I like cars like Audi's or the Nissan 350z. After winning a few races, I got enough cash to buy a car for the european races.

There are three regions, America, Japan and Europe. For each you can get reputation, to unlock the next license, but each region is different. America has alot of tracks in cities, Europe has their circuits, like Le Mans, Spa, etc. And Japan has industrial areas in which you can drift, mountains to touge on and a few circuits.

After a while, I noticed that America and Europe were the easiest for me, so I kept doing those, unlocking the remaining 2 licenses in America and one for Europe, unlocking an even bigger garage. I say even bigger, because as soon as you get enough rep for the next license in one of the areas, you get a bigger garage, with room for a teammate. So I got to pick a teammate. I got the choice of three wankers. Neither of them could keep up with me for a 2-1 finish, so I got me a new teammate. A dutchie like me. This one could keep up with me, as long as we were driving in Europe.

So as soon as I could hire pro's instead of rookies, I hired a better Briton. This one could keep up with me, almost everywhere. But there was a downside. As you are driving, both your team and your other driver are talking to you. Where the dutchie couldn't believe he was on the podium, yelling "I can't believe it! i'm second!" and "I'm third! Wait...Yeah, I'm third!", the new guy was, y'know, like, erm, like.... "I'm in like second place". The dutchie only got annoying after a full day of playing, but the new guy got on my nerves after only an hour.

An then there is the fact that my old teammate didn't push and shove. I bash through the cars to get to number one, but so does the new one. Problem is, he hits me, sending me in a spin, causing me to either use an instant replay or restart the race (instant replay FTW, but I'll get to that). Really annoying when you only have 4 minutes left in Le Mans.

A few small details that I love about GRID are the instant replays and the menu. The first time you crash, your crew explains that you can use it, blah, blah, but it's really useful. You can turn back time. Litterally. You watch a replay, of which you can control the camera, rewind, fast forward etc. An when you have found a good moment, you can continue from that moment with the push of a button. don't rely on it though, you only get 5 at the easiest difficulty.

And the menu, instead of small print against a static sheet, you have massice 3d letters crashing down on your screen. You'll have to see it to see what I mean. Meh, back to racing, might put pictures up somewhere next week.

Some things are not as hot as they seem initially

This weekend, the TF2 Pyro update was released, as I wrote before. Since the achievements weren't rolling fast, I tried out one of those "achievement servers". Chaos. The irony in such servers is that it's meant to get your achievements fast. However, if you go play on them, it's likely that the only achievement you'll get is "Die too often.", which is sad, because it isn't a real achievement and I can get it in normal servers too. No problem.

The map I was on had intel points, a control point, a swimming pool and a spawn. Not 2, but 1, resulting in spawn killing. As the red to blue ratio was a 2:1 one, the blues were being singed, burned to a crisp as they spawned. Everytime I could chop someone down (I was on Red) with my axe to get the Lumberjack achievement, I would get cut down myself by a stray Blu that had survived the initial hosing of petrol and fire.

I have to be honest. I grinded the Pilot Light, Hotshot and Dance Dance Immolation (har har) achievements, to get my ax. The rest are honestly ground on normal servers. I have to say though, that the Pyro achievements are easier to achieve than the Medic ones. The Medic has to rely alot on your teammates for the achievements. The Pyro... Well, you're the one that has to fry the foes. Atleast the Pyro is a class that doesn't throw the game too much of balance. I fear the day when Heavies get their patch.

P.S.: Firewatch image is epic. It captures the silliness and uberness of the Pyro class perfectly.

Pwned

My "little"15-year old brother is a Wii-person. I, however, am a PC/X360-person. When he bought Guitar Hero III for the Wii, I was not amused by the lack of achievements, lesser graphics (Assuming that GH3 for the Xbox is graphically any good) and worst: No Downloadable Content (DLC). Between the packs, Halo Mjolnir theme and such, there is bound to be some fun content. However, I didn't see this one coming: "I am Murloc" by Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain is on the X360 and PS3 as DLC now, according to WoW Insider.

Now he is thinking about selling his Wii-tar and getting the X360 version anyway.

Orb of Insight

The Orb of Insight is back on magicthegathering.com for the upcoming set, Eventide. Although it has been there for a few days now, I couldn't use it till now. The thing loads normally, it works, but it didn't show a special code. So the anti-spam screwed it up.
The Orb of Insight tells you how many cards use the phrase you enter. For example: You enter sorcery, you get the number 23. This means that there are 23 cards with the word sorcery on it. this can be in the card type box, name or text box.

So, some numbers:

Sorcery: 23
Instant: 21
Artifact: 12

Changeling: 0
Dragon: 0
Goblin: 7
Merfolk: 9
Kithkin: 16
Hag(one of the new types I found out from the preview pack): 12
Elf: 4
Scarecrow: 7
Beast: 6
Elemental: 24 (!)
Treefolk: 6

Rogue: 7
Warrior: 13
Wizard: 11

Wither: 13
Persist: 11

So, a set with alot of Elementals, very few Goblins and no Dragons.

Guitar Heroism

A few weeks ago, my brother bought Guitar Hero III. One of the problems was: For which platform? My little brother is someone that doesn't care about the financial and/or practical sides. So he bought it for the Wii. While we have a Xbox 360. Idiot.

So we have the following:
No DLC. No Achievements. Inferior Graphics. Nice.

Funny part is that I own him in GH3, while I hardly play it.
Again, this has 2 sides: I'm not allowed to play anymore, because I own him. And he asks me to do songs that he can't do himself.

Anyway, that's not the point. Yesterday, we went the the mall and got us some goodies. He got himself a Creative Zen Stone, since his old 15-euro mp3-player broke. I got me some Microsoft Points to buy On The Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1. He also bought Puzzle Quest for the Wii, for a whopping 50 euros. Ofcourse, the XBLA version is 1200 points. 2100 points are 25 euros. You do the math.

Then he got angry at me when I said that he should trade it in and buy the points, so he can play it on the Xbox, cheaper. At this point I couldn't care less anymore, since I wanted to save him money, while he thinks I'm being Pro-Xbox again.

About 15 minutes later, he comes into my room saying:

"It's hard to admit, but... It's terrible on the Wii, my arm hurts and it's impossible to select the gem you want."

He went back to trade it in, and came back with a speaker set for his Zen Stone and DoA:Extreme 2... A terrible Xbox game.

On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Pyro's and Drafts

Wow. A while ago, Penny Arcade came with a game of their own. An episodic RPG with the same style and humor of their comic. Seeing as how the demo was awesome (me and my friends had a blast), I bought the full game today on XBL Arcade. The story is silly enough, gameplay is solid and I want more.

After a giant Fruit Fucker uses your house as a stepping stone, placing your all of your house on the same horizontal plane, you want revenge. You join Tycho and Gabe, who conviently pass by as they are chasing the robot, to solve the mystery behind the mechanic monstrosity. Once you get past the suburbs you live in, it's obvious that the guys from PA made quite the effort to get a good story going. With every minute you play, the plot thickens. Using Paper Mario/Super Mario RPG style of combat, even that is fun. This coming from someone that hates Final Fantasy because of the combat system (Seriously, If I ever have trouble sleeping...).

But... There are 2 things that I dislike. Near the end, it is unclear where you need to go to get the items to upgrade your weapons. The game isn't that big, so it's not that hard to turn it upside down, but still. And the ending credits.
I don't dislike credits, just the ones that I cannot skip. Anyhow, good game, go get it.


Also, The Team Fortress 2 Pyro Achievements are in. After playing for 8 hours straight yesterday, I finally have all the unlockables, the flaregun, backburner and Axtinguisher, unlocked at 10, 16 and 22 achievements respectively. Flaregun is awesome in maps without water, just to screw with your long range enemies. Backburner is fine in close combat, but it sucks if a Soldier/Demoman gets the jump on you and the Axtinguisher is epic, exept against Pyro's. Flame retardant suits don't allow them to burn very well. Seeing as the Axtinguisher deals 50% damage against non-burning and crits 100% on burning enemies, that's a bit of a problem. On the other hand, it looks so epic... Barbed wire on axes looks so evil.

Me and my gaming group, with which I play Magic:The Gathering, are trying something new to balance out the differences in funds, cards etc. We draft.
It's supposed to be a bit more desperate than others, just make packs of cards, with the same consistency as boosters, or use actual boosters. Then draft and play for ante's. But: We use 2 boosters to make a 40 card deck, not 3. So far it's lots of fun.