Way back in 2001, I was lucky enough to get an (original) Xbox shortly after launch. At the time, the Carson City Target was not a terribly popular place to buy video games. Jumping up to 2005 I had become a fairly solid fan of the platform and managed to get an Xbox 360 a few months after launch. However by the time the Xbox One came around, real life had struck and I had much less free time and money for video games. There was always a longing for the XBone but never strong enough to actually get one. That was, of course, until this Christmas when my girlfriend got me the Xbox One Elite Bundle. However, this is not a story of love so much as it is a study of on-boarding.

A while back Microsoft decided to do away with “points” and “point cards” for its Xbox service and converted everything to the user’s local currency. In the small print during that conversion was that your existing points would be expiring on Monday June 1, 2015. You should have also received one or more emails about this.

Today, I’d like to talk to you about Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel, the third entry in the Army of Two franchise. Jon and I both enjoyed Army of Two and Army of Two: The 40th Day. We enjoyed it so much that I composed an ode to Army of Two for AoT 2’s release date and Jon did a review of The 40th Day after we finished it. Unfortunately, the third entry does not live up to its predecessors. FYI, there will be storyline spoilers for the entire series to date.

With the Spring 2012 (1.04) patch to Battlefield 3, DICE introduced a new feature that has some people up in arms: Shortcut Bundles. On each platform you can now buy one of 7 unique shortcut bundles that will unlock all the weapons for a particular class or all the upgrades for a group of vehicles. Depending on how you look at this, the unlock bundles are either “cheating” or “making life easier”. The argument is an old one; it’s the argument of Real Money Transfer/Trading.

Today, the demo for Mass Effect 3 was released. I immediately downloaded it and fired it up. I was not disappointed.

For Christmas I got NCIS the video game. I had been curious about it, which is why it was on my Amazon wishlist, but I was not curious enough to actually fork out the $40 for it. The game doesn’t have very good reviews on Amazon, but I do love NCIS… so it’s worth a shot, right? No… no it’s not.

In case you have forgotten, tomorrow is the release of Battlefield 3 and I am excited! I played the beta and while it was very limited (only one map, only online, no vehicles), I had a lot of fun with it. I wasn’t much of a fan of playing shooters in multiplayer until Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 so I didn’t play the early generations that much. I did, however, play the hell out of Bad Company 2 online and will likely play the hell out of BF3.

I’ve been an Xbox Live Gold member for the last few years now, and other than the first time I bought a Gold Membership (through the Xbox), I have always bought my memberships via cards that were on sale (usually through Amazon or eBay’s daily deal). As a result, my subscription had well over 20 months left on it.

Arrival, the final DLC for Mass Effect 2, was recently released and it is pretty darn nifty. It took me about an hour to play through and along with snagging a few credits during the game play, there were 3 new research projects: Heavy Weapon Ammo Increase Medi-Gel Capacity Increase Heavy Skin Weave (aka more health for Shepard) There was also some Element Zero, Palladium, and Iridium to be found during the mission; the handful of planets in the system also had some resources to offer as well, though nothing terribly exciting if you have already completed the game.

If you game, you know Call Of Duty: Black Ops came out yesterday. While this is the 7th installment in a long series of Call Of Duty games, it really is “Modern Warfare 2: The Second”. By that I mean Treyarch just took the engine that Infinity Ward made for Modern Warfare 2 and reused it. At first glance that could seem like a bad thing, after all it means they really don’t have anything new in the engine. The reality though is this really isn’t all that bad. MW2 had a great engine and a great multiplayer experience. The real question is, will Black Ops manage to expand on MW2?

Last week the Xbox Kinect was released… and I got one. I ended up getting the Xbox 360 S 250 GB with Kinect bundle because I’ve been gunning for a new Xbox for a while (Editor’s note: Basically, since I got my Xbox Elite with HDMI a couple years ago). As soon as the new Xbox 360 S was announced, I pre-ordered one, but canceled it because I just didn’t need a new Xbox. Later, I also pre-ordered the Xbox 360 S Reach bundle, but again canceled that one because it seemed like overkill and I wasn’t too sure how Reach would turn out. Finally, the Kinect arrives, and I figured it was about time.

Much to my excitement, I got home on Tuesday and had Medal of Honor sitting on my porch (which has been a dice throw as of late). While I didn’t have a lot of time to play it after I got home and ate, I made sure to set aside some time. After all, it is supposed to be the new uber game of “shoot bitches” (the term we use for FPSs). I had some reasonably high expectations for this game after MW2 and BC2, and so far I’ve not felt too let down.

Medal of Honor - Limited Edition (IE it contains DLC codes)Today see’s the release of the new Medal of Honor game for the Xbox 360 (and other platforms, but who cares about them?). Right this very second it is sitting at my house (since I preordered it a while back), waiting for me to rush home and play it. I’ve never really been into the Medal of Honor series of games, but the reboot seems like it will be rather interesting. I don’t really give a rat’s ass if they enemy are called “taliban” or “tangos” (Editor’s Note: What if they were called… “THEM"? Oh, right, then it would be Left 4 Dead.), as long as I can shoot people. Though apparently calling them the former is great for causing a ruckus.

[][1]Crackdown 2 came out earlier this week. I was slightly surprised when I got the shipping notification, because I thought it came out in September. When I broached this topic with Jon he informed me that I was thinking of Halo Reach. After playing the demo (back when I thought it came out in September), I considered canceling my pre-order. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the demo (I certainly did), but it didn’t seem like it was worth paying the $60 Day 1 price. That was back then. This is now. I’m still not sure if it is worth $60, but it is a ton of fun. Oh and Amazon had a pre-order bonus that I had long since forgotten about until they emailed me: codes for 4 more sets of armor (“Xbox Agent” — Green, Gold, Black, and Gunmetal — which looks almost identical to the light grey suit).

After some mucking about on EA’s part, Onslaught mode for Bad Company 2 finally made it to the Xbox 360. I spent a bit of time playing it and I thought I’d write up a quick review to answer the burning question in most people’s mind: “Is Onslaught worth $10 (800 pts)?” 

Jon was going to write up a quick bit about this, but he is too busy trying to play it to do so. Expect an actual review of this new content at a later date. Currently, you can only get it from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace right here for 800 MS Points ($10 at standard rates). The in game access to the store does not currently show it.

Last Monday (14 June 2010), BioWare released a demo for Mass Effect 2 (and yes this is a demo for a game that has been out for awhile) on both Xbox 360 and PC. Additionally, the price recently decreased from release day standard $60 to $40, so now if you haven’t played the game, you can try the demo and then only need $40 to get the full game. On Tuesday, they released their latest bit of DLC called Overlord. Being a Mass Effect 2 fanatic, I bought it immediately for 560 MS Points (at standard conversion rate that is $7).

Shooters are sort of an odd thing for me. I never considered myself a hard core shooter player. Sure, I bought Halo and played most of the big name shooters, but generally only did so casually. Since I can remember getting into gaming most of my “passion” for games was towards simulation games. Man, I can’t tell you the number of sky scrapers I built in SimTower, or villages destroyed by earthquakes in SimCity.

I’ve been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 quite a bit. In fact, I’m getting close to 100%ing the achievements. Normally, I’m not an achievement whore like some of my game playing compatriots, but BC2 makes it fairly easy (and enjoyable). This past evening I was working on finishing ‘Communication Issues’ and ‘Complete Blackout’ (destroy the M-Com/Satellite boxes) and I found a really good guide to the locations. During that I figured I’d try and finished ‘Demolish Part 2’ which is the achievement for destroying 50 houses, I found a really easy way.

Perfect Dark recently (17 March 2010) arrived on Xbox Live. This game was originally published for the N64 and came with a 4 MB RAM expander for said device (later it became available with just the game). If you didn’t have the RAM expander, you were limited to only part of the Combat Simulator (see the wikipedia entry for more information on said limitation), so to me that means it wasn’t really an “option”.

Since I’m an avid 360 gamer it might come as a surprise to some, but I’ve never bothered to install a game to my Xbox 360 hard drive previously. Frankly I’m running an old (basically launch edition) console with a 10 GB hard drive, I don’t really have that much space for game installs. I figured I’d give it a try though. Here’s the steps: Boot up your console and put the game in Get to the main menu Go to My Xbox Go right and select Game Library Wait for Recent Games to populate Press A on your game (should be top one in the list) Select Install game to hard drive and hit A Wait At this point, god willing, your game will have installed.

As you may well know (perhaps from our earlier entry), Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out last week. I’ve devoted most of my game playing time since then to playing the game and thought it was about time to do a review. Now some of this review of Bad Company 2 (BC2) will be a comparison to how it stands up against Modern Warfare 2 (MW2). It isn’t that I believe the games are in anyway the exact same kettle of fish, but MW2 is the undeniable “big shooter” of the moment, so it is that which all other new shooters will be compared against (until something undeniably better comes out). Let me give you the ultra short version: It is definitely an improvement over Bad Company 1. My major complaints for BC1 single player were addressed in BC2. The single player campaign of BC2 isn’t long, but it is enjoyable and longer than MW2 was. The online multiplayer is also quite enjoyable and mostly major bug free (so far that I’ve seen). BC2’s multiplayer is much different than MW2 and personally I prefer BC2. If you enjoy shooters in general and haven’t bought BC2, you’re missing out. Now we get on to the long version of the review. First I’m going to cover the single player game and then I’ll get into the online play.

Both John and myself have gone ahead and pre-ordered Battlefield: Bad Company 2 even though we originally had no intention of doing so. I’ve been seeing advertisements for the game for the last month and said “meh” to it. I had enough games to play, not enough free time, and Modern Warfare 2 has been satisfying my multiplayer needs (not that I normally multiplayer much). This was up until we actually got around to playing the demo the last week before it was shut down. So what changed? Well first off in my research on BF:BC2, I saw a video which was showing off PC dedicated servers and game play, but more importantly their test server was named “Server of DOOM and cake”. This is a server name I fully approve of. I mean, who doesn’t love doom and cake? I know I do. Beyond devs with a good sense of humor, there was a demo that was enjoyable to play.

Last night I finished [AoT:TFD][1] for the first time. I know, it is shocking that a gamer like me would take almost a week to beat the game, but I've got a few good reasons. #1 I was only playing online with a friend when we both had the time. #2 STO took precedence. #3 It is kinda hard to go to another shooter after MW2.

An ode to Army of Two A is for Aggro B is for Bromance C is for Clip D is for Deagle E is for Equipment F is for Friends G is for Guns H is for High Explosive Grenades I is for Indestructible scenery J is for Jeopardizing the Mission K is for Killing the Enemy L is for Long Distance Kills and M is for M107 which makes them possible

I bought Incredible Hulk for the Xbox 360 at Best Buy a while back for $20. I wanted to get it because I knew it was an open environment similar to Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (which incidentally, was the first game I got all of the achievements for), and also because you could play in Hulk Buster armor if you had an Iron Man save (which I did). In general, I have to say the game sucks.

A little while back, Magic: the Gathering — Duel of the Planeswalkers was released on Xbox Live Arcade. Seeing as how Jon and I had both played the card game at various points in our lives, we decided we should try it out; thankfully, like all games available on Xbox Live Arcade, there was a free demo. After enjoying the demo for an hour or so, we both ended up getting the game, particularly the idea of getting to team up against either the computer or other players (mostly the former, the latter is less appealing as neither of us particularly care for random people.

A while back, Amazon (in partnership with Microsoft) started offering Online Game Codes for Xbox Live products (store front here). When it came out it had some of the more popular as well as the more expensive options, but some of the recent stuff hasn’t made it on there just yet, such as Puzzle Quest Galactrix. In addition to games, they also offer the Live access cards as well as point cards, both at the standard prices.

*Only true for exceptionally small values of Family; like 1 (2 if you have another Xbox 360 and want to do system link). Decided that I should post a follow up to Jon’s Article with a bit more about the game. First off, I had forgotten that yesterday was the day the demo would come out so I didn’t get a chance to start the download before I left for work, but thanks to the NXE I was able to queue it up over the web so that when the xbox did get turned on, it would start the download shortly thereafter (note for any xbox engineers reading this: any chance we could get the ability to wake up our consoles to download these things?

For those of you living under a rock (but still reading my blog for some reason), the demo for Halo Wars was released today. If you are a fan of Halo, you’ll probably like it. If you are a fan of RTS’s, you’ll probably like it. If you are a fan of My Little Pony, you probably won’t like it. That being said, I think it is freaking awesome. I was interested in the release, and was planning on buying it because I am a fan of the Halo series, but I wasn’t _sure_.

Ace Edge Sticks So a few weeks ago I bought the Ace Combat 6 — Ace Edge bundle. I’m not entirely sure why I sprung for the “collectors” edition sort of package — because I swore off buying collectors editions after Everquest 2 failed me so miserably. Anyways, I have to say that the game itself is a ton of fun, I really do enjoy it. I like flightsims, and AC6 is more than realistic enough for my tastes — plus I get to blow people up — and that never gets old.

Yes. My disappearance the last two days worth of posts is 100% due to Halo 3. Well that isn't completely true. Sunday & Monday were Halo 2 — I went back and replayed most of the game (didn't get all done — I do have to work you know ^_^) just to get a feel for things again. This was probably a mistake because I got used to the Halo 2 controls and things were a little bit changed in Halo 3.