February 26th, 2013

Never fear, I’m here.  Okay, its been two weeks since one of my little blogs and work has been a constant undoing to me getting anything constructive done in the writing world.  Every time I sit down to do a little bit of writing, it seems there is something that needs tending to.  I am not saying I do not have a little bit of free time here and there, but it seems like I’m more able to get some rest or zone out with a video game than put keystrokes to words and paragraphs.  But let us get to the get good stuff, shall we?

WWE 13

WWE 13 has turned out to be everything I could have wished for and a little more.  It really is a fantastic game.  As mentioned before, the only two negatives are the pin system (a scrolling meter is never a good idea) and the Live servers.  It is impossible to get community creations on a consistent basis and I have yet to get a matchup against somebody else.  On the flip side, attitude era is tons of fun, and the Universe mode is where I spend most of my time.

I have finished the first two legs of Attitude Era, the Rise of DX and Austin 3:16.  Austin 3:16 actually turned out to be a lot easier than DX and I finished it first.  Then I went back and finally was able to complete that silly New Age Outlaws/Legion of Doom match.  Basically, in that match you had to do finish four objectives.  Getting Hawk to medium damage no problem.  Then succeeding at the Attitude moment, also easy.  (they should have renamed this to Ref bump, but I digress).  However, getting the title belt and then cracking Hawk’s skull with it, huge problem.  The thing is that if you don’t do some planning, the title belt is directly behind Animal so he always cuts you off long enough for the referee to get back up.  If you are smart, you pick up the belt before hand and find a way to leave it on the outside but instead by the north end rather than its usual east setting.

This usually takes two or three good times, and then you can pull it off.  It’s speed mostly, because the referee doesn’t stay down as long as one would wish.  After that, just make sure Billy Gunn pins Animal and you are done.  I am on the fourth leg of the Brothers of Destruction (Undertaker and Kane) storyline now and thankfully have not seen anything too troubling yet.  (Though Rock took forever to submit to Shamrock’s ankle lock).  I like that I am getting all of the unlockables and since they carry over to Universe, it makes it that much better.

Universe mode, I just got done with my first PPV.  I have basically two shows (I deleted Raw and the Wednesday show entirely), my Smackdown show and my Divas show.  The Divas show took a lot of work, but I am up to 20+ wrestlers with quite a few teams and some well established feuds.  I’ve got the Beautiful People (Velvet/Madison iteration) in there, I teamed up Kharma with Maria (I think it works on a number of good levels), the Funkadactyls are a good mid card team, it works.  Oh and Kaitlyn is over all Divas champ.  Over on Smackdown, I still have Sheamus with the World Belt (but in a huge feud with Daniel Bryan) and Brock with the US Belt (feuding with Sin Cara).  Meanwhile my tag champs are Austin Aries and Robert Roode.  I had an idea about Kofi and Truth going heel, but it never worked right.  I have the other belts in what I like to call non-essential matches and playing with them until I come up with a fun idea.  It’s a good time waster that I can put in twenty minutes here and there and just have fun.  Which is really all that its about.

Darksiders

The THQ bankruptcy has produced some good finds for me.  There was WWE All-Stars for both the joystick and the game at reasonable prices.  Then, a couple of weeks ago, I found Darksiders II on sale @ BestBuy for $15 which I quickly got shipped (a few others mentioned they were able to get the LE, but I never saw a local copy, so I’ll gladly take what I can get).  It arrived on Tuesday of last week I believe, and then I went to work on finding the first one.  My range was of course less than $15 which I figured made sense.  I soon found a copy for about twelve and a half and it arrived today.  As to when I play them is anybody’s guess right now, but I wanted to go ahead and grab them before people start considering them collector’s items.

I would like to get the game guides obviously too, but judging by Amazon prices, I’m going to have to hope for the best at a Half Price books or equivalent.  But then again over the last few years, that’s how I have found all sorts of treasures like the Mass Effect 2&3 LE Guides, Oblivion GOTY guide, and quite a few other fun ones, usually for $15 or under.  I’m honestly surprised conventional print game guides still exist, but I am happy to collect them whenever they appear on the cheap.  The only guide I have honestly ever bought new was the Skyrim LE and that was worth every single penny (and I still got it about 40% off list).

Quick Hits

In the rare category, I found a brand new copy of Two Worlds 2 GOTY Velvet Edition on the fairly cheap ($40).  It was only released abroad in Europe and was limited to a production run of 5,000 copies.  It is also region free so to speak and will play on American consoles just fine according to everything I’ve read.  A collector’s item for sure and the fact that it includes the DLC which was just ridiculously priced ($20 and $40 a pop) makes it that much sweeter.  And it is in velvet.  For those lonely nights.

I also made the purchase of Bioshock: Ultimate Rapture Edition for $20.  It has Bioshock 1, 2 as well as all of the DLC on four discs in a rather nice package.  The only problem was that I already own both of the games.  I figured it was worth a gamble since I can see myself coming back to Bioshock as years go by.  The gamble was of course if I could sell my old copies on Half.com and get close to $20 making it an even swamp.  The two games sold in about a week.  The original Bioshock (which I had the original slip cover) went for $12 and some change and the second one went for about $6.    Shipping allowance+actual shipping+Half.com fees pretty much cancel each other out, so I was only out a couple of bucks and I had brand new copies of the Bioshocks to boot.  Score.

Still playing Happy Wars marginally, the game’s appeal is slowly melting away.  Too many crappy servers, too much time lost.  Most of my items are maxed out and I’m basically hanging on to get that 40 quests achievement before putting it in the bored one Sunday with absolutely nothing else to do category.  So much potential, and so much failure.

Hitman Trilogy is on the back burner for now.  I want to play it, honestly.  I even picked up the Xbox version of Contracts for like $3 just so I could do a worthwhile comparison.  But so many things going on and its getting pushed to the back, with WWE 13 is taking much of my gaming energy.

I got my wife to go back to Arkham Asylum for all of an hour or so (I called her bluff when she said if I turned off wrestling, she would play Arkham).   She’s just finished the part where she had to switch off the pumps that were containing Titan.  I still think she is pretty close to finishing the main story judging by achievements and such.  I was also very much impressed when I pushed her to give something a try that she thought was too hard.  Then she went all Leroy Jenkins and walked into a room with seven gunmen and took them flat out.  My sweetheart can kick some serious butt when she wants too.  I have also found that if I sit there and watch her play and give her some tips that she can overcome just about anything.  Too bad there isn’t a job called video game coach, I’d be pretty good at it.  As long as I can remember to sit on my hands.

Finished the second book of House of Serpents of Lisa Smedman and onto the third one, ~page 540 or so.  Still a page turner and eager to read the two Shadowrun books I found of hers once I get done.  It’s a shame that I don’t see much that she has done recently though.  Maybe she just decided to move on.

Final Words

The writing end is still kinda fuzzy, again as I have mentioned its all about finding rhythms.  I have a ton of ideas swirling in my head but when I get to writing them, I have trouble and what’s worse is I am always thinking about how much time I have until this happens or I have to do this and I ended up writing a paragraph and hitting save.  I am working on the prologue to my Shadowrun piece and I stuck myself in a really idiotic corner.  I know absolutely nothing about basic boating terms but somehow I am into a situation where I need to know them.  The internet is a decent help, but I have a feeling that anybody with actual boating knowledge is going to dismiss the piece within two minutes.  It’s not bad, trust me…its just paranoia.  I honestly hope to be done with the prologue by the end of March if not sooner.  Then it will go up here (after I mail it to myself of course).

On the publishing end, I have been reading up on some places and I came across an outfit when one of my old college friends mentioned she had published a book on her own.  It’s called Create Space, they are partnered with Amazon as it turns out.  They claim to give out higher royalty fees, you can sell on Amazon, digital and print publishing, the whole nine yards.  However, I really need to study the ins and outs of the program.  Judging by the “book” I received my friend did, either the upload file was not double checked very well or Create Space did not publish it correctly.  I still need to get with her and find out in a kind way which scenario it is.  And before I get in trouble, the book is a decent “coffee” (inside pun joke) table type book, but the typographical errors were very curious.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  Focus, focus, focus.  I swear I need to get that tattooed on my chest but alas I probably would not stick around for the whole tattoo.  See ya later kids.