A pre-emptive Since U Been Gone

Sorry to announce that I'll once again be closing up shop for a while. This time though it's not on a down note, on Wednesday this week, after a long and extremely stressful process, I finally got to close on my house. So it's moving time. Again. For the last time though for quite a while I hope.

Sooo, I probably won't get to bore you with what I thought of the Fangoria Frightfest films. You're sad, I can tell. For those who have been following along, I did manage to break the 50k mark for my gamerscore, which you may already know if you're either a) on my friends list or b) scroll down far enough and look at my gamercard in the sidebar. It was Metro that put me over the top. That is a fun game, you should play it.

Anyway, just wanted to say goodbye to my blog buddies, and hope to see all of you again soon. Don't know for sure how long it will be before I break down and get internet again, but I know I will at some point. Until then!

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Fright Fest

So I (barely) made it through the Ryan Nicholson library, you might be asking yourself what's next for Mister Bones and his quest to watch every mediocre to horrible horror film ever made? The answer to this question is quite simple....Fangoria's Fright Fest of course!

Week 6

I got fed up with Gamefly, so I went out and bought Metro 2033. Glad I did though, this one's a keeper. Loving it so far, it's kinda like a cross between Fallout 3 and F.E.A.R. and that's high praise from yours truly. Sunday, I only put in about an hour, but did unlock two achievements, "First Blood" for completing the intro chapter, and "Nosalis Hunter" for killing 30 Nosalies.

Back to the subway tunnels of Metro on Monday. So far I've primarily been using the knife to kill enemies because there's an achievement for doing so. My thinking behind that is, might as well use the weakest weapon at the beginning of the game as the enemies here probably aren't as tough as they will be later on in the game. So anyway, I unlocked "Slice and Dice".

Wednesday I finally got Eat Lead: the Return of Matt Hazard in the mail. And after about 30 minutes of play, it's going right the hell back in the mail. This game is without a doubt one of the very worst games I have played in a looong time. Believe me when I tell you, I've played some terrible games too. Even the easy achievements aren't worth the headache of playing this piece of shit. 30 minutes did get me several though, and they were: "It's Hazard time", "Take 5", "Hands-on Approach", "Headache", "Disco is Dead", and the appropriately titled "Migraine".

In an attempt to permanently burn the memory of Mr. Hazard from what's left of my feeble brain, I threw Metro back in for a while. I set an explosive and blew up a tunnel to seal off advancing monsters for the "Demolitionist" achievement, then made my way to a different station and was promptly arrested by Reds. When I made my escape, I made it all the way to freedom without getting recaptured, unlocking "Fugitive" in the process.

I've turned my 6 year old into something of a Street Fighter junkie as of late, which should surprise absolutely no one that knows anything about me. We've been playing nightly pretty much all week. Friday night when we threw down, I finally got my 50th Super Combo Finish, and the "Super Combo Champion" achievement.

I don't know how many of you have ever attempted to explain, or train somebody on how to pull off a Hadouken in Street Fighter, but if a person has never played Street Fighter before, it's moderately difficult to get them to grasp the concept of the down-to-forward motion on the stick coupled with a simultaneous press of the punch button. Now imagine trying to explain it to a 6 year old. My patience was being tested severely at the beginning of the week, as there was much whining and frustrated 6 year old smack being talked. Somewhere around the middle of the week it clicked for him though, and he can actually hold his own a little bit. He tends to favor Blanka, of course because of his extremely cheap electricity attack, and because he looks like a monster. "Daddy, I'm over guns and shooting, I just want to fight now." Who says the fighting genre is dead? SHORYUKEN!!!

Curtain closed on week 6 just shy of my goal. I would've cleared it by a sizable margin if Matt Hazard hadn't been so god awful. It was so bad that I refused to even finish the first level, 50k be damned. Breakdown....

Beginning Gamerscore: 49,752
Finishing Gamerscore: 49,987

A gain of 235 points, which is not bad at all considering how much time I spent this week playing Infamous on my PS3. Also this week I canceled my Gamefly account, as I'm paying $15 dollars a month for them to skip all the good stuff and continue to send my bargain-bin shit from my list. Matt Hazard was the final nail in the coffin. I highly doubt I won't be able to find 13 points in something this week, likely Metro, so week 7 will officially end the countdown.

Mister Bones' Top 5

Game Informer released the cover art for it's upcoming September issue, and it sure is nice. Of course, Game Informer almost always has a nice cover, and as such I thought I'd post my 5 favorites.

Top 5 Game Informer Covers

5. Gears of War 2

4. Bioshock 2

3. Aliens Colonial Marines

2. Batman Arkham Asylum (Joker version)

1. Batman Arkham City

Infinite Playlist - Hymn for the Shameless, Apology

Went back through and browsed my previous additions to the Infinite Playlist, and was shocked and ashamed at the lack of any Alesana. So we're gonna fix that by adding a couple of my favorite Alesana songs right now, the first of which I think is the greatest song they've ever recorded and are likely to ever record.

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Antoine Dodson

Makes me proud to be from the same state... but hey it's not all bad, we did get this killer remix out of it...

That's gonna be in your head ALL day. You're welcome.

Bulletstorm

Yanno, after watching as many videos as I can on this game, one might think it would be hard for me to pick my absolute favorite part...however, it's actually pretty easy. Rick Remender wrote it, and he writes good. You'd know that if you played Dead Space, or read comics like Fear Agent, The End League, or Frankencastle.

Week 5

Sunday I decided that if I was going to finish this damn Saw game that it needed to be quick, because it was really beginning to try my patience. So, I began a marathon session on Sunday afternoon, and without boring you with a lot of detail, I unlocked "Surgeon", "Say Hello to my Little Friend", "Absent Parent", "Curb Stomp", "I Can Stop Anytime", "Wait for the Boom", "Aphasia", "Professional", and "Splitting Headache"...most of which were for getting more kills with more various objects and weapons. Yippee.

Sunday night, I switched over to Modern Warfare 2 for some Spec Ops with my homie Diptastic. Love the Spec Ops missions, although I haven't played all of them yet because there's hardly ever anybody on my friends list playing when I'm online. Anyway, finally made it to 30 stars, and got the "Specialist" achievement as a reward for all my hard work!

After work on Monday I was determined to be done with Saw one way or the other, so another marathon was in order. More bullshit timed traps to work my way through, more horrendous melee combat, and more random achievements! Here's the list: "Eager Student", "Hatchet Job", "Penetrated", "Grave Digger", "Choked Up", "Born Victim", and "Violence Begets Violence".

And finally, after all that, all the cheap deaths, shotgun tripwires, poison gas filled rooms, shotgun collars, and everything else this game tossed my way, I got to the ending, and made my final choice between the Truth and Freedom doors. I chose Truth first, and it ended up being the "real" ending, which ended up being pretty cool, it was the ending that we would've seen had this been a movie instead of a game, and that door got me the "Cost of the Truth" achievement. After that I reloaded my game back to the choice, and picked the Freedom door, which was the crappy ending, but I got "Never Truly Free" for going that route.

Saw is FINISHED. Overall for a movie game, it wasn't really all that bad. If you're a fan of the movies, I'd definitely rent it. Not worth a buy though. Just be ready for lots of timed puzzles, very clunky combat, and LOTS of cheap deaths.

Tuesday I purchased the full version of Limbo after falling in love with the demo over the weekend. I can honestly see "Arcade Game of the Year" for this one, as well as adjectives such as genius, brilliant, haunting, creepy, and the ever-popular "awesome". This one is light on the achievements though, and the ones that are available for unlock are hidden pretty well. I did manage to find the easiest of the bunch though, by immediately going in the wrong direction at the very beginning of the game..."Wrong Way" unlocked!

More Limbo after work on Wednesday, and one more achievement, one of the well hidden ones too, "Alone if the Dark" unlocked. I also saw another of the hidden eggs, though not exactly hidden this time, the route to said egg though....WELL hidden. Will backtrack once I've finished the game for the first time.

Bones by nimble, Bones be lame....Bones be addicted to the Limbo game! On Thursday, my first playthrough of Limbo came to an end. This game is absolutely wonderful. The ending was a bit of a wtf, and of course subject to player interpretation, and of course leaves things wide open for (hopefully) a sequel. For completing the game, I unlocked "Where Credit is Due" and also a Limbo creature for my Xbox avatar :)

Started going back through chapters to find eggs, with the help of a video walkthrough on Youtube, and managed to get all of them. "Under Ground", "Altitude is Attitude", "It's Stuck", "Urban Exploration", "Climbing the Cog", "Backtracking", "Guided by Sparks", and "Going Up" all unlocked. That only leaves one more achievement for Limbo, but it requires a playthrough of the entire game in one sitting, losing only 5 or less lives. Yeah, gonna take some more practice on some of these puzzles before I attempt that one.

That's a wrap on week 5! Looking like week 6 will close out the Countdown....breakdown:

Beginning Gamerscore: 48,972

Finishing Gamerscore: 49,752

An unprecedented gain of 780 points! With only 248 points to go, I like my chances of knocking this out next week. I got the bone again on Metro from Gamefly, so Matt Hazard will likely be the game that puts me over the top. Now if I can only stop playing Infamous long enough to play the Xbox....