The only gaming action my PC saw this weekend was popping into LOTRO briefly to check mail and chat with some friends. Otherwise the 360 got the bulk of my gaming attention, where I reached a new Gamerscore milestone of 5,000! That still keeps me squarely in “noob” territory compared to most of the people on my friend list but considering most of my gaming is MMOGing on the PC, that’s pretty good. Frontlines: Fuel of War put me over the 5K mark with a multiplayer achievement (two actually, I got the “Noob” achievement but it’s 0 points) then I continued with a couple Ironman and one Stopwatch achievement. I just finished the Convention Center act in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, completed my first No Mercy campaign in Left 4 Dead where I nabbed a few achievements, and I also picked up The Orange Box (I also own it on Steam) where I picked up a few achievements for both Half-Life 2 and Portal. I’m nearly caught up in Half-Life 2 to where my PC game is saved, though I think I missed a few exploration-type achievements already.
Other than two victorious maps in EndWar’s single-player campaign, I did nothing but shooters. I’m still a mouse and keyboard shooter at heart so I find it bizarre that I’m going for so many shooters on the 360. I’m even able to hold my own pretty well online in Frontlines, which I’ve been playing a lot of. I’m not nearly as good in Battlefield: Bad Company but I still diligently go online with that one too. I was very disappointed to take Team Fortress 2 online today, though. On the PC I thought TF2 was not only a great game but also one that made it pretty easy for inexperienced players to jump right in. On the 360 though, holy crap! My aim was all over the place! I don’t know what the deal is, I’m doing just fine aiming in Half-Life 2 but I was flat-out useless in the single TF2 match I played. Not good when the Medic can’t aim his heal gun. I may give it another shot someday but first impressions tend to linger with me.
All said and done though, I earned either 13 or 14 achievements this weekend and at the moment my gamerscore is clocking in at 5,330! :cool:
My girlfriend and I also got out of the rain today and saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Awesome movie, though I had no idea it’s nearly three hours in length! But I would highly recommend it. The acting was subdued and spot-on and the special effects are amazing; truly something to behold. Other than the love story, what I took away from it is the message that everything in life — even things that seem destined to be — is but a fleeting moment; nothing is forever and we must all say our goodbyes, even to life itself, so try to live life to its fullest.
I’m nearly getting used to my new car, finally. My lease was up in December on my 2005 VUE. It only had 19,349 miles on it! That goes to show how much I’m gone during the course of a year… I could have swore I had another year left, but apparently not so I got a 2009 VUE on the 30th. They’ve made leases so unattractive with the economy in the gutter that I ended up buying this one. I’m very dismayed that as of 2008 all Saturn vehicles now have all-metal bodies rather than the polymer material the company has always used. Given how much time my car is parked at an airport, I can only imagine how many dings the car would have had. I was rear-ended a couple months ago and there was no damage whatsoever thanks to the polymer; if it had been metal, who knows? I’m digging the built-in Bluetooth for hands-free cell phone use, though! I just push the button and say “call Mom” (it uses a voice recognition system) and it dials my mother’s number and puts the audio over the speakers. My favorite part of the new VUE though is the XM radio. I’d flirted with getting XM in the ‘05 one but ended up not. There’s not many decent radio stations here in Jacksonville, so I end up flipping between NPR, an 80’s station and two rock stations. The radio in the ‘05 didn’t even have an auxiliary audio input so I could plug in my iPod or Zune to listen to podcasts when no decent music was on. Not only does the ‘09 have the audio input for MP3 players, but XM is sweet! I’m nowhere near being fluent with navigating the menus and finding channels but I found XM41: Hair Nation and I am in 80’s hair band heaven! Hey, we all have our private guilty pleasures… that’s one of mine, deal with it!
Finally, we’ll be headed to Orlando this week. One of my best friends is getting married at Disney! The exciting part for me is that we’ve been such good friends for 12 years now but we’ve never met in person. We met back in ‘96 doing mIRC scripting then IRC helpdesking on Undernet and have been friends ever since. We talk on the phone quite a bit but the majority of our communication has always been online, from chatting on IRC or IM to gaming and chatting in an MMO or FPS or over Xbox Live. We went from MMO to MMO together as well. So this is cool to finally meet each other in person, and at such a momentous occasion in his life! As a bonus, his fiancée is a gamer chick! In fact, they met in City of Heroes! The three of us have done Guild Wars together, and back in our World of Warcraft days we’d formed our own guild as well as raiding together!
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