Gamer Score and You

So this past Christmas, my nephew got Guitar Hero 3 for his Play Station. I played it that day over at my sister's house and I quickly learned that it was a fun game to play. That and I totally kicked my nephew's butt!! So within the next few days I decided that I was going to purchase the game for me and my X-Box 360 (far superior to the Play Station). So I did.

Then I looked at my gamer score and saw that I was under 1000 points. I thought that was rather lame so I set out to raise my score. I set a goal of 3000 points for myself to get to by this summer. I mean I was just under 1000 - so I figured 2000 points shouldn't be that hard to accumulate. But how to do this without breaking my bank account and buying every cool game out there?? Simple - play the games I already have! Mind you, I had Gears of War that I had not played and I had a few other games that I had tried and put away. It was just a matter of playing games and having fun playing them. I think I can handle that!!

So I started playing Guitar Hero 3. In a matter of days I had beaten the Tour on Easy mode and was more than half way through the Tour on Medium. I tried Hard - and it was really hard. So I stuck with Medium. Then I borrowed GH 2 from a friend and applied the same technique. Blew away Easy and Medium on that, all the while racking up gamer score points.

Then Devil persuaded me to try Gears of War. So I did. WOW!! Talk about a life changing event. OK - so maybe its not that good - but it was the best game I had played since Halo 3 game out. Devil and I co-opped our way through the campaign on that and finished shortly before the release of Gears 2. Well I did go out and buy that game. Gears 2 blew away GOW. It was awesomely good. Once again, Devil and I plowed through the campaign on that one too. Then did it again on Hardcore!! NICE.

So by this time, I had hurtled across the 2000 point barrier and was well on my way to my 3000 points. Also, by this time, Bungie released the Mythic Map Pack for Halo 3. Along with that were a whole slew of new achievements. So the Prophets have been working on unlocking many of those achievements and enjoying the new maps.

While I am just shy of 3000 points, I am pretty sure I will be there shortly. I put together a list of the games played by the Prophets and how much gamer score we have achieved in each game. My challenge to each of the Prophets is to get to 3000 points! I will play Halo, Gears of War, Guitar Hero and Battlefield: Bad Company with any of you any time. The only game I won't play is that DDR/DS 2 game that Domino got (he claims for his daughter - but I know its his favorite). So take a look at the chart and start building up for that 3000 mark!

Fight!

Here's something different and fun! Well fun to me! (Six will enjoy this too...) Anytime Chris Neil can get popped in the face, and by a Devil no less - I'm posting it! And by posting it I am officially expanding the scope of this blog to include our takes on sports and any other hobbies or events that we feel like commenting on, including Xbox 360 games - just not limiting them to Halo only - and other interesting junk from the webernets that I come across...

But - more on that later... First, Clarkie needs to show someone who's boss!

|)3V!|_

PREPARE TO DROP - An in-depth look at the new Bungie Teaser Trailer

OBEY POSTED LIMITS!

Bungie has finally revealed (a little) what their next Halo themed project will be. The teaser trailer appeared on Bungie.net yesterday, the One Year Anniversary of Halo 3. And boy howdy, it did not fail to impress me. It was short and at first glance not too much to see, but there actually were a lot of goodies in there to look at, if you knew what you were looking for, and this fanboy would like to think that he does.

I'm going to give you my interpretation of what things in the trailer mean using what I know of the story, the timeline and what has already been disambiguated on the intertubes. If you haven't already, go get the video and watch it. It's on Bungie, but I think the best place to watch it is from Xbox Live Marketplace. It's in HD and you can pause and rewind at your leisure.

Let's start at the basic premise and background. Required reading includes the first two posts from the mysterious Superintendent which were laced with clues. Read them HERE and HERE. Who is the Superintendent? Well he appears to be a City-wide AI. It does not appear that he is a "Smart AI" like Cortana, but an AI that is in control of a city's infrastructure. Not at all sentient, but knows how to keep the lights on and the services active like communications, water, the garbage trucks, etc. And speaking of communications, this is where the Super gives the first clues, in his monitoring of various transmissions.

The first communication is a transcript of a classified Office of Naval Intelligence transmission possibly between someone on a UNSC Prowler (Prowlers, electronic intelligence gathering ships, are run by ONI) and the "URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE A.I. [SUPERINTENDENT]". It doesn't go well for the human trying to communicate with the Super. The Super is not making any sense. There appears to be a problem of some kind, an apparent malfunction and the communication doesn't go well. We can tell that there is some kind of metropolitan emergency, possibly a Covenant attack, and that according to the Comm Officer on the prowler, help is on the way.

But what kind of help? Help for what?

It looks like the second intercepted transmission sheds more light on those questions. Again, a classified ONI conversation, this one seems to be between the commander of the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name and an unknown Captain, possibly on the ground requesting more troops. The crux of the conversation is that the Captain is trying to get the ship commander, an Admiral, to release or approve the release of more ground support. The problem is that the Heavy Cruiser is clearly in the middle of an intense space battle. The Admiral is trying to fight this battle and command, at the very least, his ship, not to mention that an Admiral is probably responsible for dozens more, possibly an entire fleet. Understandably the Admiral is essentially telling the Captain to go away, that he has bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

However, in the middle of this, the seemingly nonplussed Captain on the ground merely states that he doesn't report to Fleet and that neither do his men for that point. That can only mean that they are ONI or that the Captain has the authority to take troops for ONI missions that supersede FLEETCOM orders. The other clue to this is that the Admiral refers to them as "you S1 Types", presumably - ONI Section One

from Halopedia:

"ONI Section One -
The main intelligence-gathering section, and the foremost provider of electronic intelligence for the UNSC. Covenant ship movements and force deployment, evacuation notices for colonies, deletion of data for secrecy purposes, and much more are all done by Section 1. "

Reluctantly it seems, but with approval once it's revealed that the Captain is from S1, the Admiral agrees to the request.

Guess who's coming to dinner...

Now we look at the Trailer itself. Up to this point all we had to go on were all the disjointed messages from the Superintendent on B-net before E3 and then these last two, much more substantive communications.

The trailer opens with a shot of a cityscape and then jump cuts to a fiery falling object in the upper atmosphere. You get to see this for a second or two then it jumps back to the city and seems to cycle through a few stationary security cameras. The city is New Mombasa. We know this because of two clues. One - in the wide shots you can still see the space elevator stretching up into the sky. New Mombasa was one of two confirmed locations on Earth for Orbital Space Elevators. The other being Havana Cuba. The second clue is more obvious and more of a 'duh' moment if you pause the video. In the 2nd security cam shot, at street level, there is a sign that says City of New Mombasa. But you can only see it paused and in Hi Def.

For those who have paid even a little attention to the Halo 3 story, you'll know New Mombasa is just about the most significant location on Earth during the Human-Covenant war and was a prominent setting in both Halo 2 and 3. In Halo 2, Regret knew that there was something special about that area, but before the Master Chief and Earth forces could get to him, he initiated a slipspace jump in the atmosphere to escape, but the rift caused by jumping in the earth's atmosphere, destroyed Most of New Mombasa. In Halo 3, we now know that what Regret uncovered with the Slipspace jump and what drew him there was the portal to the Ark. Truth came to finish the work Regret had started, but thought that the portal was the Ark. We all know how that ended...

The trailer continues with the Superintendent (presumably) zooming in on many objects falling from the sky at great speed. Probably many of the fiery objects we saw up close at the beginning. As they reach the city level there is also a huge shockwave of some kind that is sweeping through the city. When this reaches the camera, it all goes black. after a few seconds we see the Super coming back online and he cycles through all of his now familiar responses:

Please Remain Calm (in English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese)
Expect Delays
Road Closed
Yellow Means Yield
Obey Posted Limits
Pardon Our Dust
Maddie, Where Are You?
Proceed With Caution
Danger: Flood Zone
Final Notice: Bill Past Due
Keep It Clean

The one of these that took me by surprise and was hard to find was: "Maddie, Where Are You?". I have never seen this one before. I can only assume that the Superintendent is trying to communicate with another AI. Possibly the AI that controls the Orbital Elevator. We know from Contact Harvest that it's possible that there could be separate AI's to control city-wide duties and elevator control.

Once the Super gets the cameras back online, we can now see that the city has been razed. The street scene is now one of total destruction and the cityscape is now smoke filled and the buildings are clearly severely damaged. What caused this? Based on the fact that the Orbital Elevator is still intact, this may be the Slipspace event that first destroyed the city in Halo 2, which gives us pretty concrete evidence what the timeline is for this game.

And finally, the video concludes with one last drop pod falling into the city and seemingly landing on the camera lens sending the video to black. That's right I said DROP POD. It looks like the cavalry coming to the rescue are those crazy Feet First Into Hell, Helljumpers - the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.

I'm pretty sure at this point that the mysterious ONI S1 Captain, convinced the Admiral on the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name to release his squad of ODST's, to take care of whatever Covenant ground threat is left over after Regret turned tail and ran.

The ODST's are bad-ass. There are no two ways about it. They are the toughest, craziest, meanest sons-of-bitches in the entire UNSC and the only thing tougher, is a Spartan. Unfortunately there's not too many of those to go around, so the real work in this war will be done by you presumably taking command of a freshly dropped squad of ODST's and taking it to the Covies on the ground. I'm guessing yet again that it could be like a Ghost Recon, or Republic Commando experience, which would be totally cool. Needless to say I am looking forward to that!

The Elevator is still intact so I am expecting that to be a big set-piece of the game, as at some point we know that it has to come down. Pieces of it can be seen from the first time you set foot outside of Crow's Nest in Halo 3 all the way to Voi and the Portal to the Ark. Watching that fall to Earth should be pretty breathtaking. Finally one of the last things you see as the video ends are the words: PREPARE TO DROP. Not sure if that hint can be any more blatant, but it works just fine for me!

Want to learn more about the ODST's and you haven't read any of the books? Check out this handy reference from Halopedia:

Halopedia: ODST

I hope you are as jazzed about this addition to the Halo universe as I am. I can't wait for more to be revealed so I can stop guessing and get to the real content!

Thanks for reading and please leave some comments or thoughts!

|)3V!|_

Milestones and Memories

Some time ago, Merlin, Devil, Domino and myself used to get together every so often on Fridays to play Halo. We coined the name "Halo Friday" and an idea was born. If you are at all familiar with www.halofriday.com, you are well familiar with the story. I will not retell it here.

This weekend I was playing Halo III and nearing several in game milestones for myself. As I came closer to some of the marks, I sat and remembered the good old days of gathering at someone's home and playing Halo, eating pizza/wings, drinking beer and doing shots of George Dickel. I really miss those days. They were some fantastic moments.

The whole idea of Halo Friday was for good friends to get together and have a good time for a few hours. When we all got X-box 360s the hope was that it would be even easier to get together because we could do it from the comfort of our own homes and not have to drive anywhere to get together. Early on it was great. Every Friday we would join around 8:00 and play for several hours and have a good time. Lately, its been hit or miss and we have been lucky to get two or three guys together for more than one or two matches.

But enough about memories. On to my milestones. I know some readers will look at these and say - "That's all you got? You SUCK!" Well - these are my milestones. I'm a casual gamer playing to have fun more than anything. So here goes (note these are only for RANKED matches):

Milestones
TOTAL KILLS - 4000
DOUBLE KILLS - 200
KILLING FRENZY - 1

Almost Milestones
KILLING SPREES - 48 (50)
BEAT-DOWNS - 970 (1000)
ASSASSINATIONS - 186 (200)
SNIPES - 48 (50)
GRENADE STICKS - 286 (300)

I was very happy to get my first killing frenzy. It took me a very long time to get it. The very next match I had a spree of 9 - so I almost had TWO in one day. But oh well.

Now, I am laying out a personal challenge to MERLIN, DOMINO and DEVIL to match my milestones!! OR even surpass my milestones!! Can you do it??

Speaking of Music...

Since I've talked about the whole Halo Friday Playlist thing, here's what's actually on the playlist in its current form. It's still taking shape as I add stuff to it all the time but this is it as of right now (bands only as there are multiple tracks from each artist. I might list those out later).


40 Below Summer
808 state
Ac Dc
Breaking Benjamin
Caviar
Chevelle
Coheed and Cambria
Death Cab For Cutie
Deftones
Everlast
Expansion Union
Fall Out Boy
Fishbone
Fluke
Front 242
(Hed) p.e.
Helmet
Hybrid
Jimmy's Chicken Shack
Josh Wink
Justice
Korn
Mindless Self Indulgence
Mudvayne
Muse
NIN
A Perfect Circle
Poe
Prodigy
Queens Of The Stone Age
Senser
Silversun Pickups
Snapcase
Staind
System Of A Down
Taproot
My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult
Tool


So if you catch me singing into my headset during the next Halo Friday, I apologize in advance. This is a great bunch of artists to jam to and kick some Spartan ass!

|)3V!|_

I taught my 360 a new trick

Well not really, I just finally tried something that it already knew how to do.

First a few words about my setup...

My Xbox is in my office, not connected to a TV but hooked up via the VGA cable accessory to my 19" LCD monitor. I then have a KVM that lets me switch from my PC to my Xbox with a double-tap of the Scroll Lock key. Very convenient. Since my office is upstairs two walls from our bedroom, I never game with external speakers on. Instead I use a set of Turtle Beach Ear Force X1 headphones.

These things are amazing. The quality of the sound is excellent. All of the game sound plus any voice chat is pumped in to the headphones with separate volume controls for each so that you can fine tune just how much of your friends or the game you want to hear. This allows me to game whenever I want to no matter what the time is, without bothering anyone. I think that you also get to hear more of the nuances of the game sound by having it driven directly into your ears without losing it in the rest of the room. It's awesome for Halo, but has recently become more evident when I recently put in The Orange Box and Gears of War and was blown away by the sound.

Now back to the trick -

I am also Zune owner. When the new generation of Zune's came out, I did my research and took the plunge, opting against the against the Ipod classic. I have to say that overall I am a total Zune convert. I have an older Ipod and have no problems with it or the Apple software. The Zune just did so much more than what the ipod offered. Admittedly the software isn't as smooth as Apple's, but as you work with it you get to know its quirks and it's actually quite capable.

So this past Halo Friday, I connected my Zune to the 360 with the USB sync cable, and on the 360 dashboard flipped over to the media blade. I selected music, and there was Devil's Zune, listed and ready to go with no tweaking or installing needed. There in the interface were all of my playlists and music arranged by artist. I decided to create a playlist on the fly and within a few minutes I had about 70 songs ready to accompany a night of Halo 3 multiplayer mayhem! Some good songs for shooting your friends too - a good mixture of Rock, Techno, Metal, Industrial, all different kinds of blood pumping sounds. Then just hit shuffle, play, and start the game. As soon as the game boots up, there is your music playing in your ears.

Now this brings me back to the main point of my post. I NOW LOVE THIS WAY OF PLAYING MULTIPLAYER. The whole night, while engaged in pitched battles, I was jamming to some of my favorite tunes. I have to say that it really kept me in the game! And, I could still adjust the volume so that I could hear the game sound as well as the chat of my teammates. Finding that balance was really easy with the X1 headphones. And to bring this around full circle and why I explained my setup in the beginning, I think that using the headphones really made the experience what it was. The audio quality of the music right in my ears along with the game's sound effects and the voice chat, was not too much to handle and gave an overall entertainment experience that I wasn't prepared for. In a good way! I loved it! I can't wait 'till the next session so I can fire up the new multiplayer specific playlists that I've created. Mind you, I'm pretty sure this would totally ruin any single player game that you would play, as those are so scripted with content driven music and cutscenes, but in multiplayer where there is no soundtrack or in-game NPC exposition, it is a perfect fit!

I do suggest that you try it sometime, and if you don't have a Zune, I believe it also works with flash drives and can also pull media from other pc's on the network. If you don't play with headphones, but pipe the sound through your TV, I'm not sure that you would benefit from this neat trick, but if you use the hi-def sound from the Xbox or some good 5.1's, I'm willing to bet that it will sound pretty freaking cool.

Let me know if you try this. leave a comment and tell me what you think of the feature. I know that from now on, I'm only playing multiplayer to my own personal soundtrack!

Devil