Been spending my Microsoft spacebucks lately. I bought The Ballad of Gay Tony for GTA IV when it came out and have completed it since. It's pretty good. I love the new cars, the crazy dancing and the new missions. If you liked The Lost and Damned, you'll probably like this as well. The achievements are a bit more painful this time though, I think I'll struggle to get 100% in every mission, but since it adds replayability I won't complain.

I also bought the second episode of Wallace & Gromit Episodes today. Didn't have points for the third and fourth episodes, but I will eventually. I usually don't play these kinds of point and click games, but I find Wallace and Gromit to be extremely charming. Cheese!

Forza 3 is here at last, and I picked up the limited collector's edition that I preordered. Which is funny, since GameStop doesn't really allow preorders on LCEs (at least here in Norway), which the clerk pointed out. Either way I got it. When I came home I had codes for GameStop cars, limited edition content and the standard free DLC!

Anyway, I've played around 10 races or so and am digging this game. It's great for car enthusiasts, especially when you're a VIP member and get the cars like Ferrari 430 Scuderia and Aston Martin DBS that "regular mortals" don't get. Graphics are awesome, not completely photo-realistic, but still mountains better than Forza 2. The community stuff is sweet, supporting screenshots and videos and uploads for both. Only thing is the servers seemed broken for a while, I had to do five tries for my video to upload and the official site gave error messages a lot, but finally it worked. Haven't tried the 720p setting yet, but 360p was decent. Maybe I'll make a montage! But I won't review it, so suffice to say I can see why it has a Metacritic score of 92/100.

The LCE is pretty pimp, for a lack of a better word. You get a 2GB USB memory stick, which I love since I didn't have any already, and a keychain with a fancy Forza 3 metal piece. Odd thing is that the keychain is too thick for the USB memory stick to fit...

In conclusion, the game is great, the LCE is pimp and look forward to screenshots (like the one above) and videos!

So I bought FIFA 10 yesterday. Oh boy... Now I remember how much I played FIFA 08. FIFA games don't stop, and with the new Be a Pro and Manager features I'll be playing this game a lot.

I decided to skip FIFA 09 since I thought it would be better to "save it", and I'm glad I did. FIFA 10 is so much more awesome than FIFA 08. More streamlined gameplay, more stuff to do... And the achievements are much better this time around, which of course is important to me. 50 000 gamerscore soon, by the way.

All the EA site stuff from FIFA 08 has apparently carried over, so you can check out my profile here. I have some FIFA 08 and FIFA 10 videos uploaded. Still trying to get a gameface, but apparently the GameFace creator is extremely overloaded from the 1.7 million people who bought FIFA 10 last week and won't let me. I named my Be a Pro character Benny and he's playing as an ST for Real Madrid. Quite a nice start of your career, I would say. I'm playing with Real Madrid in Manager Mode and upgrading my character by doing "accomplishments", which is a form of in-game achievements that grant stat upgrades and some traits. I really love that, and you start as a half-decent character (70). Benny is a bit slow, so having him in the front of crazy fast people like C. Ronaldo is kinda weird, but it's getting there.

Funny thing is, I really don't pay attention to football in real life...

Picked up my preorder of Halo ODST last Thursday and have been playing it since. I played through the campaign in a couple of days. It's fairly short, but with the achievements there are a lot of replayability. There's a lot of counter achievements ala Gears of War 2 where you need to do something in a single level or specific level enough times. I haven't gotten all achievements in Halo 3, but in ODST it seems more likely, even though there are some challenging Vidmaster achievements.

Overall, since I am a fan of Halo 3, I like this game. I played it on Heroic and I definitely felt weaker than Master Chief, but there is still the same recharge shield mechanic. Ammo is a lot more sparse and you'll find yourself scrounging for the Carbine and so on. I won't turn this into a review, so to sum it up I'll say that I am very happy with my purchase, but the singleplayer was not as epic as I wanted. I did not care for the other characters. The dialogue between characters, the love romance between Buck and Dare, is stupid. I'm the last to complain about story, because I rarely care, but having played every FPS Halo game so far, I'm so used to shooting Brutes, Jackals and Grunts. A better story and more enemies (though it might not fit the Halo canon) would have helped it, especially with the campaign being rather short. Then again, playing the game again to find audio files and get achievements on a lower difficulty made it a lot more fun for me, so maybe you shouldn't play it on Heroic first as I did. Then again it's fun because you're more like Master Chief, and maybe that's what I really want.

Firefight is great, giving you a typical Horde-ish mode, but with the gameplay elements of Halo that makes it fast-paced and focused on multikills. I'm also a fan of Halo 3's multiplayer, so it's great that the game comes with a disc with the Halo 3 multiplayer and all maps. Not only do I get three new maps, but I also get to delete the old maps from my HDD and play them from the disc instead. My only problem is that the two discs aren't treated as two discs should be. The second disc is just placed right on top of the other, and being very OCD with scratches I really don't like that...

I guess this kind of turned into a review, but hey. Reading is fun.

Oh that's right, I bought new games last friday. Kind of been busy playing those games, so I forgot to make one of these blog posts....

DiRT 2

I loved the first DiRT game. Just something about going 100 through a zigzaggy forest without crashing is a lot of fun to me. And the interior view added loads of immersion on top of it. The second iteration focuses on X-Games a bit more, which I don't necessarily like, but it still maintains those traditional rally aspects. And the game looks so gorgeus! They improved on multiplayer as well, but I only played one match online so far and won pretty easily since everybody else wrecked... I like how you wait for the other racers to go first like in a proper event. I've played this many hours already and there is still stuff to do. I'm used to sim racing and arcade racing, but rally racing is probably what I enjoy the most.

Guitar Hero 5

Look, I played Guitar Hero World Tour to death. I got it in January and have gotten to rank 41 by then. Now this new one comes along, and I don't want to play World Tour again, ever. Guitar Hero 5 improves on World Tour in so many ways, and since you can import both DLC and a portion of the disc songs from World Tour, there is even less incentive for me to go back. It's so much more streamlined, both in the multiplayer and the regular career. I love the new design and the improved graphics, I love the ridiculously varied soundtrack (Public Enemy feat Zakk Wylde, you say?). The only reasons I'm not playing this game, is a) because I have stuff to do and b) because I destroy my fingers. Having played GH so long, my fingers can take a lot of abuse, but seeing how I've played maybe 300 songs since Friday I am pushing my limits and then some. It's fun, though.