TGD Weekly Update (12/09/10) – Bip. Bap. BAM!

“Ripoff” is what many a Bungie fan would be humiliatingly shouting upon reading the title of this golden steed. How DARE you abuse TGD! Yes, we know that we’re a site in the making, but face it – we ain’t done bad for a blog that came out around two weeks ago. Give us time, and the quality of our articles should be slowly climbing up the golliath, that is the Everest quality mountain. I, for a fact, plan to give the team a few English lessons. Disgraceful*.

Anyway, back to the rip-off thing. If you understand, we sort-of needed a weekly article like this to boost our site’s performance. The reason, we’ll come back to later; so keep reading, mah boi. Not that we don’t get enjoyment out of it – I’m actually smiling while typing up these witty phrases, that seem much like lame jokes, even if a lot of backspace-mashing sessions were involved. I’ve spent a lot of time on this boy, so please – the least you can do is actually read. It WOULD be nice to comment, or even Tweet if you’re generous (*hint*). Unless you’re a trolling bee-tard, then I advise that you jog on, mate.

So, please, sit back and enjoy, you spoiled word muncher.

*Jokin’.

Lazy Arses

Okay, we can all not-so-proudly admit that we’ve been a bunch of fat slobs this past week. Not many articles going up there, right? Yep, we’re utterly ashamed of ourselves, and we can’t be apologetic to all of you lovely readers enough.

Or, at least, that would be the easy way out.

Some of you would be wanting a pure explanation for this mysterious tomfoolery. One minute, we were posting articles every day. What, happened, then? I’ll tell you what – some of us, frankly, still have a lot to learn about…well…everything. Okay, I’ll be brutally honest; the entire team (excluding David) are still in education. Shocker, isn’t it, that this idea got off the ground in the first place, when you keep that in mind. Want more peculiar facts? For the factoids, then.

BACKWARDS LOGIC WARNING! Despite being one of the most lingually fluent members on the team (self-proclaimed, I know, but see for yourself), I’m also one of the youngest. No, seriously. Achievement unlocked! I’m not going to reveal my age to anyone in a million years, so anyone ‘interested’ shouldn’t get their hopes up. Also, keep in mind that I don’t tolerate any form of patriotism geared towards myself. Or you’ll be slapped in the cheek, and forced to make me a homous sandwich. Scared, are you?

Glitch-tacular

To boot off this weekly slice of awesome cake, I’d like to share a personal experience of my last week, on Xbox LIVE, with word wh…eaters like you and Sonny Jim in the corner over there. The title sort-of gives this one away, but please hold in there. This one’s a huge crack baby. After reading this next section, you may want to personally come trodding round to my home in order to give me a lovely boot up the ass, claiming that it was fake. But, seriously, this is a true story. If you make threats to come round to my house and etcetra, I’ll ban your IP address from this site. Shishka**-like behaviour will be deployed, sadly, but it’s necessary.

A few days ago, I was delving in to a nice game of Halo 3: ODST Firefight, on Heroic difficulty. This had nothing to do with THAT*** achievement, as I was dropping in solo, but rather because – shock horror – I LIKE ODST**** Firefight. Do I hear boo-ing over there? Reach will arrive soon to NOM your mouth clean out. Going on, I was enjoying myself for a few rounds, when, out of nowhere (promise), THAT achievement popped up. Properly. By now, my jaw dropped down to hell.

Not surprisingly, Bungie.net wouldn’t lift an eyelid to the irrationality of it all, and wouldn’t let me claim my Recon. However, just one hour ago from typing “Ripoff”, a Bungie server switch, focused on supporting Halo: Reach’s ever impending release, dented a colossal hole in the Vidmaster-Verification system, letting me claim my shiny helmet in the process. Some of you have reason to be as fist-clenching as you are now, knowing that someone inadvertently glitched the masterpiece up as opposed to all of your hard work. On the contrary, whoop-de-doo, there was nothing I could physically do about it. Case closed? I think so.

**Shishka, known in person as Chad Armstrong, is a Bungie employee who is known to be extremely temperamental. See him in a Matchmaking game? Let him win. Don’t send him any messages. Don’t make fun of him. And, whatever you do, don’t teabag him. Otherwise, he may bring out his feared perma-hammer. Ironically, if he notices this block of text, I am a dead man.
***If you don’t know about THAT achievement, go to school.
****Only one of those words (or abbreviations) was meant to be in capitals. Grammar complications meant that it looks a little differently.

Wordsmiths

Of course, a bee has got to make us some honey, or it would be exterminated for it’s rowdy, stinging attitude. Same with the weekly update – we’ve got to tell you something in relevance to you, or we fear that some of you may launch a hate campaign against us for informal, chatty writing on a gaming blog^. Just so we aren’t eventually murdered by the community’s back-hand sword, it would be our pleasure (or, rather, hardship) to go and spill the beans of what those eyes at the front of your head will be having for dinner in a matter of time. List, please?

• For starters, I’ve already got a review for the ever-so-underrated Blur (X360). Maybe I can actually change some people’s opinions, for once. Oh…wait, I’ve done that MANY times on Twitter.
• Continuing with the theme of oh-so-selfish Yours Truly, I will most likely be the first to lay my hands on the Limited Collector’s edition of Reach. It’s customary for the biggest Halo nerd of the team, even if all of us adore it without question. After playing for a few hours, I’ll be writing up a short article on my First Impressions on the game. And, believe me, they’re going to be spicay.
• We’ve got FIVE ‘What-to-expect’ articles on the plate. Two by Tommay W (the marmite FPS Medal of Honor, and the sequel to his secretly-favourited^^ game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed), another adventure-duo by Duggie^^^ (Fable 3 and Fallout: New Vegas count as adventure titles, IMO), and even one by rare-but-special Carnage Cazza^^^^ (about the musical genius known as Rock Band 3, which aims to sweep away Beethoven once and for all). Prepare for a Preview onslaught.
• Duggie’s prepping up that ever-so-trusty list of those technical tidbits hitting the streets this month. Let me just pop in that this month, seriously, has a fine Italian^^^^^-quality selection that even manages to overcome the joy of the Big Brother house exploding on fire^^^^^^ .
• Bonus Round. ALL CHANCES, ON. PRIZE, ON.
  Hosted by Carnage, as ever.
• Last but not least, Wheely Boy has some of his thoughts to share with you on the dying-but-not-dead gaming phenomenon, referred to by many as PC gaming. I bet this one was inspired by that Quake LIVE review I did before. *hint*

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, tuck in!

^We’re not stereotyping you. Promise.
^^Thank my Twitter psychologist.
^^^My favourite title for Nick. A few of my mates called one of my college teachers the ‘zact same thing a while back.
^^^^SURNAME PUN INCOMING!
^^^^^Talking of the boot, I ordered an Italian version of Halo PC, JUST for the Reach plate and the Custom Edition. Yet, I ain’t a fanboy.
^^^^^^At least, I HOPE that’s what happened.
“See what I did there?
“”Pun-tastic.

SongThrush Woes

All of us here in the secondary dimension have had a few unfortunate setbacks in the land of annoying-ass birds this week. If you ever meet us on the magical service, please, for the love of god – don’t have a Timmy with us. All of us, apart from Wheely Bin, have all had some sort of emotional problem throughout the entire week, making the past Sun-ta-Sun one of the gloomiest that the team has ever witnessed. Yes, even I had problems at one moment.

If you’re not brain dead, please respect our staff. What the trains say.

Reach, Reach, Reach…

On the bright, sunny, Hello-Kitty side of things, every one of us – including that guy on wheels – is currently stoked about laying our sweaty palms on what has to be one of the Games of Our Year, Halo: Reach. Yes, we already knew it would be fantastic. What else would you expect? Sheesh, you need to relax at the Gay Bar with Abe Lincoln.

Metacritic has allowed us to make this merry statement come true, in a flicker of light. Our next hope, ladies and gentlemen, is to actually feature on the website. Dear Mr. Critic…

“I swear these sections are getting shorter.”

And, indeed they are. Time to ramp it up!

Glitch-tacular, TWO!

Following on from that topic that we lovingly slipped in earlier about my fortunately-successful-yet-diabolical road to undeserved Recon, we’ve got another Glitchmaster tale from the Halo ring to fire up. What the naked eye may have picked up, however`, is that I’m“ not alone for this side of the story. For the first time ever, in a glitch-related or…bstacle of text, you even get to say hello to good ol’ Duggie and Wheely. How nice of me! Remember to send me some alcohol liquorice sweets in return!

Now, I bet that at least one numpty laying their eye on this prize“` has at least one achievement still to screw over in Halo 3, my second““ greatest Xbox 360 game of all time““`. One of those achievements would be the supposedly ‘burly’ Vidmaster Challenge: Annual achievement. The cheevo is vital for your seven-a-recon, and is famed all over the Interwebs for supposedly being a tough nut to crack. ‘Cept, it’s more like one of those burly bullies at your college that threatens to ravage your heart and soul, even if he couldn’t hurt a fly. That description just so happens to be left wide open for truth stamping, after a little Campaign game that myself, one of my mates called Jake¬, and those two prats I squeezed in earlier, faced up to.

ALL SKULLS, OFF. IRON, ON. LEGENDARY, ON. BEGIN.

Countless times have I heard cases of people smashing up their controllers of this suspect, even if it’s only worth one of your seven, and jack gee-ess. Even the universally-accepted Anoj, who runs the behemoth known as the Top Ten Series, needs it done. If Anoj fails at it, then surely WE would give up after se7en hours, am I correct? I shamefully lost to my own game there, and in gigantic numbers to flash alongside and get me even more p…ersonally angry.

We completed the entire attempt, successfully, in the heart-clenching time of 19 minutes. If you just fainted, I’ll take care of all the medical tripe. Demand an explanation, squeamish child? Well, us Fantastic four¬¬ had a purely original, copyrighted-by-Vortex approach to the camper-dancer-attitude task. I’ll spill my cuppa-tea on this copyrighted approach, but, whatever happens, take note of the word ‘copyrighted’. If you violate it, I’ll get HM Brenda¬¬¬ to spin round your hideout and kick you in the a…no, sorry, I can’t think of a more humane word for that. Arse.

One more thing. The person who comes up with the best ‘The day I failed at Annual’ comment will recieve a special surprise.

– MintagedVortex’s Clearly Mintaged ‘Annual’ Plan

• First off, keep that last paragraph in mind.
• You DO need two nade-jumping crouch-jumpers for the attempt. Call those two tryhards ‘Group A’. Call the lame ones ‘Group B’.
• When you start the game, make sure that one member of Group A is the party leader. And don’t forget that Iron skull. On Legendary. Brain-dead.
• Group A, pick up some good, lasting weapons from the downed wreck behind you.
• Tod on for the first section. Easy. But don’t waste your nades, or you’ll have to restart.
• At the first proper part, Group B should ALWAYS stay back at that cavern, being well good ass-kickers to the hordes of muntants wanting to transport you to Resident Evil.
• With the backup of the lame ones, Group A should start running over to the West side of the snowy-ground (WITHOUT using any ammo), utilising a frag grenade at the land’s end to skillfully grenade jump (with an added crouch) up to the first tower. Me and Duggie practised this all day long before the attempt, for your useless information. We also practised our English stereotypes.
• When up on the first platform, the two should quickly switch over to their plasma grenade, and use one at the south edge of floor one to grenade jump up to this ridiculously wide slope, located slap-bang in the middle of the structure. Walk up it.
• If the lame ones have gone to sleep, politely tell them that their show’s over. The 3pic ones still need backup.
• Once A have reached the top, DON’T JUMP DOWN. Instead, jump over to that slope against the west side of the top wall, so you can easily navigate to Sgt. Johnson’s cliffside. From there, the two players can take out the red dots all by themselves, using the back of the hinge to take cover at any time. They’ll rack up Checkpoints during the process, so the lame ones should be thankful for the fact that Group A are undeniably better than themselves.
• Once you’ve cleared all of the enemies, jump down, and continue in to the control room.
• If you played the level before, you know what to do now. If not, let me just say that you’re about to witness MAJOR spoilers.
• Once you storm out the backside of the control room with Pride an’ Joi, take a detour to the East, then jump down behind the ramp to find a set of lovely ghosts. There are four for all of you, so don’t be whining.
• Continue the mission as per normal, in the ghosts. A few things you need to bear in the mind’s arsenal:
• DON’T speed along the cliffside in the ghosts. Or you’ll get in to a Checkpoint deadlock¬¬¬¬.
• If any of you decides to take the Warthog, prepare to get mauled. You screwed up the entire try, and have to restart it. Well done! Want cake?
• Assuming you were kept glued in to the ghosts (not literally) like a good Timmy, get in a line together, and complete the Ghost run by following on in a line. Keep together, and sort yourselves out if you can’t. it’s best to have a veteran of the mission at the front, and a keen eye at the back, so you can all keep in control.
• Thus, it shouldn’t be long until you get an ‘Achievement Unlocked’ message. A word of warning – don’t rush the ending cutscene, or it may be the case, like one of my attempts, where the cheevo didn’t unlock at all. Patience is a virtue.

`Or not.
“Who else would you expect? Carnage?
“`The article, not the achievement itself.
““Given my ‘Halo fan’ trait, you need to study more English if you can’t deduce the first.
““`XBOX 360. No ‘Greatest Game Ever’ debates. At all.
¬Not Jack, the guy who SUCKED at doing Annual. Fans of Achievement Hunter will see the nod.
¬¬We are.
¬¬¬No offence to our queen. We ALL obey stereotypes. It’s the law.
¬¬¬¬Getting a Checkpoint AS someone is dying, and cannot save themselves. It happened as someone was careening off the cliff in one of my attempts.

Mod-tacular

My first ever article on TGD was all about the splendid joy (*sarcasm*) of hacking. A select bunch of smart alecs among our IT crowd would have deduced my hate for the sport. An even smaller select bunch of that select bunch¬¬¬¬¬, with a population of zero, would have deduced alongside that despite my hate for hacking, I love modding.

Before I delve deeper unto the Breach, let me get a perfectly clear FACT straight. Modding, and Hacking, are DIFFERENT. Get that, fifth graders? Hacking, is the act of maliciously tinkering around with a piece of hardware. Modding, is the same, minus the ‘maliciously’, and replacing ‘hardware’ for ‘software’.

On something the sixth, olde timeys will recall Micro$oft rolling out a rather helpful~ Xbox 360 firmware update that let you use a humble USB flash drive as an Xbox storage device. Subsequently, a mammoth of a modding program, designed for the 360, updated it’s own build; allowing the exploration of X360 USB drives to retrieve saved files from a stick. That program was referenced to as Modio, a staple in the books of many a modder alike.

Interetsed, I took a brave new path and specced~~ Modio out with all of it’s flesh. The tool was tricky to work with at first, but in a matter of minutes, a gateway to new possibilities that had already blown away my eyes (a blackout triggered at that precise moment) strained open. I, as a trusty Xb0x LIVE player, stretched up the possibilities of this newfound plus, and downloaded my favourite XBL gamerpicture so far, along with creating H3 gametypes with secret perks. By ‘secret perks’, refer to the power of creating Forge and insta-respawn gametypes. Call me chuffed.

There’s a jungle I’ve yet to snoop around, but keep in mind that I’m not going to achievement modding for my life. That would just show me up as sadistic, and a jerk. It also rules out any suspicions that could be arousing out there, about me possibly modding that last achievement. Trust me, it was GLITCHED. I’ve got the Unlock date to prove my taunts, which is far from orthodox. Along the way, this got my mates (including some members of TGD, not mentioning any names) to give more than a s…pade about the hullabaloo. See? My persuasive powers will soon better those of Stewie Griffin.

¬¬¬¬¬Double Something?
~A Micro$oft first.
~~I made up that word. My bad!

Reach, Reach, Reach…TWO!

I understand that there’s been a lot of Halo talk in this article. My ponderings?

BRING ON TUESDAY!

Duggie’s Part

I’ve took my valuable time to mash some keyboard keys in the honour of YOU. It’s time to let someone else take over. Duggie?

Thanks Joe, but please in the future, don’t call me Duggie. Anyhoo, time for the business at hand. Which will be a bit of a change of pace from this generally Halo centered update. First off, I want you loyal twitter followers to think back a few weeks to our self-proclaimed “Halo Friday” It was the first Friday since launch and around that period of time you may of noticed I mentioned a surprise. Well that involved me and my good friend Tom Carnohan. Basically, we know that everyone likes competitions right? Well Tom’s PS3 died roughly around the time of E3. He now owns an Xbox and has decided to be very generous. Yes we are having a competition. You will be gettign the chance to win Guitar Hero games for the PS3. Look out on Friday for that.

I would also like to point to the a little box on the side bar to the right of this post. We like to call that box the contact box. It has an email in it which we’ve never been contacted on, which slightly saddens me. So I have an idea. This will also tak advantage of our Facebook and Twitter account (also in the sidebar). A little round of asking us members of TGD questions, which I will collate the answers into a video. I shall give you say 2 weeks, so on the 26th September, I will stop accepting questions and make the video that week. And now that I’ve done my little bit for this update I am done.

The Best Video Ever

Hey, everyone, thanks for wasting ten minutes of your life on reading this HUUUUGE update. And, Nick, sure thing. As you can tell, we’ll be doing this every week (either on Saturday or Sunday), hence the title. Please comment below on your thoughts, and also, tell us about what you did when you failed Annual. Best one gets a prize, guru!

And, because you’ve seen such a nice Timmy, we think you deserve a treat. Here, is the best video ever. LATER!