Considering Online Trading as Online Gaming

This game's always been a little daunting to me, but here goes.

It may take a while to get anywhere as there's a pretty steep learning curve, but if I manage to get past it, it could be pretty rewarding. I heard about this game because people talk about it now and then, so I opened an account online and picked up some tutorials.

It does suck to start at the bottom though.

There's a few different servers to choose from, like TSX and NASDAQ, for example. I wonder what the differences are. I'll have to check out a few to get started.

Hopefully with this thinking methodology I've adopted, I can motivate myself. :D

Upsen.

EDF Insect Armageddon

This was a nice little budget title - I didn't expect that I would like it so much, but I do. The game is an excuse to let you shoot giant bugs and robots, and it does so in a really fun way.

I have been playing this for a whole month.

You get 4 different soldier/armour types to do the shooting with, and the game has 3 extended stages broken up into 5 levels each. Each level has multiple objectives in them for you to complete, such as destroying enemy carriers, anthills that spawn infinite numbers of ants or other nasties, and checking on various dropships and friendlies, as you fight the alien bugs.

The four soldiers armours are all pretty different, in effect 4 character classes:

• Battle - a tank type with good armour, a shield, and crappy weapons.
• Tactical - a pet type who drops turrets to do part of the fighting for him.
• Jet - a high mobility type that can hop and zip around the battlefield quickly
• Trooper - a standard soldier without the above special armours, but can do everything else faster or better -reloading, first-aid revives, running, dodging, bigger weapon selection.

I started off with a Tactical cause I liked the turrets for a bit of automatic firepower, but eventually I found that most of soldiers have some sort of auto-aiming shot anyways, so the turrets weren't really necessary. The first armour I got to level 8 (top level) was the Jet, and the Tactical is only slowly closing in at level 7. The other two I haven' really played much until the last week, but they each have their strengths

The weapons are pretty interesting too - there's all sorts of goodies from shotguns to missile launchers, fitting all sorts of play styles. The most notable of all of them are the Level 8 armour's weapons - they are called Pesticide guns, but they are more like clean nukes - you fire one, and everything in a 2 city block radius is vaporized (including other players) If a rifle does 400pts a shot, and a rocket launcher does 1500, these nukes do 500,000 points. That's enough to one-shot all the sub-boss type enemies, most of the boss enemies, and even the end boss will bite it in one if you manage to hit it between the eyes. (Or in a few shots if you use the nuke's splash radius damage.) This thing even permanently destroys anthills at a distance, when normally you have to fight your way up to a hill and plant an explosive charge on it.

The Battle gets a mortar version (arc fire)
Tactical gets a missile version (lockon)

Jet gets a sniper rifle (zoom in recommended)

Trooper gets a cannon version.

All of them are slow to recharge, and can't be sped up with an active reload.

The downside of this thing though, is that it's very easy to accidentally kill all the players on the map including yourself, resulting in a quick mission fail. The only player who might survive a nuke is the Battle armour tank guy, if he has his energy shield deployed and at full power, which is generally not the case.

Still, lots of fun, especially at it's price point.

Upsen.

What's coming up:

Traded in a bunch of older games and planning to pick up the following when they are out

• Catherine (got this now, kind of fun but not as fun as EDF right now)
• Gears of War 3 (September 20, 2011)
• Battlefield 3 (October 25, 2011)
• Modern Warfare 3 (November 8, 2011)
• Ghost Recon 4 (Some time in Q1 2012, ugh)

edit - wow there are a lot more titles too, though I'm not sure of them:

Guardian Heroes

Dead Island

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine

Gamma World: Alpha Mutation

Rage
Resident Evil 4 and Code Veronica HD

Halo Anniversary

Upsen.

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition

Over the past month I revisited Borderlands cause a few of my friends had picked up the Game of the Year edition that was recently released. Of course, it came at a time when I'd just wiped out my old saves from when I was previously playing, so I basically started over again. The Game of the Year Edition (GOTY) is the main game plus four DLC add-ons on a second disc. It raises the level cap to something like L68 or so, from all the DLCs combined.

I managed to crank a Siren from 1 to 55 or so pretty quickly, but I find myself playing a Hunter more right now, currently at L50. The Hunter definitely dies more than the Siren, but all you really lose is some credits, which you have way more than enough of at the higher levels. The Bloodwing action skill is fast charging even at the start, and very useful for dealing good damage without having to spend time aiming at anything, making for a much more laid back game. The hunter was kind of average until I managed to get enough skill points and the right COM unit to decrease the 28 second action skill recharge to a negligible amount of time, plus get multiple attacks going starting at L36-40.

If you play a Hunter, you probably know that the COM I'm using is a Ranger COM, which decreases the recharge time, increases the number of attacks the Bloodwing has, and increases team accuracy. Also, the mod has a team crit bonus +70% or so, which adds up to some serious extra damage backup from a revolver. I dont have any skill points assigned into any particular weapon at the moment, but I'll probably take the Carrion Call skill to use sniper fire to further decrease the recharge time. Mix in a fast firing sniper rifle, and I could probably fire off that Bloodwing pretty fast even against bosses.

A Ranger presses less buttons to get more done, I find, great for sweeping areas. I wonder how he'll do when he gets to Playthrough 2.5?

Stats for my Ranger COM Hunter at L40

Stats for my Ranger COM Hunter at L50

Anyways, a bit about the DLCs, aka Tall Tales by Marcus - most of these DLCs are presented as somewhat ridiculous stories that Marcus is telling a little kid.

Moxxi's Underdome:
The Bank is pretty useful, but not absolutely necessary, once you know how you are going to play your character. As for the Arena, I played the 4 basic intro level maps on a Siren with LD's Soldier, and found them to be kind of... long. You have to spend basically several hours of no-reward killing and not dying to get to the main levels, which are also XPless. It took LD and I 4 nights, one night for each map, to finish that. We haven't tried the major levels yet, but since we're both still in our 50s, we have a way to go levelling before we should really concentrate on this no-xp stuff.

General Knoxx's Secret Armory:
Knoxx's is a fun add-on with all the driving, new vehicles, and more Crimson Lance to fight. There's a number of new enemy types to fight so you get a little more variety than you do in the basic game - prisoners, midgets, elemental lance, and jetpackers. The armoury itself at the end sometimes gets glitched on the Marcus version of the mission, if you fall through the floor and take advantage of the chests, so apparently my Hunter is screwed until I can join someone's good unglitched version of the Marcus Sweep.

The Claptrap Robolution:

At the end of the main game, the INAC gets activated, and this DLC plays out what happens after it starts a revolution. Fun, over the top as always, though there is an annoying map called Sander's Gorge which can be kind of a maze. There are a number of Achievements in this DLC that are a pain to get, basically you will have to farm claptrap revolutionaries for a few nights until you get the items dropped, they are kind of rare. (Yes, annoying pizza slices, I"m looking at you.)

The Undead Island of Doctor Ned:

This is probably my favorite DLC, the zombies are a lot of fun to mow through. There are zombies, spitting zombies, zombie Lance, big tank zombies, zombie weapon chests, and even zombie claptraps (I'm just kidding about the claptraps) This DLC and it's achievements were pretty straightforward.

That's it, back to playing my Hunter!

Upsen.

Halo Reach: LASO Exodus

This week's LASO is Exodus - thankfully, there are no roomfuls of Elites in this one like last time in Long Night of Solace. I've been playing Borderlands instead of Halo recently though, so I'm probably going to be wrestling with the controls a bit. (like throwing a punch when I meant to zoom in on the scope.)

I'm probably going to give this a go on Friday morning since it's a day off. I gave an open invite to the usual bunch, wonder if anyone is up for it. :D

Upsen.

Tyrant guide here...

[...] You'll be granted a nice break from Elites, and instead, you'll be fighting Brutes. While they're certainly more numerous, due to their lack of shields and field ranks, you'll find that neither the Tilt nor Thunderstorm skull has any real effect on them at all, and when it comes to super-combines with needle-based weaponry, the Minors are still just as vulnerable on Mythic as they are on Legendary.

Halo Reach: LASO Long Night of Solace Fail

I tried this LASO over the weekend with DZ and LD. It was absolutely brutal in the 3 player game. I'd looked up the appropriate Tyrant guide for how to do the Mythic run, but we were very solidly trounced by the enemy control room near the end of the map.

The first part wasn't too hard, we basically sprinted up the left beach skipping the fight, and we got a hold of a rocket launcher and the sword as the guides suggested. However, I really wish we picked up a few more missiles, we didn't bother sticking around to pick up reloads. The flight section was laughably easy as well with 3 of us who knew our way around arcade style flying games.

The first part that started getting to be a problem for us was the enemy ship boarding. We were usually able to take out the 2 elite rangers that leap out to the top to greet us. On one try, a third one actually made it up to join us too. The problem was that everything would be on high alert at the bottom by the time we went in, (thanks a lot, marine support) and I think there were about 6 or 8 rangers in total in the main area. We probably died 50 times trying various methods of getting through this sequence, cheering whenever we managed to get a checkpoint farther in. In the end, we had to do the main part of the work with the one sword I picked up - we would loop around, plasma-fire and sword the rangers that jetted up to the upper walkway we were on. I had to save the rocket for breaching the entry to the shuttle bay room, cause there was one ranger with a bunch of hero grunts supporting him.

Once inside the shuttle bay, that was a painful experience too - in the end after clearing as much as we could, it took a suicidal run from DZ for the activation switch to open the bay doors for Noble-5 to come in. Lucky that we weren't required to kill the last 2 sniper rangers, they were so hard to kill.

Getting into the control room was hard but doable. The control room is where we were absolutely stuck. In the Mythic SLASO guide, the player was doing the game solo, meaning there were a few less foes. He also seemed to be a little better off on weaponry too. For our 3 player game though, we couldn't do an assassination run, something would ALWAYS see us. One time we managed to get in far enough to assassinate 2 of the 3 elites at the far end, including the BOB, but that was a one time fluke, I think. Also seeing as it was like 2am, we were not at our best performance any more. In the end after a few different tries at assassinations and just shooting our way through, we gave up in disappointment.

The night after, I tried it solo, but I was too bummed to really persist in finishing it, so after I got to the shuttle bay, I gave up and played some Borderlands instead.

One thing about it though, is that I managed to up my assassination count from about 60 to 120. As another note, our death count was about that too - 120. >_<

Also I killed so many marines (cause they kept gumming up our strategies) that my total score was zero. :P

Service Record

Allen.

Halo Reach: LASO Tip of the Spear

I ended up doing this one solo - this was the one where you have to fight your way across a battlefield, hop into a rocket warthog, and blaze your way across the map and take out a bunch of anti air cannons + their defenses. After that, you have to take out some sort of tower's defenses and shut down an enemy shield.

Initially, E called me up to do this one on a weeknight, so I figured I'd read up on it first before I tried it, to save some time. I looked at the Tyrant guide for info (I love the guy's video-clip chatter) and found a bunch of really nice time saving tips. No obvious cheating, like the way it was in Nightfall.

However E was totally jetlagged out from a trip by the time we were supposed to start, so I did the mission myself. It took a few tries, and I got it in about 2 and a half hours.