StoredGrunt's Halo Blarg

Time for a Decision & An Announcement

2012-02-10T23:05:00.001-06:00

Not to sound dramatic with the title of this post, especially since I hate Internet drama, this is more so about what direction that my Halo "career" could go. Along with some other things as well.As I'm sure you all can tell (even if you just found this blog today) I am a huge Grifball nut. The past few days I have been looking at GrifballHub's website and reading over the new stuff relating to the new season of the GGL (Good Games League); in that time I have also been thinking of how cool it would be to play in at least one season of the GGL. I also discovered that they have a list that people can sign up to be what they call "Guest Players". I've noticed that they mostly consist of current league players but they mention that since the GGL is a recreational league anyone can throw their name on that list so long as they can abide by league rules. When I saw that list I thought about signing up for that list, but then I had a dose of reality that made me realize my schedule would not permit it right now. Then a couple days later I was back to doing the same thing. After doing some extra reading and finding a topic in their forum that was for people looking for a team and for teams looking for players, I came to the decision that next season I will throw my name in the hat and see if I can land a spot on a team. I know I had said that my schedule will be busy, but by the time the next season of the GGL kicks off with sign-ups I will be finishing up what is tying me down now.
So there you have it, during the Spring or Summer (I don't remember exactly when the next GGL season is) I will at least try out for a team. Whether or not I make it onto any team is a completely different story.

Speaking of Grifball, I have a few games that I recently played in Reach of it.
We lost a person from the start, but we had control of the game pretty much.

Dibs on Defender! I totally called it!

Good game blue team....ouch.

Bomb meet face, face meet bomb.

And just for kicks, my very first game of Grifball in Reach.

I'll close out this short post (Hey! It's late here) with some clips from Grifball that I have taken recently. They are rendered so if you have Silverlight (I think that's what it is) installed and up-to-date you can watch it right on Bungie's site. If you don't you can either download it to watch next time you boot up Reach or I am hoping to have them uploaded to YouTube in the near future.
I'll first start off with my most recent favorite.

"Be vewy quiet, I'm hunting Gwif."
Hehe, I love doing that. I also kind of did it once before in Reach and once in Halo 3.

Nothing too special honestly, but I really don't think that I was supposed to get the bomb...
Yeah so that's what I believe (at least they used to call it that) a Grifumble (might be two "f's" not sure) recovered by the opposing team. What I believe was supposed to happen was the guy I killed was actually the one supposed to get the bomb while the guy that dropped it was supposed to come after me and kill me. It seems that something went wrong...somewhere.

"I got a clear path to plate, all I gotta do is kill this dude that spawned."
"No you don't."
Yeah, so that was me coming off the spawn. Nothing too impressive again but I at least saved us from getting scored against.

Planting Fail!
Yep, I failed at planting the bomb. I would have been fine if I didn't jump. I always jump though, it's like a force of habit...or nature whichever. Either way it didn't work too well.

Haha! I lied! A quick update on my quest for 20k Gamerscore. I am currently sitting at 19,571 which if you do some simple math (20,000 - 19,571 = 429) well would you look at that! Only 429 away from my personal goal. I still need to finish the Gears 2 campaign and do some clean up on some easy achievements, plus finish both Dead Island and Bulletstorm (still...) which all should net me some extra points. I am also still going to try to earn all the achievements for Halo Anniversary with Storm; though it looks like some of them might give us some troubles.
There you have it everyone, I will try to get a full fledged post out sometime soon. No promises but I have been trying to keep this place updated on a regular basis.

Oh Internet, You Amaze Me

2012-01-26T22:14:00.000-06:00

This first paragraph is most certainly a rant so you can probably skip to the second paragraph if you don't want to read my ramblings. I cannot bring myself to the understanding of how someone can think a game that has a bug or glitch that erases your story progress completely game of the year material. Recently there was a thread in a group I am in on Bungie.net that was in regards to I believe IGN's GOTY article, which they deemed Portal 2 as theirs. One person in that thread seems intent on trying to convince me that I am wrong in my ways of agreeing with their decision and not jumping on the "Skyrim is teh best gaem evar!!1!" bandwagon. Okay, so that may not be their main goal but it sounds like it based on the way their posts read. I guess I just can't grasp my mind around the fact that someone can think a game is GOTY material when it has a serious bug that erases your story progress.I know in the past I have said the no game is perfect, and I still stand behind that. I can understand it, if it is something on a little smaller scale such as a character disappearing randomly. But take and ask this question to yourself:
Do you really want to spend 100+ hours playing a game only to save and quit one night then come back the following day to find everything, all your leveled up skills, weapons etc. gone? While you ponder that, I shall move onto the next topic.

A couple days ago I finished my first season in the Dynasty I had started. I finished the season at 14-0 and took the team I always use to the National title game. I bet you can take one guess as to who it is. Can't guess? It's the Fighting Illini. I found out that I evidently have the game on the lowest difficulty...which explains why I can go undefeated through the season. That does not explain however why I have troubles with Purdue, Penn State and Michigan each time I play them. At first it was only Penn State that would give me fits (you know, the magic player that would come out of nowhere and sack you or come up with an interception) but now it seems that Purdue and Michigan can be added to that list. I played Purdue at home in the (with "e" being stressed) Memorial Stadium and they managed to pick me off three times and score on twice of said three times.
I faced Michigan twice. Once in the regular season and they gave me probably the worst trouble. I thought this game was going to be whose kicker would be the best. In the first three quarters it was each team trading a field goal. It was only until the fourth quarter where we picked them off and returned it for a touchdown.
Since I did rely heavily on my running game throughout the first season I ended up getting my starting running back in the race for the Heisman Trophy. Unfortunately he kept getting injured in our last few games so his average yards per game went down plus we had a bye week. In the end the quarterback of Houston won. I'm not disappointed really, except for the fact that I lost out on a 15 point achievement.

Speaking of achievements, I'm only 599 points away from breaking into the 20K Gamerscore club. I'm hoping that with finishing up Bulletstorm and Dead Island I'll be able to snag at least another 100-150 more points. I need to go back and check to see which ones I can get easily. Plus this weekend I am going to pick up Gears of War 2 (hey, it's only ten bucks!) and from asking someone I know on Twitter what it's like they said it has easy achievements. As I told them, I'll take easy achievements any day. I've also thought about picking up CoD4 (aka the first Modern Warfare) however I'm still on the fence about that one. The only thing I would be playing would be the campaign for it as I am hearing the multiplayer is chock full of modders and hackers. I'm just not sure honestly.

I leave you with this short post, but at this time I don't have much more to add to this post. Hopefully I can finish Bulletstorm up this weekend and grab some more achievements in one of three games.

Island of Paradise

2012-01-16T21:33:00.000-06:00

My first post since I finished the "Bowl Bound" series, granted it is a tad later than the few days afterwards. But hey, why should it be any different from before right? During the time I was doing the Bowl Bound series I got a couple new games. One of which I already used for the previously mentioned series, NCAA Football 12. I haven't played a lot of it to form a solid opinion of it, from what I have played of it though I like it much better than NCAA Football 10. I like the stadium introductions for home teams, it actually feels like a Saturday morning college football game. I started the usually dynasty on it as well, so far I like how you have to be more involved in recruiting and the like. Needless to say though, I still kind of suck at doing that.
The other game I got was Dead Island. Picture Left 4 Dead meeting Fallout in terms of RPG/Shooter combo. I've played Fallout so I know how the RPG elements work in that game and it is rather....slow with how quickly you rank up. I'll admit I was expecting the same thing with Dead Island when I first found out that it was going to have that element. When I started playing it I was proved wrong in my assumption (see, they're not always that great) and was leveling up rather quickly. I love how huge the game world is, I am about halfway through the game and still have yet to fully explore the island itself. And (Spoiler Alert!) since that is the case I made into the city, which might be larger than the island itself, but I still have yet to explore it completely either. Needless to say, if you enjoy exploring large maps and hunting for hidden items this game will certainly cure that itch for a while. I never really used to explore the maps until I was watching Storm do it in Bioshock and saw that he was finding all these cool things hiding away in dark little corners. I went and played later on and did the same and found all this cool stuff that Storm had previously ran across. Not that I would ever commit some of those spots to memory and go back to them when I played...nope, never.

The other game I have been playing recently is Bulletstorm. It's a fun game I like it from what I have played of it. If a sequel is ever released there is some work that should be done to the basic gameplay and I'm sure the developers would do that. They do know how games work after all. There are times where you are fighting an enemy and all of sudden you glitch through the floor and can't do anything. Or there's the time where the "sidekick" walks over a bridge and starts to float towards the sky only to get caught in a tree. Yeah so the game isn't perfectly polished, but it's still fun to play nonetheless. The leash is really sweet, I like how you can yank enemies towards you and kill them that way. Or if you want you could leash them your way and then kick them into the nearest cactus...or over the closest ledge. Or even back in the direction he came from and back into the group of enemies he was around.

On a quick closing note, I am currently sitting at 19,091 Gamerscore. If you remember a while ago I started a quest for 10,000 Gamerscore, currently my new goal is for 20,000. It might take a while, but I'm sure I'll eventually make it. There you have it, a somewhat short post but I am hoping to have posts out on a regular basis. So until next time!

Bowl Bound: BCS National Title Game

2012-01-09T17:15:00.001-06:00

If you've been following from the beginning or just stumbled upon this recent I would like to say thank you for putting up with my, at times, rather inconsistent rambling with the "commentary" on some of these games. So quick tally update, since I didn't manage to get the sim going for the GoDaddy.com bowl last night that moves my record to 16-15-3. This game tonight will give me either a winning record or I'll split the record in half. With that said, I present to you my simulated "prediction" for the BCS National Title Game, which pits the number one ranked LSU Tigers and the second ranked Alabama Crimson Tide. Both of which also reside from the SEC.

I think this game has a liking for Alabama, both times that Achievement Hunter did a prediction on both times LSU and Alabama met, it picked the Crimson Tide to win...and the same here as you can see. By a rather large margin at that. With that said, we will find out later tonight who actually wins. I'm going to say LSU personally, but I've been wrong before.

Update: And with that, the collegiate football season is over. A whopping 21-0 shutout by Alabama to cap off the season. My final record for the season is 17-15 with three games being forfeited. Until next year!

Bowl Bound: Cotton Bowl and BBVA Compass Bowl

2012-01-06T12:22:00.001-06:00

Quick update on the tally. So...hehe, how about that Orange Bowl? My prediction was horrendously wrong. Clemson was supposed to win, but lost 70-33 to West Virginia. After that I am currently sitting at 15-14 with the AT&T Cotton Bowl tonight and the final three games coming over the next three days.

This is the Cotton Bowl, Arkansas and Kansas State. It was a close game, played defense heavily in the first quarter. For some reason it seemed that Kansas State could not have been stopped in the second. Then Arkansas came out after the half and tied the game up early in the fourth. However, KState threw a nice pass and took the lead again. After that it was a quick three and out for Arkansas and clock management once they got the ball back.

This is the BBVA Compass Bowl which takes Southern Methodist and Pittsburgh. Not sure about this game, we'll see tomorrow how it turns out though. The final two games will be posted most likely tomorrow as well. After that, the usual musings of a Grunt will resume.

Bowl Bound: Orange Bowl

2012-01-04T18:03:00.001-06:00

Bowl season is slowly coming to an end. Only four more games after tonight. With that said I shall give a quick tally update and the results of the Discover Orange Bowl. After last night's Sugar Bow, which was Michigan and Virginia Tech I am now at 15-13. Luckily Michigan pulled it out with a field goal in overtime. They saved my record and gave the Big Ten conference it's fourth bowl win this season.... With that said, scoreboard!

I'm pretty sure Clemson can win this game. Granted I have said that in the past and been wrong. I can't say much about the game, it was rather quiet and uneventful. Clemson had a chance to go up two scores early but failed to convert at the one yard line on fourth and goal. I also am getting a tad bit creeped out by the break dancing mascots...seriously stop it!

As I posted in my last post, my usual posts will resume at the end of this week hopefully, or by the start of next week at the latest. I'm hoping to have some more play time for Dead Island under my belt and hope to get a post about it out, plus the awesome shenanigans that resulted from a recent play through of both Mercenaries 2 and Just Cause 2.

Bowl Bound: Update

2012-01-03T19:42:00.000-06:00

I was busy today and didn't get around to simulating tonight's Sugar Bowl with Michigan and Virginia Tech, so I'll take a stab in the dark and guess who will win. Michigan better win, the Big Ten needs it otherwise this bowl season will have been basically a bust for the conference. Out of the ten teams that were going to games this year only three have won their games. I honestly don't know if they will win or not, but it would be nice.

Update of the tally after last nights' games. Almost went zero for six and I thought I would; luckily South Carolina and Oregon pulled it out to beat their respective teams. When I was 12-9 moving into yesterday, I am now at 14-13. Yeah, yesterday was a pretty bad day for those predictions.

If you are stopping by my blog and know what I have done in the past, those posts will resume by the end of this week. I have played enough of the new games I got plus some of the older ones I have to comprise a post or two. One of which will involve the shenanigans of Mercenaries 2.

Bowl Bound: January 2nd Games

2012-01-02T12:14:00.002-06:00

So after Saturday I was beginning to think that I would go 1 for 5...with my only correct prediction coming from Auburn. Northwestern and Vanderbilt were the only two losses that day, Utah pulled it out to beat Georgia Tech in overtime, Illinois beat UCLA (yay!) and Auburn beat Virginia. After that I am sitting at 12-9 heading into the six games today. First off is the TicketCity bowl, Houston and Penn State. I swear EA has this thing with Penn State being a powerhouse team.... Scoreboard!

I doubt Penn State will win this game...from what I have seen Houston is a much better team than PSU. That and the fact that Houston was up 17-0 in the second quarter...yeah so who knows. Next up, the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl, Ohio State and Florida. Again I will update this post throughout the day much like I did on Saturday. That game is finished simulating and that means...scoreboard!

Not sure how this will go, two powerhouse teams that are no longer that. I believe OSU was loosing to Florida when I last looked. Next up, the Outback bowl with Georgia and Michigan State. That game finished up a few minutes ago so that means scoreboard!

Not sure how this will go either. I could care less about MSU even though they are another Big Ten team. It looked like Georgia was going going to win this game hands down, but MSU put up a good drive that tied the game up. Then Georgia came back with the game winning touchdown pass with 15 seconds left. Next game up, Capital One Bowl; Nebraska and South Carolina.

Update: Current tally sits at 12-10 after the Penn State loss to Houston. I knew that would happen, but it's not my fault that the game developers think that PSU is the best team ever. Florida is currently beating OSU and Georgia is currently beating MSU. Next up is the Capital One Bowl which is Nebraska and South Carolina. Scoreboard!

This is very good, I don't like Nebraska and will not consider them a Big Ten team...ever. So far with the fourth quarter to play, this prediction is spot on...well minus the score. That is completely different. Two bowl games left for the day. Next up is the "Grandaddy of 'em all" aka, the Rose Bowl. A Wisconsin Badgers team takes on the Oregon Ducks.

We shall see how this game goes as well. Last I looked Wisconsin was ahead, but that was a little while ago.

Final game is the Fiesta Bowl, which is Stanford and Oklahoma State.

I believe Stanford could easily win this game. Currently tally sits at 13-12, so far this has been an interesting day for my predictions.

Bowl Bound: December 31st Bowls

2011-12-31T11:59:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was bowl games a plenty, well today is even better. Five total games are happening today, a quick list of said games: Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas (Northwestern vs. Texas A&M), Hyundai Sun Bowl (Georgia Tech vs. Utah), Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (Illinois vs. UCLA) Autozone Liverty Bowl (Cincinnati vs. Vanderbilt) and lastly the Chick-Fil-A Bowl (Virginia vs. Auburn). After last night I imporved drastically from 6-6 to 9-7. My only "lost" game was the one I knew would be wrong, Oklahoma and Iowa. Anyways, scoreboad time!

I'm not sure how this game will go, but I know Northwestern could keep the game close...maybe. Currently Northwestern is up 7-3 in the second quarter. As with yesterday I will update this post throughout the coming hours as I finish simulating the games. Next up, the Sun Bowl. I can't wait to find out the results of the Fight Hunger Bowl though.
Simulation of the Sun Bowl is done. I'm not sure how this game will go. For the ESPN app on the 360 I chose Georgia Tech to win, according to the scoreboard however....

We'll see how this game goes. The simulation was pretty quiet with the first quarter filled with nothing but quick 3 and out's. Utah got within scoring distance late in the first, but didn't kick the field goal until the start of the second. Next up, the Fight Hunger Bowl with Illinois and UCLA. The prediction I have been waiting for since I started this project. The Fight Hunger Bowl sim is done, scoreboard!

I really hope this prediction is correct. I would like to see the Illini win, but we are just too inconsistent for me to fully believe in this prediction. The game starts in about a half hour and I plan on watching it. If I only predict one out of five games correct I hope it is this one. Next up, the Liberty Bowl with Cincinnati and Vanderbilt.

Late to post the results of this one and the game is already over. Yeah, Vandy was in control pretty much this entire game. It seemed that they could have actually won the real life counterpart, but Cincinnati came out on top in overtime. The last bowl of the day is lacking a scoreboard...my iPod's battery died and I forgot I have an actual camera to use...yeah I know fail on my part. Either way Auburn should hopefully beat Virginia. Before I leave you for the night (and year technically) I shall update my tally. After the first four games of the day I am sitting at 11-9. All I care is that Illinois won their game. If I remember after the Auburn/Virginia game is over I might come back and do a quick edit to the tally.

Bowl Bound: December 30th Bowls

2011-12-30T11:32:00.001-06:00

Bowl games a plenty today, there are four total going on. Right now the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces bowl which is taking the BYU Cougars against the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. I am also simulating that game as I type this. As a matter of fact, BYU just snapped the ball and got a nice long pass within the ten yard line.
Enough rambling! My current tally sits at 6-6-2. I knew that there was another bowl game last night, but didn't have the time to sim it and post the results. Oh yeah, BYU just scored. I'll run a quick list of the games coming up today. First bowl is the Armed forces bowl with BYU and Tulsa. Next one is the New Era Pinstripe Bowl with Rutgers and Iowa State, followed by the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl which consists of Mississippi State and Wake Forest and lastly the Insight Bowl with Oklahoma and Iowa. Throughout the day I will update this post with the score and thoughts. Plus with some of them even a running tally since some of them are early games. Oh yeah, and BYU scored again...
So my simulation of the Armed Forces Bowl is complete. Comparing the score to the real game going on now and this sim, I'll probably be wrong. Scoreboard!

I honestly do not believe in this prediction 100%. BYU in my sim acted like they were a nationally ranked powerhouse team that just came off winning the national title game. We shall see how the rest of the game goes and see if BYU can comeback and win, but I'm not too sure about that.

Next up is the New Era Pinstripe bowl with Iowa State and Rutgers. Finished that sim up a few minutes ago and scoreboard time!

This is another game where I have no idea how each team did throughout the rest of the year. This game was favored by the Rutgers in the first three quarters, but Iowa State made a comeback with about a minute left but unfortunately could not hold the Rutgers from responding and retaking the lead. Next up, the Music City Bowl. Wake Forest versus Mississippi State.

Quick update, apparently BYU did pull out a win did beat Tulsa...I can't believe it. Current tally sits at 7-6. ISU and Rutgers are playing now and ISU is up a field goal.

The Music City bowl, it looked like it was going to be a close game from the start. And it was, the score is clear proof of that. Not much can be said about this game though, it was pretty quiet and slow at times.

I'm going to come out and say this right now. Iowa will not win. I hope they do so I can +1 my win column and a family member can be happy, but I doubt that Iowa will win. It was pretty evident that Iowa was at least going to try and beat Oklahoma, they did lead the pretty much the entirety of the game. Eventually Oklahoma tied the game up in the fourth, but Iowa took the ball back and kicked a field goal with five seconds left. After tonight we should find out what my record will be. It's already at 7-6 with the surprising win of BYU over Tulsa. Currently, Rutgers is beating Iowa State 17-6.

Bowl Bound: Champs Sports Bowl

2011-12-29T14:12:00.001-06:00

After last night, my record is now sitting at 6-5. This next game is the Champs Sports Bowl. Which pits two 8-4 teams against each other. The Florida State Seminoles originating from the ACC and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish from the...well Independents.

This game was pretty slow in the first half with each team having solid defense. FSU had some easy opportunities to take the lead twice but over threw the pass in the endzone the first time and got intercepted the second time out. Each team matched the scores put in place by the other until we got to overtime, in which ND intercepted Florida State (deja vu?) and ended scoring the game winning TD.

Bowl Bound: Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl

2011-12-28T18:40:00.001-06:00

Since I totally botched the screenshot placement, there's the outcome. Anyways, PAC-12 versus Big-12 with the former being represented by the California Golden Bears and the latter with the Texas Longhorns. Not sure what the records for each team are...that really doesn't matter in the end I don't think. I'm going to come right out and say this, I don't believe this will happen. I know this years Texas team isn't the powerhouse team they have been in the past and I really don't know how good California is this year either. So who knows how it will turn out, I might actually watch this game....maybe.

The game was pretty even throughout its entirety with Texas getting on the board first. With that said it was also a boring game yet exciting at the same time. It was a defense heavy game with most of each teams' drives going three and out. The fourth quarter is where Cal really started to shine. They put together a 70 yard drive to score the game winning touchdown with seven seconds left.

Currently Air Force is playing Toledo and that looked like that was a real good and close game when I last looked at the scoreboard, hopefully Toledo can pull out the win.

Bowl Bound: Military Bowl

2011-12-28T12:34:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the late post, but I have been busy. Quick tally update, Pursue beat WMU and NC State took down Louisville. Which in turn places me at 5-4. Anyways the Military bowl takes a 7-5 Toledo Rockets from the MAC against the Air Force Falcons with the same record and from the Mountain West.

The game was pretty back and forty with each team responding after each score. However, Toledo should be able to win this one. That's all that can be said about it really. It looks like the actual game is turning out to be the same as well.

Bowl Bound: Little Caesars, Belk Bowl

2011-12-27T14:51:00.001-06:00

So I remembered that there are two bowl games going on today. The first one starts in about half an hour which turns out to be the Little Caesars Bowl. Which pits the 7-5 Western Michigan Broncos from the MAC against the Purdue Boilermakers with a 6-6 record and originating from the Big Ten conference. And both teams have faced Illinois...unfortunately we only beat Western Michigan. All of that out the way, scoreboard time!

It was a rather quiet game honestly with the only real action coming in the fourth quarter when Purdue mounted a comeback to tie the game at 31. Purdue was on the board first with a field goal but WMU responded with a couple of touchdowns. With about 40 seconds left in the fourth, Western Michigan started a drive and got within field goal range and took the lead 34-31 where the score stayed.

Hopefully WMU can beat Purdue and I know they can at least give them a run for their money, they did us.

As I am typing this up, the Belk bowl which takes the Louisville Cardinals with a 7-5 record from the Big East and the North Carolina State Wolfpack from the ACC and a 7-5 record is simulating away. Currently NC State is up 7-0, but Louisville is driving towards a score. I will update this post after that simulation is done with the final score and all that.

That's the final of the Belk Bowl. It was pretty uneventful so I can't say much about it. Tonight we will find out how my current tally (at 4-3-1) will end up. Will it be 6-3 or 5-4 or perhaps even 4-5. Who knows, we'll find out tonight though.

Bow Bound: No Bowl, Bowl

2011-12-26T20:55:00.004-06:00

Yeah, apologies for not getting the Advocare 1,000 Independence Bowl simulated and posted on here. With it being the holidays I was extremely busy and didn't have the time to get a game going and post the results. With that I will quickly update the tally and let you know what bowl games are next plus a change in the forumla. So with Southern Miss winning the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl that places me now at 4-3. After tonight I will add another column to that as a representative of a forfeited game. I am now 4-3-1. Let's hope that final number doesn't go up. Anyways, the next bowl games coming up are tomorrow night and are the Belk Bowl and the Little Caesars Bowl. The latter is Western Michigan (a team which Illinois is familiar with) against Purdue (yet another team which Illinois is familiar with.) The former is Louisville against North Carolina State.

The change in formula that I was talking about earlier is I will now be using only six month old data instead of two year old data. What I'm saying is I got NCAA Football '12 for Christmas and that will hopefully make these sims a little more realistic. Plus it has all of this years' bowl games as places to play at. Which is great! Less work for me in the long run. Who knows I might even take my old simulations and run them through this game and see if the results end up being different.
Making this post short as just an explanation as to why there was no prediction for tonight's game, again sorry for that. With that said when I'm not playing football, I'll be getting all stabby with zombies on Dead Island. Enjoy!

Sheraton Hawaii Bowl

2011-12-23T17:25:00.000-06:00

It seems that it has been an exciting past couple of days in football. I'll quickly update the tally, I had posted about the MAACO Bowl I was still at 2-2. Now after both that game and the Poinsettia bowl have been played I am sitting at 3-3. My prediction on the MAACO Bowl was completely torn apart by Boise State as they beat Arizona State. Which if you remember correctly I said was perfectly fine by me as I don't like ASU. TCU took down Louisiana Tech in a game that was nearly identical to the one in my simulated prediction. Anyways on to the next bowl game. This is the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl which pits a 21st ranked Southern Mississippi Gold Eagles team from the C-USA with an 11 and 2 record against a Nevada Wolf Pack from the WAC with a 7-5 record. I'm sure you know what time it is, scoreboard!

Due to time constraints and this game being tomorrow I only set the quarter length to 5 minutes. Southern Miss got on the board first with a field goal and then Nevada returned the favor with a TD. Then late in the second Southern Miss took the lead back with a rather impressive drive for 97 yards after being pinned deep in their own territory. Afterwards it was pretty much a defensive battle with USM getting another score late in the third to secure the game. So there you have it, Southern Miss should be able to win this bowl game. Let's hope they can as my record is at stake...and yes I am taking some pride in these selections. Although...technically my method isn't exactly scientific as I am using two year old data...oh well it still works...sort of.
With that said, I will leave you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays until Monday. Why Monday? That's when the next bowl game is and I hope to have it posted by then as well.

Bowl Bound: MAACO Bowl

2011-12-21T19:18:00.002-06:00

First thing is first, I shall update the tally for you all. After last night I went to 2-2 after Marshall knocked off Florida International. The next thing is I don't understand how a simulated game can have three kickoffs returned for a touchdown, but yet when I play a game I can't even get a single one. It just baffles me as to how that is possible, I mean some of these returns are pretty sloppy. Either way I hope this prediction is wrong as I don't like the team that wins. So this game pits the 11-1 Boise State Broncos in the MWC against a 6-6 Arizona State Sun Devils team from the Pac-12. I'm pretty sure you know what's coming next. Scoreboard time!

This was easily the most interesting, yet boring game at the same time. It was fairly close throughout the first three quarters, but was pretty much dominated by the kick returns. At one point I thought that was how this game was going to turn out, was who could return the most kicks for touchdowns. Luckily by the second quarter the pace of the game had slowed down. Other than that it was pretty uneventful so not much can be said about this one. As I said before, I hope this prediction is wrong. I honestly do not like Arizona State so I hope Boise State wins this game. I'll take the extra loss on my projection record I don't care, but I won't complain too much if ASU does win as it'll basically be a free addition to the win column. With that said, tonight we shall find out if TCU does actually beat Louisiana Tech and where that will put my record. Next game after this one I am posting about is the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl I believe...or some other bowl game of sorts. I honestly don't remember.

Bowl Bound: Poinsettia Bowl

2011-12-20T20:38:00.001-06:00

Alright so Marshall is playing FIU currently and that means in my post tomorrow I will update the tally. Currently I am sitting at 2-1, hoping to go to 3-1...or 2-2 whichever. Anyways, this is the Poinsettia Bowl which pits a TCU Horned Frogs from the MWC with a 10-2 record against the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs from the WAC and an 8-4 record. With that out of the way, scoreboard time!

At the start I thought that TCU could easily walk over LTU, but they surprised me and tied the game up. Then they took the lead early in the fourth and even threatened to beat TCU. However TCU scored relatively late to tie the game and eventually take the lead. In the third quarter I was thinking that this game could have been heading into overtime.
On a closing note, we shall find out whether or not I'll move to 4-1, 3-2 or 2-3.

Bowl Bound: St. Petersburg Bowl

2011-12-19T17:49:00.001-06:00

After this past Saturday we found out how my predictions stood the wrath of reality. With that said, lets update the tally! Temple beat Wyoming 37-15 in the New Mexico Bowl. Ohio just barely beat Utah State 24-23 in the Idaho Potato Bowl. And lastly, San Diego State fell to UL Lafayette 32-30. If you can do simply math you already know that my current record is 2-1. With this post I am bringing you the St. Petersburg Bowl which pits the Florida International Golden Panthers against the Marshall Thundering Herd. Of which the former is 8-4 and from the Sun Belt conference and the latter with a 6-6 record from the C-USA conference. With all that out of the way, scoreboard!

This was easily the best out of the four games I have watched. At this point I honestly wish I had a capture card to record this game and upload it to Youtube. When Marshall had the lead at 38-29 at the half I thought FIU was done. I was thinking it would be like the rest of them and Marshall would come out and run up the score. I thought it would turn out much like the Temple-Wyoming game. However it did not, Florida International came out in the second half and stopped Marshall several times. In the fourth quarter however Marshall was still in the lead, that is until FIU scored and went up by four. Then Marshall responded with a TD to take the lead again. With only a minute left FIU went on a drive that led them to take the lead with five seconds to go. That meant that time would run out on the proceeding kickoff, it did and Marshall was not able to make a miraculous comeback.

With that said, we shall find out tomorrow if I improve to 3-1 or go to 2-2.

Bowl Bound: Famous Idaho Potato & R+L Carries New Orleans Bowls

2011-12-15T15:45:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the delay in posting the next bowl games, I have been extremely busy as of lately. So this Saturday is the 17th, that means the first three bowl games of this season kick off. The first game has already been posted, you may find it here. The next two games are the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and the R+L Carries New Orleans Bowl.

The former game pits a 9-4 Ohio Bobcats of the MAC conference against a Utah State Aggies team with a 7-5 record from the WAC conference. And yes I know that the "C" in each abbreviation stands for conference so it is technically "conference conference". But if you want to get technical...
Anyways, this game was much like the last one and pretty one sided.

At first I honestly thought that Utah State could have pulled this one out. They were on the board first with a TD and had a good defense that forced Ohio to to go 3 and out several times. However as the first quarter came to an end Ohio pulled out to a 17-7 lead as you can see above. Second quarter came along and was rather...dull to say the least. If you look at that quarter from a defensive stand point, each team did great in that aspect. USU held Ohio to only a field goal and Ohio held USU scoreless. The third quarter came around and Ohio kicked their game into overdrive and put the game out of reach for Utah State. However, there were several times that Utah State could have started a comeback in the fourth, but apparently NCAA '10 thinks their place kicker sucks... He missed several very easy field goals that could have put them back in the game and possible made a miraculous comeback. I mean the one was from twenty yards out and was right in front of the goal posts.
According to my "simulation" Ohio should win and take home Idaho Potato bowl. I also want to know who comes up with the names for these bowl games....

The following game was actually a lot closer than the first one...the score is also almost unrealistic. The R+L Carries New Orleans Bowl takes a San Diego State Aztecs with a 8-4 record from the MWC conference and places them against the Ragin' Cajuns from Louisiana Lafayette with also an 8-4 record from the Sun Belt conference. Each team combined for a total of 160 points, so far the highest score that I have gotten from this little project of mine. I hope there are none for over that score though...then I'll begin to think something is up with the simulation...

I present to you the box score of the game:

I honestly thought this game could go either way at any point in the entire game. Sure as you can see SDSU clearly outscored ULL throughout the entire game, but I didn't know what else could happen. This game was also laden with injuries for each team, with the starting QB for San Diego State being injured in either the first or second quarter. And then ULL's running back being injured later in the game. There really isn't a whole lot to say about this game as the score pretty much tells it all.

There you have it though, I am "predicting" Ohio and San Diego State to both win their respective bowl games. In only a couple days we shall find out if my current predictions stand true or if they fall flat on their face. At this point I honestly have no idea what's going to happen...

Bowl Bound: Gildan New Mexico Bowl

2011-12-06T18:33:00.001-06:00

I know in my last post I was going to randomly select a bowl game and sim it every other day. I'm still sticking with that plan to some extent, my newest change is I am doing them in order from first to last according to date. This is the very first bowl game that will be played to kick this bowl season off.

It pits an 8-4 Temple Owls team from the Mid-American conference against the Cowboys of Wyoming, from the Mountain West conference, with a similar record. It was actually a rather high scoring game, with both teams combining for a total of 93 points. Unfortunately...it was also a rather one sided game in favor of Temple. As you'll be able to see from the picture of the box score I grabbed:

Probably the most exciting part of the game was in the first quarter when Temple scored first in the game and then Wyoming returned the kickoff for a TD. Followed by Temple returning the favor on Wyoming's kickoff. Afterwards it was pretty much just Temple running up the score... If by the fourth quarter Temple didn't have 47 points already, I easily think that Wyoming could have come back and at least put a threat towards Temple for the win. There was also only one turnover in the game and that was an interception by Temple returned for a TD.

That does it for this prediction. Come December 17th we will find out if Temple does win and my prediction count goes to 1-0 or 0-1....hopefully the former because that would be really cool. Anyways, next prediction will come in the form of the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl where Ohio takes on Utah State.

Bowl Bound: An Introduction

2011-12-04T22:40:00.001-06:00

Right I'm going to imagine you're either sitting there asking yourself "what's with the title?" Or you're likely reading this thinking "shutup and get to the point." As you wish since this will be a pretty straightforward post.

If you have been following Rooster Teeth's Achievement Hunter series, you are probably familiar with the "Achievement Hunter Predicts" specials they do. If not, they simply take and pick the biggest game of either collegiate football or NFL football and run it through a simulation in either NCAA Football '12 or Madden NFL '12. Then they take and capture the highlights and do a commentary for them and upload it to youtube. Well, I'm going to take that idea in a way and do my own version of it for each of the college football bowl games of this year. My version will be covering all of the bowl games and will not feature highlights....or commentary....or any fancy videos uploaded to youtube as I lack one key ingredient in that, a capture card. Of which I might own one in the future.

I'll pick a random bowl game every other day and load up the appropriate teams/field/whatever else and let my copy of NCAA '10 sim it out. I know it's not going to be a current game, but it's the only college football game I own. What I will do though is take a screenshot of the final score and write up a post about that game with the final score and publish it right here. I know that there will be some bowl games that aren't in NCAA '10 but I will select a neutral stadium as close to the real bowl game site as I can. That way home field advantage won't be an issue....or something like that. Lastly, I'll be placing all these posts underneath the tag of "Bowl Bound" that way you can find them easily should you want to reference them at any point later on. Who know, maybe if I enjoy doing it here I will do it next year or for pre-season/regular season games anyways.

Learn 2 Fly

2011-10-31T23:45:00.000-05:00

While I am sitting here watching the Ghost Hunters Live event on the SyFy channel, I decided to try my hand at this wonderful thing called multi-tasking. I hear it does wonders for people. Anyways, a few days ago I already announced that I became an Xbox Community Ambassador. Since you already know about that I will completely skip over that and head for the flight deck.

About a week before Kinect Sports Season Two was released everyone was going to get Battlefield 3 and I wasn't. Well, technically I didn't get it, a family member did and I ended up playing it. The campaign was good, I liked it; you really have to play it tactically...if that makes sense. You can't go in all Halo like thinking the enemy can't kill you and you can just nail them with a shotgun...although at times it does work. It is hands down the most realistic game I have played, the weapons actually sound like their real life counterpart. Which makes me very happy. I did feel though that the campaign could have been a little longer, but it does get the story through. I also wish you would have been able to use more vehicles during the campaign. The level Going Hunting is a very fun level as you get to partially fly a jet, but it needs more of that I think. After I had completed the campaign I decided to hit the multiplayer and give it a shot. Well...that was after EA's servers had decided it woud let me. After they did decide to let me join a server and play some games I got stuck playing this gametype called Conquest. In my first two or three games of it I had no idea what to do so I just ran around the map following my teammates. Yeah that probably wasn't the best idea either as they seemed to have a magnetic attraction to RPG's. Once I found out what I was doing and that each team had a set amount of "tickets" that were depleted with each death on one team. Oh yeah, you could also deplete said tickets by capturing certain points on the map. Think of a cross between a modified slayer variant and Territories from Halo. Plus if one team controls over half the points on the map the opposing team starts loosing tickets automatically. It's an interesting gametype and I find it fun at points.

I also had an interesting time flying a helicopter in a game of Conquest. I know how to fly a helicopter in most games and it's pretty straight forward. You sometimes use the left and right triggers to ascend or descend and use the left stick to move around and the right one to look. Well in BF3 it's a little different story. The triggers are still used to control your altitude, but the right stick controls your pitch, yaw and roll. Wait...what? That's exactly what I was saying when I hopped into the pilot seat. About twenty seconds into the game I was about 50 feet above the ground so that's a plus...wait is that a hill coming up on my right? Dear God it is! Once I start hovering over said hill I gently set it down ontop of it. Okay, not bad I think I'm getting the hang of this. Let's try taking off and actually go help my teammates. I end up taking off and then landing really hard on the side of the hill I just took off of. Yep, so count that as my first suicide of Battlefield 3. After that experience of flying the helicopter I cannot wait to fly a jet now.

Speaking of jets, I have been wanting to play one of the "run around and blow everything up" games I have. I haven't though as I'm not sure exactly which one to play. There is Just Cause 2 with its large game world and all the possibilites it can hold. Plus you can fly jets and in this game I know how to fly them somewhat properly. I jut have to remember that the nearest body of water acts as the Bermuda Triangle.
On the other hand though, I have been thinking on popping in Mercenaries 2 since it is almost the same thing. It has attack helicopters (that I can actually fly) and the equivalent of each vehicle in JC2...minus the jets and Bermuda Triangle. However to make up for this lack of aircraft and mysterious bodies of water, it has airstrikes. Which I love to use whenever I get the chance to, because you know causing a huge explosion is always fun in a video game. I really don't know, the sound of airstrikes is winning me over slowly. That and I haven't played Mercenaries 2 in a while and I do enjoy it.

Again not much of a post, but I at least got two posts within a weeks time frame. Anyways, until next time! Hopefully I'll have more stories of an endeavour in flight and perhaps even a failed airstrike or two. Danger close!

Some News...

2011-10-27T22:54:00.001-05:00

Going to give out a short little post here, but I really want to share this with...someone. Anyways, on Monday I read a tweet from both the Xbox and XboxSupport Twitter account directing us to the new Xbox Community Ambassador website. After seeing that and checking out the new website I contemplate about clicking on that shiny "Apply Now!" button. After clicking on it and then reading the extra notes that were on that page, I decided to think about my decision and put it off for a few minutes. Ten minutes to be exact, after that time had passed I went back and applied for it. I knew I would hear back with three business days as to whether I was accepted into the program or denied. Sometime this afternoon I receieved an email stating that I was officially accepted into the Xbox Community Ambassador program. What is an XCA you ask? I have a simple answer for that. We are fellow gamers and Xbox LIVE community members that have volunteered to help fellow community members with questions they might have.

Also since the other day was Tuesday the 25th, that means I was able to pick up a new game. That game was Kinect Sports Season Two, from what little of it I have played it is fun. I have only played darts, skiing and tennis so far. The only one of those games I've played in real life has been darts...and that was an....interesting game to say the least. Since I've played it before, I'll start off with it. From the whole two and a half games (don't ask about the half a game...) I have played of it, it is kind of hard to get the hang of. You have a reticule if you hold your arm out a little bit and you can move it around by moving your arm around as well. I guess if you move your arm back slowly to "throw" the virtual dart it "locks" the reticule in place and you'll hit the part of the board that is within the circumference of that reticule. However, if you move it too fast or move your arm from the way you were holding it, your reticule will disappear. It's kind of finicky really, I'll have to play around with it some more and find a way to compensate for it.
Tennis is much like table tennis was in the first game, only on a larger scale. You don't have to worry about moving around the court yourself, the game does that automatically based on where the ball is going to be. It's actually a pretty clever system, they had it back in volleyball in the first game as well.
I didn't play much of skiing either, but this is certainly a sport you'll want to have plent of room if you play it with another person. I couldn't get through a lot of the gates as when I would go to turn, I would end up standing behind the person I was playing with...yeah not good. It's not the games fault, no far from it actually. It's just the fact that we didn't have the correct amount of width space at that time.

Anwyas, that's all for now as that is all I have. I will hopefully have another post out next week as I'll have played a bit more of Kinect Sports: S2 and perhaps another game as well. Then I should have more to talk about.

Three Months, but Who's Counting?

2011-10-07T20:02:00.001-05:00

Right if you answer yes to the question of who is counting the amount of months since my last post, you can stop counting now. So why the lack of posting for the past three months? I do have a life outside of gaming you know. Anyways, in the past three months I haven't done a whole lot really. I've been playing the usual Reach, but I also went back to playing Fallout: New Vegas in hopes to finish it sometime....soon-ish. And by "soon-ish" I mean sometime within the next several months. In that same time I also went back and finished my third season in my first dynasty I started when I first got NCAA Football '10. Interesting story about that actually.

So why not start with said interesting story, I agree, lets. Resuming my third season as Illinois about half through the actual season (makes sense right?) I was still undefeated and ranked about sixth or seventh in the nation. I'll admit, I did suck when I first started playing again as I haven't played it for ages. With that being the case, I would just so happen to draw Purdue as my first opponent back in conference play...this should be fun. Fast forwarding to the actual game, we had home field advantage (I love when we play at home, both in a video game and in real life) and it was a back and forth game to go along. We won the coin toss at the start of the game and I decided to defer until the second half ( I know, not a smart choice) but I was confident that our defense would be strong right out the gate. I was right, we held Purdue off from scoring...not before they could move down to within the five yard line though. Once that happens we hold them at a quick three and out with pushing them back a few yards on a couple plays; then they bring on the field goal unit...only to miss. I'm still puzzled as to how they missed about a twenty yard field goal. Anyways, that results in us getting the ball at their end, we march it all the way down the field and score. After avoiding what should've been an easy three points for them at the start of the game and returning the favor by scoring our own seven points I'm thinking "Great, we can take these guys easily now." Kickoff to Purdue coming, fielded at about 24 yard line. Okay return coverage lets them get it to about their 35, moving a little bit ahead, they manage to throw these short passes on our secondary and eventually make it back down to the five yard line again. Deja vu anyone? This time we're not so luck as for holding them off though, they make yet another short pass over the middle into the endzone to tie it up seven a piece.
Continuing on to the second quarter both teams basically end up wasting each time they had the ball. Closing in on half time that is, I manage to take a forced fumble back for a TD and a 14-7 lead. Thinking a little more conservatively this time around on defense and knowing that with time running out for the first half I predict the short passes to the sidelines. Purdue does exactly that...and it still works for them. They manage to tie it up going into the half. Skipping ahead to the middle of the third quarter I manage to take over on offense and put another couple scores to match Purdue's one score they put up. Going into the fourth I'm up by a score making it 28-21, proceeding later into the fourth I am able to get two interceptions and take them both back for a final score of 42-21. It was really an interesting game...I'm glad I escaped with the two interceptions in the fourth.

After escaping that game I moved up to number two in the nation and then had a road game against Indiana and then back to Champaign-Urbana for Penn State. Oh boy...Penn State, EA always has something for them being a really good team each year. I don't remember how this game went, but I know I beat them by double their score. I'm always happy when that happens since they are the only team that actually threatens to beat me each season. After all this is said and done I end up getting bumped down in the polls to number three. A few "weeks" later they release the bowl predictions with second ranked Florida taking on the first ranked NC State (seriously...where did they come from in that season?) playing in the BCS Title game. Fine and dandy and all that extra stuff, I don't care about Florida or NC State, I end up getting sixth ranked USC in the Rose Bowl. That sounds fine to me, it'll be the perfect revenge for the '07 real-life Rose Bowl destruction they handed us. I finish the season up and we proceed into the post-season, all the conference playoffs are going on and since the Big Ten doesn't have those (until now anyhow) I just sit there. I sim the final week of the post-season and find out that both NC State and Florida lost their conference championship games...this in turn places me into the first seed taking on number two Miami in the title game. -blam!- At this point I would have much rather played in the Rose Bowl against USC as I wanted revenge badly. Forwarding into the title game I take it 27-13, and now I am currently in the off season. The part I hate about playing through a dynasty.

After I had completed my third season, it got me to thinking that I wanted going to play Nebraska in my next pre-season games as they are not part of the real life Big Ten conference. I did some research into NCAA Football '12 and I found out when setting up your dynasty you can customize the conference. This got me a little excited as I knew once I had that game I could have the Big Ten conference created to perfection complete with the Leaders and Legends divisions with the appropriate teams in each. So, sometime in the near future I will be talking about NCAA Football '12 instead of '10.

Moving onto the rest of the topics I'm hoping to cram in here. Unfortunately I can't comment much on New Vegas as I haven't played it enough yet to form a solid opinion of the game. I can say this though, I -blam!- hate the Radscorpions, I swear they come out of nowhere when I am playing the game. I'm also not sure if I want to side with the NCR or someone else yet. I've been told that I can side with Mr. Hand (whoever that is...see I'm early in the game yet) and I might to do that as I'm not hearing much good about the NCR throughout the wasteland. I know, I know, I can also side with Cesar's Legion (spelling for the in-game character is not correct most likely.) Last time though I saw someone using fur for a head cover was back in the 1400's when I was Ezio. Yeah and they tried to stab me...a lot. I don't take kindly to people who try to stab me. On the other hand, I've heard from someone on the CRF forums (shameless self promotion I know) that they think the NCR suffers from the usual "fight the powah", as they put it, that governments face. So who knows really, I sure don't.

Yesterday I downloaded the demo of Forza Motorsport 4. I really don't play racing games much, but I do enjoy them when I decide to crash, er, I mean race around a track in a half a million dollar exotic sports car. I have the first Forza for the original Xbox, so I sort of knew what to expect from this demo. I would get a game that was more realistic and focused on tuning your car in order to make it handle the way you wanted it to. Sadly since I'm not a gearhead I could never be that good at it, it was fun yes but unless you knew what you were doing you would totally mess something up. So I pretty much left my cars with their stock parts. Back to the demo, the virtual cars handle great. In the demo you were only allowed to play either a race or take on a friends' challenge on beating course within their set time. This doesn't sound like much of a demo does it? Well, thankfully for the races you could choose between three different cars to race in, you in turn would race against cars within your class. If you usually play an arcade styled racing game, the same thought process you would use for one of those won't work too well here. Say you want to drift into the next turn after speeding down a nice long straightaway, sure I suppose you could do that but you might slide into the wall conveniently located to your immediate left...or right.

So what's the point of all that rambling? Well in a more technical sense, you really have to slow down if you want to go through the upcoming turn while maximizing your...well whatever special technical term that goes here. The physics for this game are awesome, easily the most realistic racing game I have played. If you over steer going through said corner (yes, that corner again) you will start to spin out and crash...not that I know from experience.

The Rival mode is what I was previously talking about where you race a copy of your friend(s) and try to beat their fastest time. I didn't play much of this, but it looked interesting. Think of a classic arcade unit where you try to beat the highest score, I can easily see this promoting some friendly competition amongst the people on your friends list. The graphics look really impressive, the sheen of a what looks like a freshly waxed Ferrari is very nice. I know that is not much of a "first impression" of Forza 4, but it's only a demo and there isn't a whole lot to do. In the future though I can see this game easily raising the bar for simulation style racing games and becoming the go-to game for those that throughouly enjoy racing games.

I have a goal set for myself and is to grab 20,000 Gamerscore. Currently I'm stuck at 17,788...yeah it's going to be a little while yet before I can get it. Luckily though the other day I went through my game stash and found there are some games I have yet to play on my LIVE account and earn some achievements for. There are also others that I can go back and grab some extra points from to help my "cause". Also something else that'll help is I'll be getting three new games within the next couple of months. In turn will grant me access to more points to help out.

I believe that is all for this post, I am honestly running out of words to throw in here in a semi-logical order. I will however, leave you with a parting gift. Do you remember the web based flash game called Warthog Launch? Well, I swear in a game of Firefight there were a group of Grunts playing that this game.

Into The Mist..er Space

2011-07-26T21:49:00.001-05:00

In the almost four months it has been since I made a post on here, I actually haven't been doing a whole lot. Since that time I've gotten a few new games(like three...) and a ton more achievements(Bleep Bloop!). A lot of the time spent recently have been going over old projects I had worked on over the past couple years in the Halo community and various other places. The most notable one that I take a large amount of pride in was HGA. Or some of you may know it as the Halo Gaming Association, unfortunately the group and idea never took off. Twice, I might add. Another event is the Campaign Challenge I ran for The Upper Echelon....which has now also stopped. Hmm, I'm noticing a pattern here. Anyways, more words inbound!

See, told you more words inbound. First the games that have been wasting my time. In April Portal 2 was released, a couple weeks later Gamestop had a sale for it. Being a fan of the Portal series, I couldn't resist picking up the sequal for almost half the price. Brought it home and played a few levels of the single player. It was so nice to hear the banter between GLaDOS and Wheatley throughout the entire game. The humor that Valve has also was very awesome to see in it, with achievements named "The Part Where He Kills You: This is that part." truly express this. The introduction of the two different types of gels also really make you think about how to work those puzzles without falling into an abyss...not that I would know from experience at all...nope. The addition of co-op as well was something that I think Portal fans wanted for a little while and Portal 2 delivered that. You really have to communicate with who you are playing with if you want to beat the co-op portion of the game. Having to place all of your portals in order to set up an "infinite" loop is awsome, just make sure your timing is right otherwise you'll be crushed...or worse. Being able to sabotage your buddy is also fun at times...not that I would know about that either. What's that? You want to cross that chasm while I have a shield being looped in front of those turrets. Okay we can do that, but wait! You're halfway across and now you have to deal with the fire coming from those turrets I previously mentioned. Ha! That's what you get for throwing me into that pit before! Oh...ahem...sorry. Moving on, but first. I'm in space!

The second game I picked up was the third installment in the Fear series. Simply named Fear 3; actually, F.3.A.R if you want to go according to box art. So far I think it is easily my favorite in the series. The campaign is a little shorter than the previous games, but it is also really fun. Storm and I sat down and played until Interval 8(the last inverval) in one day, but then went back to start searching for the Alma dolls hidden throughout each level. We did this several times before actually completing the game a week later. The ending also leaves a possibility for a fourth game, or at least some future DLC. This was also another game that was originally single player in previous titles, but then added co-op into it. The co-op has one player play as the main character Point-Man where the second player plays as his brother Fettel. Needless to say it is awesome playing as Fettel as you can take over bodies of enemies and use them to fight their used to be allies. It really brings a new perspective on the co-op much likie Portal 2.

Final game I picked up was Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Not really a whole lot to say about it; it's a continuation of the storyline from the second game. They added a few new things to it, like you can now find people across the city and rescue them and recruit them into your assassin...brotherhood...thing whatever you want to call it. Then you can send them on their own missions or call them out to help you within the city. It's a really cool feature that I am glad is returning for Revelations. The dual hidden blades returned and I love using them against unaware guards. They also did add a multiplayer, but I can't say I have really tried it out aside from a couple games. It'll take some getting used to before I can really enjoy it.

I do have some stuff I want to talk about, but if I post all it two things will happen. A) It will be really late by the time I have finished and that would suck plus B) I won't have a reason to delay a post by four months like last time. However this I will share, a long time ago I'm sure I made reference of a Completely Random Forum. Well, the very first version a Completely Random Forum is starting to make a come back. So might I suggest taking a stop by the Completely Random Forums? Also with the return of the forum, RandomProxy(admin/owner) decided to set up a Tumblr account and Twitter page for it. If you have either feel free to check out the CRF Tumblr and our Twitter for updates on stuff happening in the forum. Yes, I know, that was shameless self promotion, but hey consider me sharing a site I like to you to check out.

Four Years and Still Strong

2011-03-29T16:54:00.010-05:00

So, today signifies the four year join date for me on Bungie.net. Since that is the case, I would qualify for the Veteran prefix for my title. However, that's not the case as I already have Exalted which is the highest prefix one can gain. Over my stay there I have been in so many awesome private groups, one of which was the very first group I joined I am still in. I remember the first group I started on my own and tried to get off the ground. Needless to say it didn't go to well... Ah yes, the abomination of a group that was Troops of Onyx. Oh, and can't forget about the real only semi-successful Legion of Elites. Yeah, it had a whole 15 members and only a few were ever active. After that I finally realized that I should give up on trying to start a group myself. I think the only group that ever had a chance at getting off the ground was the Halo Gaming Association. Apparently though, two revived versions of the group wasn't enough to get things going smoothly.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I played some of Reach's multiplayer with Storm. We had plenty of awesome games and here are a few of them. One of the only times where I'll ever have 20+ kills. The Key made me do it! The Key is basically the sword; it's a reference to a phrase the Tucker makes from I think season four of RvB. Okay, so maybe this is another one of those times. Again, the Key made me do it. Blarg! That was an awesome game, it basically came down to who could control the yellow(more like green to me...) Which a lot of people consider bad for Sword Base, but I like it; I think it adds to the chaos that goes with the name of Halo. <3 Oddball. I didn't do much scoring wise, but I kind of helped by keeping the enemy team away from our teammate who had the ball. Yet another close game. Stupid Armor Lock... I believe that is all of the games I have to post.

However, I do have some rendered videos to show off. This first video shows how not to throw a grenade out a doorway. It might look like it worked, but Storm(yes, he's the one who threw the grenade) was actually intending to throw it out the doorway a little bit farther to the right. In turn I end up getting blown up by a grenade. I'll admit, I laughed pretty hard the moment it happened. Embedded version is below, with the direct link to download the clip to Reach. At some point I hope to have it uploaded to my Youtube channel.
Direct download link is here.
Speaking of my Youtube channel, about a month ago I uploaded some other rendered videos I had laying around in Reach to it. I believe that some of them I haven't posted on here before, on the other hand; some of them already have been. Ah well, pick and choose which one(s) you want to watch.

As of lately, I've been going for another personal goal of reaching 15,000 Gamerscore. Most of you might remember a couple posts I made earlier about my quest for 10,000 points and then later 12,000. I am currently sitting at 14,653 and having a hard time getting those last few points. I originally thought it would be easy to get the last 500 points when I reach it, but that was like 3 months ago... That's all I have for now. I know it's a rather short post compared to what I usually do, but it's at least something.

Top Ten Awesome Games

2011-02-14T23:56:00.001-06:00

Yep, late as usual on getting a post out. By now I'm sure you already aren't following my suggestions as to when I'll have a new post out as I can never manage to get one up by then. Anyways, this time you can blame all the Grifball, Assassin's Creed...and maybe Need For Speed. Onto the point of this post though. Normally, you wouldn't mention what you are going to talk about in an English paper at the start of it...however, this isn't an English paper. By the time you have managed to read through this wall of text; I hope to have given you my top ten games/game series that I have played in my total of 7, almost 8, but still 7(!) years of gaming. Although, I'm pretty sure you already know what game will take number 1.

To kick things off at number 10: the Ghost Recon series. I may not have always been able to beat the single player side of it, but it was an awesome game to play nonetheless. It was really the first game that I played where you could use modern and even futuristic weapons. It was also always a blast to sit down with a friend and go through the hunt and kill levels(post for reference.) And no...I still cannot use an RPG in that game.

Number 9: Another series along the same line of Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six. More specifically, Rainbow Six: Vegas. For the exact same reasons as Ghost Recon. It's fun to play, especially with friends. Another series that you get to use modern weapons in. The Terrorist Hunt mode is really fun, it takes a good amount of teamwork and communication in order to get through each level. The first game I was ever able to use a P-90 and SCAR-H in also...

Number 8: The somewhat unheard game of the Xbox 360: Full Auto. Take your normal arcade style racing game with a handful of cars. Now, take those same cars and attach a various amount of firepower to them. Sure, it may not have been the best game out there; but it was still sweet drifting around a corner in a high performance exotic while filling the air(and fellow cars) with rounds from your two mounted .50Cals attached to the front of it. The amount of destruction you could omit to certain things in the game environment was pretty awesome as well. Oh snap! The guy in first is about to cross the finish line? No problem, just drop the nearest water tower on them. Hehe, that was always awesome to do...not that I ever did that to anyone...

Number 7(!): Just Cause 2. I've always been a fan of the Mercenaries series and JC2 takes the best of that series and expands on it. I always wanted to fly a jet in Mercenaries, but never could. With JC2, I can do that fairly easily. Although, it doesn't help that I still crash them into trees. I swear I didn't see them! My only regret, needs more tanks and the bullet absorbing enemies either.

Number 6: The Mercenaries series. This was really my first "open-world" game when I picked up the first game in it for the original Xbox. The amount of destruction you could do in the game world was really awesome. The second game I fell however, didn't live up the potential that it could of had. Sure, it was awesome and the potential destruction within the game world was ramped up from the first one, plus the game world was a little larger(for the record, JC2 has the biggest game world that I have played in.) It is easily one of those games that you go play if you want to mess around doing stupid stuff in.

These are the top five games that I have had the most enjoyment of. Some surprises in here if you don't cyber-stalk me and have no idea what games I play. On the other hand, if you do, you may already know where I am going with these.

Coming in at number 5: The Left 4 Dead series. You can never go wrong with some classic zombie killing fun. So, the doors are a little "difficult" to get through; but we can blame that on the Zombie Apocalypse instead. It's just an awesome series, I really don't know how to describe it. There's just something about blowing a zombie's head off with an auto shotgun that makes me love this game. The random banter that goes on between the characters is awesome as well. Some of it is rather funny.

Number 4: The Assassin's Creed series. I actually picked the first game up on sale while I was out of town for the day, brought it home and have enjoyed it since then. Well, actually only about mid-December did I actually complete the game for the first time. It's another one of those games that has a real deep storyline to it and you have to start at the first game in order to understand anything about it. I really like the timeline that they take part in as well, although it doesn't help that I enjoy history a lot either. There's also so much stuff do to once you have completed the game. From going back and collecting flags of the different Kings(the first game) to collecting eagle feathers strewn about the game world(second game).

Number 3: The places for spots 2 and 3 were rather difficult to decide. I truly enjoy both series, but the Mechassault series takes the third spot. 30+ feet tall robots that walk around blowing anything up that gets in their way. 'Nuff said. I got this game along with my original Xbox back in December of '03. The other game is soon to be mentioned. If you already played this game, you know exactly why it's in my list. The story is awesome, the way the other Mechs blowup when you destroy them is awesome and the weapons are awesome as well. All the different kinds of Mechs you have to choose from is awesome. I prefer the assault class mechs over any of the others; especially when you can manage to upgrade their weapons to level three. Overkill to the lower classed scouts? Oh yes, but who cares when you have four others of them shooting at you and more on the way?

Number 2: Another "if you've played this you know why" series. The complete F.E.A.R series. The only horror/shooter game I've played, the storyline is twisted with plenty more twists as the story progresses to keep you guessing. It also is home to the best shotgun in any game ever. Plus it gives you plenty to do if you are a completion-ist with looking for answering machines in the first few games; to looking around for data pads that uncover and add to parts of the story in the second one. The environment is really nice as well.

For the game series I have enjoyed the most since 2003...probably no surprise here: Halo. Surprised? No? Didn't think so. Anyways, I have always been a huge fan of the story side of the game. Nothing beats sitting down and playing through a level or two of the campaign in the original game. When Forge was introduced in Halo 3, I thought that was so cool. I'd finally be able to make maps for friends to play on(more like only one friend) without having to build one from the ground up(literally) like in Far Cry. Well, so I can make maps, but not real good ones...or finish them for that fact. Then ODST came along which introduced Firefight into the franchise. When I first saw the video and the first few details I fell in love with it. Like killing an endless amount of zombies can never get old, neither can killing an endless amount of Covenant. The fiction behind the story is truly amazing also, I don't get into it a whole lot, but I do enjoy reading about certain aspects in the backstory of the series.
With the release of Reach some of the settings for the game modes have been taken apart and reassembled to give you much more customization than in previous games. Especially with Firefight in Reach, you can decide which enemy you fight in exactly a specific wave in a game. Plus you can have custom skulls on which either give you, or the enemies(or both) an upper hand in the battle. I could have an entire post dedicated to nothing but Firefight material...I might have to do that at some point.
The multiplayer is great also; I'm not a huge fan of the multiplayer(online part mainly) portion of any game to begin with, but I find a lot of fun with it in this series. I remember so many awesome games of Oddball with a few friends back in the days of Halo 2. Then going back and playing the same thing and a few extra custom made gametypes in CE also. There was always the awesome games of Crazy King or Juggernaut.
In short, the two things that really make this game series enjoyable to me is the deep storyline and Firefight.

So there you have it, my ten games/game franchises that I have had the most enjoyment out of for the past 7(!), going on 8 years of me gaming. But wait, there's more! Yes, I said more. There are a few(read: a lot) of games that I have played that have had these really awesome moments that deserve to be listed as well.
I enjoyed Modern Warfare 2, however it just isn't a game I can play on a daily basis(even though I did for like a month after I got the game...); however, the co-op Spec-Ops mode was pretty awesome. One level in particular keeps coming to mind. The Spec-Ops level entitled "Overwatch" is the one I'm thinking of, but anyways; you and your buddy are split up basically. One of you is one the ground and have to fight towards an extraction point, meanwhile; your friend is up in the sky in an AC-130 gunship providing covering fire. I cannot count how many times I played that level with Storm when we first got the game, it's just pure awesomeness getting to help your teammate reach their destination with that amount of firepower at your control. I dare say it, but it is my favorite thing out of all the CoD game I've played.
Then there's the first Bioshock, where you're swimming to the lighthouse in the middle of the ocean/whatever it is and then taking the Bathosphere(I'm surprised I remembered that...) down to Rapture. Maybe not extremely awesome, but nonetheless it's still pretty epic.
Another one that comes to mind is from Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Getting the gnome that is shoved underneath a nearby table at the start of the game and keeping track of him throughout the entire game and locking him away on the rocket at the end of it. Most annoying 30 Gamerpoints towards my gamerscore ever. I'll admit though, it has to be my favorite achievement that I have earned.
Going back to my roots here, the first encounter with the Flood. I'll admit I was younger when I first started playing Halo so they did freak me out at first. The level, 343 Guilty Spark, is the perfect setting for what happens later on in the level; plus all the winding chambers and tunnels that you have run through in order to escape really adds to the atmosphere of possible impending doom. And, you can't forget the video of the previous squad of Marines that travel to where the Flood is being contained that you get a hold of to find out why everything is the way it is. However, right now that is one of my favorite levels of the entire Halo franchise.
Speaking of Halo, another immediate awesome moment comes to mind via Halo 2. The game was full of them, but the one I'm thinking of is at the end of the level High Charity(I think...) where you face off against Elites and their minions that are fighting Brutes and their minions as well in the mausoleum. If you have played this part of the level, you know exactly why I am listing it here. Personally, I think it has that classic "Halo battle" feel to it with having to fight both sides of the Covenant.

Okay, so now there you have it. My top ten games I have enjoyed plus the few epic moments I can remember right now. I might have to post some more epic moments from games when I remember any. Now, feel free to post any of your favorite moments if you want.

Title-less

2010-11-12T22:22:00.002-06:00

No, I haven't lost my title on Bnet yet; it's just I don't know what to call this post...again. I think I'm going to jump right on into this post with a few of my older posts from the forums that have been hiding for a little while. You might have to scroll down the page until you see my name in order to find them. Whereas others are near the top of the page.
No, I don't have a Hail to the King; I have 7 of them now. Yes, at that point I didn't have any, but it was only a couple months later that I got my first one.
Really? I had no idea that getting a random unplanned kill was not expected.
You're kidding, right? The more I look at that thread; I don't know what I was thinking.
Seriously, back in Halo 3 I was always changing my helmet several times throughout the day. Luckily, I like the helmets they have in Reach so I don't change them that often.
Says the person who has played a handful of games and netted themselves a skill of 5 in the playlist.
Again, really I had no idea that it takes good teamwork to defeat a good team...
This is decent one with the way I worded it. It makes it sound like I boot people if they betray me in a game even if it was an accident.
So far, those are all the posts I have found for now. I'll see if I can scrounge up some more for a future post, but they are slowly dwindling now that I realize how not to be an idiot.

Anyways, remember that map that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I said I was working that was originating as an idea for a Halo 3 map and it has kind of died of since I started it in Reach? Well, I haven't killed it completely...not yet anyhow. I do have a very good start on it(read: pretty much finished) however, I need to change around some things on the map that I'm not happy with. Oh, and it still needs a name for it. There still are a few things that I need to add to it, such as making it compatible for the other gametypes. I'm thinking of also changing the current spawns for the sniper rifle as I'm not exactly happy with them. Once it is finished and I have given it a playtest with Storm, I will post it on here accompanied with a few screenshots perhaps for you all to download and enjoy. Or hate on, whichever suits your style better.

Now, before I leave you with a short post; I'll add in a few more words and pretty colored text and some moving images share some of my files I have taken in Reach as of lately.
First up is so far the only Firefight gametype I have created. I am actually rather happy with it. When I first started brainstorming the idea I was hoping for a Jackal only match of Firefight; well that happened and it is comprised of mostly Jackals, but it wasn't fun with only them. Needless to say even with the skull selection for each round it didn't offer a challenge. I wasn't planning on creating a gametype that was meant for a challenge, but I didn't want something that was going to easy to complete either. Once I had everything perfected in the end I ended up with a few other groups of enemies added in there also. It's still a fun mode to play, especially if Jackals have been owning you in the campaign and you completely hate them(like I do) you can take out your frustrations on them here. I also think you'll like what's in store for you if download it and play until round two.
Anyways, link to download aforementioned gametype.
Next up are a couple video clips I took from the game. Right now I will embed the video directly into the post, and give you direct download link. However, here soon(as in I'm going to do it no matter what) I'll have them and the older ones I found that I had rendered and that are stashed away uploaded to my Youtube channel. No promises as to when they'll be up, but I'm hoping to remember to do it soon.
First up in the batch of videos, a very lucky Elite with a Ghost and also, a very unaware Grunt that ends up going through a window....ouch.

If only I had Armor Lock... Direct download link.

I hit the Elite with the Ghost thinking that ramming him up against the building and the front end of the vehicle would kill him, but nope it doesn't work that way. He evidently had an invisible parachute that saved him. Direct download link is available here.

Now, the following is so far, I think, my best failure of Reach currently. Like the description of the clip says, I need to learn how to get out of a vehicle safely.

So that was Storm driving the Hog on the left after getting killed then respawning near one, I was the one that drove our old Hog back(located on the right) so we could use it. Well, lets just say that Newtons law where an object in motion tends to stay in motion until an equal or greater force are presented didn't work in my favor. At least...I think that's the way that law goes. Direct download link can be found...here.

I believe that is all I have for now. I'm hoping to get another post out with that map I was talking about sometime in the next few days. However, if past experience is any source; I wouldn't count on it.

A Look Inside the Message Box

2010-10-21T21:02:00.002-05:00

After receiving a reply from someone I have been talking to as of lately, I got the idea to expose some of the more interesting PM's I have been sent in the past year and a half. Yes, I know that completely voids the meaning of the letter "P" in PM since it stands for private message; ah well, they technically are my messages...in a way. I have removed some of the names of the users that have sent me these in order to protect them from...well for whatever reason. Anyways, moving onto something more than random banter. Although with some of these I do wonder if it really is a change.

"Hey, want to join Dark ODST, its a new group on bungie.net, and im looking for great new members, We do a varity of things, not much stuff is going on now. But when we get a few more members, the group will stay active, and you'll be a great member of the group. I hope u join."
This message was sent by what is now someone who had their account auto-deleted back in March of last year. Nothing really special about it, but I have learned in my time being there that when you send out a recruitment message to someone ask to join your group; they would kind of like link to the place. Yes, the name of the group does just fine, but how am I supposed to know to go search for your group?

The following one is very simple, and short. A little too short almost...
"join group Ghost of onix"
Yep, that's it. I really have no idea what to say about this....

"Hi, i noticed you in the Halo 3 forums. and i would like to ask you if you wanted to join the ODST Red Team. The first member to join will be instantly promoted."
If only you would have given me a link to the group, perhaps a small description or the motto and most importantly; sent it two months ago when your group was new...

This next one is probably one of the most random messages I have ever received with my stay on B.net.
Title: lets play h3
Body: "ill send u an invite"
Yes...you do that. Wait, how do know what my gamertag is and how do I know that you'll actually invite me instead of just ignore me? Or is this all something that I am imagining happened, but actually isn't real?

This is probably the most out-of the blue conversation that someone has started with me, it starts a lot like this:
Title: Good Evening :) (Note, they just had to add the creepy little looking smiley in there didn't they?)
Body: Good day Onyx Spartan, how are you feeling this evening sir?
I reply simply back with; Good and yours?
I get their reply back: "Recovering from sickness, but better :) thanks!
I reply back with something else and get this response:
"Indeed, and I'm happy you're happy as well :)" (There's that smiley again...)
I give my final message and get the final reply back with "Yeah! :)"
Yeah, probably the strangest conversation I have had with anyone. I swear though, if I see that stupid smiley one more time; I'm going to kill my inbox.

Next up, another recruitment message. Yeah, I get those a lot and they have kind of accumulated over my three year stay. This one is rather long, but I'll take out the good parts of it.
"I noticed your activity in the Bungie.net community and I figured I'd send you this message detailing my custom content group. If you're interested in the group, join it! "
Really, I had no idea I was an active member of the community and yes, if I like a group I would normally join it also...
"Our state-of-the-art thread titling system uses scientific principles to help you find what you want easily! Custom content threads are titled with special symbols - $ is for Screenshot Threads, @ is for Map Threads, & is for Gametype Threads, and # is for Film and Video Threads!"
I never knew the dollar sign was state-of-the art... I had the perfect science related comeback for that and now I don't remember it, ah well maybe I'll remember it later and update this post with it.

Random message that has nothing to do with what I posted in a thread are always awesome. A little backstory here as to this message. Bungie had put up a poll on their front page that asking what was the multiplayer feature that you liked the most. Well I had posted a reply to it and got this message from some random user:
"a load out is the special abilities like you can be invisible without picking up an active camoflauge it just like the special ability to run, fly, and camo"
Yes, I already know what a Loadout is but thanks clarifying it anyways. I honeslty don't even know how I got that as what I posted had nothing to do with the Loadouts anyways...

"hi this isint about the beta but im [redacted] and i have reacon buti need it back cuz some1 hacked me somehow and took it off but i changed my name to [redacted] so plz give me another piece of that asthome armour plz listen"
Sorry dude, but I can't help you there(even though I did try and get him in contact with the right person), but I'm not a Bungie employee.

Then there is the message asking if I knew when the Reach Beta would be out back in May and if I knew what time that would translate to for those over in the UK. Well all I was going on was "Late morning PDT on May 3rd." since that is what everyone else was going by.

Title: Hey.
Body: Long time no talk, what's up?
Umm, not much considering last time we talked you hated me still for disagreeing with the choice I made in a group we were both admins for....so yeah.

Title: Recruiting You
My Thoughts: Oh boy...here we go again.
Body: Bunch of rambling.

more rambling....

"You have received this standard copy/paste recruitment message because we wish to have you amongst the Staff."
Well, you were at least to the point of it being a standardized copy and paste message...sort of.

Now, for the best message I think I have received in the past three years of my membership on Bungie.net. This was sent by someone who posted a thread in the community forum and I have been talking with them off and on as of lately. They've made comment of how I'm the only *active* Mythic that they rarely see in the public forums and how my avatar compliments the blue title bar. On Wednesday I lost my Mythic status for only that day and gained it back on Thursday(it'll be gone tomorrow for me mentioning it on here now) and he messaged me saying that I lost, well I messaged him back later today saying I got it back. This is the result of me saying I got it back:

"Webteam: "This Onyx Spartan guy, he seems to be telling us something... I've got it! He wants us to add "Onyx" to the title system as a Base title! It's genius!

*later*

Webteam: Ok we are just about done! Lets make Onyx Spartan the very first Onyx member!...
Computer: ///SERVERS SHUTTING DOWN+/// CAN NOT LOAD ANOTHER TITLE TO SYSTEM REBOOTING...///

Webteam: WTF?! Shut it off! NOW!

*later, again*

Webteam: well, at least we saved the servers from asploding... WHAT?! Onyx Spartan is now Legendary?! Must have been an effect of shutting the servers off completely for 5 WHOLE MINUTES.

WebTeam: Lets promote him again tomorrow, I;m tired."

I will admit that the thought of the webteam taking anything from me and actually implementing it into the website would be pretty cool, this is just plain hilarious though. +1 to kool fat kid for writing that up in his spare time.

Now, that is all for now; but rest assured(or worried) that this feature will return at some point in the future as I don't plan on deleting any messages I get from here on out. That and I always have a total of nine pages to fall back onto for awesome stuff. And I know that there is still more stuff lurking out there in the depth of my inbox currently; I just don't have the time to post it all right now.
Oh and, :)

Next Tier: Gold

2010-10-19T23:37:00.001-05:00

Ah yes, if you look at my Halo: Reach service record that is is what most of my commendations for the campaign look like. What are commendations you ask; well some of you might be at least. Basically they are certain milestones for getting "x" amount of headshots in campaing/multiplayer/Firefight. However, they aren't only for headshots; you can get them for killing so many enemy vehicles(or killing so many enemies inside a vehicle) anyways you get the idea though right? Good, now moving on. Since I have been playing the campaign in Reach so much I have six, almost seven, commendations upgraded to their Silver tier. Each tier has an "x" amount you have to reach in order to gain the next tier. The tiers are set up much like this(in order from lowest to highest): Iron -> Bronze -> Silver -> Gold -> Onyx and then I think you can max out the Onyx tier also, not sure on that. Plus when you reach the next tier of a commendation you get a credit boost(hear by known as cR) on top of whatever you got in the game you just played. It's a cool way to gain some extra cR's if you have the time to sit there and "rank them up" so to speak. So what does any of what I just said have to do with anything really? Well, I'm on a personal goal to max out at least one of the campaign related commendations; however, after looking at a friends' service record which has a couple commendations that are Gold tier and the next one being Onyx, it looks like it's going to take me a really long time in order to accomplish that goal.

Now moving onto something else and I know I've already stated this. A couple weeks ago I took my first foray into the multiplayer since the Beta back in May and it's still really fun. So here, I'll share a couple games from that experience.
My very first game of multiplayer was in an age old classic playlist called Big Team Battle. I was actually really happy that my first game was Territories. It probably my favorite gametype anymore next to Grifball. Yes, I like it even better than CTF now.
I also like Oddball... and Headhunter. However, I still don't like SWAT; which is why I'm glad that it is its own playlist now. Since Storm and I decided to switch to Team Objective so we could play Headhunter, we also got to play a gametype called " Hot Potato" which is pretty fun. I'm still not sure exactly how it works, but I think when one team has gotten so many points holding the ball(which is actually a bomb) it blows up and resets. Still though, it's pretty fun.
I have found out that I still have this strong liking for one sided assault(one bomb.) Despite the score being 2-0 in our favor, the game was still pretty close. There were points when we thought they would score easily, but then our defense would kick in and stop them. I remember one time where they had the bomb armed with a few seconds left(10 I believe) and the actual timer on the bomb was only one to two seconds behind the game time. So in one round we escaped that round without them scoring only because the countdown on the bomb was a couple seconds slower then that game timer. It was awesome to say the least. Not a whole lot went on in this game. However, it was still another good game. The other team scored fairly early in the first round and we had a little trouble scoring our first time, but again our teams defense kicked into action that round(mainly Storm keeping them pinned down with the sword, more on this in a bit) and held them off so we could score in the final round. Now, what I said about Storm keeping the other team pinned with the sword makes no sense right? Well, it was interesting to see to say the least. They took the bomb off to one of the sides of the map and tried to sneak it around that way, well one of their players had already grabbed the sword and rushed into our base where Storm had killed him thus taking the guys sword. Anyways, the bomb carry gets killed right out in the open and the other team tries to rush in there to grab the bomb in hopes to overrun us; but each time Storm stepped out there with the sword they ran away and hide until the rest of their team showed up. It went on like that for pretty much the duration of the third round.
This final game, I have only one thing to say. I still like the Warthog.

So I will give you a quick update on the map I say I am working on, and yet; still have to show it to you. I actually have more than two bases and two rocks placed on it after some time on it today. I managed to place the flag and capture point to make it compatible with CTF and have placed a lot more cover than what was there before. I have also added a few weapons to the map also; and will most likely add more here soon. It was interesting trying to get a kill zone I have placed next where the rockets are set up so that it wouldn't kill you when you went anywhere near them. After that I placed a couple small little sniper towers, but those might not stay as I don't want the sniper to always have everyone else pinned down and all that....even though that is the point of a sniper. It's near being complete, all I have to do is maybe add some more cover, perhaps weapons even and change the respawn times on the power weapons. Oh, plus figure out what some of the stuff I have placed on the map does. And think up a name for it wouldn't hurt also. It should be done within the next couple weeks I'm guessing, but it really depends on how much longer it takes and how often I get the chance to work on it.

I believe that is all I have for now. I can guarantee that I will have a little longer post out sometime soon; just don't count on it is all. I will also give a quick update on my title on Bungie.net; I still have the Mythic title since I gained it back in last month. I also noticed that this Thursday will be one month that I have kept said title. That surely beats the whole four days I had it last time back in August.
Update: So, I'm back down to Legendary yet again. I'm noticing a pattern though, each time I talk about it on here; I loose it. Solution: don't even mention it on here anymore. Am I disappointed? Yes, but the way I look at it is I didn't loose it due to a ban or warning.

The Classified Files of Reach

2010-10-01T23:33:00.005-05:00

Okay, so maybe they're not exactly classified; but I thought I would share some of the files I have taken in Reach so far in the past two weeks. Well, it'll actually be a whole two film clips and a screenshot as the other couple of items I have; since you've already seen it. Anyways, moving on. I embed most of the clips in the post since I have them rendered and will follow up with the direct download link for Reach. In a few days I hope to have the multiplayer ones posted up on my YouTube channel and that way it'll be easier for you all to view them. Now, I believe we are moving on.
First I'll start with some clips. This first one is a custom game of Oddball on Pinnacle, which is Reach's re-imagination of Ascension from Halo 2. It's a simple clip actually, I jump down from a ledge and perform on assassination on Storm as he is running around with the skull. I think the best part is how the skull rolls towards the camera.

Almost forgot, direct link to download.

Now this next one was taken from our venture into Reach's matchmaking last weekend. We were wanting to play Team Headhunter in BTB, but no; everyone decides to play SWAT instead...stupid SWAT gametype. So still wanting to play Headhunter, we move into Team Objective and get a game of it. Later on we play several more games and hit another game or two of Headhunter in the process. However, on the third or fourth game; I manage to grab one of these.

Yeah, you could say that it was instant win literally. So yeah, my first and probably only Skullamanjaro(I think that's how it is spelled...) And here is the direct link to download.

Now for that lonely screenshot that I have taken. It's really simple and rather boring, but it was also rather awesome. Evil Storm shows now mercy to a poor Grunt.

Before I publish this quick post, I'll update you on a couple things. You remember that map I said I was going to make in Halo 3, then changed my mind and said I was going to make in Reach? Well, I finally got a start on it. It's not much of a start, but I at least have a couple bases(which is more than what I had on the H3 variant) and a neat little place for the rockets or shotgun hanging of the cliff and a fancy little place in the middle for...well something. However, I'm missing a key detail I'll need before I publish it anywhere, a name and description. I have a couple ideas floating around but I'm not sure; maybe I'll come up with something better in the following days.

And lastly, I have been promoted back to an Exalted Mythic Member of Bungie.net and this time I'm betting I keep it for a little while longer than last time. It's funny actually, I logged on around early Thursday night and logged back in later that night and I noticed my title bar color had changed from Legendary gray to Mythic royal blue. Funny, that's what happened last time also. What makes me say I can keep it for a little longer than the previous time is I see a lot more Legendary members out there so the quota for that title might be filled already and I have gotten "bumped" up to Mythic finally. That and I am hoping to keep my activity consistent from here on out and hope to keep active enough to keep it. Of course all of what I just said is completely a hypothesis and all. Now, I think that is all. A better, longer post might come out sometime next week if I can have the time to do so. Until then, keep killing Jackals/Skirmishers.

Hour of Reckoning

2010-09-18T00:06:00.000-05:00

No, this won't be some long drawn out post about Reach. However it will be about Reach. I have decided to post my experience of the midnight release that I attended at my local Gamestop. It's only four pics of that, but I am also adding in some pics of what I got and my first screenshot and video from the game. Which were taken from the campaign, but shouldn't have any spoilers in them in case you have yet to finish the game. Anyways, on to midnight release stuff. A forewarning though, some of these people might seem a little strange in the one picture. Okay, so they're in reverse order but oh well.

The time should read 1 hour, 38 minutes and 20 seconds until release.

Poster hanging in the window.

The larger-than-what-I-thought it would be crowd.

Time of departure for the game store.

The next group of pics will be of what I got that night. One item which I new I was getting since I payed for it and the other, which I had no idea of.

Picture of both the Legendary edition box and the limited edition Xbox 360 "Slim" model with a Reach design on it.

And a side view of the actual console itself. I have more pics of the seal on the Legendary edition, but I would like more with the contents and a better view of the box. Anyways, onto a screenshot and quick clip I took the other day. First up; the screenshot.

And lastly, here is the embeded version of the film clip I took from the campaign followed by a direct download link for Reach and WMV.

And here is the direct link to the file for download in Reach or WMV.
Anyways, hope you enjoy it and expect some more pics at a later date and maybe even some more clips also.

If Only it was True

2010-09-04T00:02:00.000-05:00

So, some of you may be wondering where I've been the past few days...or weeks. It's simple actually(isn't it always?), a few weeks ago I played the demo for NCAA Football 11 and that made me want Fall to come even quicker and it also made me want a football game for the 360. So a couple weeks ago I went down to my local game store and picked up NCAA Football 10. Yeah I know it's not the new one with all the fancy features and all; but hey, it was 20 bucks cheaper! So far, I have had several intense games and a couple blowouts also. Anyways, what's all in this post? Well, hopefully I'll be able to talk about a bit the football game and how I've done it. Maybe I'll even manage to fit it some talk about Reach. Yeah, pretty sure I'll be able to fit that in there somewhere; I'll make room. Anyways, moving on.

Like I said, a couple weeks ago I picked up the football game(I can find a way to use it this sentence again) and have enjoyed it so far. It is by far one of the best Collegiate football games I have played. Before I continue though, you might be asking(more likely not) "What is the team you chose to use?" Well, that team is my favorite college team; Illinois. There really isn't a whole lot to say about it though. I did start a Dynasty on it, which kind of has you playing as the coach of the team; but you're still actually playing the game. On my first season(Which I started three days after getting the game) I went 8-0 in conference play and 12-0 overall. But wait; that's not it though! I finished that season rated #1 in the Coaches' poll and all that stuff, plus went to the BCS National Title game against #2 Boise State with the same record. Despite it being a video game, I was actually nervous a little when playing the game knowing that something would happen. So, the kickoff happens and Boise State is receiving for the first half. Okay skip all that and go ahead several downs and Boise State is close to scoring a touchdown. Luckily our defense held them off at our own 15 yard line and they only escape with a field goal. Okay, so now I'm wondering what to do now since we're down 3-0 and I'm not having much luck getting my running game going. So I decided to start passing on them with the occasional option run play thrown in there. Well it works I then take the lead 7-3 and build on it from there. In the end the final score is Illinois 63 - Boise State 3. Yeah...umm, owned. After winning that bowl game, I ended finishing the season and 13-0 overall. At the end of my first season I still had another two years for my contract with Illinois, however; I got a couple job offers also. One was with Alabama, which had a really good season that year(in that game that is) and another one was North Carolina I believe though I'm not sure how they did. I also had the choice to renew for another six years with Illinois, well I decided to renew my contract for the other six years. Right now I am currently in my second season of it and am ranked #5 in the Coaches' Poll with an overall record of 7-0. So far in the second season and in conference play I am 3-0 already beating Michigan, Minnesota and just recently, Indiana. So far the only team that has shown any sign of possibly beating me was the game against Minnesota. I still won that game, but the final score was 62-24. I know, I know; that's still double their score so why should have worried about that? Well they scored a TD first, which put us down 7-0; however on the kickoff I return it for a touchdown thus evening up the score. Fast forward into early in the second quarter I score another TD taking the lead 14-7. Soon afterwards they score yet another touchdown and tie the game up. Halftime rolls around finally and I have the lead at 21-14; second half starts and I just take off from there and finish the game with the previously stated final score.

Really the only thing else I have done was started a "Road to Glory" mode thing.... What you basically do is create a player and start with your state's high school championship playoffs and try to get a scholarship to a college. I did that, won the Illinois State playoffs with a local high school and got scholarship offers from a whole bunch of places. I decided to sign with....with.....I can't say it....with Iowa. That left a bad taste.... Yeah, so since I'm an Illinois fan I don't care a whole lot for Iowa. However, I was guaranteed a bunch of stuff by signing with Iowa, one of which was being a starter for them. I would have liked to sign with Illinois(obviously), but they wanted me as a second string and I was hoping for a starter position. What I am thinking of doing is creating another player(probably someone on defense) and seeing what I can get there. I don't know really, it's the least of my concerns since I want to see how I can do in the Dynasty I started; that and Reach is only a couple weeks away, but hey who's counting right?

Moving onto that map I said I was going to make before Reach came out. Yeah, so that was like two weeks ago and I haven't started it yet. So obviously by now I have decided to scratch the idea of creating it in Halo 3's Forge and just wait until Reach comes out(two weeks!) and start it in Forge World. I don't know where I will build it exactly, but I am thinking about going to The Quarry and building it there. I know it's an open area and all that so how will people know where the boundaries of it are? Well, they're called death barriers for a reason. Since it's in an open area that obviously means that some stuff might change, however this could be a good thing in the long run. Luckily that means it should give me the chance to make it a little larger than what the Sandbox version currently could be. I can see some really cool stuff being worked into the new version of it with all the stuff we'll have at our hands in Forge World. As of right now I don't know if I'll try to make an exact remake of it(with the general geometry and weapon placement) or if I'll make some changes to it. However, it's going to be along the same concept of the one I was planning on making in H3's Forge. I know, it sounds like I just contradicted myself there; but if you read it carefully I'm basically stating that since I'm planning on building it in a different place some of it might change if I can't make it work properly...or something like that at least. Anyways, moving on before I confuse you even more.

So, after reading Bungie's weekly update for August 20th, 2010 I am really excited for Firefight even more. So if you watch the one video showcasing the Firefight gametype called "Skeet Shoot(-ing)" I really liked the way that one looked. After seeing that video though it made me start hoping that they included in the game the option to save custom Firefight settings(which I'm sure they did), but also the ability to upload them to your file share for the game and download other variants and such. A lot like the way we can download custom maps and gametypes in Halo 3 already, but only with Firefight 2.0 for Reach since we are going to be able to edit all sorts of settings for that mode. I have already mentioned a few ideas in earlier posts that I have made about some settings that I might change in order to make a game of Firefight interesting. I have yet to see some gameplay of the one built-in Firefight mode called "Gruntpocalypse." I guess it's nothing but Grunts and whatever load-outs you have to choose from. Sounds like a real good version to play when you want to waste some time or just have fun and don't want to play a regular game of Firefight. I have seen some footage of Firefight Versus and it looks fun. I'm honestly note sure how often I will play it, but I'm sure I will at some point just to check it out even.
Something that I think would be really cool to do, but I think it's not going to happen and is to late implement is if you could make your own Firefight maps using Forge World. Now at first I was against the idea of being able to create your own maps and using them in Firefight; but honestly, I think it could possibly be a really cool feature to have. I can easily see it being used and some great community Firefight maps being made in the end; especially from the more "known" Forgers in the Halo community. The one thing I would have done if you could have been able to do it is make even just a part of an old Firefight map from ODST. I would leave the basic geometry and layout of said section if at all possible and just adding maybe some extra cover if I wanted to and certainly adding some more weapons laying around the main area of the map. Like I said though, I doubt it we're going to be able to do and since the game comes out in 10 days(again, not counting...) it is most likely too late to put it in the game right now.

Anyways, I think that is all for now. I am hoping to have another post out possibly before Reach comes out; but I'm not going to guarantee anything. I can guarantee that I will have a post out sometime shortly after Reach is released as I'll be wanting to talk about all the neat new stuff in it and I can do so here. So until then, keep killing aliens...or whatever it was your were doing before arriving here. Oh yeah, I also got around to changing the picture for the header of my blog. It's a screenshot I took from the Reach Beta. If I remember correctly I am the Elite that is on the right hand with what was left of the laser blast in my face. I swear when that happened I was dead...

What is Mythic?

2010-08-13T23:13:00.002-05:00

This is something I have been thinking of the past couple days since I saw a video on Waypoint and since I saw the new bio for someone on my Xbox LIVE friends list. Anyways, I'm sure most of you have at least heard of what Mythic difficulty is and what it is all about. If you haven't or simply just forgot what it was; here's what the "true" definition of it is. Turn the game up to Legendary difficulty and turn all the skulls on and complete it by yourself. Oh but wait! That's not all, you have to also complete it in one sitting without using the save and quit feature. Now personally, that's fine and all; but I mean if you complete a level of Halo 3 or ODST on Mythic difficulty and you turn it into someone to get an "official" award stating that you completed the level and they comeback and say for some reason that it doesn't count. And yes, I've had that happen before. That's not the point though, my point is since you don't sit and play the game in one sitting you shouldn't get an award for going through all that torture of Mythic difficulty? Tell me, is that any fair to you at all? Personally, I don't think it is. In my case I turned in a run to a site that was running a campaign challenge and I thought I would try it out on Mythic difficulty; well when I did that I did the run of the level on co-op with Storm. Once we finally completed the level I thought we both would get a little badge on our profile page saying we "completed this level on Mythic difficulty." Well, we get an award to go on both of our player pages; however, at the same time I received a message from the person running the challenge that it didn't count as on "official" Mythic run since it wasn't done solo. Now that's fine and all now that I understand what the "true" definition of Mythic is. However, if you break the difficulty for Mythic down into its basic parts what are you left with? Legendary campaign difficulty with all the skulls turned on and campaign scoring also. I suppose you could count that doing it solo is a key component, but to me it really isn't something that is a huge factor in it. Because again, Mythic is really just Legendary and all skulls on. Lastly on this subject, I will share the game which I refer to several times in the previous paragraph. Moving on now.

So, I'm sitting here thinking "what else is Mythic?" Well, I believe I can answer that question actually. Sometime the other day I was promoted from Exalted Legendary Member on Bungie.net's forums to Exalted Mythic Member. Now, I'm sure some of you might be thinking "Well what's the difference and why should I care?" Well firstly, you don't have to care if you don't want to. I just thought I would share this here with anyone who wandered here to my blog. Secondly, the difference between a Legendary Member and Mythic Member is somewhat simple. A Legendary Member is an active member for 1-2 years, whereas a Mythic Member is an active member for 2-3 years. Which if you look at account age, I can qualify for both. Another difference is the title bar color for each is light grey for Legendary and royal blue for Mythic. There are also a very few amount of Mythic's at one time.
Anyways, back to the point here. I could have qualified to become a Mythic member earlier in the year(since my 3 year join date was this past March) or even last year since you only have to be an active member for two to three years. When March did roll around I was hoping to gain the Mythic base title, but never did. Around March the only thing related to my title that I gained was the Exalted prefix; which is basically three years without a warning or ban. I didn't mind it at all since I didn't even know that I could qualify for that prefix. So at that time I was an Exalted Legendary Member and from what I've seen; not that many people hold the Exalted prefix either. Throughout most of the summer that is where I stayed and I didn't mind it in the least bit. Now fast-forwarding to yesterday, I log on and go about the normal stuff I do on there which consists of checking my groups I'm in. So I go to one that just recently started where I was asked to be a staff member for them, I go and check the staff group out to see if anything new has come up in the meantime. I see that something has so I go check it out; then I see a post I made right above the new one and that is when I noticed that my title bar color had changed from the Legendary light grey to the Mythic royal blue. At the time though I didn't know if my prefix changed to something else since I was viewing the group and my roll in it is called "Staff" (like had I lost my Exalted I have?) so I went and checked out a post I had made the night before in the public forums and found out that I wasn't actually seeing things and that I was an Exalted Mythic Member. Anyways, that's that; I am now(at least for the time being) a Mythic Member.
*Status Update* As of August 15th, I am back down to Exalted Legendary Member. I didn't think it would last long. Maybe I'll get it back sometime.

And moving on...yet again. The last thing I wanted to cover here quickly. Remember when I posted this map here? If you do and you have downloaded it, I am hoping to maybe go and completely redesign it in the next few weeks or so. What I have in mind for changing it so far is adding something more to make it look more visually appealing. The basic geometry of the map isn't going to change a whole lot, however I may add some more structures in the center and possibly in the bases somewhere. I also know that I am going to add some more weapons around the map as well; though I have no idea which ones I will place and where either. If everything goes according to plan also, I am going to make it work for more than just the Slayer gametype. That was probably one of the larger mistakes I made about the previous version "Prototype" and I plan on fixing it. With some help from Storm I might get it to work with Oddball and possibly even King of the Hill. I have also decided that if the release of Reach is getting too close before I have finished the map I will scratch it and start from new in Forge World when Reach is released. I have thrown around the idea of making it for Halo 3 and possibly making another version of it in Reach. No idea where I could go with that as of right now since I don't know a whole lot about what we can do in it. Well we do actually, but I have to try it for myself in order to brainstorm ideas for it.

Lastly for this post, I recently discovered that there are some rendered videos I have stashed away that I haven't uploaded to my Youtube channel yet. So, when I get some free time I will try my best to go through the ones I have uploaded and make sure these aren't already on there and if they aren't; I will upload the others.
That is all I have for now. My hands are getting tired from typing this thing for the past three hours (give or take a couple) and I have nothing else to discuss right now.

Fun With Brutes in Firefight

2010-08-07T23:54:00.004-05:00

Quick and short post here, but I wanted to share part of a film I rendered earlier tonight from a game of Firefight I played with Storm. This happened several times throughout the game, but the best part was at the end. I know from somewhere I will take ridicule for it and yes; I also know that it probably wasn't the smartest thing to do since we had no lives left and a fairly high score going. But hey, what's the point if you can't have some fun with the enemy at least once in a while right? Anyways, here's the embedded video plus the direct link to the file in case you don't have Silverlight installed, you can at least watch it in Window Media Player or whatever it's called now. Also, I know it's cut off on the right side of the video; so you might be better off going to the direct file link and watching it in WMV. Your call.

Direct link to file for download in ODST/Media Player.

Set Start, Tough Luck On

2010-07-19T22:00:00.000-05:00

If you have every played even a little bit of Firefight from ODST, you know exactly what I mean. If not, I'll quickly explain it here. Each time a new set starts in Firefight, the Tough Luck skull is turned on in the first round and stays on in the following rounds. Now with that out of the way, you're wondering why the title is that way(most likely not though); well I have been playing a huge amount of Firefight lately and now I realize how awesome it is. So in this post I was going to dig through my games of Firefight and post the ones I thought were good. Maybe even through in a screenshot from it or two. And, if I can think of what to talk about it, maybe even discuss some more Firefight 2.0. I'll kick things off with the very first game of Firefight I played, which also happend to be the first time I played ODST the night it came out. http://www.bungie.net/Stats/ODSTg.aspx?gameid=777802&player=StoredGrunt360

Didn't do too bad for the first game, however; it's nothing compared to what I could do now. When I played later that day, I did have one decent game. 87,428. Next day when Storm and were trying to make the campaign last on Normal, we decide to hit Firefight co-op for the first time on the map Windward and here are the results. We also grabbed our first Firefight related achievement by getting par score(which is set at 200,000) for that map. Still though, we can do better than that. So we continue to get the par score for each of the maps fairly easily, until we have one map to do; and that map is Last Exit. First try we get 58,902, second game only a small 11,756, third game we think we finally might get it with 64,700 only to fail there and in the next game getting 12,994. Well we finally get it after like 6 tries. Traveling back to Windward we get our first high score above 200,000 points. Set 5, Round 2, Wave 4; 740,804. Moving forward a couple months, here is our first game where we reached one million points. Yes it was on easy, but so what; we were aiming for massive amounts of kills not points that game. Although the points were a bonus. I would like to note that that game was the only time I thought we would reach a million points. However, this game begs to differ and so would this one. Okay, so I was wrong and we have been able to get to a 1.5 million points at least twice and one million points once. This next game was our first(and only) attempt at the Vidmaster: Endure achievement. Which is to pass the fourth set on Heroic four player co-op over Xbox LIVE. Sound simple right? Well I thought so at first since at the start of the third set we had a decent amount of lives stockpiled until we used them all up. I was left as the last man standing on the fifth wave of round three and got owned horribly by the never ending amount of Brutes. So yeah, we were close since all we had to do was get out of set three and get past set four. This last game was played just yesterday and we almost made it to a million points four a fourth time. We could have kept going except I was the last man standing and was trapped in a corner by a Brute, but when I was finally able to get away from him to reload I jumped right into a suicide Grunt. I hope to get a screenshot of that soon.

Moving onto Reach's Firefight 2.0. If you played the Beta back in May, mainly in late May that is, you probably played the playlist that was dubbed Network Test 1? Well that was meant to test the network coding I guess for the game, however it turns out that the basic gametype for that playlist is going to be a Firefight gametype. From the games I played of it in the Beta it was awesome and I can't wait to see how it is going to work with an endless amount of aliens coming after you not only trying to kill you, but also take out the generators as well. The other gametype I'm interested to try out is "Rocket Fight" I think it may have been called, but anyways; it's nothing but rockets with infinite ammo for them. One thing that I am sure will happen with that version of Firefight is chaos will ensue. I've already talked a bit about the customzation in the new Firefight, but let me elaborate a little as to why I like it so much. Probably the main reason is you'll be able to do pretty much whatever you want to in it. If you want to fight nothing but Grunts then go ahead and do so. If you are tired of being screwed by the Elites in the campaign and just want to slaughter a couple hundred(or thousand if you're like me) then you'll be able to do that also. I'm pretty sure you get the point by now. I know a lot of people that are actually against us being able to do all that; however, their only argument is this: "People will be able to get high scores easily and no skill is involved." Well you know what, fun > skill. Yes it helps to know how to play the game at points, but really if you are just wanting to have fun are you really going to care how far you get? And yes, I also know that to some people, doing to good is having fun and that's fine, but to me it really isn't worth getting mad at a game because you aren't doing good. I know, "But I'm still not having fun." well maybe you should reconsider your current definition of fun.

Anyways back on topic here. Besides what I mentioned in my last post about what I plan on doing in Reach's Firefight. Another thing I think I might end doing sometime in it, is having at least one wave or round dedicated to Hunters. I really think they could be a challenge in Reach and from the screens I have seen of them; they also look larger than they were in ODST. Also, I would easily settle for a round or two of Jackals and their counterpart, Skirmishers.

On a closing note; I'll leave you with some screenshots I have taken over the past few days from Firefight.

Reach Beta Clips or Firefight?

2010-07-12T22:01:00.002-05:00

Remember how a while ago I posted saying that I had taken several clips from the Reach Beta and I was going to render them, upload them to youtube and post them here? If you do, good; if not, then look here. I know, at that time I didn't have many uploaded yet and I kept promising how I was going to get the last group of them up and posted and yet, I never did. Until now that is. The other night I took the time to upload the last three film clips that I took from the Halo: Reach multiplayer Beta. So where are they you ask? I suppose you could click this link and get all the Reach videos I have. Now you might have to find a way to play the video outside of my channel page thing, as it tends to lag and looks horrible. I need to find a way to organize them better maybe.

So E3 is already long gone and done with, however we did get some interesting campaign footage of Reach and with that we also got the confirmation of Firefight returning. I do wonder though if there was any doubt if it would return or not since I'm assuming it was very popular in ODST, even to this day. The one thing I am very excited about its return is the amount of customization you are going to be able to do in it. From what I've gathered you will be able to decide which enemy and how many of them you want in each wave. Same with rounds and sets I think also. You'll also be able to decide how much damage you and the enemy deals out to each other and if you can be killed or not. Much like you can with certain things in Halo 3's custom games. I was already brainstorming and idea for it the other day with Storm after being owned horribly by a couple hammer Chieftains with their invincibility turned on. If you've ever played ODST's Firefight, you know exactly what I'm talking about on how it seems to last forever when you are so close to making par score and they end up killing you in the end anyways. Well, in Firefight 2.0 I plan on changing that. Right now I know you're probably thinking something like this: "You're crazy Grunt, there's no way you can mimic a Chieftain as a Spartan-III!!!!" Well with the amount of customization, I can! Give myself a hammer and turn on invincibility and set the enemy in the wave to a Brute Chieftain and there you go, one instant rebuttal for all those times you got ripped off by that hammer or fuel rod Chieftain in ODST. Plus if you always got behind the ones with the hammer as they were invincible and assassinated them, just imagine that with the new form of assassinations that are in Reach. Hold B to own Brutes!
Another thing that I've also thought about doing if they return is setting up an entire wave or round of suicide Grunts and see how long we can hold out against them. They get very annoying in ODST currently, but I really want to see how long we could last against just them.

Anyways, I think that is finally it. However, don't be surprised if I comeback with another post mainly discussing Firefight from ODST and possibly Firefight 2.0. Lastly, the complete breakdown post on HGA is still in the works. I haven't had the motivation to work on it as of lately and I still plan on delivering it sometime in the future. With any luck, before Reach falls.

No, the Zombies Haven't Taken Over Yet

2010-06-25T23:33:00.002-05:00

Like the title says, zombies haven't invaded the earth yet. Or come into existence for that fact. So why no new blog post as of lately? Well, I've been doing my part at keeping the zombie/alien invasion at bay....kind of. Simply put, I've been busy and haven't had a whole large chance to get a new post out at all. And remember that detailed breakdown I'm working on for HGA? Well, it's still being worked on; however, I feel it will be worth the wait. I've also been playing some Half-Life 2 again as I really enjoyed playing that game. Same way with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 and with ODST. Wait, do I ever really stop playing that last game? And lastly, I'm still planning on uploading and posting the last few Reach Beta clips I have, all in a matter of time though.

Finally, Reach Videos

2010-06-10T23:20:00.003-05:00

Yes, I know I said I was going to post them all at once; however, I haven't had the chance to upload the rest of them yet. So I'm going to change how I was planning on doing things and instead of posting them all at once, I'm going to post the ones I do have uploaded to my youtube channel. Oh and I'm not going to share them individually and embed them into this post. For one reason, it's easier to share the playlist they are in instead of the other way around. Anyways, here's the link: here maybe?
When I upload more I'll be sure to post here and let you all know. I have about three or four more clips that I need to upload from the Beta.

Anyways(again...) here is some stuff that I have in store here soon; or sometime at least. Currently I am working on the complex breakdown of "Project HGA" that me and Sgt Riffle started back in 2008. It went through two different versions, one in '08 and the other one in '09. So, I will be working on that and once it's published; you'll know why I hold HGA close to my Bungie.net life.
One thing I did do recently though is completely do a re-structure of ERS Spartans' group ranks. Well almost complete at least, the most major change was the title names changed. I'm happy with them, except for mine though. It's simply "Administrator" which is fine and all since that is what I am in the group, but I want something different. I wonder if I could work the word "elder" in there somehow as that is the only one title I was going to use, but didn't.

Anywho, enjoy this little rambling type post. Also, E3 is next week; what are you wanting out of it? Personally, some info about Reach's campaign and the confirmation of Firefight to return and maybe some sweet details on Natal also.

Nameless Post 2

2010-06-04T19:59:00.003-05:00

Ah yes, I ran into that dilemma where I can't think of a name for this post. Well, what else is new. Anyways, not a whole lot is going to be discussed here. I'm just going to share a few more Reach Beta screenshots I took and maybe give a little detail as for a future post. Anyways, here are some screenshots.

I know, they're not clips and that' what you want to see; well be patient. I don't have all of the clips I took from the Beta uploaded to my youtube account yet and I want to be able to share them all at once. So why not do it now instead of sit here explaining it to you? Well, you want to come here and read something right?

In other news, tomorrow I am going to be getting Just Cause 2, why? Well I played the demo and it was actually fun. Plus I've been looking at Rooster Teeh's Achievement Hunter youtube playlist and some pretty sweet easter eggs exist in that game. It also reminds me a lot like Mercenaries and I enjoyed playing that game also.

In other other news, sometime in the near future I am planning on taking a post on here and giving a complete detailed breakdown on the rise and fall of the group called "HGA." I'm sure you remember reading a post I made sometime last year saying what it is and what it was about, but this time around, it gets complicated. That is all.

Reaching for Beta: Shared Files

2010-05-17T22:32:00.001-05:00

Ah yes, the Halo: Reach Beta is coming to an end, however in the meantime of it; I have managed to get a few screenshots and clips from some of the games I have played. This post here will get you access to the screenshots I have taken so far. I know, I know, you want to see the awesome clips that I may have gathered. Unfortunately as of right now, I don't have them uploaded to youtube currently and can't share them yet. Yet, for whatever reason, you know that I've rendered them already and the above statement is a complete lie covering up the fact that I don't really want to post them; you're wrong. They'll be coming in a later post as there are couple others I can grab hopefully before the Beta goes down.

Anyways, here's a few of them. Again, I'll break these up and put some of them in another post.

Reaching for Beta Part 2

2010-05-13T17:29:00.000-05:00

Yep, that's a part 2 that you see in the title and no, it's not a mistake....or something like that. As most of you are sure the Halo: Reach multiplayer Beta was released on the 3rd and I'm also sure that you've done your fair share of providing feedback to Bungie to fix the broken things right? If not, oh well, no big deal. Anyways, I'm going to give my true feedback about the Beta here.

Be warned though, if you are a super-competitive person and think that Reach sucks and that I have a 1.03(which is still positive, but barely) K/D ratio and my opinion doesn't matter; you may want to stop reading after the next paragraph as what I'll say will most likely not agree with you think. That said, let's move on shall we?

Firstly, I'd like to redirect to this post here. In which case I stated that I was going to change my gamertag from StoredGrunt360 to TUE StoredGrunt. Well I did that, obviously, but now I have decided that after May 19th(the day that the Reach Beta ends) I am going to change it back to StoredGrunt360. No, I'm not leaving TUE and no I'm not losing interest in the group; I just want my old name back. So after the Beta is over with, I am going to become StoredGrunt360 again. Heh, right now I'm listening to the ODST soundtrack and the tempo increased right as I started typing that last sentence. Oh the irony of that.

Anyways, here's the start of what I currently think of the Halo: Reach multiplayer Beta. I'll start of by being general, I love it. It really brings back the fun that is Halo multiplayer. When I first started playing it, it brought back some memories from playing the first Halo on splitscreen with some friends. I cannot remember the last time I had this much fun playing the matchmaking side of Halo. However, there are a few things that could be changed I think. Some of them have already been addressed and are going to be fixed for the final game in the fall. I personally think the grenades are a bit overpowered, but it's not bother me if it doesn't change for the fall. Even though they already addressed the issue and are going to fix, they just don't know how though. I'm also not a huge fan of the spawn on Sword Base for 1 Flag CTF. The starting spawns for the attacking team are a little close to the flag. I mean, I don't mind the initial rush at the start of the game to see which team can get the flag first, but if the defending team doesn't choose the Scout loadout(which has the sprint armor ability), then the other team is almost guaranteed to get the flag first and be off before you can do anything about it. Like I said, it's fun and it scream Halo fun, but it gets annoying after a while when the other team is there and gone with your flag every single game. I also think that the spawns for the gold team I believe it is, in Invasion need to be changed or at least some more cover added to it. I don't like Elites in the least bit, but when your playing as them and you get stuck on this side, it's kind of hard to get away from you spawn before you get killed. Over and over again.... Other then those few things, I'm really enjoying the Beta so far.

Onto things that I like in it, besides the fact that it brings back the fun in Halo multiplayer. The new assault rifle in Reach is awesome. Other then the fact that it sounds real for once(which is a big complaint of mine in any shooter game where the weapons don't even sound real) it is actually effective and kills people. Well I was going to say that in the 3 years I have played Halo 3 I had less kills with the AR than I do in the few days of the Reach Beta, but I can't do that as I actually have more kills with in H3 than Reach. However, it's still much better in Reach. I also started to like the new Needler for Reach. It'll actually kill people now and not just annoy them...or me for not killing them. The new shotgun is different from the one in the past Halo games. That one is an M90 Close Assault Weapon System(or for whatever reason you want to call it by it's acronym; CAWS) while the new one in Reach is an M45 Tactical Shotgun(TS). Yes, that was the Halo canon(story) nerd in me there. I'm not sure what I think of the grenade launcher yet. I can say this though, I don't know how to use it correctly and I haven't blown myself up with it yet; which is actually good considering my luck in Halo games and blowing myself up with explosives. The Focus Rifle is really sweet also, I always enjoy using it and always hate getting hit by it. It really drains your health and shields quickly if you're caught out in the open with no cover in sight. I really can't describe what it's like to have, it's just super-awesome!

Now that I am done with the weapons, let's discuss the gametypes in the Beta. So the big hype of the Beta that I'm sure half of the community was really wanting to play was Invasion. Personally, regular Invasion is awesome and with a few tweaks to how the Elites spawn(for example, gold team has the worst spawn since it's right in the open pretty much) it can be perfect. I'm not a huge fan of Invasion Slayer though. I mean, I understand how it works and all that, but it's still confusing. I at least understand what the territories are for now, you capture them and hold them for an extra 15 seconds I believe it is and you are rewarded with a weapon or vehicle drop. Stockpile is something that will be awesome to play if you have a good team. The only thing I can see that would get annoying with it, but it's a totally legit tactic to do; is the teams that don't really want to play it just go in and take your teams flags out of the collection area for the entire game. As I said before, it's not cheating or anything, just rather cheap and annoying after a while. The return of 3 plots from Halo 2 is awesome, I've always enjoyed playing that gametype with friends, never got to actually play it online against other people though. Anyways, it's awesome and I like it, glad to see it return. It really is full of chaos and fun, which is Halo to me. 1 Flag CTF is still awesome, however; I don't like it on Sword Base. I already stated why I don't like it, but maybe it'll change. It's really fun on Powerhouse so far. SWAT is also in the Grab Bag playlist, but my opinion of SWAT does not change from Halo 3. I hate it. I mean, it's okay, but unless you see person A first, you'll most likely die from someone hiding away in a corner. So, in short, I still don't like SWAT. Team Oddball is still awesome and personally, I think it requires more teamwork now as the ball carrier doesn't have a radar now. Did you ever have one in Halo 3? Was there even a Team Oddball gametype in Halo 3? Covy Slayer is a new gametype to Reach also and I actually like it more then I thought I would. It's basically like regular slayer only with Elites versus Elites with Covenant weapons on the map and for the loadouts. It's simple, but I actually like it more then normal slayer. A new gametype that was added yesterday called Spartan vs. Elite Slayer(or as it actually appears, SvE Slayer) is pretty cool. However, I've only played it twice so I'm not exactly sure what I think of it exactly.

Headhunter in FFA is fun, however, not as fun as I thought it would be. Not a whole lot I can say about it really, so moving on. Juggernaut, an instant favorite of mine. I have no idea how long it's been around in the Halo series, but I got hooked on it back in the early days of Halo 3 when Storm would load up Mad Dash on The Pit or something. It's really cool how the Juggernaut sticks out this time around. They still have the basic waypoint above their head that tells you where they're at, but you also are on fire to. However, I'm sure the being on fire part is just for cosmetic purposes only, but it still looks sweet. I do think though that the Juggernaut needs a little reduction in damage resistance. I understand the definition of a juggernaut, but at points you just can't kill the person who was made the Juggernaut at the start of the game. And that's no fun after a while. Especially if you go in with a full party of 8 and get the game multiple times and the same person is the Juggernaut for most of those games. Oddball is still Oddball as I stated before. It's still fun, but still the same way it was in Halo 3...and 2...and CE, a camp with the ball in the corner of the map that no one can get to festival. I still enjoy it though.
I think that's all for the gametypes.

I really hope Firefight returns in Reach. I guess there have been videos posted up on youtube of people that have hacked the Beta and have found that Firefight does exist in the code, we just can't play it. That's fine and all(even though I'm against people hacking and modding their consoles) I just want official word from Bungie about it returning is all. It can really expand from ODST's version of it with the new sandbox. If it does return, which I'm sure it will with how popular it is in ODST currently, all I really want is more than ten maps. More vehicle based maps like Lost Platoon was in ODST. I think it would be also cool to have perhaps two versions of it, one where you play as Spartans and maybe the other could be where you play as Elites. I know it sounds cruel wanting to play as an Elite and kill endless waves of humans and all, but it would offer a different style of gameplay and you could play as them more then just in the multiplayer when you absolutely have to.

I think that is finally all I have to say about Reach so far. In a few days I'll be post some screenshots and film clips I took from the Beta so far once I have them situated and all that. I'd talk about the campaign a little bit, but we don't know anything about it...therefore I can't theorize about it yet. Oh and one last thing, I will be overhauling my blog a bit. It won't be anything major, but some of the tags are going to change(read: may or may not disappear) and maybe even the picture at the top might change again. We'll have to see. Hope you enjoyed this little read if you are currently reading this.

Reaching for Beta

2010-05-04T19:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, quick update everyone. I've been enjoying the Reach Beta since it came out. That means I haven't put a post out yet, well in a few days I will make a post about what I think about the Beta. Currently though, it really brings the fun back into Halo multiplayer.

Fearing 10,000

2010-04-21T19:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, so a week or two later than what I had planned on, but it's not out of the normal for me. I'm pretty sure you can guess the point of this post by simply reading the title of it; if not, I'll fill you in a little bit. A while back ago(maybe a month or so) I got 7,000 gamerscore and set out to met goals in increments of 1,000. A few weeks later I hit 8,000 then went for 9,000 and so on. Well on April 12th, 2010, I broke the 10,000 point mark I was originally aiming for. The day before(the 11th) I was playing Fear Files to get the last points I needed, well by the time I was done for the day I ended up with only needing seven points in order to get 10,000 even. I couldn't find any games that I owned with a seven point achievement except for Marathon: Durandal which had one, but I already had it. So the following day I played the Fear 2: Reborn expansion pack that could be downloaded, keep in mind I already had it for a week and earned all the easy achievements in it, and earned the "Foot Soldier" achievement for it. It requires you to get through the first level of the expansion without using the armor you drop in. Which is actually a lot harder than it sounds since there are way too many enemies shooting at you with rockets. Anyways, once I got it, that put me over to 10,023 I believe and I've continued on since then. Granted a little more slowly since I don't have a goal to reach, but still.

My first achievement for my gamertag(which I might consider changing it back, not sure yet) was from Halo 3 and that was "MVP: Earned the MVP in a ranked playlist.", worth five points and earned on November 14th, 2007 in my first game of Halo 3 online.

Anyways, moving on. I recently picked up Bioshock 2 and have played it. It's pretty good, I think I close to completing it though. So in order to combat that, I started a new game and am currently playing through it again being "evil". With the Bioshock series you can either choose to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters you come across, on my first play through of the game I decide to rescue them and get all the stuff they give you. For what reason? No idea. Anyways, once I've completed it at least once like that, I go back and start a new game and then harvest them all. Now with Bioshock 2, there are people you meet and they've done something(I know what they've done, but hey, trying to keep it spoiler free in case you haven't played it) and you have the choice to either leave them alone or kill them. Well on my second play through I am going to kill them and see what's different from my first play through(when I don't kill them) once I finish it. Now if none of that makes any sense to you, I don't blame you. It makes little sense to me either and I'm the one doing it.

Tomorrow I will probably be putting Bioshock 2 down for a little bit as Left 4 Dead 2's "The Passing" DLC is going to be released. I'm really excited for it and it's fairly cheap also. It's supposed to come with a couple new weapons(an M60 and a golf club) and a new uncommon common. Plus it is also bringing back the original four survivors from the first game; I cannot wait to see what part they play in it.

I think that's pretty much it for now. It's not much, but it's something at least right? Oh and my Xbox Live profile is currently undergoing changes. As in my bio, motto and possibly gamer picture might change. Maybe even later on I may change my tag back to StoredGrunt360. I haven't left TUE and don't plan on it for quite some time, but I have a feeling that it might disband after Reach is released. Anyways, that's all for now.

Exalted? Nope.

2010-03-31T15:26:00.002-05:00

So what's the point of putting the exalted in the title you ask? Simply put, it's a prefix for the member titles on Bungie.net which means you have gone three years without a ban or warning. What does that have to do with me though? Well this past Sunday I gained that prefix for my title. So now instead of being an Intrepid Legendary Member(Intrepid prefix had to do with a high post count I guess) I am a Exalted Legendary Member. Both of which can make some pretty interesting acronyms if you do it right. The only logical reason I can think of for gaining that title is that the next day was March 29th and marked my three year join date. Personally, I've always liked the sound of the Exalted prefix.

Anyways, moving on. I thought about sitting here and going on some little rant about how people act and if you are wrong about something they make sure you and everyone else knows about it, but you know what; that's what they want. They want you to do that, that way they can get the attention they think they deserve. Just remember though, this is the internet after all and it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Moving on...again. I am very close to breaking the 9,000 gamerscore mark; however, that is not my goal though 10,000 is. I was able to get close to it by playing Fear 2(more on this later) and completing it. I only see a couple problems with getting to 10,000 though. The first is the one game I wanted all achievements for is taking a lot longer than I had expected, so I really don't know if it will happen. The second problem is that once I get done with the original Fear and Fear: Files, I really don't have many games that offer many achievements. There are a few games that I haven't played in ages though that could offer up some points, like Assassin's Creed, which I have yet to finish, and a few others that I can't think of. If I don't have any that offer up some points, I'll have to wait until Reach comes out in the fall or whenever it is; or breakdown and buy a cheap used game that I like and play through it. I've thought about picking up a copy of the original Mass Effect, but I'm not a huge fan for sitting there for hours upon hours collecting things and then investing them in my character. I didn't mind it at first with Bioshock, but I quit doing it after a while because it got boring.

If you remember earlier in this post I mentioned that I played and completed Fear 2. I can't get over the fact of how awesome the shotgun is in that game. I understand why now after reading up on it in the game. It's a 10 gauge and it's larger than the 12 gauge...or something like that I'm not completely sure. The way the game ended we certainly......interesting to say the least. However, I'm lost on the complete story since I didn't play the first Fear nor Fear: Files; which I plan on playing both in order to understand the story and earn some achievements from them.

Anyways, that's all for now. Another short post, but it's at least something as I normally say. Just remember, it's the internet and you shouldn't take it seriously. Which if you aren't taking it seriously that means that what I just said is a mute point to you then. Or something like that... Also, the spell checker on here says I spelled "internet" wrong...I'm pretty sure I know how to spell that.

8,703 > 8,000

2010-03-26T19:18:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I'm finally getting this post out that I said would be out last week. Anyways, update on the chase for 8,000 gamerscore. I reached it about the middle of last week actually. I was able to grab the last few points I needed in Left 4 Dead 2. However, I've pretty much ran out of achievements I can earn in it without playing online. Right now though I'm playing another game in hopes to earn all the achievements for it. The game: Lego Batman, hey, it's an E rated game, they normally have easy achievements in them. If I do get all of them for that game, it'll be the first one where I have gotten all the achievements for it. I'm close to getting them all with ODST, but the Vidmaster Challenge: Endure stands in my way. I've had a ton of people say they are willing to help me with it, but I'm not too concerned with getting it. Okay, so it'll get me another 25 points, the first or second game with all achievements and the Recon armor for Halo 3.

Anyways, moving onto achievements that are difficult, yet don't offer many points. I understand that the point of the achievement is to do something difficult and you get a little award or something. In the case of what I am talking about though, you do something difficult in a game and get the achievement; yet when you look at it, it isn't worth but only 30 points or maybe less than that even. A good example of these are two achievements along the same lines, just in two different games. The first is, "Little Rocket Man" from Half-Life 2: Episode 2. In which, you are required to find a gnome(which are evil) at the start of the game and carry him to the end. Needless to say it was a pain to keep track of that stupid gnome in the middle of a battle.
Same thing goes with Left 4 Dead 2, there is an achievement that requires you to do the same thing in it. Find a gnome at the start and carry it to the ending rescue you with. Both of which were worth 30 points and were rather annoying to keep track of the gnome in the middle of a battle. You'd be surprised how far those zombies can kick a little gnome. Poor guy....must have hurt, but you're still evil.
Anyways, back on topic here, I'm not saying that they should have been worth 100 or 150 points, but maybe something like 40 or 50 points would be nice for all that trouble I went through. So, my question to you is this, have you ever had one of those achievements where it sounds awesome to do, but not worth it point wise?

Now why was I saying gnomes are evil in the previous paragraph you ask? Well, besides the obvious fact that they are evil. It's mainly due to the fact with the previously stated achievements I was talking about. The gnomes would just not cooperate with whatever you wanted them to do. So if I put him in a little corner while I went to grab ammo after I was done protecting it from a massive horde of zombies, he would not get in the corner, but instead bounce off the wall or something. And, when I would have to drop it in order to fight off a wave of zombies, they would kick him around and away from me. Surprisingly enough, a multicolored gnome doesn't stick out at all on a white floor or light brown floor. Or a turf styled floor for that fact... That being said, gnomes are evil. Maybe a few exceptions, but not many.

That's all for now, I know it's not much but it's at least something. I'll try to get posts out on a more decent basis, even if they are just short little updates on anything really. However, once I have completed Lego Batman and got all the achievements for it(may take a while, but I'll get them, probably even need Storms help for one of them) or hit 10,000 gamerscore(whichever comes first most likely completing the game) I'll then have enough stuff to make a semi-good post. Until then, keep doing whatever it is you've been doing.

Quest for 8,000

2010-03-13T22:53:00.000-06:00

Ah boy, I really need to start updating this more often. Anyways, I will have a proper post(can there really be a proper post though?) in a few days. Again, don't ask me how many days few means as I have no idea...as usual.

Anyways(again...) I am nearing 8,000 gamerscore. Gamerscore, I'm sure most of you know what it is, but in case you don't, it's basically the sum off all the achievement points together that you have earned. I have 7,863 currently and plan on getting another 30-50 in the next few days. I know it isn't much, but those are the ones that I know I can get fairly easily and are worth that added up. I should be able to get more much later on(as other games that I am interested in come out, I buy other games that I like and I play older games that I own currently.)

And lastly, as you can see(or didn't see, whichever) off to the right hand side of the page and underneath my gamercard, is a little follow me on Twitter thing. I got an account there a few weeks ago(or something like that) and have been using it mainly just post(or tweet I guess is the correct term for it) cool things that happen in games once I get done playing them. Currently, I keep it more updated than I do this, but 140 characters just isn't enough for me, I need more space! So maybe that'll give me the urge to keep this updated more often.

That's all for now, like I said before I should be able to get a better post out sometime maybe next week...maybe.

Long Time No....Post...

2010-02-22T22:52:00.001-06:00

Okay, first off I'd like to apologize for not making an actual post since the start of the month. Anyways, let's get down to business shall we?

First things first, some games from Action this past week with Storm. More importantly, we played 10 games of Grifball in it and went 10-0. I'll post most of the really goods ones in here and some of the clips from them later on.

Trash talking generals complaining about Pit of Joy. Yep, they were complaining about easy the game is and how much it sucks. Then once they got tired of that, they started bringing out the fact the me and Storm were grade 4's.
Shut-out number one. The other two teammates of ours were good, but they wanted to go for kills mostly and in Grifball, that's not always good.
Second shut-out. Yep, another shut-out. Even though I scored four of the five points that game, I played defense the most. Makes no sense I know, but it's what happened.
I am tank. The definition of being a tank is something like this: "These are the guys who keep the other team distracted while the runners normally score. Also known for spawn killing." So yeah, I scored twice for us, but Tanked most of the time.
This game was a little better. It was actually a really good game except the lag at the start of the game.
2 on 2 Grifball....sucks. Yeah, it does. We actually did better once the other two teammates of ours quit.
More Pit of Joy please. Yes please, it is probably my second favorite gametype in Action Sack next to...you guessed it, Grifball.

That is all for games the clips will come towards the end of this post as I have to finish uploading a few. An update on the campaign kills you want? Okay, well after checking the last night, I am down to 4th and Storm is down to 5th. I've given up on going up from 4th. It's near pointless since these people come out of nowhere and have 88,000 kills overnight.

Anyways, this is a little random here, but while I have it on my mind. I'm sitting here listening to my iPod and browsing through the community files, well actually the rendered videos tagged with the word grifball(or girfball as I saw one of them...) and to be even more specific, narrowed down by the assault gametype. Some of them are pretty cool, yet some of them are extremely pointless and stupid....very stupid.

Anyways, now moving onto...something. Ah yes! I got a new 360 as an early birthday gift. It is a 360 Elite Holiday bundle. I still kept the old though, it still works so why get rid of it? Got three new games with it also, Pure, Lego Batman(can't guarantee how often I'll play it, but it has achievements and I'm a sucker for them anymore) and Modern Warfare 2. Which I'm not as happy with as I thought I would be and everyone made it sound like. I'd go into details, but it would bore you all.

I still can't get over the fact of how quiet it runs even with a disc in and running. And yes, I know I can install the game to the hard-drive, but I could only do that with ODST as normal Halo 3 isn't optimized to run on using the HDD. Honestly though, it isn't that noisy with a disc in it to begin with anyways so it really doesn't bother me. I love the fact that is has the 120GB HDD on it though, with the old one it was only a 20GB and we pretty much used most of the space on it up.

Now about those clips I was talking about earlier, I finally got them all uploaded. However, there are too many to embed in here and all that. So I took the time and learned how to create a playlist on Youtube...well it took longer than anticipated, but here they are: all the Grifball clips I have taken and all at your viewing pleasure. Feel free to either comment on them there at Youtube or here...or not at all, it doesn't matter to me what you do.

I think that pretty much covers it for now. I may have another post later this week, but be warned, it may contain lots of Grifball things as I am strangely addicted to it right now...and always. What can I say? It's a fun gametype that I like. Anyways, that's all.

New Post is Coming...sometime

2010-02-20T23:22:00.003-06:00

I do plan on getting a post out here sometime in the next 7 months or so. Seriously though, it might be up sometime next week. Exact time? No idea, depends on when I get around to it. Until then...just do what you were doing beforehand.

First! No...wait...Third!

2010-02-01T23:14:00.001-06:00

Ah yes, I'm sure you will remember back on December 23rd I posted saying I was first in the state of Illinois for campaign kills and then later on someone posted this comment?

"Where are you at now? Did you make it?" Well, yes I had a 324 kill lead at the time of that posting. As for right now, well I'm some 18,000 kills out of 1st place. Currently sitting in 3rd with a 10,000 some kill lead on 4th. My 1st place seat only lasted for about a month, a lot longer than what I thought it would last. I really have no idea where the first person came from though, I look one day and have the lead still then come back the next and someone else has a 5,000 kill lead over me. Go back a week later and yet someone else has a 10,000 kill lead over me and the guy in now 2nd. I really don't care if I'm in first or not, I'm just surprised that it lasted a month. I thought for sure someone would have the lead the next day, but no.
Now my next goal is to get Storm into 4th. He's only 182...or 187 is it... I forget. Anyways, it's to get him into fourth and build a solid just in case someone decides to come along and wipe out an entire Covenant world. Ahem.... sorry, all Covenant must die in my book. Anyways, moving on.

I played some Grifball for the first time in I think two months maybe, not sure. We had some pretty good games, mostly dull ones however, played 18 games total and won 10 of them. Simple math indicates we lost 8 of them...I hope, not good with numbers, yes I said it.
First game up, down 2-0 and comeback to win 3-2.
Meh, not much can be said about that game. It was close, but awesome.
This next game was kind of like the one above this, typical 3-2 win for us. However, the other team would not shut up about me and Storm having gold bars. Yes, even the Brig on their team was trash talking us. Ha!
Last good game worth posting. 4-1 win for us, nothing too impressive.

I did get closer to my playlist Field Major though. I have 176 exp in the playlist and I need 185 I think to get it. I wouldn't mind getting a playlist general in it. I think that's like 500 or 600 exp in that playlist. So that's only about 200-300 more wins to get it...yeah, simple enough to do.

Right?

A little more reasonable goal I have right now is to surpass my current Social BTB exp at 273. That's only 97 more to go and 48.5 wins to get it...even though you can't get half a win. So we'll just say 49. That's possible and can be done. According to HaloCharts though I have a 99.44 percent effectiveness at earning exp in that playlist.
Some random(well maybe not so random...) stats from Grifball. It is my third worst playlist kill to death ratio at 0.75...which is negative. Ah heck, now anything below 2.5 is considered negative. After some looking, let's just say this, anything that involves K/D ratio and Grifball is negative. So...um, don't let me Tank for you then I'll defend or run. Mainly defend though, I love using the sword and making sweet stops, albeit close ones, but still awesome.
Have no idea what I'm talking about with these stupid terms such as tanking and ball running? Click this strange looking text and all will be clear...or at least that part will be.

Anyways, got two film clips for you to watch. Ha, and here you thought this was going to be a bunch of words thrown together. Well it is that, but not completely.
Anyways, first clip of two. Those are the kind of stops I was just talking about...only me doing them. Seriously though, that was an awesome stop by Storm. What happened was we launched our two other teammates up near the center(and I think maybe even over the center line) while those two are off wiping out the other team(except for one person) Storm and I make our way to the bomb. Well I get owned by the guy that gets past the rest of our team(badly owned, clip shows it I think) and grabs the bomb. With me being dead and the rest of our team gone spawn killing that only leaves Storm to defend, well this guy has a good lead on Storm already. No possible chance at stopping him, Storm rides a mini-wave(see Grifball glossary) and catches up to him and kills him. Stopped!

Next clip, No Mine! This was me, spying on the other teams ball runner. Heh. I really don't know how to describe this one, so you'll just have to watch it.

That's all I can think of to add in here. I'm sure I could throw the word playlist in here somewhere else. In a few days I'll try to get something with more random things in it. Don't ask how many days, because if you know me, it'll be the end of this year before I publish another post.

Playlist.

That is all now.
Oh and, playlist.

Digging A Little Deeper

2010-01-11T19:29:00.001-06:00

Take what you want out of the title, but what I am talking about is shedding a little more light on my history at Bungie.net. I'll try to outline this and categorize it the best I can. Be prepared for a relatively long read here.

First, let's start of with the groups I have been in and tried to start on my own.

Ah painful memories arise when I think about the groups I started. I have actually tried to start two of my own group, both of which, have failed horribly. We shall start with exhibit A: Troops of Onyx. It was the first group I created, if I remember it was back in August of 2007 I think. The premise of the group was pretty simple, ALL THINGS HALO as stated in the group description. I know really original isn't it? The rank structure was really simple...and boring...and overused, standard military ranking. So a new member would be called a recruit or Private, whichever way you went about it. However, if I remember correctly I think that the administrator and moderator ranks stayed the same. Eh I don't remember; all I know is that it had 10 members and was pretty much dead. About a month after failed attempts to bring it back into the living side, I found out how to delete the group and did so.

Now for the next group, Legion of Elites. The ranking was very similar to the way the Elites(hence the name of the group...) have theirs set up. A new member was I think an Elite Minor and I forgot what the rest of the ranking structure was like. I pretty much don't remember a whole lot from the group. I do know that it was my largest with like 50 people, which was the most I've ever had. Sadly though, it suffered the same problem that Troop of Onyx(or ToO that some people dubbed it as, don't ask.) and died(became inactive) after a while.

That's pretty much it for my created groups...sort of. I've created another group, but that was with the help of someone else. Which I will explain in a bit, but now, onto the great groups I have joined.

My first group that I joined was ODST Recon. Which was(and probably still is) an active group when I joined. They did all sorts of things from, forum games, role playing threads(they were really fun) and a whole bunch of other stuff. I took part in most of, if not all of these events, but I didn't do much in the group. So a few months after I joined the group and spending time there, I left. Yes it was a short stay, but it was well worth it since it was an awesome group.

Now the second group I joined that I'm still in, here's a little story to it. It all started on May 10th, 2007 when I log on one day and see a message from someone named StrikerSniper77. I open the message and read it, well, it's a recruitment form and I'm sure you all know how much I don't like those things now. This one was different though, it actually got me to think about joining the group. After thinking about it a while I did finally join the group, and, I'm actually glad I did. It is by far one the best groups I've been in. The members are actually nice and don't treat you like a piece of garbage.

Umm...anyways, moving onto the actual group and what I did in it now. When I first joined it I didn't post much or do anything. That was mainly due to the fact that they liked to play online a whole lot and I didn't have Live at that point. I finally get the courage up to post more than usual and I get promoted. Sweet, fast-forward a few more months and I get a message asking if I would like to moderate the forum and be part of the first batch of moderators for the group. So I say sure, why not and stick in that role for a couple more months. Fast forward a couple more months and I am asked if I wanted to become an Administrator for the group since they were thinking about expanding a little bit. I asked what I could do to help out and was told that I could help recruit. Well, I don't recruit members that well as is obvious with my two previously failed attempts at my own group. So instead of recruiting members, which we had our own department of 5-10 members that did that, and went to doing things around the forum. Such as organizing the pinned topics and accepting news articles for the front page of the group. So then the founder saw I was doing a good job at keeping things organized and working he tasked me with like "Member Support" or something like that. All I basically did was help keep things organized and when members ask things about ranks and where things are, answer their questions. It was pretty simple and I enjoy doing it.

About May of 2008 one of the moderators opened up a database thread that contained a small little Q&A section, threads of interest, links to favorite videos and stuff plus a whole bunch of other things. Well me and another Admin(I'm sure you've heard of him, Sgt Riffle, I refer to him quite a bit on here...well earlier posts) started getting it into shape and adding all sorts of things to it. We were tasked with keeping it updated on semi-regular basis.

And that's it pretty much for that group, it's kind of quiet right now. Moving on.

There were few smaller groups I joined, but not much worth noting. The other large group that I joined was The Upper Echelon. Oh yes, that name sounds familiar doesn't it? I've talked about it quite a bit since I joined it back in December of '08.

It's a pretty simple group, the only thing I've done for it really has been organize a couple events for it. One of which was the campaign challenge, which was probably the second most successful even done for the group...mainly since there has been only three "major" events in the group. The campaign challenge was pretty popular up until about the 7th level. Then there was only two people at the end of it. I was considering bringing it back once ODST was released, but once I thought about it after a while, I just figured it wouldn't work out.

So once I made that decision I shifted gears and went to work on another idea I had. The TUE Racing League was originally proposed to the group on July 4th, but beforehand I had asked the staff if I could go about this. They said sure and I got right to work on it by finding maps to use and setting up the day of the week and time to have it on. It officially started on the second week of Sunday and went until the week before ODST was released. However, the last couple weeks nobody showed up for it. That in turn, led me to cancel the event. It was worth it I believe, a few people did enjoy it while it lasted.

There was also a third event that I was helping with, but never got started. It was called the 441 Tournament. Simply put, you gathered a team of 3 other members from the group and played four games of Action Sack and one campaign mission. The only limit to the teams was there could only be two of one rank on a team. So there couldn't be a team full of 5 Star Generals competing. Anyways, scoring was based upon the team who had the most kills at the end of the tournament. My job in it was simple, manage the campaign portion of it. I was also able to get the games from the teams and send them to the other tournament administrator. We got about three full teams of four and that was it, no one else signed up or decided to team up with others. After that Bren decided to postpone the event for a later date. However, there is rumor that it could make a return later this year.

That's pretty much my history there are TUE. Anyways, moving onto that other group I mentioned somewhere else in here.

Not sure if any of you remember this post way back when. Here, it was announcing the opening of the one group called Halo Gaming Association or HGA for short. The main purpose you ask? Well we took all the sports for Halo(Rocket Race, Grifball and a few we created...Grifball, no we didn't create Grifball) and were planning on gathering a whole bunch of people and form teams to compete in these seasons, just like normal sports do it. We got pretty far with this group, just no far enough where we could open it to the public. The co-founder(Riffle) was the forger of the group and was the leader of Team...something I forgot the name. He ran the basketball and football portion of the group among a bunch of other things. We each had our own teams(so he had his and I had my own) along with the founding team. Which consisted of both him and me and a couple other people we selected. I do remember that team name however; Team Flaming Death. Yeah, we never got far enough to actually challenge any other teams from within the group, but we did hold 2v2 scrimmages to test out new maps. I ran the Grifball and Jumpball(my own created gametype...lame name) part of it.

As a matter of fact, the map in the background here is one of the many attempts I tried for a tennis map for the group. I think I got rid of it since I didn't have a way to get the ball back into the court once it went on the other side of the wall. Perhaps I can fix that with Sandbox and the Crypt.

I think that was probably one of the best time I have ever had on B.net. I really enjoyed contemplating ideas late at night and asking Riffle about them and then working on them the next day.

That is pretty much my history in groups. Now to move onto some posts....well actually all of them. No, not all of my *insert number here* amount of posts. I'm just going to give you the really good ones that I have dedicated a post to on here. So if you do want to check out some of my older posts, feel free to check out this tag. Forum Fails, some of the posts contain things that aren't forum related so just don't pay attention to those parts.

And that is pretty much my complete history there at Bungie.net. Hope you enjoy this somewhat longer post that has been in the works for just a bit over a month. My three year join date is coming up March 29th, which I am looking forward to.

60,372

2009-12-23T15:54:00.003-06:00

What does this number mean you ask? Well for starters, it's the number of total Covenant that I have killed. Secondly, it is the current kills for the person sitting in number one spot for most campaign kills in the state of Illinois. Now stop and think about that for a couple minutes...or second whichever. I'll wait.

Thought about it yet? Good, if you were able to put two and two together it means that I hold the number one spot for most campaign kills in my state. I am currently holding it with a 324 kill lead, but who knows how long that will last.

Want some proof of it? Well, here's your proof!
Anyways, that's all. Merry Christmas(or whatever it is you celebrate) and if I don't get a post out before New Year's, happy new year.

A new post is coming soon

2009-12-19T19:53:00.004-06:00

Rest assured a new post will be coming soon. How soon? That I don't know for sure.
I'm currently working on one that is sort of special, you'll find out when it's ready. I'll also come back with one since I just recently got Left 4 Dead. Which in that case, zombies must die, all of them.

Holding The Line

2009-11-30T20:49:00.003-06:00

So I'm sure many of you have Halo Waypoint...maybe. If you do and you just so happen to be on it this past Friday and watched the video(which you might still be able to catch right now, I don't think they took it down at all.) called "Holding the line" you already know what I am talking about. If not, I'll explain a bit here.

So the video starts off by showing the level ONI Alpha Site when you play as Dutch. Your job is to arm about three charges on the bridge you start off on and fall back to the inner courtyard. Instead of falling back and doing all that stuff, you go at the enemy and kill them all. Of course, I'm all for this; since I believe that all Covenant must die based on what they have done in the Halo universe. This past Saturday I sat down with Storm and we had our go at it on Legendary. The end result was successful, we did hold the line...even though it was really annoying when we kept getting killed. I really wish I could get area specific stats so I could tell you how many times we died and how many Covenant were killed on the bridge. However, I can give you post-game stats and a video. Yes! A video...sort of. You'll get it twice and actually probably around three times if I have a say so in it.

First, the interesting enough stats. Oh look! Pretty text. See it there, that should take you to the stats of it. Keep in mind that all the details and total kills and all that good stuff is of the entire level.
Now for the video. I'll post it two ways, one will be the direct link the clip(which is rendered so you can download it and watch it) and the second will be me trying to embed it into the post.
Only reason I am giving you the direct link is I'm not sure how many of you have that Microsoft Silverlight. So here it is, Holding the line in its embedded glory and yes I know, the timing is screwed up on it. Sorry! You didn't miss much...just tanks blowing up. You know, nothing too important. Oh yeah, and it might be cut off due to the blog layout. Curses!

If you can't see it, hit the link above the red X or whatever it is and download the Windows Media File and if you can't do that, download it to ODST. And if you can't do that...well I might try upload it to my Youtube page in a few days. I'll post it here in a separate post if I can upload it.

CTF That Is Classic

2009-10-21T19:10:00.002-05:00

This post will be short, but at the end you'll walk away with a free gametype...if you can call $60+ for the game free.

Anyways, if you have been to Bungie.net lately, I'm sure you have seen that The Upper Echelon got their Community Spotlight. If not, then click here and scroll about half way down the page and there is our first week in the spotlight. Once you've done that, head over here, no here. And check out week number 2 of our stuff. The first week can be found by going to page one and it should be right there.

Now moving on to the point of this post. If you go back to the last link I gave you, and notice the gametypes(Note: Don't feel like you're in a rush...unless you really are stretched for time then yeah, be quick, but take a glance at the other stuff there too, it's some good stuff.) at the bottom, the one titled "Classic CTF" is one that I created shortly before I changed my gamertag to what it is now. So feel free to give it a download if you want. Either from there, or from the direct link to the file; which can be located here. It has become the second most downloaded item on my file share, with 544 downloads. In the last half hour, it gained 100 downloads.
I'm imagining that someday I'll get recognized for creating it. I highly doubt it, and hope that it doesn't happen. I don't want to be that guy that had that gametype, I want to just be that normal Halo fan. Though if I do get found out and people do start sending me messages like they have nothing else to do, that's what the auto-responder is for. I've already got one typed up, but still have it set to send out the reply manually. Probably the only time I will consider setting it for automatic is when I log on four days in a row and I have 20+ messages. Don't get me wrong, I won't just let them sit there and ignore them, that's rude and I try not to be rude. I'll read them and most likely respond to them all personally as I would like to hear feedback about the gametype and maybe were a version 2 could be made.

I believe that is all, like I said, it would be short. On a plus, I'm not listening to the same track off of the ODST soundtrack anymore. I finally listened to the Halo Wars soundtrack...then went back to the same song.
One last update on the download count, it is only 18 downloads away from being tied with one of my screenshots that has 591.
Enjoy all!

"Stosh says,...

2009-10-20T00:15:00.002-05:00

"...Think before you throw." Click the link below for details. Haha!

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/how-not-to-play-wii-courtesy-of-the-home-shopping-network/1364836

"KEEP IT CLEAN!"

2009-10-06T22:13:00.002-05:00

Ah yes, the age old phrase of the Superintendent. Remember him? The one random green dude that appeared all over Halo land about May of last year. Well you all probably know that it lead up to the announcement of Halo 3: ODST and all that good stuff. Well ODST came out about 2 weeks ago, I'm sure most of you have picked it up and had your fun with it already. I have completed the campaign with my friend(whom you are familiar with as Storm) on Heroic right now, we still have to beat it on Legendary. I have almost beat it on Legendary solo, I have just one more level to do. He's working on Heroic right now and I think is almost done with it also. Granted it's a short game, but if you don't sit there for 7-8 hours on easy(like most people I know did, at least not on easy though) and actually take a break to do something else you would be surprised at how much play time you can get from the 7-8 hours of campaign. Plus if you want it to last about double that time, just explore the city, look for the audio logs or more Covenant to kill or just walk around mindlessly admiring all the cool looking architecture and stuff.

Anyways, moving on. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but it should be interesting...

I'll start with the new multiplayer/co-op mode called Firefight. It's kind of like Gears of War 2's Horde mode...I guess, I've never played that. It's meant for a full team of 4 people, but if you're bored enough and have plenty of time, you can go in on your own. Now what I find cool is that going in solo and going in with 3 other people, the amount of enemies do not change at all and I think that is really neat.

The two things I don't like about it are these: it only has 10 maps, 7 of which are available straight out of the box. I mean yes, they're good maps and I enjoy them, but seriously 10 isn't enough. Granted Bungie has said that there are no plans on releasing any DLC maps since they are mainly focused on Reach right now, but if the demands arise, they might start considering it. I seriously hope they think about it even for a second.

Also the skulls needed to be randomized. Tough Luck, Catch and Black Eye are good selections for round skulls, but when you complete a set and start with the same three skulls again with just adding a new skull, it gets boring after a while. Don't get me wrong, I think the skull selection is great, but making them random would be more interesting. So I guess this is more of an idea of improvement then a complaint.

Onto a little bit about the campaign. Note: there are possible spoilers here, so if you have not completed it yet, just skip over this section here. I'll let you know when you can start reading again.

*Spoilers ahead!*

Most people I know felt it was short, and it was somewhat, but it wasn't meant to be an actual game. The story was really good, except the drama between two of the characters, that just isn't Halo I'm sorry. I enjoyed the flashbacks, they lead to a lot of interesting gameplay and memorable moments. Take for example the end of Uplift Reserve when you're playing as Dutch. You are supposed to escape the area and get into the city, or whatever it is I forgot, and you drive through this hole in a cliff wall and all of a sudden, you're flying from 1,000 feet in the air(or something like that) and crashing into building. Now I'm sure most of you are familiar with the classic crash the Banshee you're in to the nearest wall, well this is the same. It's another one of those classic moments that you'll remember a while down the road.

Another thing I liked was the fact that since you're not the Chief anymore, some of the Covenant are actually larger then you. Like the Hunters, remember how in Halo 1 the Hunters were about as tall as you were? Then they gradually increased in size in Halo 2 and 3. Now they're actually these 12 foot tall walking tanks. Roaming around the city is really nice, since you can pretty much go anywhere and explore the majority of the city is great. Plus with the hidden audio files, it gives you a reason to explore the city.

*Spoilers end.*

Yep, that's it for spoilers. I really enjoy music in the game, it sets the mood for it perfectly. It still has the "Halo" sound to it. Granted it's not like the music for the past three games, not the more uplifting sound that they have had, it's more quiet then the it has been before. So far my favorite piece is "Finale", though "The Menagerie" is slowly becoming my favorite. I first started off by liking the overture the best, but once I got the actual soundtrack the previously stated tracks sound really good and I like them more now. I think that Neon Lights is becoming a favorite of mine also, it's really good.

I think I'll close of this post with a few screenshots that I took over the weekend. Most of them were taken in campaign, but again, are free of spoilers. They're just some pretty sweet action shots that I thought were cool. Also, instead of seeing them right here embedded into the post, I'm going to give you the link to them. You know, make you work for them.

Okay, not really, but I've noticed that pics I have uploaded and posted as of lately you have not been able to click the picture to get a larger version of it. Well a couple of these need to be seen in more then just a small 2x2(or something like that) thumbnail. So by giving you the links, you shall be able to see them in all there juicy digital color.
I'll start off with my favorite out of the bunch I took called, "Green and Dark."
I really like how that one turned out with the lighting of the Hunter's cannon blast mixed with the pitch black background. If I would have to say so myself, it is one of the best screens I have taken yet. Moving on.

This next one isn't a real good one, but it shows how much larger the Hunters are compared to an ODST. Nameless Screenshot 1.
Like I said, not real good, but it's sort of an action shot.

Again, nothing interesting going on, but if you take notice there is something lurking in the background...
Nameless shot 2.

My first screenshot from ODST called "Cornered." It's a fairly decent shot, it shows me and Storm trapped inside a room on one of the Firefight missions, Windward, by five Jackals. Yeah, there where more, but they kind of died before the majority of them in the frame. So I tried to get as many as I could in there to try to make it look epic and this was the end result.

Another interesting action shot here. "Drone and Chieftain vs. ODST." Umm yeah, so apparently a Drone and hammer Chieftain against a lone ODST doesn't end well for the poor soul. That was classic, a 15 foot or so lunge while on fire that still kills the ODST.

Finally, this is another one of those attempted lurking screens. However, this one is a little bit more hard to notice...maybe. Hiding. This one is semi decent I think for the simple fact that they had no idea I was there.

Well that is all for now. I will try to get a post out sooner next time...of course whenever I say that I don't manage to do it. So, maybe I should just stop talking about doing it and just do it.
Also look forward to some screenshots over the next week or so. I plan on taking more of them, how good they are is another question. I'm more of an action shots kind of person. No pre-staged standing in a corner with a sniper rifle.

In the meantime remember; "OBEY POSTED LIMITS."

"PLEASE REMAIN CALM"

2009-10-05T23:36:00.006-05:00

Okay, just though I would let you know that I haven't forgotten about this. I've been busy lately and haven't had a whole lot of time.

I am currently in the works of a post now. However, it will probably be up tomorrow or Wednesday as it's way too late for me to finish up the fairly large sized post yet tonight. It'll mainly be about ODST and I will try my best to keep the spoilers to a minimum. If there is anything about the campaign it will be marked with something like this: *Spoiler(s) ahead!* and the end of said spoiler section will be this; *Spoiler(s) end*. Or something different, but along those lines to get the message through.

Oh and the title, it's a phrase said by the Superintendent. I'm sure most of you are familiar with him.

More Than Two

2009-09-17T23:04:00.000-05:00

So it has been past the two weeks I normally make a post, which I might add, I am still trying to change. Sorry about that, but I have been busy with a few things and three new games. One of which is Guitar Hero: World Tour. I finally got the guts up and bought the game. Well, not at normal price. My local Walmart had it on sale for nearly half price, so I decided to get it after all this time. It's very cool and I really like it, the new band play is awesome. The one thing I don't like about the new guitar controller is the slider bar, it's rather annoying to use. I mean it is easy to use and if you now where all the buttons are you can move your hand back and forth with relative ease. It's just the touch pad is extremely touchy; or at least on mine it is. Playing the drums is pretty sweet also, it took a little getting used to but I kind of got the hang of it. Some of the songs are pretty good also, some I also can't stand either...

The second game I've been playing has been Assassin's Creed. It's interesting to say the least. A little difficult, which is why I haven't been playing it a whole lot lately. So there really isn't much to say about it. Which means moving on...

To the third and final game, Bioshock. I think this if my favorite game between it and Assassin's Creed(see, I bought them at the same time so...) The story is really interesting and it has a great replay value. One thing I like to use in the game is the plasmid things, I'm not real sure how to explain them. It's like you can throw fireball(Yeah, I know lame but cut me some slack here) and things of that sort. Some of the guns are pretty nice too, the shotgun is awesome. I always seem to go back to the wrench though. I think that's funny that one of, if not the best weapon of the game is a freaking wrench, ah well, if it works I guess.

Now onto some Halo stuff. Only 5 days away from the release of Halo 3: ODST. I'm getting more and more excited for it everyday we get closer. Now though, Bungie has updated their site to reflect on the release of the game. If you haven't yet, I suggest you check it out here. http://www.bungie.net/default.aspx
The front page got a new look to it, now it looks nice and clean, much better then it originally looked. Also the new service records look nice as well. Instead of having separate pages for Halo 3 and Halo 2(like it was) you now have an overview of both ODST and regular Halo 3. I like the chart breakdown on your games played and how it divides them up into how many ranked, social, campaign and custom games you've played. They've always done that, but not as cool looking; just the numbers of how many you have played.
In other news, there was an update to HaloCharts a couple weeks ago and the site owner made two supporter options, yearly and lifetime. In the meantime of that, I somehow got free supporter status. It costs $10 for yearly and $20 for lifetime supporter status. I got access to all sorts of cool features to glance through, plus I can collect my stats daily instead of every 3 days.
I found out that my best k/d ratio per map is Last Resort with 1.35 and my worst per map is Sandbox with a .79. Also my best k/d ratio per playlist is Big Team Social with 1.61 and the worst is the long retired playlist Head To Head at .71. Grifball and 3rd worst with .76, not bad considering I am trying to ball run now. I also found out that it took me 16 weeks, 6 days, 15 hours, 5 minutes and 9 seconds to get my highest skill of 33 in Ranked Team Slayer. And to get a 32 in Lone Wolves(I hate that playlist now...) it took 85 week, 4 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes and 19 seconds and I still can't get a 33 in it.

That is all for now. Maybe later on this week I can manage to get another post out with some older Halo 3 games. Only five more days before we are officially dropped into the firefight.
That was not meant to be directed towards the Firefight mode...even though it's awesome I meant a battle type firefight.

3rd And Stuff

2009-08-28T19:47:00.005-05:00

After a long journey over thousands of dead Covenant bodies, I have finally reached my goal of 30,000 campaign kills. Which in the end nested me a nice number 3 spot in the state of Illinois for kills. Plus it granted me 109th in the world. Pretty good if you ask me. My driver is still in 5th in the state, we need to work on that...
It was rather fun to get the amount of kills I wanted. Granted not as much as a few people I know(118,000+), but it was a small dent in what they have. Honestly, there isn't much I can say about reaching this goal. It was bound to happen sooner or later, it was just a matter of how long will it actually take. I am glad I got it before ODST came out though...now to work on those campaign/firefight kills. I'm going to have so much fun with that.

Anyways, lately I have been playing my original Xbox I got back in 2003, it has looked so lonely sitting there collecting dust while its newer cousin sat there getting used almost, if not everyday. So I actually started it up the other day(without the dust, I do clean it off on a regular basis) and played some other games other then Halo 1 or 2 on it. Don't get me wrong I love those games, especially when you can plug in another vacant controller and slay against yourself for endless fun...or is that just me? Either way it's still fun to do, you should try it sometime. I just wanted to play something different for a change. So I popped in Rainbow Six 3 and played it for a bit. That went rather well after I quit pushing the wrong button(which I should remember that the bumper buttons don't exist on an Xbox "S" controller) to reload and switch weapons....then I finally went through the training levels again. After that, I moved onto actually doing the first level, with two or three retires in there I finally completed it. I then proceed to try the second level, getting ambushed about 3 minutes in, I give up and move onto the original Splinter Cell.
I then managed to do something I didn't think I could possibly do, fail the training mission! Alright, that's fine I can re-do it I suppose. I get through it no problem the second time and go to the first or second level. I then manage to not grab a key code I needed and get stuck. So then I say okay, I'm done new game please. I then put in Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow and play it. I forgot how much I enjoyed that game, it is actually really awesome. By far one of the best Tom Clancy based games I have played. The main reason I bought the game was for the co-op feature it had, I played that all the time with my driver when we would get bored with Halo 2.
I also found my weapon of choice in the game if I don't have to go in all silent like, the M16A2. It's been a good choice to have in the kind of terrain the game is in. I remember when I first played it that I got to the last level, but couldn't get through it so I quit playing it. And as it seems right now, I can't get past the 5th or 6th level...oh joy.

I've also been playing a game called "America's Army: Rise of a Soldier." I guess it is supposed to take you through all the training and situations that real life soldiers go through on a daily basis. I must say, it's pretty impressive on a realistic scale for a game, but it is no where near anything close to portraying what they actually do. It's still just a game in my books.
Anyways, I was able to get through as a Rifleman and Support Gunner, but Grenadier and Sniper on the other hand. Qualifying for a sniper is actually rather annoying, I have go and do some sort of field test(They have a name for it, forgot what it was) and scout out these areas while avoiding enemy contact(that is still training mind you) and get to a certain point also in order to pass. I've gotten into it and have gotten spotted each time, it's rather annoying, but hey, the real snipers have to do that stuff also. I'm still playing it, so maybe I'll pass it and actually get to do that stuff in a real/fake game mission.

I have also been playing a football(American football, not the European version of it)game and umm...well it has gone okay. The one thing I don't like is how there is no simple season selection to play through one single year of a team of my choice, oh but no! You can't do that, you have to chose a Franchise and import your own created team in order to play it. Alright fine, I can deal with that just let me create my own team. 5 minutes later, I finally get to play my first preseason game. I manage to get into the Super Bowl and win it, skip the Pro Bowl and go into the off-season. Now, before I actually entered the franchise menu, it had me set all the options I wanted to. Since I really don't care who I sign in the NFL draft I set that so that the computer can take care of that. Oh, but then again, you have to do that(even though I set it so that I wouldn't have to...) plus your over budget and can't sign anymore players for the season. So if you would be watching one of those cartoons were the character would get mad they would have a little fireball over their head, that's me at this point.
Once I figure out that there is no way around that without getting rid of my entire team(which I'm needing more players for anyways, oh yeah, and we're still over budget...) I say forget it and quit the franchise. I go to quick game and play a couple games there.
I've been playing those games for the past week now...well excluding the football one for obvious reasons.

I'm assuming that you've seen and read up on most of the stuff for ODST. If not then head over here, unless you're avoiding reading that stuff until next month...then completely ignore this link and possibly the following paragraph or two. http://www.bungie.net/
The site updates they plan on doing for the release of ODST looks really, really sweet. I cannot wait for them to go live and look at all the cool stuff they have. The ViDoc is awesome too, it contains pretty much all the information we know currently about Firefight, just in delicious video form. The beginning scene is rather interesting also, I wish we could actually kill a Brute and Jackal that way.

Speaking of thing related to ODST, the ODST forum has gone to pot now. According to Halo.bungie.org, a French game store has released ODST to it's customers earlier, much earlier then the planned September 22nd released date. At least that's what I think it says...have a look for yourself here. Microsoft France has said that they will ban anyone caught playing ODST before the release date on Live. Which is a little harsh if you ask me, but I guess they don't want it spoiled for anyone.

Well that is it in this ramble-ish post. Hopefully it makes sense to you and are able to read it.
Until next time, keep on doing whatever it was you were doing.

Two Weeks and finally a post

2009-08-17T20:30:00.003-05:00

Ah yes, it's been about 2 weeks or so since I made a post. I guess trying to break that habit isn't work out to well.
Now onto the actual post instead of this random bunch of words I have been typing for the last minute or so... I'm doing it again... I'll start with a few games from the past week or so, posted in the "War Stories" thread at The Upper Echelon.
Classic game of Grifball. Storm was a great runner and tank this game, plus he got a Killtacular to boot.

200-184. Close game was awesome.

2 people up and we still loose. We even had the lead for most of the game. I'll give the other team credit for pulling out a victory, it feels good to beat a full team while down 2 people.

I love using the Banshee on 1 Flag Avalanche.

This game was great, I lasered a Banshee trying to kill Storm in a hog bringing back the flag carrier. I also like using the laser on Avalanche.

Storm gets another Killtacular in Action Sack, while we 4-0 the other team. Yes it's Grifball.
That makes 2 killtaculars that Storm has on Sandbox.

Typical game of Ninja Assault is typical. They always end in a 2-2 tie. But it's an awesome gametype!

You can have fancy Killionaire and Extermination medals, but you cannot have fancy win medal.
And even though they had a Striker Commander on their team, they still trash talked us. Fail!

I love my sword. Yet I still hate Tug of War...

Storm's first Hail to the King.

Down a person from the near start, Storm manages a third Killtac and I grab two Triples with the bomb. Plus a 3-2 win.

My second Hail to the King. I have no idea how I got my first...

Our second game of Team Scuds and this is the result...I just don't know what to say about it.
I seriously don't.

Team Splasers is the name of the gametype, yet my tool of destruction is the Magnum.
I later got cursed out for having the Magnum as my ToD, win.
That's all for the links to games.

Now to see if I can find some old posts.
I seriously need to stop being a forum cop.

What? Again, it's another one of those "why did you post that" replies.

No, you're an idiot. Nothing special, but the last post is pretty pathetic...

What....? I still want to know what friends not being good at the game has to do with being a Spartan or Elite.

Posted in the Halo 2 forum...which is better? I think Halo 2 was the better of the two. Nothing spectacular, I'm starting to get smarter.

That's the point, you're not supposed to get it. Go back to being in the dark about everything onyx.

Umm...again, what? Firstly, don't say noob, it makes you look bad. Second, it's buddy, not buddie. And finally, just shut up!

IT IS NOT THERE!!!!!!! Yeah umm, my caps lock key wasn't stuck and I'm sure it could of done with a few more exclamation points, not enough you know. Also, keep scrolling until you see my second post on the thread, I can't spell "are" it turns out as ar....

No, no you didn't complete on the "frist" day you got the game. I made the game last for about a week before we finally complete it. And come to think of it, I still haven't beaten it on Legendary solo.

I know you have seen this next post, but it's pure awesomeness(it's a word) wrapped in win.
You got it, get it, good now go get one.
That's all for some old posts. Sad to say, but it looks like I am running out of good old posts to show you.

I think I'll actually say something instead of giving you a bunch of links to mull over. Here it goes...about Grifball, yes.
Last weekend when it was around I was able to get to 148 exp in it, even though my service record shows 146. I wasn't able to get in one last game to update it correctly. So I am almost to a Major I think it is... I'm hoping to get to maybe a playlist Brigadier or something, I don't know for sure. Maybe I'll get a 500 exp and become a Grifball playlist General, who knows.

Campaign kills, ah yes, I haven't forgotten about them. I still need to get to 30,000, but it doesn't look like it will be too hard of a task. I am 1,162 away from having it, I should be able to grab them next week when I plan on going for it. Right now I am still sitting in 4th for the state of Illinois and my driver is in 5th. We've also been doing Legendary on our own and needless to say, he's just about done with the campaign on Legendary solo. I've got only 3 levels done and am regretting doing Tsavo Highway and The Storm. I guess when it comes to campaign, since I don't have the 30,000, I just want to go through on Heroic and kill some aliens not die at the same part over and over again to beat the game on Legendary. Though I will do it at one point, maybe a whole new series of posts called something like "Legendary Update" or something.

Anyways, that is all. Hope you enjoyed it. Until next week...or knowing me, the next 2 weeks.

Grifball, Not Grufball

2009-08-05T19:50:00.004-05:00

Ah yes, it's the time of month were Grifball roles around as the Double EXP weekend. In lieu of this, I have changed my gamer picture from the blue and white Seventh Column it used to the dual grav hammers and bomb. There might be a sword or two in there as well, not sure though.
So that means I will be playing a lot of it this weekend. I've also noticed that in a few of my older games both me and Storm(You might know him as my nameless Driver, well he now has a name) have played with or against people that are or have been at one point on a Grifball team. How I noticed this was, the other day I was watching the Summer '09 League highlights and noticed a person named Spud H3ad which is also the Team Captain for the team Separate Intelligence. Not to mention a couple people from Tied The Leader(TTL), we lost both games, but it was pretty cool.

Now moving onto a few film clips and screenshots I took over the past few days. This one is uploaded to my youtube account, hope you enjoy it.

And sorry if part of the video is cut off, it's probably the theme of my blog...even though it's from Blogger...
Anyways, more videos!

I'm sure you have seen this one, if not watch. If you have watch it again. This was a pretty sweet score put in by Storm during the game against Spud H3ad of SI. Again sorry if the video is cut off, blame youtube...or Blogger I don't care.
This next clip is rather interesting to say the least. I had a friend over who doesn't play Halo much at all, so he's not real good and doesn't know how to play Grifball either. So he gets the guts up and goes to grab the bomb(or ball whichever) and gets boosted up in the air after grabbing it, then proceeds to drop the bomb in front of Storm. Storm grabs it and gets betrayed, then after that is where the first clip comes in.

And finally here are the screenshots I promised.

I hope you enjoy these as that is all I have to post for now. Until then, see you out in the court!

The Nameless Post

2009-07-28T22:36:00.001-05:00

To start off this week, I will hopefully stop starting my posts with the word "Well,". I've noticed it in my last several posts and so has my buddy Riffle. Here is what he has to say about that.
"Well I was going to stop saying well at beginning of my posts because Timmy's stuck at the bottom of a well, but we can't do anything about that- now can we?"
Well...you could say that I like wells...maybe.

Anyways, moving on already. Here are a few games from the past week or so. Really good ones at that.
The other team thought they could beat us. We pull out out an easy win.

This game was also good. I manage a Killing Frenzy.

I could of had an Overkill Extermination twice, but failed horribly.

I can has my one and only plasma pistol kill.

The other team was ahead by 20 points at one point and it was very laggy, yet we still manage to pull out a win.

I R Bungle pro!

Cursed game! Give me my triple kills I deserve!!!

I want more shotgun kills.

This game was pretty much given to the other team at the start, but yet we get some lucky spawns and manage to pull out the win.

That is all for the game links since those are the really good games that stuck out that past couple weeks.
Now, moving on. A while back ago there was a thread on the Community forum asking if you Googled your Bungie.net username or Gamertag. Well(there's that word again!) I didn't until I saw that thread, never really thought of it. So I did and it came up with this.
Yep, this is how I am bringing you these posts.

Wait....what? Yes the titles are a bit misleading, but still that post makes no sense.

A year ago today, I was someone else. And yes, it was pre my gold bar status.

Oh wait...I don't exsist anymore...

Pun fail! Oh yes...I said it.

Seriously, I am. Just in case you didn't know, I seriously am. Seriously.

Because you are supposed to be Heroic, duh.

Not anymore we don't. It's called the HALO 3 forum. Ahem...was I shouting there? Sorry.

Tal...what? I don't know what I was doing when I posted that...wow.

"Are you talkin' to me?" You got to read that one...it's great.

It must be me... It only must be me.

Just stop...stop right now. This is another one of those "What were you thinking?" posts.

That's all for now at least. I hope you enjoy it since it's not been 2 weeks since my last post.
Also, Rockets, infinite grenades and Warthogs on Blood Gulch in Halo 1 = win. Me and a friend did some crazy stuff that I would of loved to have been able to record. Backflips resulting in him getting splattered...ah yes.

10 Days and Counting

2009-07-18T23:41:00.000-05:00

Not towards anything as much as it's been 10 days since my last post. So in order to not get into the habit of not making a post for weeks upon weeks, I'll make even a quick one here.

I'll start with a little activity on Bungie.net lately. Okay so I'm sure that you all know and have received those pesky group invites. Not that I don't mind them, it's a great way to get your group out there to the public. I just don't like constantly getting them for the same group just from different people. I've gotten a couple of those lately, so I give them the normal auto reply consisting of this: "I'm sorry, but I am not accepting group invites anymore." So turn around a couple days I get a form for the same group, so now I am thinking that I need to change my auto reply message to something different...something better. I thought for a bit and came up with this: "I'm sure it took you a while to type up that nice long recruitment form, plus another couple hours scouting potential members. And now I'm going to burst your bubble and say this; sorry, but I'm not accepting group invites anymore." If that doesn't stop them from sending me invites to their group, nothing will. Well the block button will, but I hope to not have 2 pages worth of blocked users...
Like I said, not that I don't mind hearing about your group it's just that I am happy with the ones I am in already. Yes I read the entire message and yes I'm sure I did consider joining that group. It almost seems like it's one of those it's not you, it's me situations.

Now moving on...
Some games from the past couple of days...or so.
The other team got the early flag cap, me and Jade make an assault with about 2 minutes left and this is the result.

One of those rare semi-decent sniping games of mine.

This game is another one of those rare good games. Only this time my gunning skills came out.
Let explain that one there. So my normal driver isn't in that game sadly, but BurningOrphan did just fine. Right off the bat I get a Running Riot, and I was only 3 kills away from getting my second Rampage. I was still a ways off from even reaching my current amount most kills in one game. So far though, my regular driver has done all that stuff.
That's all the good games...sadly.

Well not sure if I mentioned this before, but I was starting a racing league over at TUE. Well this weekend marks the end of that campaign challenge, which means that next week I can start up the racing league. I've already got the first track setup and ready to go. There are already 7 people that are wanting to take part in it, which I am glad about. I didn't think that anyone would take interest in this. I've asked a couple people if they would be willing to help lead multiple parties if needed. The only problem I am having troubles with is getting timezones for the people that signed up...

Well that is all that I have right now. Hope you enjoyed it. It's better then what I gave you in the past 10 days right?

Well, it's been a while

2009-07-08T23:34:00.001-05:00

Ah yes, it has been a while since I last posted on here. I suppose I should get around to it more often.

Well let me see here, were shall I start. Ah yes, I finally reached my 2,000 gunner kills. As a matter of fact, right now I am at 2,127. Getting closer to the ultimate 3,000. I actually can't wait to get the last few for it. Long ways off though. Now moving on.
Campaign kills, I haven't said anything about that in a while. Well in the state of Illinois, me and my driver have finally taken over the 4th and 5th spots. Of course though, in order to prove that I am not making this up, I was going to link the leaderboard to you for proof. Oh, but no you cannot has link to see proof as HaloCharts since they decided to take down the group, state and overall leaderboards to rework them. Bah!

Now moving onto yet more things Halo. I have a couple file items off of my well..my file share. This first item is a short little clip of a close finish in a mongoose race for an event. Download here... In a few days(about a week), I will have it rendered to video once I get more render minutes. That means if you click that link and see a watch now thing, you won't have to download it to Halo 3! Great isn't it? Now for file number 2, download here... It is a simple wheelie. But it was pretty neat the way it looks. And this one, is actually rendered...it's the clip that I spent my last render minute on...so enjoy. And finally, my finished map that I said I was going to do. Download here...for the third time. I think that is all that I really want to share.

Now moving onto even more things...this time not so much Halo related as much as group related. I'm sure you all know about The Upper Echelon and that I am extremely active there. Well I've mentioned the campaign challenge which is coming to an end sadly. After that I am planning on starting a racing league. Well so far everyone has liked the idea. I've got some people lined up for this Sunday to do a little test run to help me decide which maps to keep and which ones to not. I already have about 20-25 maps selected that we will use throughout the course of the league. Plus I will be searching for more maps to use during the league, not to mention that there are several TUE Members that are currently working on their own.

Well, it somewhat short but a post nonetheless. I hope you enjoyed it at least.

The End of an Era...or is it?

2009-06-24T21:19:00.004-05:00

Well I recently did what nobody thought I would do and that was change my gamertag from StoredGrunt360.

Now, before you say anything, I didn't change it completely. I am still StoredGrunt, there is just no more 360. I replace it with the abbreviations of a group for grade 4's in Halo called The Upper Echelon. So my new gamertag is now TUE StoredGrunt. Anyways, moving on.

I am only 11 kills away from reaching my 2,000 chaingun kills. I surely hope I can get them this weekend or even later this week(oh boy, the whole 2 days that are left). I do know this though, I will have it by next week and if I don't...wow is all I will say.

Now for some good games over the past couple of days. Take note though that it will say I wasn't in these first few games, but I actually was just I didn't change my name yet.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190500306&player=StoredGrunt360
Three kills with a Guardian, they must of liked me that game. Also kind of sad that it was my ToD...

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190535010&player=StoredGrunt360
Good game, they had solid defense out of there base and wouldn't let us get the score. I almost tied it up in one round, but when I armed it there wasn't enough time left in Sudden Death.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190585315&player=StoredGrunt360
No idea how to explain this one. They did stop us before we actually did get each score.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190603273&player=StoredGrunt360
Not bad, we did mount a small comeback near the end.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190689832&player=StoredGrunt360
Hey! Look who decided to drop in. Awesome game, can't remember much of it but it was sweet.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1190737314&player=StoredGrunt360
Both teams had good defense and I think we got our flag cap in the last few minutes, not sure. And that is where it ends, iDrive Vehicles needed only 1 more win for his BTB General, so wish we could of gotten it for you.

Moar(yes, I meant to spell it that way) games.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1196941075&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
I <3 Tug of War and ActionSack.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1197802833&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
GG guys! Good game all around, we kept them out of our base, they kept us out of ours.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1197848917&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
I have no idea how N1CK got booted, lagged out I don't know. Me and Storm picked up the slack and we held onto the lead. Storm was only 10 wheelmen away from setting a new record for most in-game.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1197946974&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
I can easily describe this game, I hate lag! Even though we had no idea if the flag was there at base or not(no thanks to lag) we at least managed to hold on for a 1-1 tie.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1198029400&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
Awesome game! The guy on the other team got the Killtac with us trying to arm it and camping with rockets. Overall though, really good game we did have some struggle getting into their base to arm.

Even more...
http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1199821193&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
Oh hi there Larson, nice to meet your gauss cannon as well.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1199778045&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
They had complete control of the map with both hogs running through the majority of the game. We just got luck and pulled out the win. It was actually pretty cool, they thought they had us beat at the start and we sneak in to arm the bomb.

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1199708756&player=TUE%20StoredGrunt
Blue team cannot has hill. Well, we kind of let them have it for a few minutes but not the entire game.

One of those games was pretty sweet. I think it was Standoff and the other team had our flag in their base and we held them off long enough to return it.
That's pretty much it for now, hope you all enjoy!

Render To Video and Some of My Work

2009-06-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

Well I'm sure you know of the Render to Video beta that is going on for those that paid for a subscription to Bungie Pro. Well I guess I got into it somehow and here are some of my videos that I rendered and was able to upload to my youtube accont.
I'll show the best ones I have up there and then link you to my youtube channel to see the rest.

That is one of my friend/driver showing off some of his sweet Grifball skills.

This next one is an awesome wheelie he managed to pull of during a game of slayer on Standoff.

Finally this last one is called "Killball Win!" Watch and you'll see why it's called that.

Now here is the link to my youtube channel for the rest of my little clips. http://www.youtube.com/user/StoredGrunt360
There you have it, a quick little post with some eye candy...if you want to call it that. Plus the link that takes to the Completely Random Forums has been changed to a new address.

Finally...Sort Of

2009-06-09T23:41:00.001-05:00

Well it has been a bit since I made a post. Go figure, anyways I do have a bit to mention this time around; ODST, Reach and the first challenge.

I'll start off with some of the stuff that you probably heard/saw from E3. I'm sure a lot of you have already seen everything you can or want to on Halo 3: ODST and I must say, I'm excited for it. I've been back and forth between which looks the most cool in the game, the Firefight mode(like Gears 2 of War 2's Horde mode, only Halo-ized. Halo-ized is now a word.) and the campaign. I see things I like of the Firefight mode and I think I'll play that more, but then I see things about the campaign that I like. I'll go into a bit of what I've seen in the next paragraph. If you haven't seen any or hardly any trailers and don't want anything to be spoiled, skip over the following red text.

Okay, so I am assuming you already saw this video here. If not and you're reading this, then do so now before you read any further. Watched it? Good, now let us continue. If you take note, the player moves towards a data panel or something. It says he can activate it so he does and it brings the Superintendent online. Now the Super leads him through the city and away from certain things. Now I think that is really cool.

Okay, you can start reading again. If you read one of Bungie's weekly updates a couple weeks ago they mention that with ODST's firefight mode they are going to integrate some new features into their site, I really can't wait to see what kind of stuff the implement. Also some of Halo 3's multiplayer medals will be brought into Firefight which is pretty cool. I think right now though I can't wait for them to put all these new toys on their site up, then I'll know ODST's release date is even closer.

Now for some Halo: Reach. If you haven't seen Halo: Reach's trailer yet, you may watch it here. There really isn't much that has been said on it yet, except it comes out in Fall 2010 and it is going to be a first person shooter. As of right I don't take a whole lot of interest in Reach since it is still pretty much speculation. I think it'll be pretty cool getting to play on Reach or one of the Spartans/Marines on Reach, that is if you do play as a Marine or Spartan. Plus if you buy ODST, you get an invitation to a Halo: Reach multiplayer beta.

Now, you have asked for it and here it finally is. StoredGrunt's Campaign Challenge.

Okay so the first level will be Sierra 117.

Okay now here are the skulls you need on: Black Eye, Tilt or Mythic.(Any combonation of those three skulls*Two of them must be turned on*)

Difficulty can be either Heroic or Legendary.

You have 2 weeks from the time of this posting to get this run in. When you have your run complete just leave a comment here with the link to the game stats. Make sure you turn on campaing scoring also!

Now moving onto some of my campaing goals. Well I finally did one of HaloCharts' campaign challenge level, and it wasn't easy. I also plan on doing some of the other levels just for the fun of it.

I also tried doing the level Floodgate on Mythic difficulty(Legendary with all 13 skulls on). I got near the end of the level and got caught on something and a ranged form(one that shoots spikes) killed me. And he was right in front of me also!!! I was so ticked that I got so close to finishing my first Mythic level only to have to restart. Ah well, maybe next time.

Also I am working on my way towards 4th in the state of Illinois for most enemies killed in campaign. Last I checked I was only 4,377 away from securing this spot. I also am currently helping my driver work on his way towards 6th or 5th in the state as well. He is so close to gaining 6th, only missing it by a few hundred kills.

On a closing note, do you like things like this?

Well if you do, just drop a comment here with a link to the screenshot you want edited and some specs as to what you want on it and I will let my buddy Sgt Riffle know what you would like edited and all that. He gave me some other stuff to post like an email address, but I don't really want to post that just yet(or you can make a comment with your own address Riffle!) and some other things, but he randomly signed out of chat and I lost the stuff. So for now, post a link to the screenshot and what you would like to see on it and I will message him with the stuff and he'll get on it. He says it doesn't take him a while to do, but I guess it depends on how busy you are.

So there you have it, a bunch of stuff in a short time...sort of.

Perfect

2009-05-27T23:43:00.000-05:00

I'll cut straight to the chase this time. I got my first Perfection the other night. I'm sure a lot of you know what a Perfection is, but if you don't it's simple...sort of. Win a slayer game with at least 15 kills and without dieing. Sounds simple, right? Well it would be to some, but to others it is extremely hard to get one.

I has proof. Huge thanks goes out to Storm for being cautious and driving me to it. Raiden192 almost had a Perfection also, but the great(not) spawning system ruined it. Someone spawned behind him as he was doing something else. It really sucks that he didn't get it, two perfections in one game would of been sweet. The game wasn't too bad, I mean I would of liked to have at least one or two other people from the other team still be playing. I still got it anyways and it'll probably be my only one.
Anyways, moving on.
2,000 Wheelmen for my driver! Yep, my driver(info on right hand side of page) got his 2,000 wheelman. After a couple games before that he only ended up needing three. So in this game, he the last three that he needed, with my triple kill. It's not his main goal of 3,000, but it does mean we are getting closer. I was hoping I would be gunning for his 2,000th and I was, but now I really hope I'm gunning for his 3,000...no idea why I want to be. Maybe it is due to me being his gunner from the start. I don't know really, but hey, we pretty much know what each other is doing or going to do in the Hog. So it works out pretty well if you ask me.

The campaign challenge hasn't started yet, but I am thinking on starting it next week. So you guys haven't missed it yet, plus it will be tagged with a special tag called "Campaign Challenge" for obvious reasons. So there's the update on the campaign challenge.

All right that is all for now people, hope you enjoyed it. On an end note, if you are reading this and a Grade four rank stop by a group called The Upper Echelon and check it out.

Fifth Finally!

2009-05-15T00:13:00.001-05:00

Well since it's been a while since my last post, I will try to cram as much as I can in here.

I'll start with saying that after little while I have finally reached 5th in the state of Illinois for most campaign kills. Here's the proof. Not much more to say about it actually.

So moving on. Remember that one map I started on Foundry and never finished? Well I finished it, but it's not on Foundry anymore. It's now on Sandbox! Anyways, it still is the same general idea and layout. I did have to rework a few things on the map several times. Spawns are what I had the most trouble with...go figure. Placing cover in the middle area was also something that stumped me. Not that it's hard or anything, just getting it and placing it there strategically so the flag carrier can't be killed while making his way from one to base to another. Well here you go Prototype. It does need a better name though.

I was finally able to get over that little 1,500 mark for Warthog chaingun kills. I felt like I was going to be stuck on that little barrier. Each time I would look to see how many I have total, it would be really close to that limit. Plus it also means I am halfway to 3,000, which is my current goal.
While we're on the subject of Halo, I managed to get into a party with a few people from H3Wheelmen. I got to play with someone from the "Blue" group, it sounds like it is kind of like a clan, but isn't officially their clan. Also someone from their "Team Euro" group. That's basically the group for people over in other countries. The party consisted of mainly people from other countries, but hey, they didn't yell at me when I would say something. I am going to have to learn the language of the Wheelmen. I was in the party today and they were talking about "Ninja-ing' the objective. Well, I had no idea what it was until I actually saw what they were trying to do. It was rather simple actually, sneak the flag out of the enemy base... So yeah, once I finally figured out what it meant I was able to react accordingly.

Now moving on again, I will be doing a campaign challenge(just for fun really) for my blog here. I have to do some thinking for the first level for skulls and that. I will make a post with the details of the first level. Speaking of campaign challenges, I just posted one for the grade 4 group I am in. I was surprised when a lot of the members liked the idea, it's my first successful idea for a group I am in.

Well, I think that pretty much covers it. Hope you all enjoy it, I know it's not much.

A Post About, Well Nothing

2009-05-05T00:36:00.001-05:00

Yep, that's right. A post about nothing. Okay well this post is going to have to do with something, but I couldn't think of a title.
So I have started playing Halo Wars again lately, mainly due to someone I know from Bungie.net getting on me about still not beating the campaign. Well I still have yet to finish it, but hope to sometime. I played against him in a 1v1 twice and lost horribly both times, but hey I haven't played it as much as he has and I'm not good at strategy games either. I did earn an achievement for it today which was reach recruit in the matchmaking part of it. It was really easy since I didn't even play the game. I quit out of the game, but that was because my teammate quit before it even started. I don't know how I even got to the recruit rank since it was my first game and I really didn't even play it since I quit out of it. But I doubt if I play Halo Wars online much anyways, since it's one of those games where best enjoyed without a bunch of loser's. See despite it being a strategy game, I take out the strategy and just assault with a large squad. I don't do any of this "oh go over here and see how many hit points this enemy has then come back with a unit that has 5 more points then him." I guess that's why I'm not good at this game, but it sure is fun to play.

One thing I want to do in Halo is become a better ground pounder. I really have no idea what a ground pounder does, but I do know they support the Hog and grabbing the objective. Anyways, I would like to get better at certain things like rushing laser and at least bringing it back for our team. The one reason I would like to do this is simple, I can't always get in the gunner seat and my driving is fail. On the other hand though, I would like to become a better driver then I already am. So I really need to think of what do I want to do more, drive or what.

Now for a couple games from this past weekend that were good.

This first game is from Fiesta. Got a killtacular with the skull and then blast into the lead with 10 seconds left.

I got randomly matched with someone from a group I am in and I drive him to a Frenzy. Decent considering my driving.

This game would have turned out different if the two people wouldn't have quit.

Our first game were nobody quit and it was close too. The game went like this, they score, we score, they score, we score and we score again. Best game of the weekend.

Another close game. I have no idea when we scored, but the other team wouldn't let up and kept coming at us non-stop.

Okay you know something that really ticks me off about the people that play Halo? It's the people that decide to pick on a rank for no reason at all. I see alot of this with higher ranks picking lower ranks. I mean okay so you're a Colonel and he's a Staff Captain, who cares? What is your purpose of doing so? Is it to make yourself feel good about beating a player who has a lower rank then you? If so, seriously how lame can you get? Rank doesn't get you anything outside of the game and I've argued this point on the forums, but no apparently it does get you things in life. Oh, by the way, you forgot to tell me what they are... The stuff I see these "pro's" do are pretty cool, but it's nothing that impressive to earn you a $500,000 contract yearly to a "pro" team. Okay so you go down to Florida or up to Toronto and win one of the events up there, again, what does it get? Yeah sure it gets you money and fame, but what else? Does it give you a place to live or does it get you food each month you need it? Answer, no it doesn't.
I guess all I'm saying is, no matter what your rank is, no matter how high you can push your k/d spread or no matter how many perfections you've gotten. It's not going to get you anything outside of the game. Yeah I'm probably wrong, but right now, I don't see it.

Sorry for the rant, but I get so tired of these people that think rank means everything. Anyways, that's all for now. Hope you enjoy.

Achievements = Song Titles?

2009-04-21T23:50:00.000-05:00

Well the other day I had a friend over and I was playing Mercenaries 2 and looking over some of the achievements I had earned and he noticed that the names for the achievements are titles to songs. When I first played through the game and was unlocking them, I had no idea that they were named after song titles. It's fine I guess, but it seems a little cheesy to me. I mean surely the developers could of come up with names for them, right?

While we are talking about Mercs 2, I have been playing it recently and enjoying it again. I have managed to do what I never thought I would be able to do, make the Chinese hostile towards me...again. Yeah I guess they don't like it if I try to take some of their fuel they have hidden away. Not my fault I need it guys. Also I managed to at least tick off Universal Petroleum once and as of now, they are neutral to me. I don't know what I did to them... Also managed to turn some other faction against me. Again, I didn't do anything to them, well maybe... Maybe I blew some of their tanks up. Finally, for the first time since I got the game I managed to tick off the Allied Nations. How so you ask? Well I had the Chinese mad at me, so instead of paying them 8.0 million dollars, I decided to do some of the work they wanted. Capture some HVT's and destroy high risk targets. Everything was going fine, I wasn't getting caught doing any of this until I had to destroy an AN controlled oil rig. It was hard to do since I couldn't get close to it and my airstrikes were kind of limited. So I regrouped and bought some airstrikes to use. In the end I ended up taking a boat and sneaking underneath to a ladder, climbed up the ladder and threw down a beacon for a cruise missile strike. So now I had to get off of the rig before it blew. I jumped off the side and completely missed the boat I had, so I started swimming. Hijacked the nearest boat and got away as quick as it would go. I got out, but someone was able to call in my acts and report me. That is how I ticked off the AN.
That's pretty much how it's gone so far.

Now time for Halo stuff. Well campaign is what I have been playing lately. Trying to grasp 20,000 enemies KIA, right now I am at 19,720. So I am only 280 kills away, that can be covered in a couple runs through campaign, maybe less. Last I looked with the amount I currently have I was ranked 7th in the state of Illinois, so I wonder were I would stand with 20,000. It wouldn't be too hard to move into the top 5. I am only 1,098 away from it. That would be something to see on here one day. "Top 5 enemies KIA in campaign in the state of Illinois" Okay new goal people!
I am just under halfway to my 3,000 chaingun kills. 1,421 so close to it, yet far enough away. I really can't wait till I reach that halfway mark, it means I am that much closer to the 3,000 mark. Ah well, I'm rambling on about, so now for some good games from this past weekend.
This game was close until the end. This game was close until we got lucky and pulled out by ten in the end. Which won it for us.
Each team had good defense for each round. I mean, there really is no way to describe this game it was awesome.
The other team had good control of the map near the start. We pull a sneaky move near the cliff to take the second score for the win.
Sadly the best game of the weekend, I feel like not posting. Don't get me wrong, it was a great game, it's just that all but two of the other team quit halfway through the game. I really don't consider it good game material. What I mean is yeah we won, but almost the entire other team quit. So we really should of won that game. Some of the best games I have had have been against a full team.

So that is all for now people, hope you enjoy it.

Late, As Usual

2009-04-16T23:10:00.000-05:00

Well sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I have been busy and my other computer died. So anyways, this post will be here, but kind of short since I don't have much to post.

I'll first start off by updating you all on my quest for Master Gunner. It's going to be a rather simple goal to reach, but it will take a little bit to reach it. What I have to reach is 3,000 kills with the chaingun turret on the Hog. I am just a bit under halfway there with 1,369. I feel closer to it, but it's still a ways off from having it. Reaching 3,000 isn't just the only goal for the chaingun, I already knew at the start of the year when I started Hogging more that I wanted to get 5,000 or more. If I can get to 3,000 I know going for 5,000 is going to be no problem. Hardest part is going to be getting a driver when my main driver(see right hand side for that info) isn't on. Most of the people expect me to drive and them to gun. Yeah that's fine and all, but I am trying to save you from a quick death. Okay you still want the gunner seat, fine take it, I don't care. I'll drive you, but don't expect anything to spectacular from me.

Okay now for some other goal-ish thing I would like to accomplish. One would be trying to drive better. I drove my driver(again, right hand side for this info) to a Running Riot a while back ago and I would like to do it more often. As previously stated, I don't drive for the simple fact of, I suck. My main problem is once I get sight of an enemy and my gunner starts shooting, what do I do? Do I take a risk and head towards them were they can have rockets and take us out or do I stay back and let my gunner take them? So many questions that need answers, it's maddening!
Now some of my other goals. I would like to get at least 2,000 kills with the shotgun and right now I have 1,384. Not much, but it's something I would like to do. Something else would maybe try for a 35 and see if I can get to a Strike Commander, but that isn't important and would mean I would have to play ranked. I already determined that I dislike ranked playlists unless it is something I really want to play. I would also like to get a Killionaire(10 kills in a row withing 4 seconds of each other) with the Gauss Hog and if I can do that, that says something about me. I say that since my aim is horrible in the Gauss. Highest multi kill I have gotten in, was a Killtacular, half of what I want to get.

Anyways, that's all for now. It was short, like I said, but it is a post. So, since I stated my goals. What are some of yours? Do you want to get the coveted 50, or is it something else?

Walking Trees and 50.

2009-04-05T00:10:00.002-05:00

Well yes, this finally is my 50th post on here. Well after a year and I finally get to it, while a few others I follow are on their 150th... Anyways, I have a lot of stuff this time around, I'll first explain the term walking trees.
So, the other day I was playing Ghost Recon 2 with a friend and we were going around playing one of the modes on there and we had to eliminate all the enemies on the map. We get a map with lots of trees and other cover, so I pick the class of Marksmen. Fast foward a few headshots into the fight, he thinks he sees someone walking so I scope it out and see a tree. I respond to him, "No, that's a tree not someone walking towards us." I then look a bit to my left and see someone walking with gun raised, I said something like this "Well that's not a tree, it's a walking tree *fires*" Thus equals the walking tree. If this makes little to no sense, it would if you were there at the moment. So we then proceed to finish up the level, I take out my RPG and continue to shoot a tank and hit a magic rock in front of us and blow us both up. I fail at blowing tanks up... I also figured out I can't be a grenadier class person since I can't aim the grenade launcher without killing myself. Hey, it's not my fault he stepped in front of me when I shot!

Now onto some games I can find from the few games of Team Flag I have played so far.
This game here, apparently since we won we standbyed to win. Wait a minute, if what I heard when standbyed the other team cannot play. Also after doing some looking we got matched up with someone from H3WM, DarkGodzilla. That is awesome and I didn't even notice it until now. So how come you were trying to steal our flag this entire match? Logic fail. Or maybe it's your connection, maybe you need to fix it? Honestly though, who cares you lost one game deal with it. If it's that much of a problem, get a life.
This game we won, but was rather close. After it I didn't like the one guy on our team also. Each time he would grab the flag he would take it through the teleporter and wait for someone to pick him up in a Mongoose or something. Yeah I can see to where it would be quicker and all, but what if we can't get back to that little corner of the map and be your cab driver. When he would die he would start yell at us for not supporting him, we snuck the win out in the end though.
This was the best game I played all day long. We went down 1-0 in the last few seconds of the first round. We came back to tie it up with a quick second round capture. We finally got our act together and held them off for the third round. Then we make sure we kept it together for the final round which I think I scored that last one, not sure though. It was my first successful attempt to juggle the flag. I really hate how annoying it is... So far those have been the only games I have played of Halo 3 lately since I have been playing Battlefield: Bad Company a lot.

Speaking of which, look its gold! Seriously though, I finally quit being lazy and checked out Battlefield: Bad Company's multiplayer and I must say I really enjoy it.(Note: I will never give up on Halo, despite me saying I hate it at points I will never give it up too much fun.) I can't say much about it since I didn't play much, but I am a much better sniper in here then in Halo. I can actually get headshots and kill people with it. I do notice though that campers still exist in this game as well. Also, I cannot for the life of me kill a tank or hit anything with an RPG...

Now here is a little snippet of an IM conversation that I had with a friend of mine from Bungie.net. He sent me something and I responded back to him. Here is how it went,
onyx: and sent
Riffle: thanks
Riffle: look ,some nub that i haven't even sent a message to replied! what a hack!
Riffle: lol
onyx: What? He needs to be banned.
Mainly if he is a Noble Legendary Member, I hate them pricks!
Riffle: inorite?
onyx: Think they're better then us.
Riffle: what a freakin field major!
onyx: Totally, gold bars are even worse
Riffle: and that nubcake plays griffball all the time!
onyx: grifball sucks
Riffle: i know man, MLG 1337 4shot BR's pwn AR's and balls of griff [ i made a funny, lol]

Ah, that was awesome. All because I haven't sent him any PM's lately.
Bungie had their April Fool's day joke, actually they had two. One of which was staged by the moderators and it was done quite well if I must say. I guess there was supposed to be a new moderating structure being released that day and a few of the current mods didn't like it and were going to act as rebels against it. Here is the thread for when it was found out to the public. Yeah it went on with people saying they were going to leave the site if this "new structure" was implemented. So come the next morning(still the 1st mind you) they release to the public Shadow Ninjas! So once you read the first post you'll soon see it's an April Fool's day joke. Well played I think. The next one Bungie pulled was something called BUNGLE. The one and only competitive Halo 3 league. They actually went and created their own maps and gametypes for it which can be found on the second page of Bungie Favorites. I still have yet to download any of them.

Sad to say it, but I have run out of things to throw in here for you. Just remember walking trees don't always shoot back and never let me have an RPG since I fail at blowing tanks up...still.

Two Years Work

2009-03-30T11:23:00.000-05:00

Well today is Monday March 30th, but yesterday was the 29th. The official day of me being a two year member on Bungie.net. I know I said I would make a post yesterday, but I was busy and wasn't able to write one up. So here it is, maybe not as nice as I had hoped for, but a post nonetheless. My history there is pretty simple, just a fan that wanted to talk about Halo and interact more with the community. I joined looked around the forums every now once in a while, then discovered groups. I joined a couple groups and it went from there. About a year after I joined they introduced these member titles. I soon get the Heroic Member, then they added prefixes related to certain things. I was soon bumped up to Honorable Legendary Member, then yesterday I log on and make a post and find myself a Noble Legendary Member. I went up from Honorable and skipped the Senior prefix, which means that my trust rating is on the increase which is good. So as someone said that I was talking to over instant messenger said, "You R Noble."

Now for some Halo stuff, if I can find anything... Well I've got a screenshot at least that I forgot to post in my last post. This screenshot proves my horrible driving, I somehow managed to flip the Hog on a flat surface and land on a Jackal which was the only good thing out of that.

It's my new trophy shot as you can see with the Bungie card located to the right. More proof of how bad my driving is.

Anyways, here are a few games we played the weekend before last.

This game was good, I became xxmLgH0G4shotzxx. Okay I'll explain the little thing typed out there, alot of people have xx, MLG and 4 shotz(s is optional, but z is cooler I guess) in their gamertag and they get made fun of for not having an original tag.

Now this game I'm not in it, but my friend is and he is playing with some people from H3WM. I was five minutes off from being in there... Thing is, they were in a party of seven and we would have faced them, which is alright, but I would of rather played with them.

Gold bar trashers = the orange team, gold bar trashers = fail. Pretty self explanatory, we started taking trash for being gold and they came in a tie for fourth.

We lost this game, but it was really fun. Didn't help that two people on the opposite team had 25 and 35 kills. Carried much?

Well some of you may remember that on February 24th I got my 1,000th M41 LAAG(Warthog turret) kill. Well right now I am at 1,279 and counting. My next goal is to reach 2,000 kills with it, once I reach that, I'll plan on going from there. I might take a break from gunning and start driving more in hopes to get better at it. If I do this and don't see an improvement I am going to go back to gunning. Another thing I might want to do, is try for a 35 once I have reached 1,800 exp that way I can keep my gold. If I do reach it, I will become a Strike Commander. I don't know what playlist I'll use, probably the "takes no skill" ranked living dead. I'm a 13 in it, but it doesn't take much to rank up in it. I guess that's why it's called no skill needed, oh well it's fun to play. Not as much fun as social infection, now that is awesome. That is the playlist I will forever remember and like. It was the playlist where we first got to play against a Bungie employee. Here is the proof.

That's all I have for now. Not as special I would of liked, but there is next year. Hope you all enjoyed! I also might dig up some older posts I made and throw them together for another blast from the past post.

TUEsday

2009-03-26T20:24:00.001-05:00

Yes, TUEsday, even though it is WEDnesday today. I recently took part in The Upper Echelon's TUEsdays custom game nights. Yeah so one person from the group thought it would be cool to host a little get together with a few members of the grade 4 only group(omg ur elitist group!) and play some custom games and or matchmaking. Well it was set up on Tuesday since the groups initials was TUE. Yesterday was the first time getting a few people together, once the time rolled around for it to actually start there was only 6 people. It was enough to have an awesome time with those who did join. I might have some screenshots and the person that hosted it will be posting a writeup soon so look forward to that. "We are Nooby Tuesdays."- MR DROZ's wife. One of the members wife said that to a few members there I guess, long before I joined.

Anyways, now you remember this map here "I have an idea for the one on Foundry and have already started it a bit. All I've got placed on the map is a few double boxes and flag spawns and that. It originally started as a CTF map only, but if all goes well it may turn out to work with assault as well. I don't have any ideas for the Ghost Town map, but I want to finish the one on Foundry before I get started on it. The only real problem I am going to have trouble on both maps is going to be getting all the respawn, starting points and weapon placement to work out perfectly"? Well I finally got even more of a start on it. That's right, I finally got started on it and it's actually going really good too. This is actually the first map so far where I have been able to setup two respawn areas and have them work the right way. Here are a couple screenshots from what I have so far.

These are a couple overview screenshots of the map. The first one is looking towards the two rooms. The second one is looking at the attackers base. I'm still not sure if it is going to be a single bomb or multi bomb based map. I could even try to see if it will work with CTF to. Only weapon I have placed on the map is a shotgun, so yeah that rules out MLGness there.

Hate to say it, but it's going to be a short post today. I will be back on Sunday hopefully with a special post. If I am not it will be the following day or two, so please stick around.

Two Betrayals

2009-03-18T22:03:00.003-05:00

Ah yes, one of my favorite levels from Halo: Combat Evolved. How I come to this topic is I was talking to one of my friends from Bungie.net about the music in the game and I remember one of the songs/tracks that can be most certainly classified as "Flood Music". Now what is this Flood music you find yourself asking? Well it's simple, as usual, it's the music that always plays whenever you find yourself facing swarms of Flood. For example, is you have heard the Halo soundtrack you should recognize what this music sounds like(even if you haven't heard it you'll still know it when you hear it) if you listen to the track named "What Once Was Lost" it screams Flood. As do some of the tracks that follow it also. It is one of the reasons I like the Halo series, the music is designed(or whatever it's actually called) to go with certain areas of levels or certain levels in general. So if you ever find yourself playing a game and you come across a certain enemy or something that has this music that always plays with it, you have come across *insert enemy name here* Music.

Now that said, why don't I share some Mythic map stuff. Sorry guys, but it's not a code :( I don't have any. Well I do, but it's used...anyways. I said share since not all of you have them right now. Anyways onto this stuff I have been rambling on about.

Okay here are a couple screenshots I took while messing around on Sandbox

This one came naturally with me downloading a map that had a few fusion coils placed around the map. So I did the only thing I could think of, get a vehicle and drive into them.

Now this one is actually my first time while hitting the fusion coils placed on the map. I hit them and was sent flying outside the boundaries and I got killed by the Guardian towers. Well I have been helping a friend make a map up in the skybox of Sandbox. It reminds me of a racing style map, but it might be a one bomb map I'm still not sure. I just help with placing things and testing it once he has items placed and wants me to fall to my death... I am also working on a map up in the skybox as well, but it is sort of a demo derby-ish map. I will say this, I am not going to post it on my blog until the Mythic Map pack comes out on Xbox Live Marketplace. Just so I don't torture all of you.

Well a couple weeks ago I asked someone that does signatures for active members on H3WM if he would have some time do some for me. He got back to me and said that he does them in his free time, just send him a screenshot that I would like to have it in. So I sent him one screenshot and he told me that he didn't like the way it was turning out so he took another one and made two sigs. I log onto the site today and he says he has them posted in a thread for the sigs, so I go there scroll down to see what they look like and well here they are:

Thanks again for taking the time to make these Zer0! I like how they both turned out, but it's really hard to pick which one I like the most. So far I am using the bottom one, but I will most certainly switch back between the two and use them both.

Now in about two weeks I will be officially a two year member of Bungie.net. I have liked it there ever since then and will continue to enjoy it for the rest of the time being there. Through all that time I have seen a lot of stuff go on there, some cool, some confusing and other stuff I just don't want to know an answer to. Then once these member titles came in it had everyone wondering "which one am I going to get?"*Note: Not me, just people in general.* Well I myself received a Heroic Member shortly after they were introduced, I was like "Hey, that's cool I didn't even think I would qualify for one." Well that was all said and done, then about mid December I get booted up from Heroic, to Legendary. Shortly after that they add these prefixes that stand for certain things like ban history, account age and other things. So one day I sign in and find I have the "Honorable" prefix in front of my Legendary status and I've held that ever since then. Next year if everything goes right I should become a Mythic member. Who knows, but expect a special post come the 29th of March.

Now finally while sitting here typing this up, I was thinking of changing my Gamertag, but I decided against it. The name StoredGrunt360 has grown on me enough, plus a few friends were telling me not to change it since that would be the end of a StoredGrunt. So there you have it, I am still StoredGrunt360.

Now that is it, go play whatever game is in your 360, PS3 or Wii right now. Also keep in mind that certain music goes with a certain enemy in the game.

What I Was Doing March 3rd

2009-03-10T22:46:00.000-05:00

Well on March 3rd I went up to my local game store at midnight(yes midnight) and picked up my copy of Halo Wars. Yeah so late Monday night I went up with a buddy to the game store at which I pre-ordered Halo Wars and picked it up for their special midnight release they held. I got it, got home and the first thing I did was go against my word of saying I was going to play Halo Wars first. Well I didn't, my friend wanted to check out the maps so we downloaded them and checked them out. More about that later though. Here is all of what I got with my LCE Halo Wars.

Here is the little box that the game came in. It's got two side to it, the one that is showing and one that looks like the one on the left.

That's the box that the extra goodies came in. Which consisted of leader cards of some sort, a little graphic novel and a patch for the "Spirit of Fire" ship that is in the game. I still have no idea what it is for, all I know is it's cool.

There's the front of the box with a hole in it to show the patch. Still trying to figure out what it's for.

Finally, the official game guide that I also got. It's been helpful at points. Plus that is what the other side of the game box(as seen in the first picture) looks like.

I got some screenshots and some other things I will post in the next couple of days so check back often.

Mythic or Mithic?

2009-02-26T21:06:00.000-06:00

Yeah so it's actually spelled "mythic", but I've seen a lot of people being lazy. Anyways, this past Saturday I went to the local game store and pre-ordered the collector's edition of Halo Wars. You all probably know that it comes with an early download code for the Mythic Map pack for Halo 3 plus some other goodies. Well, unlike a few people I know, I am not just getting it for the maps. I actually enjoyed the demo when I played it and thought it was a really good game. Yeah RTS's really aren't my style, but this is one that I like. It has simple controls and great gameplay, plus I can use the Scarab when I want to in Skirmish. I have a feeling that I will be playing the Skirmish mode more then the actual campaign in it. I really don't know what map I will play a lot and I don't know all the maps, but the instant classic map from Halo: CE makes a return in it, Blood Gulch.

Also you may take note that I changed the background of my blog, hope you like it. I liked the Guitar Hero one, but I thought it was time for something new and saw this one. Now if only there was either a Grunt or Hog one, now that would totally own.

Some of you may know that recently I reached my 1,000 kills with the Warthog chaingun turret(see below post). Well that's the first 1,000 mark that I am aiming for, I am also trying to get to 1,000 wheelman's. Though with the way I have been driving recently I hardly see that happening anytime soon. I guess I have been getting better, but not to quickly as to get the 447 soon.

I was recently introduced to Squad Battle which is a Ranked 6v6 with slayer and objective games in it. It's pretty fun from the few games I played of it. It's got the covies variants which I haven't played in a long time and back then I used to swear by it and thought it was the best gametype. It's a good playlist, but I like Social Big Team much better though. I find it more relaxing and not so serious, maybe it's just me I don't know.

Anyways, time for some good games that I had.

Multi Flag CTF on Valhalla. This game was great, me and my driver got into a hog at the start and made hit and run attacks on their base to clear them out. Well it worked and got me a Killing Frenzy, but no one would get in there and grab the flag plus no one was at their base while we were doing this also.

Now with these next two games, there is a certain order in which they will make sense. This first game was Multi Flag CTF on Rat's Nest. Yeah this game we got spawn camped just a little bit. I mean yeah you could say that they kept us out of our base, but that wasn't the case. We got shut out, but this next game tells the tale of revenge.

Multi Flag CTF on Sandtrap. Yeah this game is the exact opposite and we faced almost the exact same team from the last game. Okay so me and CX4(I need to find a new nickname for him) started out this game by going on the attack. It worked and we get the early lead since no one stayed at their base. Lots of other things happen and we manage to return the favor and shut them out this time around.

More Multi Flag CTF on Valhalla. This is a good example of base defense once the team gets it together. I'll explain that a little more, the game starts everyone on our team goes out and assaults the other teams base for the first few minutes. They then sneak a mongoose in through the metal wall side and take our flag(Granted we spawned at the lake front base not the waterfall one). They get no further then the center before our entire team is on the poor guy carrying the flag. They repeat this same tactic several times again before part of our team finally stays back and defends the base. That's where the Sniper Spree and Killing Frenzy of mine come in, plus the Killing Spree of my friends' come in. I still can't believe we got our defensive game together and won.

Here are a couple older games that I found with some searching.
My first Social Running Riot and two Overkills. Yeah so this game I got my first social Running Riot plus two overkills on the Hog turret. It gave me 29 kills with to go along.
My First and only Social Rampage. Here is my first and only social Rampage I got in a game of VIP.

Okay, finally here is a short little clip I took this past weekend of how to take a Hog out in under 30 seconds. Click me. Yeah, it's pretty sweet so check it out if you have the time.
That's it for now, Halo Wars is coming out soon so expect me back then.

1,023 and Counting

2009-02-24T00:04:00.005-06:00

Well I finally did it, I finally got the 1,000 Warthog gunner kills. I started playing Saturday and got most of the 71 kills needed in one day. After that day was done and said for, I checked out the stats for it and found out that I only had one to get. That's right, after one day I got 70 of the needed 71. It wasn't to hard to get it, but it wasn't that easy either.

So in order to get it I went into Squad Battle and we get Big Team Slayer on Valhalla. Me and my driver(see right side for all that info) jump in the hog at the start and get killed right off the bat. No problem, we re-spawn near the downed Pelican. Both him and me grab a shotgun, we sneak to their side of the map where I take down two people trying to go for their Hog. Okay so two kills and a Hog into the game we finally steal theirs. Someone pops out of their base and I start firing, my driver starts to drive off then backs up trying to get me an angle at the guy. He tries to take one last attempt to kill us and throws a plasma grenade out towards us. Misses us completely and I nail him for my 1,000th M41 LAAG turret kill. First game, third kill into the game.

So there you have it, the proof of the 1,000th kill. So if you run across me in matchmaking, you might want to try and keep me and CX4 STORM 40Cal out of the Hog.

So Close, yet So Far Away

2009-02-16T23:33:00.000-06:00

Sorry this being my first post since the 3rd, I have been busy lately and haven't had the chance to do much. Anyways, I'll start off by giving you an update on the CTF Foundry map. Well, I haven't given up on it, but I haven't been working on it lately. The one problem that has made me put it off for so long has been rather simple actually. I got the general layout of it done, but now I don't know what to do with the rest. I've got the back wall enclosed into the base, but that leaves the rest of the map open with nothing. See here I thought the spawns would be the hard part about making this map oh no, it's the map itself that is giving me fits... Only forging I did this weekend was make a little base on Avalanche to have sort of base wars with a friend. Compared to his base, mine was even could even barely qualify for an outpost on a cool map. Yeah so, yesterday I went back and fixed it up a little bit. Added some weapons on my side, ran out of a budget, removed somethings, added more and finally gave up and was happy with it. I think I still have the films of it and if I do, I might take some screenshots and post them.

Bungie changed the design of their site once again. This time it's a little less dark and more blue-ish. One of the things they added was a sort of box at the bottom of the page, some people like it, others don't and say it's a waste of space. I'm not a web designer or anything, but I think it looks cool. With the addition of the box at the bottom and a few other things, I think it has gotten much more easier to use the site. It's easy to navigate from a groups forum to the public forums with the new design. They also added a new auto-reply feature which I guess will be useful for people that are really popular or have Recon. I guess you can set it to where it automatically sends out a pre-typed(you type it up in your profile section) response or you can set it so that you can pick and choose who you send the auto response out to. I'll use it for the people who send out group invites, I seriously hate those things anymore. Yeah, I'll still read them and at least give the group a look at, but if you are just randomly spamming my inbox that is what I find annoying. I can't wait to see what kind of responses I will get from it. I just now need to think of a comeback for when they say something stupid.

Now, some of you may notice the column to the right(It's somewhere over there>) that there is a set of numbers, I'll explain the point of those. It's rather simple actually, each Sunday or Monday I will come and update it with how many kills until I have 1,000 with the Warthog turret. So far I have 71 to go before I reach this goal. I could of had more kills with it, but either other teammates took the hog and wasted it or didn't know how to drive. My friend I normally play with tried to drive me to a Perfection on a Big Team Slayer game on Avalanche. I thank him for the thought of getting one, but it's no big deal if I get one or not. Our run in the Warthog seemed to be very short, but it wasn't actually. I mean considering he got me 8, almost 9 straight kills at the start. I really don't know how we got killed anyways, there was no one around from what I could see. Anyways, the game went pretty good for the both of us, we both got double digit kills. Here's the link to the post game stats: here. We didn't do to well this weekend, but a lot of the losers were playing Big Team and sadly, we got them. All I wanted was one good multi flag game, but no, we get spawn killers and objective holders.

Now for some more Halo 3 related...stuff. So if you have recently been to Bungie.net you should of seen the recent weekly update that they posted. What do you all think of Sandbox now that it has more stuff to it? Not the simple forging map I thought it would, Crypt Grifball is going to be awesome. I don't know what I'll do with the map, but the first thing is going to be mess around with the new Killballs. I mean, you walk into them, you die, you drive/fly into them you die, what more could we do with them? Oh, I know one thing, Killball Wars! I really hope to see some great maps from the community when we get the maps, at least there better be. I'm still sort of one sided on which is my favorite map so far and that would be Orbital. I don't know if it is going to be symmetrical or asymmetrical or whatever, but it looks cool. I've always wanted another "in space" based map since I played Halo 1's Boarding Action and Halo 2's Elongation I think it is.

Anyways, that's all I got for now. Maybe I can get a post out within the next two weeks or so. Enjoy!

Forging Frenzy

2009-02-02T16:56:00.000-06:00

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to be making a map. Well, I finally decided that it is going to be two maps on Foundry and Ghost Town. I have an idea for the one on Foundry and have already started it a bit. All I've got placed on the map is a few double boxes and flag spawns and that. It originally started as a CTF map only, but if all goes well it may turn out to work with assault as well. I don't have any ideas for the Ghost Town map, but I want to finish the one on Foundry before I get started on it. The only real problem I am going to have trouble on both maps is going to be getting all the respawn, starting points and weapon placement to work out perfectly. Yeah and if you don't already know this, it isn't going to be an MLG based map. It's going to have rockets and a shotgun on there. Thing I don't understand, is why does MLG use a Mauler instead of a shotgun. Don't they serve the same purpose?

Well this weekend I played some Social Big Team with a friend of mine and did pretty good at points. We went on a little winning streak at one point also went on a loosing streak for a couple of games. I am going for 1,000 kills with the Warthog turret and as of right now I have 890. When I first started this past Thursday, I had 826, so I gained a few, but not enough to reach my goal. Which is okay, it will take a little bit and I did put a little dent in the number. I also reached 600 wheelmen medals also, though all I needed for it was one more. Right now though I have 650 and I aiming for 1,000, but it's going to take a little while since I really don't drive. I have been driving a little more lately in hopes of getting better. I'll let you know when I actually make some progress. I have noticed I have been getting a little better plus I learned something that I wasn't doing before, communicating with your gunner or other passengers. Yeah I know, something everyone knows and I just discovered it, well like I said, I don't drive. I'm the type that likes to shoot things and that.

A couple things I don't understand is why do people that send you game invites either don't wait for you to finish the current game you are in and the join or if you have a friend you want to bring along so you ask and they either say no he sucks(even though they haven't played with him to know) or don't say anything and continue playing and ignoring you. I mean come on if you really want to play with me you'll let me join no matter who I am currently playing with.

Now the other thing I don't understand is why do people spam grenades? All this weekend while playing Big Team and we were about to score or something, the other team would just start throwing grenades at us like it was the only thing in the game. You know, you have a gun for a reason. Besides, once you run out of grenades what are you going to use?

Finally here is a site for all the people who do the driving of the Warthog. You know who you are, the unsung heroes of the team that drive people to Running Riot's and Rampages and get no respect when you only have three of four kills. H3Wheelmen.com
So next time you see someone on your team that has few kills, check and see what they did in game and how many wheelman medals they had.

Red vs. Blue, One of the Best Machinimas

2009-01-23T21:50:00.003-06:00

Anyone who has watched or watches Halo Machinima(don't ask how it's pronounced. I don't know) is quite familiar with the Red versus Blue series. I don't know a whole lot about the history of the series, but it started in April 1st, 2003 and it lasted five seasons and closed off with 100 episodes under it's belt. Somewhere along there they also had an Xbox Live mini-series called "Out of Mind" I think. Then they took a break and just last year came out with their latest series called "Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction" and I actually like it. I started watching it at the start when it came out, but lost interest in it half way through the series since it just didn't remind me of the good old RvB. Just the other night I sat down and watched the the few episodes that I didn't watch and it got better. It returned to some of it's roots near the end with Sarge wanting to get rid of the blue team. Now you might be asking "why do you think this is one of the best series out there?", well it was one of the first machinimas I saw. I guess that and I just plain like it. I don't know why I like it, I just do. I know there are others out there like "Arby n' The Chief" and others that I don't remember/watched yet, but this is my all time favorite.

Well Bungie released the January matchmaking update and there has been a little controversy about a map called "Smashed" that was chosen over someone else's map. Well the site that the map that "should have been in matchmaking" is mainly a Forge related site, big one at that, but the person that created this map says it's a horrible map or something like that. I don't know the guys post didn't make much sense, but honestly, who cares? It's a map and you really shouldn't worry about it. Take the advice that Shishka gave you and work out the spawns, deal with it. It's a game you shouldn't fret about your map not being selected for a simple mistake. Fix it and re-submit it and boom, problem solved. I downloaded Smashed and it's okay, it wouldn't be my first choice for map of the year, but it's playable in my opinion. I also downloaded a few other maps that I thought would be cool and they were.

Okay, enough about people complaining about maps. I have actually been wanting to create either a CTF, Assault or Territories based map. I'm just not sure what gametype to base it on and what map I want to use to make it on. I know I said in one of my earlier posts that my forging is horrible, but I still want to make a map. Oh and I can already tell you it's not going to be MLG based, it's going to have a shotgun, laser or rockets(or both, there's a thought for you!), there will be a few other weapons and that. I'm not sure exactly how I am going to work it all out, but it should be a good one...I hope.
If anyone has any ideas on what they map they think would work feel free to leave a comment telling me what could work.

Okay, now I think I am done talking about maps and that. On to SMG's and other things! I've seen several posts on how the BR is better then the AR and how the SMG is better then both the AR and BR. I'm not one to swear by the BR only, but it does have it's purpose as do all weapons in the game. My preference for which one to take is simple, what kind of situation am I in. Though when I am playing base defense in objective games, I'll try to find shotgun and either SMG or AR to help me out. A lot of people say that the AR is "noob" weapon, but I consider the opposite I'll use it to take out someone who is close range. I primarily use it for base defense though along with a shotgun or something else. I am finding out more and more that the SMG is perfect for base defense as well. Okay now for some failure clips I took today, oh yes I did fail in these.

Okay so I go into DLC BTB(now social big team, but whatever) with my friend this past weekend and we get a game of Neutral Assault on Avalanche and right off the bat I go through the side transporter in our base to grab rockets. I get the rockets and take the grav cannon to the middle of the map to grab the bomb and hopefully fall back a little bit and grab a ride to the other teams base. Oh no, it doesn't go like that, I really don't know how to explain it, other than I get betrayed in mid-air. Here's the link to my file share clip: Failure 1
Failure two of four, yes four failures that happen. This one though, I think sticks out more then that others do. I really liked how this happen, me and my friend re-spawned and we started chasing down the guy who had the bomb for the other team. So my friend grabbed the laser and took out the first guy who was being the escort for the guy who had the bomb and then we turned the corner and I grabbed the cloak and a Brute Shot and my friend lasers the guy who had the bomb. I pick it up and make a dash for the other teams base while still cloaked, I reach the grav cannon outside the base and get on it and get half to the base in it and someone on the other team grabs their hornet and flies at me, not knowing I was there and splatters me. No one knew I was there, I mean a Warthog drove past me and didn't even see me. Failure 2

That's all I have for now, my next post will include my other two failures, but I need to do some organizing of my file share. Until then, enjoy this little post along with some epic fails.