Something Blue and the New Year

It's the new year and quite a bit has been going on in my life. Since my last post, I got married and spent a week honeymooning in Tenerife. After that X-Mas went by nicely, and yes, I did get quite a bunch of presents :)

I started the new year by playing one of the best adventure/interactive stories I've seen for a while: Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in US). I got bored to shooting and driving on 360, so I wanted to try adventure game for change, and never looked back - Fahrenheit is very close to game of the year 2005 for me (very high on my top games of the year at least).. I recommend you to check that out on PC or XBOX if you haven't already (especially if you liked Grim Fandango, Monkey Islands and such back in the days).

XBOX 360 Time!

I got my Origen price of Xbox 360 premium package, the Origen experience has officially been closed now (Although the Live experience with the new Origen friends lives on). The 360 has been up and running in my living room from last friday (2nd of December) and it has been good. I've played a bit of PGR3 and Geometry Wars, but most of my time has gone to Kameo.

Kameo is one excellent game, the main game is excellent with superb graphics and nice features (although some puzzles in the game have been a bit vague). The scoring system of collecting multipliers (brutal, carnage and frenzy), and online ranking list of the individual missions made me go nuts with the game. I tried and tried to hit the 'A' rank in Forgotten Forest mission, and it took about 5 hours (prolly even more) to get it right.

I finally passed 15 million in Forgotten Forest (required for rank 'A'), but as I played that particular game offline (not connected to Live), it seems that my hiscore wasn't submitted (it should do so when there is a connection, but for what I see the game only sends the scores when the hiscoring game is finished and if the connection is not there, it doesn't - ever :( Oh well, at least I got the 'A' rank achievement for it (and propably will go for even higher scores just for the fun of it)

as a side note concerning the HDTV speculation on the earlier post.. it turned out that getting HDTV and any other goodies with the 360 for the Origen win, was more and less exaggerated. The Xbox.com article announcing that Origen winners got the 360 with all the accessories including HDTV was published by mistake, and it has now been removed. Not that big a deal, but it wasn't cool at all to publish article like that and then take it all away.. But as said, I'm happy with my free 360 and I'll be busy with it for a while :)

Other Blogs with "Zero Hour" stories

I made a super quick search for other blogs with Zero Hour stories..

Other Blogs with Zero Hour / Origen stories (and/or other info)

Xbox Live's TriXie Tells All
manufactured freedom
Keiko's Random Thoughts
Nefarious Designs
turbopunk.cpp
the mini Blog
The Console Wars

Find more yourself with BlogSearch
http://search.blogger.com/

Origen - Can it get even better?

During our excursion in LA and Zero Hour, we were informed that XBOX 360 with good supply of accessories and games would be delivered to Origen winners on 2nd of December (the launch date in Europe). I kept my cool there, as I kind of knew already we would get the 360).

The story just got boosted (and I started losing my coolness)! There is a story in xbox.com 'xbox news' section (at least on European mirrors) about Origen and Zero hour and the article ends with this:

"We surprised them with vouchers for their own Xbox 360 and all the kit you could want to build the ultimate gamer den, including a high-definition television. "

HDTV! If this is true, my already anxious wait of two days will feel like two weeks :)

You can find the whole story here. There's also nice video about the opening of Zero Hour that I hadn't seen before.