Squidpunch.com

Hey Squid you skipped a week again!  Yeah I am aware, but this week of all weeks I have a pretty valid excuse, perhaps a few.  I joined a new site officially, a site is moving, and unfortunately a site is dying.  This should be an interesting update. 

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The Gamer

• So how about this?  I got myself all worked up over my chatpad not working with the wireless headset.  Probably the next day it was working, and I figured wow I am a schmuck for complaning soooooo much about that, luckily last night it did NOT work, so clearly something is up, and I am not insane.
• I finally passed the end of Act III in Gears of War for Windows - only 2 acts to go
• I finished Pirates of the Caribean: At World’s End, to add to my 100% complete list.  Soul gathering was the most annoying part.  It isn’t hard, just time consuming.  It took about 16 hours total.
• I am up to level 40 in Kingdom Under Fire.  I can see why the game gets some mediocre reviews, it really is alot of the same, and to get all the achievements is without a doubt going to be a complete grind.  I however still enjoy the game and would tell everyone that might be interested to at least give it a rental and see what you think.
• The gamerscore challenge is over, as expected Pat2k9 nabbed the prize with a serious gain over all of us.  I opened my big mouth and trash talked Kanone into beating my butt too - I did finish up with 4th place.  Considering the time I have to game, and the games I have available - it wasn’t a bad placing I guess.  

The Coder

• I continue to dabble with the code for TheLiveEye.com - still nothing obvious, really just trying to test out somethings to make it more stable, or more efficient, so far I am not sure I made any real progress actually.
• DaKing240 sent me some more ideas to expand on his contest site - which I added some of that stuff to the site, but it was mostly basic HTML and throwing some ideas out on the site to expand later.
•   At work I have been essentially rebuilding the entire framework of our existing application - its proved rather fun, frustrating, and rewarding all at the same time - the first phase is almost complete after about 2 weeks.
• I did some coding for the not ready to announce project, which by the way will be officially announced and open for discussion soon. 

The Person

• Another boring week for the non-gamer, non-coding section of this little update.  I just did the normal things, spent time with the family, watched tv, etc.
• My DVR system died, so I missed Prison Break, rather annoyed about that
• Also due to the DVR issue, I once again missed the Sarah Conner Chronicles, I guess I am just not watching this show - if I miss too many episodes in the start of a show, I just never keep up with it - anyone else watching this?
• My wife got me interested in Dexter - so we rented the first season on DVD and watched that, it was interesting, not sure if I will upgrade to include showtime or just watch box sets when they come out yet.

Another Monday, another status report.  This week seems to be a pretty big entry, after looking it over I seemed to have gotten quite a bit of gaming in, and even a little coding.  I also threw up a little section about me/my family as a person rather than a gamer - for those of you that really do actually want to know more about the guy behind the gamertag.  Hopefully you actually like it, otherwise I am wasting quite a bit of time typing all this stuff up!

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My friends over at XBLRadio have released episode 54 of their podcast.  I was away this weekend so I asked one of the other great staff members of 3fs to do the friendspot spot.  So make sure you head on over, check out Ant on the Friendspot Spot - and let him know how he did

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

NEWS:

• The newest trend in music downloading; Pay what you want!

CONSOLE CRIMES:

• Apple gets sued for price dropping.  This may make Wal-Mart rethink their “Falling-Prices” campaign.

GAME NEWS:

• The Wii recasts a new fishing sim. Perhaps they are angling for a new kind of gamer. Hope they can TACKLE it.

GAME REVIEWS:   

• The Orange Box: Rusty Ranchero gives us the scoop on Valve’s Half Life Bundle. Is 5 games enough to justify the transition to the 360? Or is Portal enough of a selling point? 
• Hour of Victory vs. Medal of Honor Airborne: Carpal once again tries to “Save Ryan’s Privates” as he enlists for two terms of active duty. Which one will he re-enlist for? 
• Drawn to Life (DS): Alex gets creative with KID PIX as he draws a conclusion on why this DS title is worth picking up.

PLUS: 

• The 360 FriendSpot SPOT 
• Useless Tips
• The Marketplace Minute. 

head on over to XBLRadio to check it out

The boys at XBLRadio released another .0 show today, and yours truly is there with your regular ‘friendspot spot’.  Here is a  recap from the RSS feed, for some reason I dont see it on the main blogcast page - but the show is out now

News

• HALO 3 breaks sales records, and a few discs.
• Activision makes a Bizarre purchase.
• Microsoft to get it’s own space on the web 2.0.

GAME NEWS:

• Mario and Sonic games revealed for the Wii Olympics. Sonic to bring the rings…
• Kane and Lynch release date announced.
• Think: “Reservoir Thugs.” -Wii announces that it’s newest Mario title will be a SMASH for online play. 

GAME REVIEW:

• HALO 3: It’s finally here and TOG and Carpal give you their opinions on how the game was received. The Maps, the co-op, the story and more. So armor-up and get ready for an in-depth look at HALO3. Is the fight finished?

PLUS

• Squidpunch gives us the 360friendspot “SPOT”
• Useless Tips -And a special (SPOILER ALERT) discussion about the HALO 3 in the out-takes. It’s almost a whole other podcast; but we felt we needed to get it off our chests. So get ready to hear Rusty, Carpal, and TOG talk candidly and unedited about the biggest game release to date.

Download the Episode here

Just thought I would quickly let everyone know that 3FS has a few interesting prizes up for grabs, so without further delay….. 

<Shameless Plug>

ZaaM and I have opened up the prize vault again and are giving away 2 wonderful prizes

come read all the details

</Shameless Plug>

I just realized how long it was since I made an actual blog post here, for the very few of you that even bother to check my blog these days

I have been mostly busy with the family, spending time outside while the kids play, going to water parks, the normal father things I guess you could say and during the day I have been pretty busy at work.  I also haven’t been staying up for my late night gaming as much anymore, perhaps I am getting old, not sure.  I also picked up a Wii recently (Friend code: 2057 7482 7233 6739), though I have played that less than the xbox.

At times I spend some time on my DS on lunch breaks.  I have been working on finishing Pokemon Pearl - but honestly its getting rather boring.  They have a few other titles for the DS (old and new) that I want to get my hands on - specifically Sim City, and from what I remember reading a while back there is a Zelda gaming coming for the DS…..I am such a sucker for Zelda - its probably 75% of the reason I bought a Wii.

Seems like since my 360 went out for repair I started falling behind on posting news, gaming, or just random blogging in general.  We haven’t had much changes to the 360friendspot or theliveeye websites that I haven’t posted about (as far as I remember), I guess I just dont have alot of ‘gaming’ related things going on.

I have the darkness on rental, and just as I said from the Gamerscore Blog road tour, it’s amazing.  If I had not spent the money on the Wii, and Zelda I would definately have bought it by now.  Speaking of buying, there are so many good titles coming out soon and I am not sure how many of them I will get to buy - my son starts preschool soon, which means another somewhat large monthly payment is currently coming out of my income. (i hope gamefly loves me and sends me all the new releases without much trouble). 

I think that will do for the “random post because I havent posted in ages post”

Ok if you haven’t notice I have not really been keeping up with and posting all the E3 news - mostly because I am rather busy with work and I can’t even keep up - let alone repost everything.  I am well aware that all of you will get your news in other ways, if you go to just my blog for news - you really are living in the dark

 But I do have some news, we (and by we I mean 99.9% ZaaM) have been working for a bit now on the latest version of the Live Eye.  There are some enhancements and also a little bit of a redesign on colors and layout.  You might also notice that it now resides on its own domain, that’s right this project has grown enough we considered hosting it as its own beast, don’t worry 360friendspot, the community and other services we provide are still going to exist.  So head on over and check out the new Live eye!

So I have created a few different wordpress plugins

• one that connects to 360voice (shown here)
• one that connects to the live eye (shown here)
• one that pulls the gamertile of the user from xbox.com if they are using their gamertag to comment (just post your feedback to see it in action) 

Does anyone actually use my plugins on your site? 
Do you care? 
Should I make more? 
If so, what would YOU like to see? 
Would you like to use the Live Eye or Xbox tile Comment Plugins?

Just looking for some feedback from those of you that visit my little blog.

Officially the only one that is publically available is the 360voice plugin, but you can see the live eye plugin in action here (and if you want to use it let me know), and finally just put a comment to see the gamertile plugin in action