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.

So I just realized that I haven’t posted about my trip last weekend to hang out with Steve (Fatty Chubs) and Trapper (ChangeAgent) from 360voice.com.  That’t not entirely true actually, I did mention it in my Status Report, but at the time of that post I had not uploaded photos. 

Friday Evening after work I headed to my wonderful small time airport awaiting my flight to Chicago.  The flight was like most flights these days delayed, but luckily they offer free internet service in the airport.  So I was able to pass my time with Zelda: Phanton Hourglass on my DS (I still haven’t come close to finishing this game - I am such a slacker), and randomly browsing forums and chatting with friends etc. 

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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

To celebrate our community and gaming in generally we are organizing a little awards ceremony.  More on that when the time comes, or feel free to check out more details here.  Currently shopping for some vendors that might be willing to sponsor a few small prizes for participants and those that recieve an award, we shall see how that goes.  If you want to help sponsor a prize, or have a contact of someone that might be interested in doing so - contact me!

Episode number 42 of XBLRadio is out, I have a small spot on it interviewed about 3FS.  Everyone go tell ZaaM how good his english is, so he can join the fun of podcast interviews

Check out the show, the guys over at XBLRadio are great community guys that offer a variety of video and audio podcasts.  I personally subscribe to all the podcasts that they offer and listen to them as soon as they are released.

well I just finished up a chat with one of the boys over at XBLRadio, if you dont listen to their podcast, I would suggest checking it out - they are a nice bunch of community guys with a bunch of different podcasts - a video podcast, an xbox live roundtable (for gamers just like you) and a standard news type deal.

I am not promoting it just because I am interviewed on it, because well I generally think I sound like a tool on these type of things. But I do subscribe to their podcasts, and since I just finished the discussion with them, it made me think to mention them to you guys.

I am not sure when the interview will be up, and lucky for me, it was no where near as long as the one with deacon over at unscripted [:D]

You might know of www.360gl.com, and if you dont definately check them out. Here is the official description of them.

is first and foremost a Gaming League and Tournament Site, but we are building the Gamerbase into a useful tool for combining (and referring to) the great community sites that are out there.

I am happy to say that they have added a little feature to display live eye information on their gamers (that have a live eye profile) using the 360friendspot public APIS.

Swing by and check them out, looks like they a Gears of War tournament coming up - you and all your team members can rack up a smooth 1600 MS Points, to bad I completely suck at Gears of War

Well one of our great members over at 3fs posted that the codes needed for the Xbox rewards prizes are now on your rewards page (this is for Contra, the MP’s, and the gamerpics - if you won Fuzion Frenzy and the shirt, at some point they are going to mail it to you. Thanks Kanone.

Play and Win Shooter / Gears of War

Well I finally got an achievement last night during my Gears of War session last night. It was one of the pretty simple achievements - Mix it Up - where you just need to be on the winning team of the 3 different game types. It was also brought to my attention that even though I thought I was going to get a 100 kills with a [insert weapon here] achievement, that there is not one for shotgun kills - which was what most all my achievements were based on, and the one I assumed was going to rack me another achievement, so that wasn’t very wise of me I would say. Thanks to Antediluvia for bringing this to light. This concludes the dates that you can recieve an entry in the Play & Win Shooter Contest, and I believe I should get an entry for each of the 3 days . . . winning is a long shot - but it doesn’t hurt to try (and those prizes are pretty smooth).

Shadowrun Beta

I recently recieved my beta invitation to Shadowrun, but haven’t dedicated a ton of time to it as of yet. Of course in the invitation the NDA was restated that not much else can be said except “Yes, I am playing the beta”. So until the NDA is lifted dont expect to hear a ton more about that. You can keep track of my play time on the game in my Live Eye Profile as you can see at the moment I have only played about an hour or so. Over at 360friendspot we have about 62 current live eye members in the beta and being tracked by our tool, you can see an overview of those users at the Shadow Run Beta Profile Page

360Friendspot / LiveEye

Speaking of 360friendspot and The Live Eye, last night I spent a good amount of time updating some queries after seeing a bunch of sleeping records in the SQL Activity Monitor. This was a hope that what might be causing the slowness or hanging of the site was related to SQL table locks - since I was definately getting time out errors and transactions were hanging out here sleeping. If that resolves, or at least partially resolves the performance issues - I am going to be extremely pleased, but also upset that I didnt find it sooner. I am sure there are more things to optimize - but maybe I am at least going in the right direction at this point.

Crackdown All Nighter, and Rumors

Finally - Happy St Patricks day, and look for an update from my all nighter activities at a later date. Achievements and random video goodness will most likely come of it. There is A rumor posted in my comments about this all nighter being a time that they release some new content or the final 100 points - no clue what that user based it on - but I am all for it!