On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I picked up GTA: CW for the Nintendo DS.  I had avoided it for quite a while thanks to Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation review, which wasn’t very kind.  The game has it’s upsides and downsides.  It’s easy, it’s very linear for a sandbox game, and lastly, it’s really fun.

If you have a DS, pick this up.  Rent it at the very least.  The top down presentation is a throwback to the GTA games of old, but at the same time it contains some of the features you will be familiar with from the more recent GTA games. 

One feature I could do without is the drug dealing.  I think this is the one feature that really makes the game too easy.  I have such a stockpile of cocaine that getting nabbed by the cops seems more like a minor inconvenience than something to actually dread.  I just head to a safe house (of which I have many), pick up some coke and sell it to replenish my weapons.  If you have ever played dope wars you will feel right at home playing the drug dealing mini game in GTA.

So, as I said, pick this up.  Rent it if you must, but give it a try.  The only problem with renting this one is that, being a sandbox game at heart, you won’t have enough time to do everything there is to do in the game if you just rent it.

I made a new years resolution this year, which is something I am normally against.  This year I was pretty sure I could hit my goal, so I went for it, and I am almost there.  So what did I resolve to do?  Hit 10,000 gamerscore on the XBox.  I am only 400 or so points away, which is like another week or two of gaming if I do it right.  However, I have 5 months left to hit this.

I am amending my resolution for this year a little because of this.  I now resolve to not only hit 10,000 gamerpoints, but also to hit 50 percent gamerscore completion.  I have 39 games for the Xbox 360 (both retail and live arcade games) with a total possible gamerscore of 28,850.  This means that I need 14,425 to be my gamerscore in order to hit his.  This supposes I don’t buy any more games, which is unlikely.

Last night, I hit 200/200 gamerscore with Monkey Island.  Making it my first game with 100% completion.  That boosts my confidence a little.  Wish me luck.

I finished Monkey Island and have started my second play through, this time with the aim being to finish up the achievements that I missed.  Playing it has gotten me in the mood for some more Tim Schafer games, so I am thinking of digging out Full Throttle (which I totally stole from a dude in high school!).  It also has me thinking about downloading Psychonauts through the XBox Marketplace.  It is a game that I borrowed from a friend and never got around to playing much of it.

It also made me think about what other old Lucas Arts games I could get.  I remember you used to be able to call Lucas Arts and get a free book, once a month or so, with a Sam and Max comic in it, and tons upon tons of advertising and merchandise.  I wonder if you still can.  I somehow doubt it.  I used to call them from the payphone at school during lunch and get them to deliver it to my home.  Those little magazines were great.

If you are looking for some more great Lucas Arts games, I suggest the Indiana Jones games available now on Steam.

• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Those two games were great fun.  It’s a different style of game play than what you would be used to unless you played the old Lucas Arts adventure games.  Very similar to Monkey Island actually.  I will try to make this the last post related to Lucas Arts games for a while.

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia.

A few months ago, I picked up UFC 2009 Undisputed.  I sucked pretty hard at it so I didn’t play it much until last week.  As a fighting game, it doesn’t have the pick up and play feeling of games like Street Fighter or Tekken.  It is almost impossible to button mash your way through the game, or to even play it without first going through the hour long tutorial.  The controls are robust, more robust than any other game I have ever played, with context sensitive moves for almost any situation, and separate buttons for each arm and leg of the fighter.

The Create a Fighter system is incredible, and it makes it fairly easy to faithfully recreate anyone you have ever met, if you are willing to put in the time.

I haven’t spent any time playing online matches yet, so I can’t really comment on that, but I should have more to say about this game when I do.  For now all I can say is that, if you are not a UFC fan, you may not be able to get into this game.  Definitely a game for the fans.  If you are unsure, I would put this one down as a rent.

just a quick little update because my son wanted to create a zombie using the Zombatar, and put it on my blog.

There it is, an original Ashley Danger Hynes creation, using the Zombatar.  It brings families together.

My steam account has pointed out to me that I have spent 77 hours in the last 2 weeks playing Plants VS Zombies.  I figured that was enough of a reason to mention it here.

Plants VS Zombies, for those who don’t know, is a Popcap game, wherein some zombies have decided to eat your brains and the only thing keeping you alive is your garden.  Sounds like a weak premise I know, but it works.  My son is obsessed with it, often sitting on my lap to watch, and so I rarely close the game during the day, which is what really accounts for my 77 hours of play time.  That is (unfortunately) not my real play time.

Still, that’s not what I really wanted to talk about today.  What I wanted to talk about today is the Zombatar.  You can find it over at www.plantsvszombies.com and it allows you to make Avatar’s for MSN, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Myspace, or whatever.  Avatars like:

or or

It also lets you send a Zombiegram to your mom if that’s your thing.

If you haven’t played Plants VS Zombies, I recommend it.  I noticed a friend playing it one day and figured I would try the demo, an hour later my demo was over and I was fishing out my credit card to buy one for myself and one for my wife.  I have rarely turned it off since.

Holy crap…it’s dusty in here.  What happened to this place?  I leave for…ummm…for a long time I suppose, and look at this place.  Well, i’m dusting it off because I have just been knocked back to my childhood a little and I wanted to talk about it.

While I was browsing through the xBox 360 marketplace (well not really, it was on the opening screen) I found out that The Secret of Monkey Island, one of my all time favorite LucasArts games, is available on xBox Live Arcade!  How cool is that?

I downloaded it about 5 hours ago, and have made it about 20% through the game so far.  They have adjusted the graphics, making it look slightly more modern than the original version, but the gameplay is the same, and the jokes still make me chuckle and groan in equal amounts.

The Secret of Monkey Island is available on XBox 360 and on Steam, it may be available elsewhere as well, but I haven’t looked into it much.  If you never played the game when it was first released, you may not enjoy it the way I am, but it is worth checking out either way.