June 2009 video game tab
Video games and other gaming related purchases:
Logitech G9 Laser Gaming Mouse – $59 at Amazon.com, $29 after $30 mail-in rebate
Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2 (DS) – $8.98 at Amazon.com (after 10% ECA discount)
Puzzle Fighter HD (360 XBLA) – $10 for two codes at Amazon.com
Wii MotionPlus – $17.99 at Amazon.com (after 10% ECA discount)
Guitar Hero World Tour Band Bundle (360) – $80.98 at Amazon.com (after 10% ECA discount)
Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition (PC, used) – 200 Goozex points (taken from the 1000 points I got for trading Left 4 Dead [360], which cost $3.03 to ship)
Total cost: $179.98 ($149.98 after rebate)
There’s a couple things I’m not sure I should count. First, the Wii MotionPlus isn’t for me; it’s Kelvin’s. We don’t have any Wii MotionPlus games yet, but Kelvin wants one to take it apart for… I dunno what. It’s probably not gaming related, but I’m putting it down in case Kelvin doesn’t end up dissecting it. I also counted the shipping I paid to ship out Left 4 Dead on Goozex, but I paid for that back in April. It’s part of my video game spending, so I need to count it somewhere, and I didn’t count it in April.
I’m liking the new mouse. It’s got way more features than I’d ever use, but it’s comfortable, very smooth, and has thumb buttons. Most importantly, I don’t randomly stare at the sky or ground and spin uncontrollably during TF2 anymore. My only problem with it is the middle button is really hard to push down. It’d probably drive me nuts if I was using it for work (lotsa Linux pasting), but I’m not. And for gaming, it’s been pretty great.
Haven’t had much chance to check out the other things I got (Oblivion is still in the mail), though Kelvin already managed to ruin Puzzle Fighter for me. He beat expert mode twice with zero deaths using some mindless brute force method that requires no skill, thoroughly convincing me that Puzzle Fighter is a poorly designed game. If you have an itch for a competitive puzzle game, play Dr. Mario.
Games I beat:
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (PC)
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War was a decent RTS, but like StarCraft, I’m really terrible at it. The single-player is really short; there’s only one campaign with 11 missions. You only play as Space Marines, even though there’s at least 4 other races in this game. Despite its shortness, each mission on average took me a couple hours to beat because of my ineptitude at RTS. The pace is SO much slower compared to StarCraft, and my favorite strategy was using tanks to destroy everything, which is incredibly inefficient. Everything took an eternity for me.
I thought the graphics were pretty awesome, even though the game is almost 5 years old. Considering that the most modern RTS I played prior to Dawn of War (2004) was StarCraft (1999), I guess that’s not too surprising. There’s some decent voice acting, but the in-game-rendered cutscenes are long-winded and look goofy. The characters are Warhammer figurine proportions, so everybody looks like angry children. Their mouth movements are not synced at all, so all the characters look like bad ventriloquist dummies in a dubbed kung-fu film.
I’m not too sick of Warhammer yet, so I’ll be moving on to the expansions for now.
New thing I learned today: Goozex derived its name from “goods exchanged”.
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