Guitar Hero® 5
today i bought THE guitar for my xbox360 Guitar Hero 5 and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith – its way cool and addictive!

Monopoly City Streets is a online game which lets you play a Monopoly kind of game on the REAL world map. It is a cooperation between Hasbro and Google (I can’t wait for RiskCityStreets ) (yes that is mine now gnagnagnagniffel).It uses both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap and the content is  under the CC-Attribution-Share-Alike license .

It was to be expected. The worldwide buzz around this Google maps game that promises to be the best thing ever happened in life …was down, reload, down, reload, down but… at 20:56 … I made it! In the meanwhile in the blog of the game there was a poll to vote for a complete reset of all scores because of the downtime, about 99,99% users voted for it.

So… why does this game make such an impact?

the playing map – Well… because a playing map of ALL streets in the world using Google Maps. Wow… we can actually conquer the real world!

buy every house on the planet – Users get 3 million dollars when starting and can buy actual stuff for it: houses, skyscrapers, stadiums, you name it. The price of a building of course depends on the location of the building AND the length of the street (a longer street contains more houses).

pay rent like in real life – Each day users pay a rent for the houses they bought e.g. 50.000 dollar for a house and 100 million dollar for a skyscraper.

sell, trade or negotiate – yes you can sell and trade your stuff with other players which provides the option for an actual mortgage bases virtual world economy!

cards – you can also gain chance cards that lets you randomly sabotage other players or give you the option to build bonus buildings such as parks, schools, water towers etc…

It opens with the screen above where after it led me choose between languages and… even Dutch was in the language list so that is really superb. Next…. we wait again…. (reload… reload … reload) (in the meanwhile I scroll to Antarctica to set a personal goal to conquer it.

Buying your first street – It starts out by giving you the chance to search for a street to buy. You can do this in the welcome screen or by searching for a street. Obviously I tried the Kalverstreet in Amsterdam first, in the dutch monopoly game the most expensive street.

Registration - Only after you have selected your street you are prompted to register for the game, again I took a fancy name “internet”, which, very cool, was not reserved yet.

Buying more streets – You can now buy more stuff by simply selecting the “buy streets” option and buy more stuff.You then get a map of the streets in the neighbourhood of your street, the ones in purple are available for buying and the ones in blue are owned by other players. The interesting thing here is that you can offer on streets that you do not own.

As you can see above the complete neighborhood of the Kalverstraat was ALREADY sold….and that in just a few hours while noone could login….but on the right you see in purple the streets that were still open. So, this … is too much… I’m heading back to Maastricht…

Then… each time an error occurred, I had to press like 10 times but could not get through, whatever I tried I got not get past the error, probably  the site is still to busy and Amsterdam is simply in the cache.

But then….

I OWN THE VRIJTHOF !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(see YOUTUBE or WIKIPEDIA if you dont know the square)

AGAIN: I OWN THE VRIJTHOF !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So… lets put stuff on it:

Hey… and suddenly a chance card pops up: it lets me build a stadium!

So… Let’s continue buying some streets since I still have 2.3 million dollars left Maastricht: you are MINE gnagnagnagniffel.

I hope I gave you a nice little first impression of the game. I will leave off with the most expensive set of buildings you can buy in the game and the rent they make. I wonder If I EVER will make enough money to buy myself a monopoly tower! It makes more than 1.000.000 in rent a day, which makes me wonder if I can best focus on buying streets or best focus on generating money.

p.s. I now own the Vrijthof, the Markt, the Bredestraat, the Grote Staat, the Grote Gracht the Helmstraat and the Platielstraat….

Each player also has a public profile, as said mine is “internet”, so… I don’t know if you can / how you can actually link up with me (actually…. this reminds me of a facebook application… omg  im thinking facebook applications…) but if you find out how link me!

and I got some bad luck:

On interesting thing was that on some links of street my virusscanner gave the warning that the “nutcracker” virus was found in the url from monopolycitystreets, so I was wondering if this would be the BIG news of tomorrow (already hacked):

Interesting Links:

• http://www.monopolycitystreets.com
• http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/ – the blog
• http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfzghp76_3f3s5b6gr – the official FAQ
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_City_Streets – the wikipedia page
• Google Dutch News Feed

This is a Legendary day…

Since today I reached the milestone of having killed 1000 opponents (!) in the game of RISK in the multiplayer online RISK version ATTACK (an app which you can play on facebook)

Look me up and challenge me

The Great Flu

I received an invite for Loudcrowd (beta) which lets you listen to new songs and dance to them in a guitarhero style. You must hit the arrows to make a move and as you progress in our dancing style you earn extra moves and new cool stuff to wear. It’s also a social network kind of thing since it lets you dance and romance with others.

The current version though is a little bit “shocky” on some occasions I didnt even see the dot and the game was already over. On other occasions I had to press the arrow keys a little bit before the actual arrow to “hit it”.

Then again, it’s an early beta, so that will undoubtly improve. It was neat enough for me to return.

At Loudcrowd you listen to music with others, and play games to hang with friends or to meet new people. Everything here is about who’s online right now, what they’re doing, and what you can do with them. Instant gratification.

If you’re reading this, you’ve found yourself a backstage pass or hacked in to see what we’re up to. Things are still very rough – we’re testing out new ideas about how people can interact online and still figuring things out – so expect things to crash a bit and explode.

“the website is down ” are hilarious videos about a helpdesk employee during a regular day.

Turn up your sound, and just press play. Some other goodies can be found there too:

My X-Box is on “autodownload games”, it’s a sort of stumble-upon for one-click games. Today I found “Portal ” inside the downloaded games folder. It’s a 3d puzzle game by Valve, the creators of Half Life and it was released originally more than a year ago in “the Orange box”.

This special X-Box 360 version, Portal:Still Alive was released three weeks ago and contains 14 bonus puzzles.

My first try was not good. I really didn’t understand the game and switched it off. On my next try I had the headphone on and suddenly understood the story… (tip: you need the sound) and somehow I like it. This happens not that often. Most of the games I delete after a few minutes but this one got me hooked.

You start off in a 3d maze and have to solve some simple puzzles by using blocks, portals and other inventive stuff. You could say it’s a sort of 3d sokoban . The voice guides you into the more difficult puzzles and slowly after some puzzles you get the hang of it and it slowly becomes addictive.

The game is based on the freeware game Narbacular Drop which you still can download here . The same team of people was hired by Valve and worked more than 2 years on Portal (screenshot of the Narbacular Drop on the left). Though it only has few level, a community has created many extra levels.

Much, much, MUCH more on the game can we read on the wikipedia page of Portal .

So… I started Assassins Creed and I must say… this game is absolutely stunning. I read earlier that it was choosen as the best game ever and after diving into the initial storyline I must agree.

The graphics are mind dazzling. The game takes place around 1100 during the crusades and your character can freely travel through the VAST country, mountains, cities, villages and do basically anything he likes. He can ride with his horse to Damascus or to Jerusalem through the mountains and you have the feeling you are really there. I just stop occasionally in the mountains to enjoy the sights, truly stunning.

At the moment I’m standing on a plateau high in the mountains and I have an overview of Jerusalem in the valley, normally I would take a picture of the panorama! The complete city in which I later on can wander (I ride with my horse down) and do some breathtaking climbing. It’s hyper realistic and I can basically do anything I like.

I have no words to describe the game it’s simply wow. My mind simply can not grasp that I can ride through a vast country, travel through cities and all “as if it is real”. I just stop the game to watch the sight and watch the scenery. When I’m climbing a high building I get sweat in my hands!

I have been playing only 1 game on my X-Box 360: Lost Odyssey . I started in april and today I finished it. The end sequences and boss were amazing wow.

It was the best game I ever played. I traveled the complete world, learned all skills, gathered all accessories, leveled everyone up to max, found all dreams, all seeds, all side-quests and enjoyed this comprehensive game to the max.

I can only propose that you play it, it’s amazing, it’s a life experience.

Here are my achievements:

While updating the risk.startpagina.nl I found the Risk Express edition on the Hasbro site, it is out for a while but I haven’t written about it yet.

This is a mini version for Risk Addicts, like me, which we can bring along on vacation or to party’s and which can be played within 20 minutes.

It can be played with 2 to 6 players.

You can download the manual in PDF format here to give you an indication of the game. I haven’t had the game in my hands "physically" but it looks pretty cool to play.

In this portable game all territories are cards. Which makes it handier than carrying along a big board.

Each of the so called territories / country cards looks something like this:

What you see the right is an example card, e.g. North America.

If you conquer North America you will get 3 points, the one with the most points at the end of the game wins. Complete territories give extra points and, different than the board game, if you completely conquer a continent noone can re-conquer it.

On this specific card you see 3 lines of icons:

- 1 line consisting of a cavalry icons and a cannon icon
- another line consisting of a cavalry icons and a cannon icon
- and a line with 3 soldiers

You need to break through all three lines before you can conquer the country. Which means that you have to dice all the icons on the lines with your 7 attack dices whereafter you get to conquer the country.

E.g. suppose you throw:

This means that you can place the cannon and the cavalry (horse) icon on the first line of defense. You can not place the other dices all at once because you can only conquer 1 defense line per dice roll.

The next roll you might throw this:

In this roll there are neither a cavalry+cannon nor the 3 soldiers so you can not conquer any defense lines, so you must put 1 dice away and roll again:

Now you have a roll in which you have a cannon and a horse (artillery and cavalry) which you can put on the second line of defense, You now only need to conquer the third line of defense (3 soldiers):

you have 4 soldiers which is more than enough to conquer the defense line with the three soldiers, so now you have conquered North America!

Pretty simple. There is also the "general" icon on the card. This should be used/diced when another player already has the country and you want to conquer that territory.

There are some minor house rules you can introduce: if you do not manage to conquer the country you could create the rule that the other players can then continue the fight to conquer the country.

As said, I do not have this version yet, so I can not say anything about the playability or real strategies you could form around playing the dice/card game. If you have played it let me know how it was.

Edward de Leau
http://risk.startpagina.nl