video games – Brian Garside

Still With Destiny, After All These Years

September 6, 2016September 4, 2016 by Brian Garside

It’s hard to believe, but we stopped working on BalanceDo two years ago. In order to truly wind down, I bought a game that had just come out two weeks before. I had loved the Halo series, but hadn’t really played a game fully since GTA IV, and Destiny looked like the right balance of dumb and fun.

I picked it up, breezed through the story mode, and played the weekly strikes and other match made content. It wasn’t until Christmas when I started using LFG (looking for group) sites to match up in order to play some of the end-game content.

Destiny Six Months In

September 28, 2015March 8, 2015 by Brian Garside

Back in September, after my PS3 died and I bought a replacement for it, I picked up a copy of Destiny with the new system (along with Last of Us, and GTA V). I blitzed through the single player story, and started doing some of the end game content. In the last six months, it is the only game I have played.

The best game of 2008

December 23, 2008 by Brian Garside

I’ll be doing some “Best of” lists over the holidays as I do every year when I look back on the year that was, best comic, best website, best gadget, and best movie are still to come, but this one is an absolute no-brainer. The best game for 2008 in my opinion totally ran away with it.

Let’s look at a few stats.

It’s the only game that I’ve played OVER 80 hours on.
It’s the only game that I continued to play regularly 10 months later
It’s the only game that I’ve bought for both systems
It’s the only game that had totally game-changing downloadable content.

The game of the year is…

How did games become my new movies?

November 4, 2008 by Brian Garside

The best games from the beginning of 2008

I don’t know when it happened exactly, but at some point in the last 5 years, I stopped being a huge movie nut, and transferred some of that love over to video games. I used to read Premiere magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. I would surf Film Threat, and Cinematical, Rotten Tomatoes was a weekly pilgramige, and I always knew what new releases were out on video. My DVD collection was huge, and always growing.

Then a strange thing happened. About 3 years ago I kind of stopped buying DVD’s. You can almost see a line in my collection that looks like a growth line in a tree. Tons of DVD’s, then nothing.

A similar thing happened with my surf habits. I now visit Gamespot, Giant Bomb, Joystiq, PS3 Fanboy and Xbox 360 Fanboy on a daily basis.

Good bye HD DVD, hello Blu Ray

October 31, 2008 by Brian Garside

Well, I did it. Last week in a moment of weakness I sold my HD DVD discs, put the HD DVD player up for auction, and went out and bought myself a Blu Ray player…a PS3 to be specific.

The deal at Rogers video was too good to pass up. I’ve been eyeing a Blu Ray player for a while because I’m just enough of an AV snob to love the way high def movies look on the HD DVD player. With nothing new coming out, I just needed a fix.

What I’m playing – the summer edition

August 29, 2008 by Brian Garside

My Profile on Xbox.com

I managed to get a fair amount of gaming in this summer, much to my wife’s chagrin. The majority of it is all casual, or quick games that I can play for ten or twenty minute stretches in between all of the other stuff I do, but it’s fun nonetheless.

Here’s my list of games I’ve played over the summer.

Initial Thoughts: GTA IV

May 1, 2008 by Brian Garside

GTA IV is out, I picked mine up on Tuesday, but didn’t get to play it right away. I’ve got a ton of stuff on the go this week, but I decided to make some time to play it anyway Wednesday night.

This is the first new GTA game for the current generation of consoles, and appropriately it’s named GTA IV rather than GTA subtitle here (for those not in the know, GTA 3 was the first GTA game for the revolutionary PS2 / Xbox generation last time). It currently has the highest ratings for any game that I’ve ever seen with pretty much unanimous praise.

What I played, Q1 2008

March 16, 2008 by Brian Garside

Since the first three months of 2008 are almost over, I thought I’d go over the games I played this quarter, what got the most of my time, what I liked, what I didn’t, and what rocked my world (pun intended).

Here’s the brief list of the games I played in the first 3 months of 2008: The Darkness, Rock Band, The Orange Box, Burnout Paradise, Halo 3, Marble Blast Ultra, Beautiful Katamari.

Rock Band: Better with a group

March 15, 2008 by Brian Garside

I’ve been playing Rock Band off and on since Christmas, and other than one night with the guys, we usually play just Char and I. We have a great little two person band ala The White Stripes going on we’re known as “Chip and the Dips”. The two of us have fun together rocking out (Char on drums, me on guitar), but yesterday during our team building session, I experienced Rock Band as it was really meant to be played.