{"id":353,"date":"2009-07-30T09:39:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T16:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/playing-catchup-xbligs-road-to-ruin-and-the-dashboard-update-preview\/"},"modified":"2009-07-30T09:39:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T16:39:00","slug":"playing-catchup-xbligs-road-to-ruin-and-the-dashboard-update-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/playing-catchup-xbligs-road-to-ruin-and-the-dashboard-update-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Catchup &#8211; XBLIGs, Road to Ruin, and the Dashboard Update Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since finishing Damnation I&#8217;ve been playing catch up on a lot of the recent Indie Games.  You can see my recent ratings of them <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xblaratings.com\/component\/jreviews\/my-reviews\/user:62\/\">here<\/a>. Nothing super outstanding but a few fun titles.  I did get to try out an early release of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xblaratings.com\/component\/content\/article\/68-strategy-a-simulation\/1005-horn-swaggle-islands\">Horn Swaggle Islands<\/a> and I&#8217;m really enjoying it. I need to put more time into it before giving everyone a full review. Still, how can you go wrong with a pirate themed tower defense game?<\/p>\n<p>I also have played through the new Gears of War 2 single player DLC Road to Ruin.  It is not really that long but I had a surprisingly fun time.  I had forgotten how much fun the single player is in Gears of War 2 and the DLC has really gotten me wanting to play through the main campaign on Insane with a friend in co-op.<\/p>\n<p>I also got into the new Dashboard Updated Preview this week.  A few quick thoughts on that.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have noticed that the Guide seems much faster and smoother now. I use to get a lot of hang ups and lag when in the guide if I opened it while in a multiplayer match.  Since getting the updated I&#8217;ve not had that happen once. <\/li>\n<li>Also, the My Games list loads much quicker. It use to populate very slowly and it is much better now.<\/li>\n<li>User Ratings &#8211; The option to have user ratings for everything in the Xbox Live Marketplace is a nice touch, but should people really be able to rate games they have not played?  How long until that is abused? <\/li>\n<li>Avatar Marketplace &#8211; I did not buy gamer pics and themes, and I&#8217;m not buying clothes for my Avatar.  However, I am looking forward to unlocking Awards for my Avatar to wear just like unlocking achievements.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since finishing Damnation I&#8217;ve been playing catch up on a lot of the recent Indie Games. You can see my recent ratings of them here. Nothing super outstanding but a few fun titles. I did get to try out an early release of Horn Swaggle Islands and I&#8217;m really enjoying it. I need to put [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-xbox-360","tag-video-game"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}