So, a buddy of mine is rocking the internet right now on Wetfish Radio and it'd be pretty sweet if you checked it out. He's just recently joined the Dtoid Army, but I've known him ever since we were kids, so you should be awesome and check it out. You can check his blog out here and check out the radio station by hitting the link below. Just open the .pls file in Winamp or iTunes and you can start rocking too. This nonsense will be going on for a good couple hours, so stop in anytime.

COOL KIDS CLICK HERE

Hello, Destructoid. It's been a good while since my last Cblog update and even longer since I've been really active in the community. Well, to be honest, I've never been making awesome arts and crafts or melting faces with the power of music, but I still made this place my virtual home a little over three years ago. In that time, I wrote a Monthly Musing that found its way to the front page, made a fail-worthy appearance on Failcast, and had an opportunity to talk games with some of Destructoid's coolest cats. My notable moments are few and far between, but I'm damn proud of the ones I have. I can't even begin to count how many hours I've spent checking the Dtoid front page for delicious new journalism, listening to the sexy voices on RetroforceGO, or just idling in the IRC. This site has been nothing but awesome since I first found it in June of 2006.

As I mentioned before, my level of Dtoid activity has been low in the past year. I've been through a lot in this time, such as a move to a new city for college, a tough break-up, and a reconnection with old friends, so my mind has been everywhere but on one of my favorite hobbies. As much as I love writing Cblogs or simply commenting on a fellow Dtoider's work, I haven't been able to find the time to do either of those things. Sure, I still check the site each day, but I think it's time to return to my favorite community in more ways than just that.



I have a number of resolutions for this new year and perhaps this decade, so what better way to jump back into the Cbloging biz than to share a few of them with my favorite Robot Army? And while Dale North has beaten me to the punch on this one, I'd still love to hear what resolutions you have in the comments. Maybe if we share our goals, we can pressure each other into actually accomplishing them.

My Resolutions for 2010:

I'm going to play more and write more.
Video games have been taking the backseat for a while since I started playing a certain addicting card game. While I still enjoy a good game of Magic, there's nothing I can grasp better than the video games that I've been playing since I was a child, which makes them one of my favorite things to write about. And because I really enjoy writing, there's no reason I shouldn't play a lot of games and share my thoughts and feelings with the community.

I'm going to complete at least twice as many games as I did last year.
If you check out Destructoid's 2009 Completed Games List, you'll notice that I only managed to finish seven titles in an entire year. And that three of them could be considered casual endeavors. I did an awful job of sticking with very many games long enough to watch the credits roll and I'm not thrilled about that. I can't even begin to think of all the games that I missed out on and I'm definitely going to try harder to finish some games this time around so I have something of value to add to the discussion when I hit the IRC or come across a related Cblog.

I'm going to write a Monthly Musing for each topic this year.
I've always loved the idea of Monthly Musings, but I've never made much of an effort to participate in them. As far as I can remember, I only managed to write on one of them so far and that one was promoted, which is something that would be really cool to work towards again. There's a fantastic feeling that comes with scrolling down the front page and seeing your work mixed in with the work of your favorite editors and I'd love to capture that feeling once more.

So there you have a short list of things I'd like to work towards this year and hopefully continue in years to come. Being a member of the Destructoid Community has been a blast and I hope to become much more active in 2010.

because it lieks Mudkips and doesnt afraid of anything

Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers will be hitting Xbox Live's virtual shelves tomorrow, so don't forget to pick it up!

DotP is a virtual version of the Magic the Gathering trading card game that will only run you 800 MSP ($10) when it releases tomorrow. Unlike Magic: Battlegrounds, this game will play like the actual card game (not volleyball with spells) and unlike Magic Online, it will only cost you $10 to gain access to all the cards in the game (and not $4 per booster pack). There will be DLC in the future, but they will be one-time purchases that add a number of set cards to your game and not random booster packs.

Here are some of the reasons the Magic players out there should pick this up:
-Single player campaign vs. AI opponents
-Cooperative (two-headed giant) campaign vs. AI opponents (Play with a friend in the same room!)
-Online two player, online cooperative (two-headed giant) play, as well as 3-4 player online free-for-all play
-Puzzle mode, which throws you into specific play situations that you must win from
-280 cards available, featuring cards from Invasion all the way up to Shards of Alara

Of course, this game isn't just for veteran Magic players. If you're interested in playing Magic at all, DotP is a great way to learn:
-An online tutorial, allowing you to learn while you play
-A mentoring system to provide live assistance
-In-game hints, an in-game rule book and glossary

Of course, the game is not without flaws, but (in my opinion) they're minor ones when I think about how cheap the game is and how much fun I'll have playing online with my Dtoid buddies. For one thing, the deckbuilding is a bit crippled, only allowing you to change a select number of cards out of a number of premade decks. So you can't quite build a new deck from scratch, but you will hopefully have access to enough cards to make your deck play the way you want it to. While this and the limited card pool (280 cards out of 15,000+) may be upsetting to seasoned Magic players, it's pretty understandable that they'd try to cripple the game in order to keep interest in Magic Online (in which you have to buy individual cards and boosters).



Of course, one of the biggest incentives to players of the card game (and possibly to those who want to start playing) is the promo Garruk Wildspeaker card that will be sent out to anyone who buys the XBLA game and enters the in-game code on this page. Garruk is a pretty damn good card (it's a rare that goes for upwards of $15), so you're definitely getting your money's worth. (BTW, I got a few "WTF is a Planeswalker" comments last time I posted about this deal, so here's a link to the Planeswalker rules for those who are unfamiliar with the card type).

All in all, I think it's going to be pretty fun and I'm hoping some of you out there will give a try, too. Be sure to at the very least try the demo when it goes live tomorrow!

How much this news will excite you may vary depending on whether or not you play the paper card game, but I think it's pretty awesome either way.

Duels of the Planeswalkers will be 800 MSP ($10), which is a lot cheaper than I expected. Especially considering you get a promo Garruk Wildspeaker card, which would cost you anywhere from $15-$20 if you bought a normal one.

I'm very much looking forward to this game and I hope some of you are, too, as I would love to play Magic with my Dtoid buddies. It looks a little dumbed down from the real game (which is to be expected; they don't want to take any steam away from Magic Online), but still a lot of fun. Hopefully I'll be able to put it down long enough when it releases to write a review or something.

So, it's Friday night and you're home alone. You had a long, hard week and you're looking to wind down by curling up with a good ol' video game. But what do you play?

Well, I'm sure most of you are already backstabbing and sniping the night away with Team Fortress 2, but there's another option if that's not your style: Infiniminer.

Infiniminer is a free PC game for Windows that can be downloaded here, along with the runtime packages required to play it. Last week, I hosted a server, but ended up falling asleep waiting for people to join. Sad panda. This week, however, I'm well-rested and ready to mine. Infiniminer is all about digging and building in a giant pixel-y 3D world full of dirt, gold, and lava. It may not look like much, but let me assure you: It's pretty damn fun.

How to get online with Infiniminer:
1. Install Infiniminer v1.5, the XNA 3.0 Runtime, and the .NET 2.0 Runtime (if you haven't already).
2. Install Hamachi and join the network dtoid-mines with the password alsococks.
3. Edit your Infiniminer client configuration file (client.config.txt) with your preferred settings (player name, screen resolution, look inversion, etc).
4. Start up Infiniminer and direct connect to my Hamachi IP Address: 5.140.171.140
5. Mine like there's no tomorrow!

Hopefully we can get a bit more activity this week (though I seriously doubt it with the TF2 updates and free weekend working against me), especially since I'm actually conscious enough to help you guys out if you have issues connecting. I've been trying to get the server public so we can cut the middle man and not have to use Hamachi (which would make everything a hell of a lot easier), but I've failed so far, so I'm just going to run it as usual this week. I'm hoping I can get this straightened out next week and maybe get some more people online and enjoying the game with less setup.

I'll keep the server up for the rest of the night, so feel free to pop in whenever you've got some free time or feel like playing something (possibly) a bit more mellow than TF2. Also, I have the ability to save maps, so please let me know if you want to hang on to an awesome creation you made within the game.

I'll see you in the mines!