I just recently reinstalled a game that I've been playing off and on for years (it's very time consuming) and I thought I'd let my buddies at Destructoid in on the fun.

Progress Quest is a game where you do absolutely nothing. Well, you do have to name your character, pick your class/race, and roll your stats, but after that, nothing. The quest begins and you just use your imagination while you watch a number of progress bars crawl across the screen.

The best part, however, is the ability to take your quest for progress online and compete with others too lazy to play real MMOs for the highest level. You can even create and join guilds!

So, if you want something to stare at and feel as though you're accomplishing something when you could be doing actual work (or playing actual games, even), give Progress Quest a download! If you feel like going online, I'm on the Spoltog server and I've also created a Destructoid guild, so check it out when you have nothing better to do.

I got an email the other day from a site called Bestuff that said I had a friend request. Considering the only thing I do with my time on the internet is sign up for hundreds of websites simply because I like Googling my username and getting a billion results, it's not surprising that I had no idea what Bestuff was. Curious about this old membership, I clicked the link.

Once I arrived at the website, I instantly remembered it. I think it used to be called "The Best Stuff in the World," so it's no wonder I didn't recognized the new name. What it is, essentially, is a website where you add items that you think are best in some category and they're listed with other items in that category in order of the number of people who also think they're best. It's kinda neat, but it obviously didn't hold my attention for long, since I signed up for it nearly two years ago and failed to come back.

Anyway, my obvious first search to add some new content to my list of stuff I think is best was Destructoid, as the Best Website. To my surprise, it wasn't even added as an item yet! Not in any category! Outraged by this discovery, I quickly added Destructoid as the Best Website, Best Community, and Best Video Game Blog.

I'm happy to have Dtoid on my list of best stuff now, but I'd be even happier if it rose in the ranks and took first from lame websites like Youtube and Wikipedia. However, to make this a reality, I need help from the BEST COMMUNITY to make Destructoid the very best, like no one ever was.



At the time of writing, we only need a measly 2 more people to be The Best Video Game Blog, a slightly larger 70 people to be The Best Community, and a whopping 1,504 people to knock Youtube off its throne (hell, if we can even hit 836 we'll beat Wikipedia and 769 will beat Google) and be The Best Website EVER.

So how about it, Dtoid Army? Care to sign up and support your robot overlords in the quest for world domination?

So, I've recently started playing Phantom Dust for the original Xbox (which, admittedly, I've had lying around for months) and I can't even believe how awesome it is.



If you haven't heard of it before, Phantom Dust is a weird action/strategy/card game mix that is completely amazing in every single way. In the game, you play as an Esper, a person who can use crazy awesome skills to fight monsters up on the surface of the Earth (most of the humans were forced underground because of the Phantom Dust, which erases their memories if exposed to it for an extended period). I was a little confused about how the game was supposed to be so TCG-like until I hit the third chapter, where you get to construct your own arsenal of skills. I suppose you could also call it your deck of cards. :P

When you get out into the action, four skills randomly selected from your arsenal are assigned to the four face buttons of your controller. From then on, three additional skill orbs from your arsenal spawn at your starting location. You can pick up these new skills orbs to overwrite your current ones by walking to them and pressing the button you'd like to assign them to. These orbs will respawn every so often with another random set from your arsenal (kinda like drawing new cards from your deck).



The combat is just as fun as the building your arsenal is, with so many different skills to try out. It's a lot like Magic, where you get all kinds of cool cards and get to pull of fun combos under the right conditions. There are different ranged attack skills, from sword slashes to sniper shots, and different defensive skills that can defend and sometimes deflect your opponent's attacks. There are a bunch of other skills, too, that can erase your opponent's skills or inflict odd status effects on them (like inverting their controls) to really change things up in the heat of battle. My skill pool is pretty small right now, so I haven't gotten to try out any of the really cool stuff, but I'm still having a lot of fun with it.

I can't even believe how similar the game was to Magic after learning about the arsenals and everything. There are five different schools of skill (lol, five different colors of mana) and your arsenal can only handle one to three of these schools (mono-colored deck? mutlicolored deck?). You can hold 30 skills in your deck, but they advise you to leave about half of it to aura particles (lol, land) in order to gain the levels you need to use the skills in your deck (lol, mana costs). They even have a store in-game that you can buy individual skills from (lol, singles) or buy Junk packs that give you five random skills of random rarity (lol, booster packs).



The absolute best part of Phantom Dust, however, is the fact that it supports Xbox Live. You can hit the internets with your custom-built arsenal and take on your friends (one on one, two on two, free for all.....there's even local splitscreen!) or you can place your spare skills (yes, you can get doubles) on the auction block and trade them with others. The coolest part (I think) about playing online? There are something like 74 ultra-rare skills that can only be attained by playing online. For every 30 matches you win, you're awarded one of these skills at random. This makes it a little difficult to collect each of them, but hey, at least you can trade. :D

Sadly, the game is pretty old now (it hit the original Xbox in 2005) and didn't sell too well from the start, so the online community isn't exactly booming these days. The good news about it being so old is that you can buy the game used for nearly nothing (It was $20 new when it came out, so you can imagine how cheap it is used now). It's backwards compatible on the Xbox 360 (which is likely the selling point for most of you) with pretty good emulation, aside from a little slowdown when the environment starts taking a serious beating from all the skills being thrown around.

Anyway, the main point I've been trying to make is this: Phantom Dust is amazing and I think anyone who doesn't hate fun should play it. I also think anyone who plays it should let me know, so we can get an awesome little group together and have some fun online. I would love to take you all on and try to rack up enough wins to get those ultra-rare skills while I'm at it. It'd also be nice to be able to trade each other and such.

I highly recommend Phantom Dust to all of you, so go out and buy it, right now!

In the past months, I've become less interested in gaming and more interested in a certain card game (well, I guess it's still gaming, just not the same kind). It makes me a sad panda, but I've been extremely disinterested in all the new releases that everyone seems to fall in love with. I think I've just been in a bit of a slump lately, so I'm hoping a great game will come along soon and help me get back in the swing of things.

Until that happens, I'm going to embrace Magic: The Gathering as my savior from exhausting college classes that require me to wake up at 6:30 in the morning. As most of you probably know, Magic is a trading card game. It involves trading and playing with collectable cards just like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh. The only difference between Magic and other card games is that Magic doesn't suck.



I love card games. I've played tons Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. For years I've wanted to give Magic a try, but I could never get past the theme of the game. I'm not much for elves and goblins and all that other fantasy crap, so Magic couldn't pull me in as easily as other card games did with their bright and colorful anime tie-ins (Seriously, I even have some Digimon and Mega Man NT Warrior cards somewhere). Only last year did I finally make the leap into Magic.

In the months that I've played, here are a few things I've learned:

-Magic is better than every other card game ever. It's been around for something like 16 years now and it still hasn't lost sight of its original concept. When I look at games like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon, it seems like all the new cards are just retardedly overpowered or the rules have been modified so much that I don't even know how to play anymore. With Magic, it's the same game that I learned how to play nine years ago (through a demo on the computer, as I had no friends to play the actual game with).

-Almost everybody and their mom has played at some point in their lives. It seems like every time I go to my local video game store to buy a few boosters, one of the employees will make a comment on the last time they played. Of course, they always name a set from 5+ years ago that I've bearly even heard of because I'm the noob that just started with Shadowmoor (which was released in April 2008).

-Booster drafts are fun. If you don't know, a booster draft is a type of tournament in which each player buys three booster packs (1 booster = 15 random cards) and sits at a table with other players. Each player opens a pack, looks at the cards, selects one card, and keeps it. Once the players have made their selection, they pass the pack to the person next to them. This is repeated until all the boosters have been opened and everyone has a stack of 45 cards. At this point, each person makes a deck out of their cards and they play a tournament. There's a ton of strategy involved and it's a lot less retarded than constructed formats (because you can't just fork out a couple hundred dollars to buy the best cards out there and make a deck out of it).



I've learned a lot more, of course, such as how to play the game and not completely fail at it, but I think I'll leave that for other blogs. I'm very interested in Magic at the moment and I can't see that stopping any time soon, considering there's it's not tied to some crappy anime that I'll grow out of in a few months. If you've never given Magic a shot, I highly recommend picking up some theme decks for you and a friend and trying it out. If you're friendless or all your friends are just dicks, you can also give Magic Online a try. If you'd like to learn how to play, check out these tutorial videos. Seriously, whenever somebody new to the game joins my little group of Magic players, we make them watch those videos and they trounce me right afterward.

Be sure to check my blog later for some Magic fun for the whole family. Well, fun if your family likes making fake magic cards. :P

...because everybody's got something to hide except meat and my monkey.

I was just as worried as many of you were when I first heard that the latest installment in the Banjo-Kazooie series would be less of a platformer and more of a racer. I have fond memories of the original Banjo-Kazooie on the Nintendo 64, which was an excellent platformer that actually held up pretty well when I played it again only a few months ago. I'm happy to say it's turned out even better on the Xbox Live Arcade, which I would have bought in a heartbeat had I not preordered the third game, Nuts & Bolts.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts won me over with its opening cutscene. Eight years of stuffing their faces with pizza and playing video games as left Banjo and Kazooie fat and lazy. When the evil witch Grunty's skull unearths itself from the grave, the Lord of Games (or LOG for short) decides to make his appearance and make their fight more interesting by forcing them to compete in a world of vehicular challenges. While this is a departure from the classic platforming style of the old games, Banjo can wander about on his own two feet just like the good old days. The platforming elements aren't as great as the old games and the duo lacks the variety of abilities they once possessed, but it's still nice to do some item collecting on foot once in a while.



Considering 80% of the game is spent behind the wheel, it's important that the game doesn't suck in the driving department. I'm happy to say that it doesn't completely suck, but the vehicles don't handle as well as they could. You'll often find yourself flipping over or flying way off course, which really sucks when you're in the middle of a tough challenge. Once you get used to the game a bit more, things get a little better, but it still feels like Rare could have put a bit more work into making the core gameplay handle better. It all feels very floaty (seriously, I've had a supposedly heavy vehicle be knocked into the air and gently float back down) and very hard to control at times.



Even though I'm not 100% certain I enjoy taking on challenges, I do enjoy just about every other aspect of the game. When you're not entering LOG's game worlds and collecting Jiggies through challenges, there's a large hub world where you can do some platforming to collect Notes (the game's currency) and Mumbo Jumbo's crates (which contain more parts). Of course, you do get a basic trolley to drive around town, making it easier to cart around any crates you may find, but it needs some upgrades to really get anywhere. You can use any vehicle you build in the game worlds, but LOG will restrict you to the trolley in town. What kind of platformer would this be if you could just build motorized stairs to aid you in your item collecting rather than earning upgrades to open new areas for exploration?

Speaking of motorized stairs, another part of this game that will suck your life away is Mumbo's Motors, where you can build your dream car, plane, hovercraft, or whatever other crazy inventions you can think up. You'll need a lot of parts to get really creative, but from what I've seen in the demo and online, there are some cool parts that could make for some interesting contraptions. I've already spent a few hours messing around with the editor, even this early in the game when I have so few parts. When starting a challenge, you can usually pick a vehicle you've created or even make one up on the spot. It's fun to test out ideas and see what works in what challenge. You can even save your creations and send them to friends!



The online multiplayer was pretty fun the few times I got a game going, though it can be unbalanced unless you use pre-made vehicles. I could see it being a lot of fun among friends, especially since the game features local multiplayer, which is a much needed feature in today's online-centric world. Leaderboards are also present, giving players even more to compete over.

Diehard Banjo-Kazooie fans may have trouble getting used to all this vehicular nonsense, but I'm sure they'll find comfort in all the familiar faces. Nuts & Bolts is riddled with inside jokes and references to the first two Banjo-Kazooie games as well as many other Rare titles. The game is also quite aware that it's likely to be hated by fans and keeps a good sense of humor about it. The idea of Banjo and Kazooie being stripped of their platforming skills and tossed into a world of racing seems like a kick in the nuts to fans of the series, but the game does a lot to please the fans, too. I feel as though my enjoyment of this game takes a hit because I've never played Banjo-Tooie, but the references I do get make me smile every time.



Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a hard game for me to judge. The gameplay has its flaws, but the rest of the game is beautifully polished. The jokes are top notch and they only get funnier if you've played the first two games. The vehicle creation is great fun, especially when you've got a ton of parts to work with. I'm looking forward to seeing some awesome photos and replays when the community site goes up.

At $40, fans of the Banjo-Kazooie series can't go wrong. It may not be exactly what we wanted for Banjo-Threeie, but it's not a letdown by any means. The humor and atmosphere alone is worth the price of admission. As for non-fans, I recommend you check out the original Banjo-Kazooie when it hits the Xbox Live Arcade on the 26th and become a fan of this great series.