Overlord - Runaway Fun Getting your "Minion on"

Well I finally fired up my new XBox 360 game Overlord.

AND Lord, is it FUN. There is really nothing that quite matches the miniature horde of underlings you have to do your bidding. I mean take a look at these darling little evil creatures:
You see, minions are part servant, part soldier, part errand-boy, part fanatic willing to sacrifice themselves for your benefit. Ordering them around is a snap. Currently I only have two types: Brown (melee fighters) and Red (fire throwers/absorbers/your basic ranged-attackers, weak in close-combat types)...I'm currently on quests to get Green (immune to poison/sneak attackers) and Blue (healers) minions. It functions well with the Xbox controller too: choosing them is fairly simply all the colored minions correspond with their same color button (exception - brown minion are coded to the yellow button).



This game is seriously warped, and I love it. I mean you start by having to free the men of Spree from the halfling (think Hobbit and pronounced harf-ling) oppression. Seems quite a few of the heroes that vanquished your predecessor have gone to seed. The halfling hero Melvin, for instance, has become a giant corpulent bag of fat who's halfling worshippers steal food for him, enslave local farmers and ravage the human town (Spree - sounds like Bree the human town near the Shire - no?). Now, dispatching the halfling king isn't exactly evil, more like evil-lite. But its still damn fun to dispatch your minions to ransack Hobbiton (er, the halfling holes), smash everything in sight, and watch them go about their perverted business with gleeful shrieks and obsequiously returning with the gifts they've pillaged "For the Master".

Wanted to take a break from the Football posts. If you have an Xbox and an evil-fun streak, Overlord is a must-buy.

Like a Lamb to the Slaughter

That what taking the new DLPT V test was like...so much for my tingli nengli (that's listening comprehension to you non-Mandarin types). Whew...I thought I'd done a lot better than I did, but unbeknownst to my delusional brain, my ass was getting pounded more than a $5 gigolo on Castro Street (that's in San Fran, in case that makes the allusion any clearer for you).

Oh well. No use crying, just got to keep on trucking, get some reading practice and hopefully take less of beating next week on part 2 (not counting on that).

So what else is new?
Well the Phillies continue their up-n-downs....getting their ass reams on day and returning the butt-scouring the next with a 26-hit, 15-3 smackdown on the Dodgers.

Oh yeah, how could I forget? Michael Vick, the dog-fighting dickhead, got indicted by the Feds. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. I had to turn on the slingbox and watch ESPN News for that one. What a dumbshit. I have to say, I ragged on ProFootballTalk.com last week cause I think they've gotten a little high and mighty, but the site has been fairly informative on this Vick stuff. I'm not a big fan of their pissing match with ESPN (they've really got it out for Len Pasquarelli - but hey, maybe the dude deserves it), because I think its better form to take the high road instead of constantly finding fault and pressing the case that "we're right, he's wrong, he's a bad guy".

Other than that, I like the depth of their reporting on the Vick case. The link above goes to an entire page which chronicles the story.

And oh, I played a demo for OVERLORD on the Xbox 360 - who knew evil could be so much fun? I mean "liberating" the town of Spree from the little fat halfling "oppression"...that's grand. If you've ever wanted to control some "minions" and watch them gleefully run about to loot and pillage (all at your command) try this game out.