Archive for the “Uncategorized” CategoryMy humble opinion… John McCain has a ton of experience in foreign policy…and that’s what this debate was focused on. Therefore, one wold think that John McCain would come out swinging, thoroughly trouncing Barack Obama without lifting much more than a finger. Surprisingly enough, that wasn’t the case. The debate was very much even this evening. I think that did a lot for Obama’s credibility in the area of foreign policy. Obamanos! .a. system: xbox 360 one sentence description: tactical FPS with vegas glam and special forces style graphics: 9 | sound: 9 | playability: 7 | challenge: 9 | value: 7 | bias: 8 total: 8.5 the low-down ahh, vegas. the casinos. the blackjack. the poker. the high rolla’s and the low ballas. the playboys and the showgirls. the explosions, the guns, and death and destruction. how i love vegas…rainbow 6 style. i have to be honest though…it ain’t much different than the first one friends. that’s a good thing if you liked the first one. if you didn’t, well, then don’t bother. it’s still just as hard. your AI buddies are just as smart as they are completely stupid. the guns and explosions pack a good wallop. you die just easily. it’s just as hard to see where you’re getting hit from. it feels extremely familiar. it adds in a little extra character building in the form of unlockable armor, weapons and outfits. and the environments are, surprisingly, different than the first one. that is the area of the game i have been most surprised (and pleased) with. you reprise your role as bishop, leader of an elite team of anti-terrorist soldiers called ‘rainbow 6′. the story is relatively simple and not worth going into save that you’re going to capture a group of…you guessed it…terrorists. and they’re going to blow up vegas. the things that make the game great are the things that make it frustrating as well. you can’t take a whole lot of damage before you die, which adds a certain level of realism to it. on the other hand, the game has a frustrating way of sending bad guys after you from places you can’t quite pinpoint. they blend in very well with the flashing lights and the general game backdrop. combine that with the ‘quick death’ thing, and you’ll find yourself restarting at a checkpoint more often than you think. from an audio/visual perspective, the game is top notch. character animations are smooth, framerates are high and the environments look well rendered. when you fire a gun, it emits a pretty satisfying bang…or sharp muffled ‘thunking’ sound when the silencer is attached. of course, the tom clancy series is known for having more realistic weaponry, so it’s to be expected. i won’t lie; the game is hard. you have to really think about what you’re going to do before you’re going to do it, and you generally can’t just charge into a room and start blasting. that approach will lay you out 9 out of 10 times. however, the thinking part of it is what makes it stand out. positioning your partners at one door and having them charge in while you drop in through the glass skylight in another area gives the game a very strategic feel to it, resulting in a sense of accomplishment when you actually pull off a complicated maneuver. i like the idea of specialties in the sense of the game allowing you to play up your strengths. for example, if you’re into tossing grenades around or blowing things up with C4, you can up your level and become more proficient there. same with marksmanship. and close combat. adding in a pretty decent multiplayer along with the character building gives you a lot of reasons to keep playing. you get to play dress-up with your character, and as you unlock more and more, you’ll find yourself outfitting him with more customized looks. this one is worth the purchase. pros
cons
So we decided to buy a house. We were kind of casually looking at first, and then we started to notice all kinds of cool things out on the market. And when that was noticed, that’s when it all went downhill. It turned into a full-on obsession. We enlisted the help of our friend Melanie Fenelon, who is…by the way…the greatest real estate agent in the world…and we went to it. The past couple of weeks we started getting pretty serious because we got our pre-qualification letter, which is, of course, the first thing the serious home buyer needs to have in hand. It provides the power of making a serious offer to a seller. And once that was procured, we started really paying attention to the search results that Melanie set us up with in her nifty MLS system. Within one week we had about 12 different places out of 90-ish that we thought looked good and fit into our price range. Looking at houses in pictures is one thing. Looking at houses up close and personal and walking through them is a completely different experience altogether. It should be no surprise that the pics generally look a whole heck of a lot better than ‘real life’. Such was the case for around 9 of the 11 places, 2 of which we didn’t even bother going through because we just knew they wouldn’t work. So that left 2 that we really liked, and ONE that we wanted to put an offer down on. But it was not to be. We went to have Melanie draw up a contract and found out that, even though it had been on the market for a mere 2 days, it went under contract the day we looked at it. It sucked because it seemed to be pretty perfect for us. We were a little bummed… Here comes the part where it becomes hard to think that things aren’t just meant to happen. That same night the place you see in the picture above popped into our search. We looked at it and thought, “Wow, that seems pretty nice.” The only bad thing about it was that it is in the upper-most part of what we wanted to pay. But that was alright because if it has everything you want, then it’s worth it, right? Well…minus the white appliances…but that’s easy enough to replace… :).
So the next day, Christy decided to drive past it. It didn’t even a sale sign out yet. But the guy who owned it was there, and she ended up being able to go in and check it out. She fell in love with it; so much so in fact that she called and I ended up coming over later that evening. I ended up really liking it as well. So we called our real estate agent, had a contract drawn up, and off we went. Pretty amazing! One minute, not a homeowner. The next minute, about 90% of the way there. Just like that. Even better was the fact that we had an inspection today, and it came back about as clean as clean can be. Melanie said that she’d only only seen three other places she has sold come back so clean on the inspection side. The inspector even said he was really having to look for things. In the end, we’re only having them do several very minor things. We’re now officially set to close on May 12th. I’m prety damn excited about it. I didn’t think I’d really want to become a homeowner again for awhile. Now it definitely feels like we’ve found our place here in the great nation of Texas, so I guess the next logical step was to grab our small piece of land. It’s especially sweet knowing that the housing market down here is absolutely booming despite what is happening in the rest of the market. This is absolutely the right time and the right place to be making this happen. A good investment I think… *patting self on the back*. Way to go, self. And wife.
charles manson…wow. what a weird, weird dude. watch. listen. be disturbed.
one sentence description: mindless hack-and-slash fun and extreme violence with a non-speaking musclebound main character graphics: 9 | sound: 5 | playability: 6 | challenge: 5 | value: 6 | bias: 8 total: 6.8 the low-down first, let me say that the lower score absoloutely does not mean that i have not been enjoying the game. on contrary, i’m actually having quite a bit of fun with it despite the fact that it truly is completely mindless and not very well thought out. playing this game makes me think that it has an absolute TON of potential for the future, and i hope that it does well enough for the publishers to do a second game that addresses some of the things i’ve laid out here. end of story. really, any kind of plot that is there is asinine. there’s a story that is told in a very graphic novel-esque way, but it’s completely forgettable. it also appears that you’re being plagued by some kind of other god’s thoughts or having some kind of flashback. again, it’s inconsequential. note my lack of recall on it if that tells you anything about how utterly throw-away the story is. you start at one point on the map and are tasked with capturing other specific points, like a refinery…or a lumber mill…or a farm. these points, of course, have been taken over by the undead. you capture the points by freeing your viking bretheren from their prison and then killing all of the undead occupying that point. it’s not really all that inredibly challenging and is fairly repetitive from point to point, map to map. you mash out various combo attacks against hordes upon hordes of enemies, see limbs and heads fly, use a special attack or two and throw some axes and fire potions. throw in some epic large battles here and there and then you wash…rinse…repeat. a lot of people have complained about the camera, but i don’t find it any better or worse than a lot of similar games. my only complaint is that sometimes when you’re attacking, it doesn’t allow you to see enough of the screen…so if something gets behind you or to the side, you generally won’t see it until it you’re being hit. oh well… i mentioned epic battles; they are kind of cool except for the fact that you can, for the most part, avoid the hordes of bad guys in your way and go straight towards your objective(s), which generally involves killing a shaman or a large sword-weilding bad guy. when you accomplish this, they give you ‘dragon amulets’, which you use to summon dragons…kind of like artillery. you have no control of them. they just come flying in an destroy what you tell them. there are so many little things that could be improved with the game that would have made it a much cooler experience. the sound is not all that great. you’d expect there to be some kind of intense epic battle music going on…but there isn’t. music plays every once in a while, specifically during the larger scale battles, but not during regular gameplay. or when you free you viking buddies from their cages, you’d figure they’d be pretty exstatic to be free’d. but they generally just come out and go after the nearest bad guys. the large battles are pretty sedate. there is no fire crackling and large explosions or the sound of arrows whizzing through the air or burly man in armor battle cries. it’s just kind of bleh. the moves start getting repetitive after a while. cutting to slow-mo and watching your guy hack off arms and heads is cool the first several hundred times, but after seeing the same animation over and over, it’s just boring. it would’ve been cool if they would’ve been more creative on this front. ever since ‘god of war’, there has been this trend of putting in these little stupid twitch button mashing mini-games. for example, the game goes to what looks like a cut scene, except the outcome changes depending on if you press a button indicated up on the screen in time or not. failure usually results in losing some of your life. victory results in a fairly violent end to whatever it is you’re up against. viking overdoes it a little bit because, for one, it just doesn’t feel like it’s necessary. for another, it’s the same sequence everytime, so there really is no challenge. you can’t customize skarin’s looks or weaponry or anything at all about him. it seems like the bar for this has been set by a lot of previous games to where this is expected. even just a super minimal amount would have been nice. sometimes it really sucks to find where you’re supposed to be going or what you’re supposed to be doing. i spent much, much more time than i felt like i should have trying to figure out the last part of a quest. i had discovered a cave blocked by a gate with a lock on it. i had to find a key to get there. so i left and completed every quest i could, but i still couldn’t find a key. it was only after i looked online that i found out all i needed to do was go back to the cave and kill the three guards there that had magically appeared. they would drop the key. what a hearty bunch of crap. with that said, as i stated earlier, i’m actually having fun with it. i do have a little bit of a bias towards these games. i’ve played all of the dynasty warriors games (except for the most recent one) and those haven’t really changed much since dynasty warriors 2 for the playstation 2. and we’re up to DW6 now…so…yeah… pros
cons
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Here we go again. Absolute insanity. I didn’t think that this would happen quite so soon, but it’s happening, and I’m actually pretty excited about it.
system: xbox 360