Thursday, July 31, 2008
-Hey hey! Thanks to Chris (roadkill), my laptop is finally in working order! I still get an occasional random pop-up, but for now it doesn't occur to be interfering with anything. Let's hope it stays that way.
-At the amazing $1 second-run theater I have been frequenting more and more recently I saw The Happening last weekend. Several people forewarned me not to, but for $1 I'll watch nearly anything. The verdict.......well, I'm glad I didn't pay full admission at this during its initial theater run. Now I'm a huge Mark Wahlberg fan, I'll even go as far as to say he's probably my favorite actor of the past 5 years as not a single one of the films I've seen him in disappointed me (Four Brothers, Departed, Shooter, Invincible are my favorites of his), and he barely managed to save this film from being a disaster. I think The Happening is one of those films that sounds great on paper, but wound up a mess in execution. The special effects people must have loved it when they heard they didn't have to do that much work when discovering that the protaganists we're running for their lives from.......air. Wahlberg I thought did his best with what he could, and I'll give the director props for at least trying to explain what the hell was going on with the toxins and everything, but a lot of the parts were silly and far fetched, what the hell was up with wife being super paranoid in the opening 15 minutes, and seeming nearly normal for the rest of the film, and the part with those unfortunate young hooligans banging on doors. Now if you excuse me for a moment, I'm going to make some hot dogs. 5/10
-Picked up the deluxe 2-disc DVD of Harold & Kumar 2 yesterday. I do not like this new trend where the behind-the-scenes bonus features I'm such a geek for are almost always on the 2-disc set, with that second disc mostly consisting of that whole new "digital copy" craze that has been running wild on the home video market this year. Now if that second disc happens to feature a solid couple hours worth of additional featurettes and other miscellaneous bonuses, than I'm a happy camper. But if recent releases I picked up like Hitman and Semi-Pro only offer up around 30-45 minutes of extra bonuses on that digital copy disc, I'm feeling quite ripped off for paying the extra $7-10 for the second disc. Naturally, I could just skip out on that version and wait for it to go down in price, but now these "limited" special editions are living up to their name, where after being out on the market for several months, only the lame, bonus feature-stripped single disc sku is available. To suffice, let me curse the movie studios and their marketing departments for their brilliant thinking on raping my wallet for every cent possible!
-Last week I wrapped up The Guiness World Records: Gamers Edition book. I like the format which is a year in review, along with chronicling the standout games in each major genre, and of course countless world records thrown in for good measure. I did notice several instances of the book contradicting itself on facts, and some other errors though which led me to question the validity of the rest of the books claims to history (NES WWF Wrestlemania was not the first wrestling game ever, let alone first NES Wrestling game!). It's well written and contains a sleek art style worthy of the Guiness name. Other than the few instances I ran into, I got the feeling that most of this was fact-checked to great lengths as and matched up with everything I knew of at least. Overall, a fine read that I feel nearly any gamer should add to their bookshelf. Speaking of which, I need to invest in one of those and stop contributing to a growing stack of books in a mere cardboard box in my closet.
-So earlier today I started up Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the 4th time! I started it once with Joey, and twice with Matt in past years, but have yet to beat this superhero dungeon crawler mostly in part because of irregular breaks between gameplay sessions. On break at work, a couple coworkers noticed me purusing a feature in the latest Game Informer on Ultimate Alliance 2 and asked me about the first one. I told them my aforementioned struggles with beating it, and how ironic they told me they were in the middle of playing it, and happen to be around the same point I left off at in the game and offered a spot on their campaign to play with! So we played earlier today and I assumed we were going to pick up where they were at (in the Carnival/circus tent stage), but they insisted we start over again. So for the 4th time, I conquered the first Shield stage in Ultimate Alliance. We played for a solid two hours and breezed through the first three missions. Our goal is to beat it within two weeks before one of the two coworkers goes on vacation. We already arranged to play again tomorrow morning, so maybe, just maybe I'll have a potential oppurtunity at beating this game. About friggin' time!
-As for what else I've been playing. I met up with Chris and Scott last Saturday and we endulged in our usual Rock Band and podcasting session. Podcast ended up going all over the place, I think we set a new record for tangents in an episode. Rock Band went well, we completed all the gigs for two more cities in our session. Put in a good amount into Eternal Sonata over last weekend too, about a good 5 hours that was entirely spent to starting and beating all of act 5. Only two more acts left! Put a couple more hours into MGS4, still loving the new controls compared to what I played last in MGS2. Loving the fantastic cut scenes too, really well produced, but do we really need a 15 minute scene to introduce the weapon dealer? Finally, I Gamefly'd a PS2 game from 2006 in Micro Machines V4. Now before you laugh, I have a soft spot for the old NES and GB Micro Machines games, and am surprised that aside from the obvious bump in graphics, gameplay has remained nearly identical since the NES days. Didn't play it for that long, only around 15 minutes, nothing wrong with it, I think I just needed to get that craving to play V4 out of my system.
-That's all for now, later!
-At the amazing $1 second-run theater I have been frequenting more and more recently I saw The Happening last weekend. Several people forewarned me not to, but for $1 I'll watch nearly anything. The verdict.......well, I'm glad I didn't pay full admission at this during its initial theater run. Now I'm a huge Mark Wahlberg fan, I'll even go as far as to say he's probably my favorite actor of the past 5 years as not a single one of the films I've seen him in disappointed me (Four Brothers, Departed, Shooter, Invincible are my favorites of his), and he barely managed to save this film from being a disaster. I think The Happening is one of those films that sounds great on paper, but wound up a mess in execution. The special effects people must have loved it when they heard they didn't have to do that much work when discovering that the protaganists we're running for their lives from.......air. Wahlberg I thought did his best with what he could, and I'll give the director props for at least trying to explain what the hell was going on with the toxins and everything, but a lot of the parts were silly and far fetched, what the hell was up with wife being super paranoid in the opening 15 minutes, and seeming nearly normal for the rest of the film, and the part with those unfortunate young hooligans banging on doors. Now if you excuse me for a moment, I'm going to make some hot dogs. 5/10
-Picked up the deluxe 2-disc DVD of Harold & Kumar 2 yesterday. I do not like this new trend where the behind-the-scenes bonus features I'm such a geek for are almost always on the 2-disc set, with that second disc mostly consisting of that whole new "digital copy" craze that has been running wild on the home video market this year. Now if that second disc happens to feature a solid couple hours worth of additional featurettes and other miscellaneous bonuses, than I'm a happy camper. But if recent releases I picked up like Hitman and Semi-Pro only offer up around 30-45 minutes of extra bonuses on that digital copy disc, I'm feeling quite ripped off for paying the extra $7-10 for the second disc. Naturally, I could just skip out on that version and wait for it to go down in price, but now these "limited" special editions are living up to their name, where after being out on the market for several months, only the lame, bonus feature-stripped single disc sku is available. To suffice, let me curse the movie studios and their marketing departments for their brilliant thinking on raping my wallet for every cent possible!
-Last week I wrapped up The Guiness World Records: Gamers Edition book. I like the format which is a year in review, along with chronicling the standout games in each major genre, and of course countless world records thrown in for good measure. I did notice several instances of the book contradicting itself on facts, and some other errors though which led me to question the validity of the rest of the books claims to history (NES WWF Wrestlemania was not the first wrestling game ever, let alone first NES Wrestling game!). It's well written and contains a sleek art style worthy of the Guiness name. Other than the few instances I ran into, I got the feeling that most of this was fact-checked to great lengths as and matched up with everything I knew of at least. Overall, a fine read that I feel nearly any gamer should add to their bookshelf. Speaking of which, I need to invest in one of those and stop contributing to a growing stack of books in a mere cardboard box in my closet.
-So earlier today I started up Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the 4th time! I started it once with Joey, and twice with Matt in past years, but have yet to beat this superhero dungeon crawler mostly in part because of irregular breaks between gameplay sessions. On break at work, a couple coworkers noticed me purusing a feature in the latest Game Informer on Ultimate Alliance 2 and asked me about the first one. I told them my aforementioned struggles with beating it, and how ironic they told me they were in the middle of playing it, and happen to be around the same point I left off at in the game and offered a spot on their campaign to play with! So we played earlier today and I assumed we were going to pick up where they were at (in the Carnival/circus tent stage), but they insisted we start over again. So for the 4th time, I conquered the first Shield stage in Ultimate Alliance. We played for a solid two hours and breezed through the first three missions. Our goal is to beat it within two weeks before one of the two coworkers goes on vacation. We already arranged to play again tomorrow morning, so maybe, just maybe I'll have a potential oppurtunity at beating this game. About friggin' time!
-As for what else I've been playing. I met up with Chris and Scott last Saturday and we endulged in our usual Rock Band and podcasting session. Podcast ended up going all over the place, I think we set a new record for tangents in an episode. Rock Band went well, we completed all the gigs for two more cities in our session. Put in a good amount into Eternal Sonata over last weekend too, about a good 5 hours that was entirely spent to starting and beating all of act 5. Only two more acts left! Put a couple more hours into MGS4, still loving the new controls compared to what I played last in MGS2. Loving the fantastic cut scenes too, really well produced, but do we really need a 15 minute scene to introduce the weapon dealer? Finally, I Gamefly'd a PS2 game from 2006 in Micro Machines V4. Now before you laugh, I have a soft spot for the old NES and GB Micro Machines games, and am surprised that aside from the obvious bump in graphics, gameplay has remained nearly identical since the NES days. Didn't play it for that long, only around 15 minutes, nothing wrong with it, I think I just needed to get that craving to play V4 out of my system.
-That's all for now, later!
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