Wednesday, October 06, 2010
-For the first time ever I believe since I have started blogging since 2003, I went an entire month without blogging. I kept reminding myself to get to it the last week of September, but never found the motivation. Not a good sign of things to come. I will try to do better LiveJournal crowd, or whatever percentage of you that are still reading this anyways.
-So since around the time of my last blog, I noticed my Internet speeds starting to dip. Pages would take slightly longer to load, but more noticeably streaming videos on Youtube, Netflix, etc. would take incredibly longer, or not load at all. After about five weeks of this I called our local cable provider to have them check it out, and as I presumed, it was that my cable modem was out of date. I still had the same one since I moved in six and a half years ago. So the cable guy installed a new one, and everything is back to normal. What would you do without Youtube access?
-For the first time in a few months I hit up karaoke. Dave, Joe, Paul and his fiance Leanne all came out to watch me humiliate myself. I belted out Mother's "Danzig" and Alterbridge's "Open Your Eyes." Thought I did allright on the first one, but just could not nail the second song. I am glad that Bucs brought back karaoke, and now with a more diverse selection. Got a chance to shoot the breeze with Steve for the first time in awhile too since he DJs there. Guy knows how to spin some good beats!
-With the start of another NFL season, means the start of another horrible season the 49ers. This is there worst start in some time actually with them losing their first four straight, and two of those losses being last second field goals!!! I saw their second loss against the Saints on Monday Night Football, and that was a heartbreaker since Alex Smith played quite well. There next game is on Sunday Night Football against the Eagles, here is hoping they step it up.
-Sean was working with me since I started my current job in 2001, I believe he was there since 2000. The was indicated he was recently let go unfortunately, because he got into a little shoving fiasco in the break room with another employee who was also fired. Employer has a no violence zero tolerance policy, but to fire a ten year employee after a glorified shoving scuffle is kind of stretching it. Even worse, they let both guys work two more days before suspending them to "investigate" the report for a few days before terminating both. I just hate to see some people go like this.
-Saw quite a few movies since the last blog so I will try to give some rapid fire thoughts. Machete kicked all kinds of ass, and for the first time since original Fast and the Furious, I did not mind Michelle Rodriguez in a movie. 9/10 Matt borrowed me all four previous Resident Evil films to watch so I could get caught up before seeing the newest one. I did not care for the first one which instantly got me back to loathing Michelle Rodriguez. 5/10 Second one had some nice cheesy action, but Nemesis and how he was portrayed completely ruined the film.5.5/10 Third flick was ok and a nice change of pace, but I did not care for the sci-fi ending that much. 6/10 The CG film De-Generation, I absolutely loved and blew everything else away. 9/10 The new RE (sorry I already forgot all the subtitles and cannot be bothered to look them up) live action film had some pretty damn good 3D effects and action, but man were there some major plot holes and boy did it overdo it on the slow-motion and tried way too hard to be like The Matrix. Wesker was awesome however. 6.5/10
Finally got around to watching one of my dad's all-time favorites, American Graffiti from Netflix. For being nearly 40 years old, it still holds quite nicely, and Harrison Ford still looks as old as ever in one his original flicks. 8/10 Went in watching John Cena's latest movie, Legendary expecting more of the usual campy cliches from him, but to my surprise, I ended up legitmately enjoying this movie, as did my mom. It struck a nerve with me since I wrestled for a few years until 8th grade, and I cannot recall seeing a single movie focusing around amateur wrestling before. John Cena also made a smooth transition from B-movie action star to serious drama actor. 8/10 Finally, I just caught The Social Network yesterday and it delivered. David Fincher can do you no wrong, just go out and see this please. 9/10
On the television side of things. I am five episodes into the third season of Psych, and 16 episodes through the first season of Veronica Mars. The Office season premiere kicked ass and cannot wait to see how its rumored final season will develop. There is only two episodes left to season two of WCG Ultimate Gamer, and Matt and I have been hooked on this one. The gaming challenges have been pretty creative and exciting to watch this year, with the highlight being yesterday's Forza 3 challenge where they had to play a race in a straightjacket. I am also cracking away at a few wrestling DVD sets. I am through disc two of the ten year anniversary of Smackdown DVD set, and I watched the excellent Chris Jericho documentary recently too.
-Yesterday I finally finished Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball after starting it around four or five months ago. I sure did milk those 700 pages. It was worth it though because it was a fantastic read. I really dug his pyramid rankings.
-Halo Reach has launched since my last blog. Unlike Halo 3, a family member did not pass this time around so I was able to hit up the midnight launch. I did get around to having one last good run with Halo 3 for a couple weeks and played a ton online to get ready for the Reach launch. Scott waited a couple hours with me outside of Gamestop and I played a ton of it over the next couple of days, and I got in a hearty amount online too since the game came out. It is a great sendoff from Bungie, and helped ease that little headache I had leftover from ODST. If you want to check out more of my thoughts on reach, check out my review on Hardcore Gamer and download a recent On Tap where we have a one hour roundtable review on Halo Reach.
-As usual, let's wrap up yet another crazy long blog with the latest on what I have been playing.
On the DS side of things I have been playing quite a bit of Phoenix Wright: Trials & Tribulations (now on the second case!), and finally started making a lot more headway into Dragon Quest IX. Since I got to Stornway the game has really opened up for me, and I instantly recruited a full party at the Inn and had a blast simply leveling up my party and buying them new gear.
On the PS3 I will still throw in Zen Pinball from time to time. I had a horrible session Motorstorm: Pacific Rift yesterday and could not meet the criteria to pass one track in my career on several attempts. Space Invaders: Infinite Gene is a tremendous reinvention of the franchise and ranks it right up there with the current crop of challenging shmups. And I mean this in the least homophobic possible, but the PSone downloadable import Cho-a-Niki is quite possibly the gayest game I have ever played.
The 360 has been taking up most of my time. Since my last blog I have finally been getting achievements for knocking out the Wizard goals on Williams Pinball Hall of Fame tables. I have knocked out my first four tables worth of Wizard goals in the past week alone. It is all finally starting to come together! I am told by friends I am getting close to finishing Red Dead Redemption, I am in Mexico and around a 55% completion rate. I am also close to wrapping up Sniper: Ghost Warrior since I just reached the final act in the game. Deathspank I have finally been getting into recently, but I got a feeling I still have a ways to go in. I breezed through Rogue Warrior within a day. For a FPS released last December, it reeked of low production values and had little depth to it. The campaign is so unbelievably short that I was able to plow through it within four hours.
Finally, I played quite a few last gen comic book games to prep up for a recent On Tap that covered all comic book games on the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube. I played a couple more missions of my long forgotten Punisher campaign on PS2. I threw in Spider-Man 2 with original intentions of playing it for about an hour or so to get a general feel for it, but liked it so much I ended up beating it within a week. Its 2005 follow up, Ultimate Spider-Man I did not like that much. Even though it had far prettier graphics, the web slinging wasn't as fluid as before and it just ended up aggravating to the point of putting it down far sooner than I wanted. Finally I played Rogue Trooper, which was a decent third person shooter, but I started to get bored with it after four missions.
-And thus wraps another insanely long blog, I will try my best to maintain monthly updates again, but no promises!
-So since around the time of my last blog, I noticed my Internet speeds starting to dip. Pages would take slightly longer to load, but more noticeably streaming videos on Youtube, Netflix, etc. would take incredibly longer, or not load at all. After about five weeks of this I called our local cable provider to have them check it out, and as I presumed, it was that my cable modem was out of date. I still had the same one since I moved in six and a half years ago. So the cable guy installed a new one, and everything is back to normal. What would you do without Youtube access?
-For the first time in a few months I hit up karaoke. Dave, Joe, Paul and his fiance Leanne all came out to watch me humiliate myself. I belted out Mother's "Danzig" and Alterbridge's "Open Your Eyes." Thought I did allright on the first one, but just could not nail the second song. I am glad that Bucs brought back karaoke, and now with a more diverse selection. Got a chance to shoot the breeze with Steve for the first time in awhile too since he DJs there. Guy knows how to spin some good beats!
-With the start of another NFL season, means the start of another horrible season the 49ers. This is there worst start in some time actually with them losing their first four straight, and two of those losses being last second field goals!!! I saw their second loss against the Saints on Monday Night Football, and that was a heartbreaker since Alex Smith played quite well. There next game is on Sunday Night Football against the Eagles, here is hoping they step it up.
-Sean was working with me since I started my current job in 2001, I believe he was there since 2000. The was indicated he was recently let go unfortunately, because he got into a little shoving fiasco in the break room with another employee who was also fired. Employer has a no violence zero tolerance policy, but to fire a ten year employee after a glorified shoving scuffle is kind of stretching it. Even worse, they let both guys work two more days before suspending them to "investigate" the report for a few days before terminating both. I just hate to see some people go like this.
-Saw quite a few movies since the last blog so I will try to give some rapid fire thoughts. Machete kicked all kinds of ass, and for the first time since original Fast and the Furious, I did not mind Michelle Rodriguez in a movie. 9/10 Matt borrowed me all four previous Resident Evil films to watch so I could get caught up before seeing the newest one. I did not care for the first one which instantly got me back to loathing Michelle Rodriguez. 5/10 Second one had some nice cheesy action, but Nemesis and how he was portrayed completely ruined the film.5.5/10 Third flick was ok and a nice change of pace, but I did not care for the sci-fi ending that much. 6/10 The CG film De-Generation, I absolutely loved and blew everything else away. 9/10 The new RE (sorry I already forgot all the subtitles and cannot be bothered to look them up) live action film had some pretty damn good 3D effects and action, but man were there some major plot holes and boy did it overdo it on the slow-motion and tried way too hard to be like The Matrix. Wesker was awesome however. 6.5/10
Finally got around to watching one of my dad's all-time favorites, American Graffiti from Netflix. For being nearly 40 years old, it still holds quite nicely, and Harrison Ford still looks as old as ever in one his original flicks. 8/10 Went in watching John Cena's latest movie, Legendary expecting more of the usual campy cliches from him, but to my surprise, I ended up legitmately enjoying this movie, as did my mom. It struck a nerve with me since I wrestled for a few years until 8th grade, and I cannot recall seeing a single movie focusing around amateur wrestling before. John Cena also made a smooth transition from B-movie action star to serious drama actor. 8/10 Finally, I just caught The Social Network yesterday and it delivered. David Fincher can do you no wrong, just go out and see this please. 9/10
On the television side of things. I am five episodes into the third season of Psych, and 16 episodes through the first season of Veronica Mars. The Office season premiere kicked ass and cannot wait to see how its rumored final season will develop. There is only two episodes left to season two of WCG Ultimate Gamer, and Matt and I have been hooked on this one. The gaming challenges have been pretty creative and exciting to watch this year, with the highlight being yesterday's Forza 3 challenge where they had to play a race in a straightjacket. I am also cracking away at a few wrestling DVD sets. I am through disc two of the ten year anniversary of Smackdown DVD set, and I watched the excellent Chris Jericho documentary recently too.
-Yesterday I finally finished Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball after starting it around four or five months ago. I sure did milk those 700 pages. It was worth it though because it was a fantastic read. I really dug his pyramid rankings.
-Halo Reach has launched since my last blog. Unlike Halo 3, a family member did not pass this time around so I was able to hit up the midnight launch. I did get around to having one last good run with Halo 3 for a couple weeks and played a ton online to get ready for the Reach launch. Scott waited a couple hours with me outside of Gamestop and I played a ton of it over the next couple of days, and I got in a hearty amount online too since the game came out. It is a great sendoff from Bungie, and helped ease that little headache I had leftover from ODST. If you want to check out more of my thoughts on reach, check out my review on Hardcore Gamer and download a recent On Tap where we have a one hour roundtable review on Halo Reach.
-As usual, let's wrap up yet another crazy long blog with the latest on what I have been playing.
On the DS side of things I have been playing quite a bit of Phoenix Wright: Trials & Tribulations (now on the second case!), and finally started making a lot more headway into Dragon Quest IX. Since I got to Stornway the game has really opened up for me, and I instantly recruited a full party at the Inn and had a blast simply leveling up my party and buying them new gear.
On the PS3 I will still throw in Zen Pinball from time to time. I had a horrible session Motorstorm: Pacific Rift yesterday and could not meet the criteria to pass one track in my career on several attempts. Space Invaders: Infinite Gene is a tremendous reinvention of the franchise and ranks it right up there with the current crop of challenging shmups. And I mean this in the least homophobic possible, but the PSone downloadable import Cho-a-Niki is quite possibly the gayest game I have ever played.
The 360 has been taking up most of my time. Since my last blog I have finally been getting achievements for knocking out the Wizard goals on Williams Pinball Hall of Fame tables. I have knocked out my first four tables worth of Wizard goals in the past week alone. It is all finally starting to come together! I am told by friends I am getting close to finishing Red Dead Redemption, I am in Mexico and around a 55% completion rate. I am also close to wrapping up Sniper: Ghost Warrior since I just reached the final act in the game. Deathspank I have finally been getting into recently, but I got a feeling I still have a ways to go in. I breezed through Rogue Warrior within a day. For a FPS released last December, it reeked of low production values and had little depth to it. The campaign is so unbelievably short that I was able to plow through it within four hours.
Finally, I played quite a few last gen comic book games to prep up for a recent On Tap that covered all comic book games on the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube. I played a couple more missions of my long forgotten Punisher campaign on PS2. I threw in Spider-Man 2 with original intentions of playing it for about an hour or so to get a general feel for it, but liked it so much I ended up beating it within a week. Its 2005 follow up, Ultimate Spider-Man I did not like that much. Even though it had far prettier graphics, the web slinging wasn't as fluid as before and it just ended up aggravating to the point of putting it down far sooner than I wanted. Finally I played Rogue Trooper, which was a decent third person shooter, but I started to get bored with it after four missions.
-And thus wraps another insanely long blog, I will try my best to maintain monthly updates again, but no promises!
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