The Last Couple Days

So I've been sitting here, still Joe-less, for the past weekend.

Well, that's sort of inaccurate. I haven't been sitting much. Had an amazing bonfire over the weekend (We do that sometimes) and I also got up at eight thirty on saturday morning to sing the national anthem at a baseball field and then get owned by some fifth grader who sang "my country tis of thee". Sunday was a little better, though I had to take the Dalton home, and I was unreasonably pissed.

Today sucked.

However, I am one of those people that appreciates a terrible day, if it's so terrible it can be comical.

I'll give you the run-down:

Woke up at 12:45. Had breakfast in a bowl that I figured out too late was dirty. Went and got my guitarist, Justin. Got back just in time to take Stp out to the dentist for his appointment (I know you don't know any of these people. I'm doing this to spite you.), and waited a half an hour, beating Justin at Street Fighter IV in Gamestop. We got back to the house, and Stp and his female went to a corresponding love-making session upstairs while we sat and did nothing for a while. Eventually, we went to Dylan's. It was fun, for about fifteen minutes. Then his dad left. Dyl got in an argument / fight with his sister, who called the cops on him. Then Dylan got arrested. We had to wait in his house while his dad was going to get home, and then, when it was cleared up that his mom was going to go find him, we decided to leave. We went back to my house, where I went on 4chan and watched threads about people dying for an hour. I passed the time waiting to drop off Stp's female by being on my computer, again. At midnight, we left to take her home.

And when we came back, things started to change. Stp and I recorded another one of our very-old talk sessions (Which are absolutely hilarious, let me tell you...) and then, we got in contact with a pair of females.

Currently, one of said females is knocked out with her legs in my lap. The other female is next to me on the computer, watching Madigascar but too high to actually sit through it.

I don't smoke, so I'm sort of laughing at her.

Today got better, I suppose.

/Rant

For the record, you won't hear pointless bullshit about my life anymore, this is purely to keep me awake.

On Finishing Work (For the Moment)

I've finally managed to get the blog to a point where I like it (i.e. it looks good and performs the way I want it to), though it's hardly perfect and I'll definitely be revisiting it at a later point. I'd like to thank the folks over at Blogger Templates and The Blog Doctor for the template of the blog and the little bit of coding I did on the site in order to make things cleaner.

"So what took you so long???" you may be asking me.

Well, I felt that the original, Blogger provided template, while very nice, was a bit lacking. So I decided to browse the various corners of the interwebs in order to find a design that I thought looked good, fit the basic "theme" of the blog, and functioned properly. Though there were many, many blog templates I liked quite a bit, not all of them were very easy to mess with the HTML, and some didn't even work at all. Often times it was simply an issue of formatting in accordance with the change to the HTML that made the template simply not work. Granted this could all be problems on my end, but I don't know nearly enough to make any sweeping edits to the blog. Ultimately, this format ended up being one that I liked and worked just the way I want it to. 

"But what is it exactly that was so tricky that caused you to have to work for so long on fixing it?" you may continue to ponder. 

Well you see, with my rather long and rambling posts, particularly my review posts, the front page can get really cluttered and reaaaally long. So in order to fix this problem, I looked up how to make the posts EXPANDABLE!!! (oh shnaps)

Basically, every time one of us here at TEOI (see what I did thar?) makes a long, long post, it will be split into two sections. You, the reader, will be able to see the first chunk of the post as normal, but in order to see the next section, you must click the "Read More -->" link at the bottom of each post. Unfortunately I don't know how to only put that link on posts that actually have more to read, so we'll have to figure out a system here in order to inform you on which posts do have things to read on.

To other authors: there's basic instructions set in the text of each post by default in order to let you know where to write in order to use the "Read More" link. It isn't anything painful to deal with, I promise.

To readers: ROCK ON

-Joe

On Responses To Rik

The blog's only been barren 'cos I've been trying to fix and upgrade the damn thing, hehe. I've been having a bunch of complications with different layouts and formats that both look good and do what I want them to do in order to keep the front page of the blog clean and smooth.

Any ideas or recommendations for templates would be much appreciated, and can be emailed to me here.

(Whoa shortest post made by me ever!)

Need to post something....

This blog has become so barren in the past week.

Announcements:

1. Joe should be coming over my house this weekend. We'll make at least one post.

2. I give up on girls. (Waiting now.)

3. Today's music:

1. I am Ghost- Dark Carnival of the Immaculate

2. Thrice- Digital Sea

3. Bomb the Music Industry!- My Response to an Article in Alternative Press

I'm too lazy to look these up. Be inventive.

On Site Maintenance

First of all, I lol'd really hard at the above picture when I was looking up something to use for this post. You can't not look at it and giggle a little bit.

Anyways, I'm planning on doing some work on the blog in order to make things a bit smoother, more condensed, easier to read, etc. etc. As it is right now, with my ridiculously long posts, one has to scroll for ages to reach the older articles, and that's no fun. Also, I'm not really a fan of the font right now 'cos it seems to be just a bit too small. And I already changed this, but I moved the author for each post to the top, so the reader can immediately see that "Oh no, Joe's making another post on stupid stuff, I'm gonna skip it and go read one of Rik's things/Yogo's reviews/Jake's rants!"

I'll be looking into this and more, possibly trying to customize the site a little bit and make it look a bit cooler and more unique. So if you (the reader) have any suggestions you'd like to put forth, feel free to go ahead and leave me a suggestion in the comment's section. And other authors...please don't go overboard with ridiculousness while I do said tweaking. Danke.

On Haircuts

So. Yesterday I got my hair cut. First of all, I usually keep my hair medium-long, and I like it that way, so I didn't really get much cut off. Texturizing, or some crazy shit like that. Basically I was just getting it "cleaned up" or something similar. Point is, I got some hair removed and paid a woman to do so.

But I'm not here to talk about the actual haircut (I think my hair is fugly half the time anyways). I'm actually here to talk about the goddam mirror.

Seriously, when you're sitting in that barber's chair, you have nothing to do but to stare into that freaking mirror in front of you while your barber person thing does their work. Sure, you can make some small talk with the person, but especially when you're a person like me, a socially awkward white teenage boy, the conversation will eventually fall to silence and you're back to just looking at that mirror, listening to oftentimes thoroughly blah pop songs on the radio over the sound of electric razors.

Let me tell you, those mirror's can e entrancing, mystifying, but they are above all a self-esteem test. Looking into a mirror like that makes you really see all the various flaws in your face. I found myself thinking "My cheeks look chubby; Does one of my eyes always sorta squint like that? Goddammit there's those symmetrical moles again!" I couldn't help but analyze every aspect of my face in some sorta negative light. I never realized my chin looked the way it does!

As soon as one steps away from the mirror, however, things seem to go back to normal as all your focus is taken off of your face. But goddam it's a powerful force. I swear it's all a conspiracy! You go to the barber's and they do a little with your hair, this and that and then it's all OHMAGAWD I need to go buy some skin care products or some lotion or this and that and blah blah blah. It's all "The Man" trying to get you to buy more stuff!

Luckily I'm just too smooth to fall for such ploys.

Rik's Required Listening: Issue One.

Alright, I've determined that I need something to talk about.

So, as a result, I'm going to come up with required listening every day. Three songs that will change how you look at the world for just that day. You can listen to all three, just one, or anywhere in between.

The first three are:

Bluejuice - Vitriol (pious edit) [off of The Zen List, volume two]

Nine Inch Nails - Where is Everybody? [off of Things Falling Apart]

Incubus - Follow [off of Halo II, though there is a version with words which, in my opinion is better.]

Have a great (and strangely wonderful) day. =]

Solid State Escapades

So I'm in a ska side project.

We need band names.

Heavy influences:

High School Football Heroes

Bomb the Music Industry!

Operation Ivy

RX Bandits

Streetlight Manifesto

311, probably.

Any ideas?

Game Shit. Shadow Of the Motherfucking Colossus. (Abridged)

Good afternoon... Clarisse.

Or general public. Y'know.

I'm here to talk about a game, because I do that occasionally. The game is entitled SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS. I put the name in capital letters because there is so much manliness in the game it can't be expressed by written word.

THE SCENARIO:

Alright, so first off, write a book. Then take out anything that could be a reference to plotline in that book. But keep all of the actual events. This is what they give you in SHADOW OF THE MOTHERFUCKING COLOSSUS. Anyone playing the game will usually feel a sort of disconnect as to what is going on. You get a vague idea, but if you need things to be typed out for you, this is NOT YOUR KIND OF GAME. Essentially, you start as a character (Who you don't find out until the credits is named Wander) who is roughly five foot nine and wields a sword, a bow, and a horse.

You don't use items in the game.

Wander's job, in order to save name-unspecific female (Also referred to in the end credits as... Memo?) from indeterminate fate is to FIGHT FUCKING GIANTS.

The first boss is bigger than the house that you're in right now.

Let me be the first to say I love this game. The plot is -kind of- unraveled as you go on, but in the end, you still have to go to Google to determine exactly what happened. (Remember Cloverfield?) That being said, there are tons of theories up on various websites, including one that I can't remember exposing a meta-theory/faq on the game.

GAMEPLAY:

Before you buy this game, get a roll of duct tape and apply to your R1 button. This is the "OH MY F*CKING GOD I'M GOING TO FALL AND DIE SO I HAVE TO SAVE MYSELF" button. The game runs on a health and endurance system which you sort of have to get used to because the LED might as well be in the same sort of half-german language that Wander and his zombie girlfriend use. The control system makes this game. It, too, takes a bit of getting used to, but once you find it, it's awesome. My only real regret about this game is that it is like twelve hours long, but the secrets that you have no way of finding out in the game (Go look on Youtube, people are still finding shit) extend it. For example, they never tell you that you can shoot lizards and eat their tails to gain stamina.

VISUAL/CINEMATICS:

By far, the best thing about this game is the immersion factor. All of the hard-to-get storyline, dialogue, and vagaries about what to do in the game just make it more ridiculously epic than it could have been. The graphics and such are absolutely stunning, and the diabolically large bosses with equally threatening attacks make Kingdom Hearts bosses seem like a bunch of Disney... Wait...

Anyways, it's absolutely beautiful, absolutely crazy, and the easter eggs you can find by looking in the game are phenomenal.

Summary:

Great Game.

Hold R1.

Climb Mountains that are fighting you and stab them with your flimsy-ass sword.

Get the piss scared out of you.

Find secrets.

Save girlfriend with GODHAND.

This review is very short, because I had almost no time to do it. I will likely expand. Unless I'm lazy.

Wait, I'm always lazy.

On Gaming: Mirror's Edge

Goooood Sunday afternoon, empty abyss of a blog! This is Joe again, coming from on high to deliver yet another succulent post about another inane topic! As Jake mentioned previously, yes, I am in fact a gamer, and a rather heavy gamer as well. "But Joe!", you ask, "If you're such a gamer why haven't you posted anything about games yet and just posted stupid things about Pokemon and music we don't really care about?" Well, see, I have a sort of confession to make.

I....I....I play World of Warcraft.

Now don't get me wrong, it's an awesome game, despite what people say. However, because I play WoW, I all too often put some of my console games on the back shelf, because chances are when I'm not playing WoW I get commandeered to play Civ 4 or Warcraft 3 via AIM, or even while I'm playing WoW. So basically I end up doing a lot of things on the computer and less and less on my consoles.

That being said, my intertubes were crapping out on me hardcore about a week ago, to the point where I wasn't able to log into WoW, and my ping on Ventrilo was well over 9000, which created some interesting scenarios, such as the ghostly voice of my disconnected self drifting into Vent announcing the boss had spawned some adds, even though we had all died to the boss at least 10 minutes ago. What made it even better was that I could still hear the group in (relatively) real time, so I got to have some fun throwing random things into the middle of chat and hearing their responses.

ANYWAYS I totally digress. Because of this general internet failure, I decided to bust out my Xbox 360 again after at least a month of negligence, which I totally blame on my friend for borrowing my copy of Fallout 3. Since the aforementioned game was currently absent, I decided to bust out a game I hadn't even touched since I got it for Christmas, as I was too enamored with other things. And as you may have guessed by now, that game is in fact

MIRROR'S EDGE





The Game


Mirror's Edge is a game about a "Runner" named Faith in a seemingly totalitarian future city. Runners are sort of vigilantes that live on the outskirts of society, choosing to live on the run from the city rather than be run by it. Her sister is a cop, which are referred to the Runners as "Blues," and are regarded by the Runners as enemies. After a few basic missions to get the player accustomed to the city, the story opens with a high-profile person in the city being murdered, and Faith's sister is blamed for the crime. Most of the game then revolves around Faith's mission to clear her sister's name and solve the mystery behind the murder.

The story isn't exactly the greatest or most original and isn't developed too well during the game, but that's completely alright, as it really only serves to give the player a reason as to why they're going here and there. The game isn't story driven at all, which is entirely the point, as the real star in this game is

The Gameplay
At it's root, this game is all about getting from Point A to Point B. But the real joy is exactly how you get there. You'll leap across buildings, dart across ventilation systems, break through doors and do other batshit crazy things to reach Point B. And you'll have a kickass time doing it. The first person view and the complete lack of a UI keeps you focused on the task at hand, be it finding a way across a large chasm or beating up one of the many Blues that try to stop you along your path. Which brings me to the subject of combat...

The combat was, in a word, weak. Early on you're taught the basics of fighting, which involves various mechanics of punching and kicking, at different levels (high, medium, low). Unfortunately, you aren't taught about things like how momentum can affect your attacks (for example, a running jump kick can defeat some of the weaker enemies in one blow, while going toe to toe with a foe often takes a lot longer), and it turns out that half of the combat techniques you learn are completely useless against the more heavily armored foes you encounter later in the game. The game encourages you to single out opponents and take them out in one-on-one combat, yet throws you into a room filled with up to five enemies at a time and gives them each guns that can hit you from quite a range, so even if you can corner one you can still have others shooting at your unprotected back. And when you do have the misfortune to fight some of the heavily armored SWAT team members, practically the only way to combat them is through a very unforgiving button press to disarm them and knock them out. You have less than a tenth of a second to pull it off, and should you fail, you'll almost certainly be killed. Sounds easy enough, right? Apparently the guys at DICE thought so, since even on normal difficulty I've found myself dying dozens of times in the same room to the same groups of enemies.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's still an incredibly fun game. The parkour elements of the game are excellent, and you really feel in the middle of the action with the first person view. I have almost nothing to complain about with the platforming and adventuring aspects of the game, except that, similar to the combat, there is no room for error, as any mistakes will most likely send you hurtling to your death in the streets below. At the very least they give you the option to see about where you're supposed to be heading, and through "Runner Vision" anything you should and can interact with are highlighted in a bright red color. Save for the deaths, the gameplay is definitely worth it.

The GraphicsI'm not normally one to harp on graphics or anything like that, as I'm of the firm belief that a game can be fun regardless of how many pixels the main character is made up of. However, it must be noted the graphics of this game are absoulutely incredible. The entire city is of a mind-searing white, which helps to reinforce the totalitarian setting of the game. There are splashes of blue, orange, and other colors that really stand out among the white, and it's easy to tell where important areas of the city are based on the bright red of the Runner Vision. The conrast of colors and great amount of detail that have been put into this game is incredible, and is a visual beauty.

Final Thoughts
Mirror's Edge is an incredibly fun game, but it isn't without it's flaws. It has a simple story and very clunky fighting mechanics. In a game where keeping momentum is law and moving around quickly is key, why does it force you to die over and over (and might I add over) while you attempt to fight off some incredibly overpowered and impossibly difficult enemies? It is a visual beauty, one where you stop mid-leap to observe the brilliant design of the city only to quickly find yourself falling to the pavement. The music and sound effects are brilliant too, with only the sounds of the city to accompany you while you leap from building to building, enhancing the feeling of being alone among many, yet being the most free out of any of them. It quickly switches to an upbeat and fast-pased music once you engage in combat, creating a feeling of urgency and giving it a sort of movie fight-scene sort of atmosphere, which is rather suiting for this type of game.

Though it certainly isn't Game of the Year material, Mirror's Edge is definitely a noteworthy game, and should at the very least be tried by any serious gamer. For real platforming and parkour junkies, the Time Trial mode will keep you playing for many long hours. All in all, I enjoyed/am enjoying Mirror's Edge and would reccomend it to other gamers.

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

Introduction: Rik

Hey guys. I'm Rik, the fourth and semi-nonexistent author of this blog. Per Joe's word.

I know Joe from a really long time ago, but I still don't know Yogo or Jake. Probably will get to know them once they see this.

I'm really into music, planning to major in it in college (And get about a thousand dollars a year, I'm entirely aware). I also appreciate gaming from a somewhat objective sense (I'm an adventure gamer myself, if you had to classify) and I have a guilty pleasure for roleplaying. On top of that, for physical activity, I love frisbee and parkour, though I'm arguably terrible at either. I'm an author, I'm a poet, I'm a philosopher, I'm a mediocre artist, I come in a funny-colored wrapper with bowties on it. Hmm.

Also, I like green tea. Let's have some green tea sometime.

=] Looking forward to posting more in the phuture.

On Music: The Campaign For Real-Time

Aaaaaand welcome back to another installment of "New Music," with me, your host. I've been really lazy about posting of late (again), but I have returned (again) with a renewed vigor towards posting on an empty and readerless blog! Today I'm gonna talk about a band that, to be entirely fair, hasn't been exactly "new" to me for a while, since I've had some of their music on my iPod for a few months at this point, but until recently they were completely unnamed and rarely listened to. What band is this, you ask? Why, it's the

Campagain For Real-Time!




The Story
I originally recieved two of their CDs from a friend of mine in exchange for my copy of Daft Punk's Discovery. Me and this person worked together on a project where we had to relate various works of American Literature to music, and he threw one of C4RT's tracks onto the setlist. It eventually got taken out, but I enjoyed it enough to ask him for some more of their work, and, me being the forgetful lazy person I am, didn't actually end up making the trade some months after the fact. When we did finally make the exchange, he gave me a blank CD with the two albums on them, with neither the tracks nor the albums labled or identified. I put them on my iPod but, since they were all completely unknown, they ended up just sorta floating around, rarely listened to except on the occasional shuffle.

About a month ago (back when I originally planned on writing this post -fail), one of their songs came up on shuffle and I actually listened to it. And it was really good. I had a general idea that the band was good, as the only labled song I had by them, Song for New Amsterdam, the same song I got from my friend originally, was really good. It was a sort of hard to describe melodic punk-rock, with a real message to get across. But this new song was completely different, but in a good way. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what the song is like, yet again, but, and I'm no expert on anything musical, I'd say it was almost a mixture of hip hop and rock. I really don't know what to call it. Shortly after hearing this, I got really interested in C4RT again, and, remembering that I had two whole CDs of theirs on my iPod, set out to label and identify each of the songs and then listen to them.

The Artist
As mentioned earlier, it's really, really difficult to pinpoint exactly what kind of music this band makes. It ranges from rock, punk, techno, hip-hop, electronic, dashes of metal here and there, and it even covers Lennon. It, quite literally, is music. You can label certain bands as rap, rock, punk, techno, etc., but C4RT encompasses it all in such a unique way that you can't label it by any single genre. Though the band itself is made up of members of previous bands that broke up, they live by some crazy story that they are time travelers here to present us music from the future (or is it the past) in order to enhance our lives or something. And one can almost believe it too, based on how unique and varied each track is...except for the fact that it's completely nutters.

At the end of the track One in the Gut, there's a brief sound clip of someone asking one of the band members "So are you guys a serious band?", with the reply "We're serious about being effective..." I think this more or less sums up their perspective on the way they work as a band; serious about their music, but they don't take themselves too seriously.

The AlbumsLet It Rise
I have no clue in what order the two albums I have were produced, since there's so very little out there on the intertubes about C4RT, so I basically picked one of the two at random once I finally identified all the tracks and had everything nice and organized.

Let It Rise was the first album I ended up listening to, and, true to form, it contains no specific single genre of music. Each track was unique in it's own way (except they all weren't...more on that later), and each was excellent by it's own rights. D.C. 77 was the song I had originally heard that convinced me to look back into the band, and Let It Rise also has Song for New Amsterdam, the other song I had mentioned originally. Adjustments is a strong track, but the acapella "doo doo doos" they do in the chorus can be kind of annoying after listening to the track enough times. Rachel Says is another of the songs I would often hear on shuffle, think to myself "Hey, this is pretty good," and then forget what I was planning to do with it later when I couldn't find the track. Photo (Negative Cutter) and Real Time Blues are both good in their own, weird way and the rest of the tracks are just plain great.
Overall Rating: 8.5/10


Yes...I Mean, No
So, after thoroughly listening to Let It Rise I started on this album. It is in all parts equally as good as Let It Rise, but I can't really say which is better because of the ongoing uniqueness this band displays. However, as I listened I couldn't help but notice that some of the tracks sounded...familiar. I could have sworn I had already heard this or that track, and yet I know I couldn't have, because I was listening to the CD I hadn't listened to yet. Then I took a look at the tracks, and sure enough, almost half of this CD and half of Let It Rise shared similar tracks. How could I have not noticed when I was labeling the songs Turn the Gun on Me on and Yes...I Mean, No and Turn the Gun on E on Let It Rise. As it turns out, about half of each of the two albums share a similar song, one a remix of the other. After looking into the track titles a bit more, I learned that Yes...I Mean, No was almost certainly before Let It Rise, because of the track pairings. Turn the Gun on (M)E is relatively clear, but by far the most obvious was In Your Dreams and In Your Dreams (Sir Certainly Remix).

Remixing aside, I found that each of the tracks, especially the original mixes, were still completely different from any other track of theirs, even their remixes. C4RT has somehow managed to come up with a way to redefine themselves with each and every song. As a whole Yes...I Mean No is a little weaker than Let It Rise, but since it most likely came before Let It Rise, that's a bit more understandable. All in all, I really enjoyed this album as well, and would reccomend it to others for their listening pleasure.
Overall Rating: 8.0/10

Final Thoughts
The Campaign for Real-Time is an incredibly diverse band from a musical standpoint. Their tracks are varied and unique. Each song could stand alone, and together you have to ask yourself "Did one band really make all these songs?" Even the remixes are solid, to the point where they practically shouldn't even be recognized as remixes but entirely new songs. Ridiculous time travelers or not, I really like this band, and look forward to more music from these guys.

Band Rating: 9.0/10

The Campaign for Real-Time can be found on their Facebook or Myspace page.

Nerd World: Gears of War 2

Name: Gears of War 2
Console: XBox 360
Release Date: November 7th, 2008

Official Site

If your a Gamer, your probably own a console.
If your a fan of FPS (First Person Shooters), then you probably own a 360.
If your a fan of fucking awsome, and gory, gritty wartime games... One of the games your probably own? If you could'nt tell by the title, its called... GEARS OF WAR 2

Gears of War first came out on the XBox. It was met with much delight, and gained more than enough popularity to spin off this sequel for the 360.


Plot: The plot is basicly this: Humans live on this planet, and fight eatchother, as humans do. Then one day, called E-Day (Emergence Day) this race called the "Locusts" dug up from beneath is and starting kicking the shit out of humans. Humans banded together and fought back against these creatures in a bloody war.





In the first gears, Dominec Santiago gets the main character, Marcus Fenix, out of this crummy jail. Marcus is a rebellious man. Marcus is a friggen tank of a man. Marcus is a known hero. Marcus is fucking badass. Marcus is voiced by BENDER for crying out loud, you can't GET any cooler than marcus fucking fenix!

First gears is this: Get outa jail, fight locusts, go underground, and blow up the locsusts home with a ligthmass bomb.

Gears 2 is this: The bomb awakened this big worm that sinks cities (Nice goin Military). With like one city left, the humans decide to finally attack the locusts at their home.

So its plot is by no means amazing... but its still fairley decent.

I want to just focus on this one part of the game... its when you leave the city on this big, elephantesk rigs. You get to ride with arguably the second best character in the game, Dizzy.
Dizzy didn't want to fight, but does to keep his family safe. He is as southern as you can get, and drives his rig called "Betty"
Now to be completely honest with you... Just play the game for the 3 levels with this guy. He MAKES half the plot, ok?
Like, all the plot consists of is Marcus being extremely bad ass, and Dizzy being stereotypically southern. And its awesome.



And lets not forget to mention the easter egg that makes everyone wears cowboy hats, like dizzy.
Yep, everybody.
Remember that humongous spider monster, the corpser? Yeah, he's got it too.



Gameplay: I'm not gonna get in depth with the actual gameplay here.
Basicly, the game is just Gritty, Gory, and RAWsome. Its a basic third person shooter, with a bit more realistic physics to it... Die faster, Have to get cover, etc.

The devolpers give us a pretty nice selection of weapons. You are allowed to carry 4 things:
1 Grenade
2 Guns
1 Pistol

You have a small selection of grenades, a few pistols (Standard, Uzi like one, Magnum), and a fair ammount of regular guns. They range from Standard rifles (Machine guns and Single shot guns) to Snipers (Sniper Rifles and Explosive bows) to big guns (Heavy machinegun, Artilery, and Boomshot), as well as Shotguns :D





One quick thing: The machinegun that the humans use? It has a fucking chainsaw attatched to it. Yeah, thats right, you heard me: A CHAINSAW. That means your all "Oh hey there some guy next to me. Should I punch him in the face?" Abselutley not, soldier! You've got a chainsaw attatched to your gun! SAW THAT SUNNUVABITCH IN HALF!

As for multiplayer? It actualy goes down pretty well. The best mode they have on it is Horde mode.
Horde is bascily what the name implies: Stand your ground on a small map against repeating hordes of enemies. Get some friends together, crank up the difficulty, and your in for the best night of your lives.
Because, since your a nerd, you ain't getting any girls ass at the bar ;)

Id give this game an 8.5/10.

So if your an FPSer, get this game. Right. Fucking. Now. And then enjoy your gory game!

P.S. Funny story.. when I went to get this game, I went to gamestop. I walk up to the guy and say "Hey there man... id like gears of war 2." in a gritty voice. He looks at me with narrowed eyes and gives me a nod that says "You sir, are a MAN amongst nerds."
His reply is "Anything else with that, fellow MAN?"
I proceed to sheepishley slide my copy of Harvest Moon: Island of Hapiness over and say "annnd this."






-Jake

Intro

Evenin' folks,

I am the third contributor of this amazing Blog. Obviously my name is Jake, But you can call me Jake or Andy if you like :D

So leme just say a few things about myself and let you be on your way. Assuming your not just some random spam bot or the Google search engine... ;_;

I'm like the weirdo among nerds. Now, since your a spam bot or a search engine, you might not understand how I can be a different class of nerds. Well let me try to explain it.



Lets say that there is a scale. On the left of the scale, you have those people who are on drugs and steroids or are just jocks, have an actual life, but are extreme when it comes to FPS's. Their the kind of person you'll find flipping out on Gears of War, or talking about Call of Duty with as many swears as possible. They are talking about a nerdy subject, but are making it sound EXTREME and badass.

Then we got the right side. This is like the nerds that play D+D, Civ, WoW, Have some super computer, Spend most of their life on their ass inside, etc...

So, First we got Joe. Joe, our all loving creator and god, is sort of mid-righish. He plays all those nerdy games, but actualy has a life. Sort of. Not really. Ok he has MORE of a life than we do... and hes a total pimp. With both ladies and guys ;-)

Then we got Yogo. Yogo is far right. Yogo is also wicked fat. He sits on his ass all day and plays WoW and D+D. Occasionally he might go play B-Ball.. But that doesent count! His life consists of being smart and wasting his intellegence on games :P, or trying to out-do the GM in D+D. Far right.

So where am I then? Im extreme. How extrme? IM SO GOD DAMNED EXTREME MY EXTREMENESS CANT EVEN BE MEASURED ON A SCALE

I play D+D and nerd out on that, but I measure it out with Gears. I camley tactize in civ against my enemies, and flip out like 2 year old kid on Halo 3. I go outside occasionaly, but own the best computer amongst the nerds. You might say "But jake, your totally on the middle then!" BUT ID SAY YOUR WRONG. Im both far left and far right. and I hate the image of far lefters even though I am, I dont like the usual fat acne ridden nerd of the far right, SO IM NOT EVEN ON THE GRAPH!

Now that i've wasted my "short" talk about me on my rant, let me just list off my interests.

I play soccer, but not so much anymore. Will get back into it.
I play like every game ever, but I find FPS's most appealing.
I am fariley tech saavy, but know nothing about networking.
I know basic VB, C++ and Java, and hope to learn more about the latter 2 later in life.
I drive a Honda Accord, and hope to drive a motorcycle some day (Probably a honda :P)

My goals in life:
-Create a game from the base up (Never gonna happen though)
-Go to a disputed region of the world and help. Probably Darfur if its still shit by the time I get there
-Live somewhere in the middle east for a few months or a year (And probably die.)
- Go telescoping in Australia
-Get everybody in a bar to have a huge fight. And come out the winner.
- Be in a Motorcyle chase on the highway (GTA anybody...)
-Have a computer that totally wrecks my rival in computers. (His is currently blue and better than mine ;_;)
- Make sure the Gov't stops being a power hungry growing dick that likes to rape the world.

There ya go! Now you know stuff about me :D

Ill try to keep my blogging to just rants, game reviews, and observations on stuff (Society, Industries, School, etc..)
Feel free to comment or send a flame letter to me

PEACE!

-Jake