Thank God

Gears of War 3 is going to have a public beta.

First Reach Impressions

I'm only halfway through the campaign, so I'm not going to discuss that at this juncture, but I will say that I am enjoying it so far. My one complaint is that the new character models for the Elites feel a bit...rounded out, I guess. I remember the Elites in Combat Evolved seeming very lean and athletic-looking, but still having enough musculature to be far more imposing than Jackals. If the old models looked like collectible statuettes, the new ones look like action figures designs for children under the age of 10. They're devoid on edges and small parts. You can judge for yourself.

The first image is from Halo 2 and the second is from Reach. I guess the difference now that I see them side by side is how much broader the shoulders are on the Elite from Halo 2. The new models are almost too humanoid. They just don't jump out at you the way they used to. They might have done that so that they'll not such huge targets in multiplayer, but I think it kind of detracts from the single player experience.

As for the multiplayer, I think this game may go down as the definitive Halo game. Sure, there will always be people who like Combat Evolved the best, and there is literally nothing Bungie nor anyone else can do to change that, but there will always who think the first Super Mario Bros. is better than the third. Nostalgia and fear of change. I'm sure there will also be people who like Halo 2 the best, but I don't think anyone is going to say 3 is the best anymore. Nothing against 3--I loved 3--but CE, 2, and Reach will stand as the three paradigms of differing philosophies while 3 remains a neutered transition between 2 and Reach. CE will will remembered for its brilliant simplicity, innovation, and ease-of-use; 2 will be remembered as the best execution of a dual-wielding centered FPS; and Reach will be remembered for its clever gun balance, armor abilities, and staggering depth gameplay options. Unfortunately, Halo 3 is now obsolete in my mind. It had dual wielding, but it was more of a leftover from Halo 2 and hardly used. It had equipment, but equipment was gimmicky, frustrating, and at times over-powered. Armor abilities are basically like equipment, but fun. Halo 3 also had a great depth of gameplay options, but Reach has far more. Lastly, Reach's version of Forge makes Halo 3's look almost embarrassing. Double lastly, Halo 3 lacked any true standout maps like Blood Gulch, Lockout, or Ivory Tower.

While I was a big fan of dual-wielding and I will always argue that team slayer doesn't get any better starting with an SMG on Halo 2's Lockout, I can't say that I really miss it. Halo's gameplay really does benefit from shooting at guys you can barely see.

--Chilly P

Top 10: Other Realms and Media

As our readers are most likely aware, I love making top 10 lists. There's just something so authoritative, so definite, so...well, arrogant about making top 5, 10, 50, whatever lists that I just can't get enough of them. Nothing will fully suck away my Saturday afternoon more than getting caught up watching a 5 hour top 100 countdown on VH1. I even watched their Top 100 child stars even though I'd never watched Diff'rent Strokes or Punky Brewster or The Partridge Family or half the garbage those kids were from. It didn't matter that I couldn't tell Corey Haim from Corey Feldman, I was wrapped up in it. One of my favorite writers, ESPN's Matthew Berry, will periodically do a "Ten Lists of Ten" article containing 7 or 8 fantasy-relevant lists with a few "Favorite Fantasy Team Names" or "Favorite Movie One-Liners" sprinkled in for good measure. With that in mind, here are some top ten lists that I'm going to come up with on the spot. Unlike Rolling Stone magazine's recent top 500 songs of all time, these are not meticulously thought out. I'm just going to go with my gut instinct. Feel free argue or agree with me, or even give a random top 10 of your own. Anyway, without further ado, here are nine lists of ten...because I'll let Matthew Berry be one better than me.

Top Ten Rock Songs of All Time
1. A Day in the Life - The Beatles
2. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
3. Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. All Along the Watchtower - The Jimi Hendrix Experience*
5. Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones
6. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
7. Baba O'Riley - The Who
8. Good Vibrations - The Beach Boys
9. Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
10. More Than a Feeling - Boston

Top Ten 2009 Best Picture Nominees
1. District 9
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Up in the Air
4. Inglourious Basterds
5. Avatar
6. The Blind Side
7. Up
8. An Education**
9. Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire**
10. A Serious Man

Top Ten TV Shows of All Time***
1. LOST
2. South Park
3. Arrested Development
4. Breaking Bad
5. Seinfeld
6. 30 Rock
7. Dexter
8. Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
9. The Wire
10. House, M.D.

Top Ten South Park Episodes
1. "Towelie"
2. "The Succubus"
3. "Asspen"
4. "Scott Tenorman Must Die"
5. "All About Mormons"
6. "Major Boobage"
7. "Butters' Very Own Episode"
8. "Trapped in the Closet"
9. "Gnomes"
10. "Manbearpig"

Top Ten iPhone Apps in the App Store
1. geoDefense
2. Words with Friends
3. Shazam
4. IMDb
5. Tap Tap Revenge: Lady GaGa
6. Wikipanion
7. Scramble 2
8. Pandora
9. ESPN Radio
10. Vevo

Top Ten Fantasy Football Players to Draft in 2010
1. Yeah
2. Right
3. Like
4. I'd
5. Tell
6. My
7. Competitors
8. My
9. Draft
10. Strategy

Top Ten South Park Episodes That Barely Missed the Cut
1. "Pip"
2. "Child Abduction is Not Funny"
3. "Chinpokomon"
4. "Chef Aid"
5. "Spooky Fish"
6. "Jewbilee"
7. "You Got F'd in the A"
8. "Woodland Critter Christmas"
9. "Christian Rock Hard"
10. "Mecha Streisand"

My Top Ten Rock Songs of All Time Circa 2007
1. A Day in the Life - The Beatles
2. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
3. Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones
4. Dream On - Aerosmith
5. Carry On Wayward Son - Kansas
6. Free Bird - Lyrnyrd Skynyrd
7. Good Vibrations - The Beach Boys
8. I Am the Walrus - The Beatles
9. Behind Blue Eyes - The Who
10. Happiness Is a Warm Gun - The Beatles

Top Ten Movies with the Best Opening Scenes
1. The Dark Knight
2. The Matrix
3. Jurassic Park
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark
5. Pulp Fiction
6. Mission: Impossible III
7. X2: X-Men United
8. Inception
9. Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope
10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail


--Chilly P


*Yes, I know Bob Dylan originally wrote and recorded the song, but Jimi took it to a whole new level.
**Okay, I haven't actually seen these two movies yet, but I'm betting they're better than the Coen brother's befuddling A Serious Man. It wasn't bad, per se, but I just didn't get it. I doubt many Gentiles do.
***Aren't old TV shows such garbage?

Black Ops and new Bioshock Information

That picture is of the Call of Duty: Black Ops Prestige Edition. You get a working remote control car with a camera on it that feeds video and sound to the driver. Being the type of sucker who owns a pair of Modern Warfare 2 night vision goggles, I may soon be the proud owner of such a toy. There's a new multiplayer gameplay trailer as well, which I've embedded below. The RC car will be a pretty fun killstreak, but it looks to only require 3 consecutive kills, so I guess campers be damned. There's also a nifty spy camera shown in the video. What makes me nervous though is the ballistic knife. It looks like it shoots knives at people and gives the user a pretty sizable lunging range. The best news, however, is that Call of Duty is finally starting to catch up to Halo 3 in terms of multiplayer features. Ladies and gentlemen, we will have the ability to record previous matches. Hooray for the end of clan disputes (now if they could just fix the mess that CoD:Mod2 left Search & Destroy in). As for the potential balance issue with the knife and whether or not we'll still have to deal with grenade launchers, we'll just have to wait for the supposed full multiplayer reveal in September.


Oh, and if you were waiting for a true sequel (prequel?) to Bioshock that's being done by the original studio and helmed by Ken Levine, the original visionary, then you're in luck. It's just been announced. Sequels done by separate studios tend to be devoid of risk and they always feel a lot like fan fiction. But when you get the masterminds themselves to make a follow-up, well, I won't spoil anything. Enjoy the shit out of the trailer:



--Chilly P

p.s. Gimmedat crossbow NOW!

I Get Wet without Even Trying

I think maybe all of my posts should be titled with esoteric song lyrics. Anyway, I think it's about time I talk in length on Hydro Thunder Hurricane. This game is a hell of a lot of fun. Also, unlike the Summer of Arcade's first title this year, it is unmistakably a video game. It's been a long time since I've loved a racing game this much, and I think it may go into my all-time favorites list with Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Burnout: Revenge. As you may have gathered, it's a sequel of sorts to the original arcade game, which was also one of my favorites. It's very arcade-y in feel (I've written that word in three different contexts now) and no other racing game is so distinctly split into two types of steering.

With a water racer, you have to deal with the elements. The most prominent of these elements is waves, and waves make you go airborne. They aren't the only thing, though, so does going off ramps, launching off waterfalls, and even jumping your boat. Handling in the air is something that I've found is key to my success in the game, and Rad Hazard is the king of aerial control. While it has the worst handling in the water (it's more a hovercraft than a boat), a skilled user can strategically use boost to steer it almost as well as any other boat. What's nice is that it controls with almost same amount of ability in both the water and while airborne, so you never feel out of control with it like you do other boats.

Well, I'm not too humble to admit that I've gotten damn good at the game, and it's gotten to the point where I have difficulty finding a challenge online. The matchmaking system is very bare bones (you create or search for a match) and it can be difficult to get into a good lobby. Other than that, I fully recommend the game. The tracks are all beautifully choreographed and every single one of them could have easily been the standout in a less memorable set. Just know this: getting 200/200 Achievement points is going to be damn near impossible. The Expert Ringmaster events are brutal, and going gold in the event that does all eight of them consecutively is a task I'm sure few men have accomplished.

--Chilly P

Thoughts for Tuesday 080310

I know I haven't been posting much recently, but all I've been playing recently is Hydro Thunder Hurricane and Halo Wars. The former isn't particularly deep and I've said about all I need about the latter. Anyway, the Madden NFL '11 demo came out, and I have to say that I do like the new feel of the game. However, apparently online franchise was the least used feature in last year's edition, so word on the street is that they haven't updated it much. Since online franchise was literally the only thing I cared about last year, it may not be worth it for me to pick it up this season.


On a random side note, remember this commercial? I liked it.

For those of you who love Instant Queue-ing on your 'box, I've got three new shows to recommend. Two of them ran only one season and the other never made it through the second season, so it should be pretty easy to get through each of these shows' entire runs. They are, in order of recommendation, Better Off Ted, Stella, and The Unusuals. The first is an ABC critical darling that just never found an audience, the second is an extremely quirky comedy from Comedy Central starring that dude who loves the 80s and some other The State vets, and the last was one of the many shows to fail at following LOST's time slot during its 6 year run. Speaking of the The State, I believe that's on Instant Queue these days as well. I've never seen it, but it's apparently where all the Stella and Reno 911 guys got their starts, so that's probably next on my docket.

If you have Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the PC and want to try making your own levels, the tools to do so are available for free on the internets. They're actually quite easy to get into (especially compared to Unreal Tournament 2004, in my opinion), and there are a good number of helpful videos on YouTube. CoD4 runs about $30 wherever you look these days, which isn't exactly cheap for a 3 year old game with two sequels on the market.

Lastly, no I don't have Starcraft II yet and yes, I wish I did. I played the beta, and that made it painfully obvious that my laptop was not capable of running such a glorious program.

--Chilly P

Let's get WWII up in this bitch

Well as I mentioned I haven't been around much and my video game playing was not very frequent, so I felt like I couldn't really write anything of substance to annoy you all with. Yet in the last month or so, I have grabbed three games that are worthy of mention and can spark something here. Think of this as a 3 part mini series of rehab posts, hooray.

The first game I downloaded and play on occasion is Company of Heroes. Although this game isn't new by any stretch, it is certainly fun and worthy of looking into. If you have a crush on anything World War II like I do, it is hard to pass by this sweet little thang. (I also love Relic/THQ as I mentioned here.) I grabbed the original game plus an expansion for about 30 dollars off Steam, and have enjoyed it since. If you are patient and look around the interwebs, you can find this game along with some of the expansions for a cheap price. As a matter of fact, the day after I bought the game, it seemed like a dam of deals was shattered and I found a flood of deals sweeping over my frustrated self.
Anyway, the game is an RTS and you can play as the Axis (Wehrmacht or Panzer Elite) or the Allies (Americans or British). The armies are distinct and play fairly differently, which allows for some diversity and ways to break the monotony. Artillery and tanks seem to rule the day, but well used (and massed) infantry can be equally destructive. Visually, this game is very impressive. The characters interact with the levels in an awesome way that is cool to watch but also fantastic to play. (If you have a computer with a nice video card, you will enjoy watching battles). The voice acting is also entertaining (copious amounts of ethnic slurs from the 40s), which makes any game better.
The general physics and engine used in CoH is something that adds a nice twist to the regular "mass and attack" style of RTS that frequently happens. The game follows the standard Relic/THQ style of squad based games, but also throws in a strong use of terrain in order to play. Every time you move squads around the map, you are trying to utilize terrain in order to gain (or force enemies to lose) defensive statistics/benefits. Light brush, small fences, etc. will provide small benefits to your defense and allow your armies to crouch and hide behind them. Stone walls, tank traps, sandbags, etc. can offer huge benefits to a squad's defense, and really cause problems for an enemy. (Being on an open road causes defense to go down.) So not only are you trying to beat your enemy by grabbing land (which contains resources), but you must use the land in order to effectively defend and attack.
I haven't touched the online/competitive gaming aspect of this game, so I really can't talk about the way it is played at a "higher level". But I can say that comp stomping is entertaining for me, so that is pretty much what I have stuck to.

This is all for now.
-SC