Righty ho, about a month ago I purchased Final Fantasy XIII after I came back from Denmark. Why did I go to Denmark again for eight days? See the charming pic to the left...

Anyway, Final Fantasy.

Lemme clear my bad name a little when it comes to FF:

- I have absolutely no history with Final Fantasy.
- I never ever gave a damn either.
- There's an awful lot of hentai regarding this series...
- ... which obviously has traumatized me. Sorta. A little.
- What was I talking about again?
- Oh yes, the girls are insanely well stacked.

So, let the bashing commence!

STORY/CHARACTERS

The story goes as followed;

A long, long time ago, there was a train. And on that train, there was a girl that has watched G.I. Jane a time or thirty too often. And next to her is the black dude from Predator... With an afro shaped like a fruitbowl which houses a damn bird. The girl is a soldier/ex-soldier/AWOL marine/something that made the government hate her and the guy is just there.

My thoughts at this moment: Well... It ain't all bad, I kinda like the Sarge-like-dude-from-Predator.

Some time later it introduces some dude who I just hate, the fruitcake with the beanie/snowhat. Followed by the annoying brat called "Hope", whose name is a contradiction. And topped it off by showing me the most off-the-charts character ever introduced in a video game; The broad with the pigtails. The entire purpose for that character being there is to make you feel even less connected to the game and to prove how bad the characterization of the game really has become.

My thoughts at this moment: Ahhh ****... -_-"

I lost complete understanding of the story, and perhaps because it's my first FF game and this is number... thirteen. Perhaps it's unclear. Perhaps it's just another saga in the never-ending Asian-pop-movie-turned-game, I just don't understand! D:

GAMEPLAY

Ahh the hate-it-or-love-it part to all JRPGs. Turn based combat.

Now, back in the days... I'm 21 and I'm talking like a World War II veteran. Back in the days... Games could get away with this feature and become hits. Nowadays... not so much. See, this is a bit like Resident Evil 5 pulling the 'you can't strafe because our games never allowed you to!' gimmick and forcing us to watch a semi-realistic battle go like this:

Two parties, armed to the teeth with guns, claws, potions and spikey hairdoos wait for oneanother to beat eachother ****less.

Doesn't really work well anymore. But it can be forgiven, as it's the core part of what Final Fantasy is... I suppose. So lets move on.

The thing that really bothered me is the transition from the linear walking down a corridor to combat. It's annoyingly bad. A two-second pause between encountering whatever you're gonna fight, and the fight itself. Just when you feel the least bit connected to the character, you're yanked out of the experience by what looks like a loading screen and thrown into this sequence where your characters are bobbing about and fifteen thousand menus appear.

All in all... The movement is clunky, the freeroam-to-combat transition is flawed and the combat itself suffers of being an afterthought as for the 4-6 hours I played, the "Autoattack" was sufficient to every encounter.

THE EXCUSES

As much as I like to believe you... And I do, actually. It's not really a good thing for a game to torture you with mediocrity for up to 20 hours before the game gets 'better'. I did the clever thing, I bought it for the PS3 so I wouldn't have to swap discs.

But I'll never even get to the point where the game would tell me to swap discs if I had the 360 version, cause a game should hook me in the first 20 hours, not lose me! :I

Now, to cover my tracks... and ass; It's how I experienced the first 5-6 hours of Final Fantasy XIII. If you loved it and you feel violated, offended, insulted or a combination of all three, be my guest and rip me a new one. I don't mind... You love it, I don't. Roses are blue, violets are red. Inverted logic bla bla bla...

There.

Adios amigos.

I'm merely human, but in hindsight... I regret doing all of them. I'll make a lil' list outta it;

• PRESTIGED IN CALL OF DUTY MODERN WARFARE 2: Ohhh yes. Never once did I prestige in any of the last three CoD's. I did it out of pure misery in WaW and it pretty much killed my joy right there. To this day, the game's gone untouched since I prestiged in that game. This was before all that crap DLC Treyarch pumped out. I've been playing CoD:MW2 for so long, I got the Fall camo for the AK47, M14 EBR, M16A4, UMP 45. Long story short, unlocking the camos ran old so I figured "**** it" and hit the prestige button. It's like a fat man climbing a 90 degree steep hill, I feel... weak without my insanely overpowered material.
• MAG. Just the game in general. I love it, I really do. It's Battlefield on anabolic steroids, minus the huge selection of vehicles. But I swear, I can only die so many times before I just give up. And while dying isn't a huge issue in a game like MAG, respawning is. I feel like grabbing a rifle and unload hell on a old fashioned clock. Thirty seconds respawn, if I'm unlucky. I die so damn much, I've seen every damn second in that countdown. **** me sideways!
• BIOSHOCK 2. I scored the game 4 days before release. Was done with it 3 days before release. How far did I get into it? The third area/mission. The game just fails at gripping me. That what dragged me into Bioshock was the story, the twists and the atmosphere. Well, I kinda know the story and it's all tragic, yeah... Boo-hoo. The game lost me before the first twist could occur and the atmosphere was a bit lacking. I dunno, severe case of "been there, done that".
• GEORGE HARRISON. I fell asleep with my MP3 player on(The iPod was five bucks more expensive, sue me), with Harrison's Set on You playing on loop. I feel like Dexter, only bad lyrics instead of French.
• DENMARK. Leaving tuesday. Whats my preperation? Flannel shirt, pants, underwear, faint knowledge of Copenhagen and the three words of Danish I know; "Jeg elsker dig". Wanna know what happened last time I did this?

Portsmouth, United Kingdom. January 4th, 11:15PM, -5 degrees celcius... No hotel, no destination, trains gridlocked, busses stuck and even cars got stuck in the FIVE inches of snow.

I'm ****ed.

Right, a while ago I blindly bought MAG for the PS3 and played one round of the 64 player team deathmatch. It was a great experience...

... when I was alive.

Today, again. I play the game, rank up a couple o' times and get access to the 256 player objective based mode. I had a blast, we lost and we won. Match after match, I had a hell of a time...

... when I was alive.

Cause for the most part, I was looking at "Deployment Countdown: 19" cause I got my ass handed to me by vastly superior players who played the game for muuuuuccchhh longer, learned the maps inside out and unlocked a boatload of items they can upgrade their rifles accuracy, stability, reload time and the likes. I had a plain M4 with a reflex sight.

I got a loooonnnggg effin' way to go. Wait! Waaaiittt...

Respawn in 5, 4, 3...

YESSSS! I RISE AGAIN MOTHER****ERS!

P.S, I'm off to Denmark next week. Adios amigos!

In a way, we were actually doing it right... But what the hell.

Alright, attacking team. Me and GreggD are in a squad. I decide to hop in one of those mobile AA's. He's on the turret, I'm driving. Now this is where **** hits the fan... I go into roadrage mode. I take a tracked-tank offroad, plow through 400 yards of trees and park myself inside the first base's demolition target A.

We're both yelling into the mic like some crazy morons, while he's racking up kills I back up and start going on some deranged road rage, road-killing five people using a tank that goes slower than running... When the entire building was nothing but a shell, Gregg got sniped; To which I panicked and started unleashing hell on the crate.

I jump out and begin trying to arm the little ****er by hand, to which my friend anarchy_zombie9 who somehow ended up on the other team blew me up with a RPG-7. Now this is the part where we both did it wrong...

I got out of a perfectly healthy tank, walked into the open seeing as I effectively levelled every obstruction in my road-rage and he took a potshot at me with a RPG.

"CASE A IS DESTROYED MOVE UP"

His RPG blew up whatever little health the crate had left, somehow. And we never even got to arming the crate.

Moral of this story; Go nuts. You'll get the entire team on your ass in no time, and they'll even do the work for you!

Figured I'd give myself a little incentive to begin blogging again...

• CALL OF DUTY: VIETNAM

Somesort of Vietnam era game in a series like this is necessary. Why? Cause Vietnam is one of the big 'three'that hasn't been bled dry yet. Afterall, we can only royally **** up Germany and France for so long before you start to think "Yeah...". The big 'three' would be; World War II, Vietnam and Gulf War/Iraq-Afghanistan/Fictional modern combat.

Modern Warfare 1 & 2 effectively dominated as the name implies modern combat for give-or-take three years now, and I lost track of how many WWII games that were made in the past 10 years...

Vietnam was a huge political loss for the United States. It was one of the longest war conflicts, but also one of the most politically challenged wars. In a nutshell, it's communist-hatred to the core; Point was to prevent the infamous 'Domino effect' to kick in, meaning that they were preventing the Soviet control to spread through 'Nam into South 'Nam, Cambodia & Laos, which it eventually did.

Technicalities aside, gameplay wise the setting of a Vietnam 1965-1973 could be incredibly varied. Urban warfare as well as jungle warfare is possible, and given the vast array of weaponry/vehicles researched up to that point, it's got all the potential for a 6-9 hour single player campaign. Think Navy SEALs, USMC, Patton tanks, Twin Hueys, M16s, M60s, etc.

Now Vietnam wouldn't be Vietnam if there's no nods at the set-the-grounds moviessuch asFull Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Given the insane budgets Infinity Ward and Treyarch get, they can easily license some Rolling Stones tunes and hire top notch voice actors to make the smell of napalm burst through your TV screen while strafing over Hué...

While they got plenty of ways to screw this concept up tenfold, you gotta admit... It's somewhat fresh, and with Stanley Kubrick's stereotypes nailed into the ground; It's a good if not a greatway of continuing the series.

Might as well, amirite?

• Ballad of Gay Tony: GTAIV's 20 dollar add-on with stuff that should've been in the original game. Yeah, that's basically what ALL DLC is good for, but this one in specific left me wondering whether they took the DLC deal with Microsoft as a excuse to catch up on old times. I recall Rockstar Games' PR dudes going "We're dead serious now" story-wise and this comes along. Sure, I'm complaining... But it's here, and minus the 20$ pricetag - It's finally here, and it's damn good fun.
• Dragon Age: Origins: BioWare's new poke at old times. Quite frankly, I didn't play DA:O's "predecessor" so I can't really say anything in relation to it. So I'll just stick with saying BioWare nailed it again. I bought it for the X360 causeI can't be assed installing it and all that considering the graphics aren't worth debating about anyway. The game plays a bit like Mass Effect on a Oblivion kind of structure. Though there's this really neat, and a wee bit clunky party system that covers most of the combat - All in all, it's definitely designed for the PC I can tell you that, it works like a pain in the ass on the X360, and I think it's fair to assume the PS3 suffers from the same issue. All in all, it's a great game... And loooonnnnnngggg.
• Halo 3: ODST: I bought the game for 35$ at a mom and pop's store, and I still feel cheated out of my money. Part of me was stupid for buying a game I'm not all that interested in, part being that the game is rather... minimalized if you catch my drift. The character flashbacks put aside, which are by a mile the best things about the game, the "lone ranger" pulling through an abandoned city with maybe 5-or-6 enemies every 4 intersections really left me bored. Halo 3 was a thrill ride, from one epic firefight to the next. As much as I like a occasional 'break', a 4 hour trek through a empty city... I didn't like that so much. All in all, flashbacks are awesome. Lone city treks are boring. Firefight is a nice addition though it won't justify a purchase, atleast not for me. Though the 2nd disc with ALL Halo 3 DLC on disc was a nice addition. :D
• Left 4 Dead 2 Demo: Boycott bull**** set aside... I've got just one thing to say: Kill all sons of *****es, that's my official instruction. That uhhh... that means it's good.

I mean... Holy crap. It's been over what, five months? Meh, it's been a while and lots has changed. I've been gone from the blogging scene as spilling my guts on stuff got me rather bored after some while. Either way, I'll make a brief comeback.

So yeah, lots of ****'s been released in the past months.

• Borderlands: Diablo-meets-Fallout. While it's not that Fallout, it's still got this barren post apocalyptic Mad Max ****-gone-bad feel to it. Sure, no nukes have been dropped - But it still has that feel. Nonetheless, I love the game. Something tells me it's gonna be the sleeper hit of '09 but who knows, with Modern Warfare 2 lying around the corner, Borderlands might be leaving as quickly as it showed up.
• Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. I'm all for realism, and I did enjoy the game to a certain extend to it. But two critical flaws just piss all over the game for me, big time. One is that the AI is god forsaken horrible. I wouldn't complain quickly about AI, but this game relies so damn much on it - It just becomes a obstacle. Two, horribly placed checkpoints. No I didn't play on Hardcore cause I like to enjoy my first playthrough. Sometimes the game is overly generous with checkpoints, but sometimes it's just flatout brutal - Two ambushes, a hillclimb AND a tank face-off, all on foot and not ONE checkpoint in between, on normal?

I also scored a PS3 some time back, my PSN is LtMcBadass, feel free to add me.

• Killzone 2: I enjoyed the game quite alot, generic FPS single player but the online... Holy mother of God am I glad that I have a Dolby Surround System cause daaaamnnn the sound is AMAZING in that chaos.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Yeah, as much as I liked it... The game lost it's touch between Sunny's annoying ass appearance and Naomi's cleavage. Also, that woman in eastern-Europe... BUY HER A DAMN BRA FOR ****S SAKE.
• inFamous: Still, overall left me wondering whether -Prototype- was better afterall... Which in my opinion, sucked horribly.

And uhhh, thats it for today dudes... Guess I'll make another return in the following week should people still read my crap. So long.

To all the employees of CNet, and GameSpot, specifically to those who got laid off - I'm pretty much speechless. Still, you all simply rocked. Flatout rocked. I'm sorry that you lost your jobs, and it's a damn shame that this website lost so many great editors at once.

Salute, and goodluck.

(I'm not specifically pointing out who got laid off, cause... Well, it's more or less a mystery. But of those people named in comment sections and the like; Don, Aaron, Brian, Bethany, etc... Seriously, this website lost alot of great people.)

Been a while, hasn't it?

I told you Giantbomb would tear GameSpot apart. Now the elitist group has moved to Giantbomb(mostly), it seems that only a select group of people still resides at GameSpot. Gotta say, for people like me, that just blog - Having to choose between to websites is easiest done by just saying no to both.

The lack of censorship and the lack of "I'm friends with X, I haz status!" stuff ofcourse make Giantbomb more welcoming... But the vast amount of blogs, and crap I've done on this website overthrows both.

Speaking of a history...

Good to know GameSpot is still broken. I had 24 new PM's. Stupid union telegrams that get duplicated 4 times each. Aside from that, the website is extremely slow. And the reviews are still as crappy as always. From scores that don't line up with the text, to some guy just being flatout negative...

Ah what the hell, I always used Gametrailers for a good second opinion. Atleast those guys look at it from the "We review what we see, not what we want/expected".

Aside from the... long break, I've been working about. Got a few new projects lying around. If there's still people that slightly remember me, they would know that for some reason... It just gives an akward feeling showing off your work.

Meh, if you want it... You got it.

Anyway...
As you can see, I ain't gone. But I guess Giantbomb gets my priority... Freedom over anything. That, and half of the guys I know are overthere.

Before I bring tears to the eyes of fanboys. Far Cry 2 isn't bad. Hell, it's one of the better games I've played in a long time. I'd say it's like Saints Row 2. A long awaited break from the same old frustrating crap we always had. SR2 > GTAIV, FC2 > any other FPS. BUT!

Yes, the dreaded 'but' that allows me to make up a sobby reason of why it isn't that great.

Allow me to bring up the list of faults. Now, please note that the game is simply ****in' huge. So, there's in a way just as many faults as the next game... But... Ya' get what I mean.

• For whatever reason, driving around only causes me to get chased by God knows who. I mean, I'm supposed to drive 2 miles, passing camps and outposts that I 'cleared' before. Every damn intersection has atleast five enemies, and two will always jump in a truck and hunt me down. Sure, I survive it again and again. But I've fixed more cars already than I shot people. Really.
• No matter how realistic it is... I didn't expect that I had to drive ALL the time. I was hoping that I could 'teleport' from safehouse to safehouse. But it turns out that I can only quick-travel if I either drive to the nearest city for a bus, which is in the heart of the map. Or either one of the four bus-stops on the edges of the map. Now, do I have to remind you that the map is 50 sq. KM large? And the one section I'm in is 25 sq. KM already. So, basically I have to drive for up to five miles before I'm at a bus-station.
• I haven't really shot anything... Well, three missions got me shooting five or six guys. And most of the time I had to fend off those camping pricks. But I seriously haven't killed more than I've driven around. The most chaos I've seen thus far was after the intro-ride. And that was all scripted.
• Also, I killed a buddy. Wanna know how? Well, I got pinned down by a sniper, and took cover behind my car. I forgot that if your health is down to one bar, you'll instantly die after 10 seconds whether you're getting shot or not. So, the game send a buddy out to drag my ass out of the fire and heal me. I thought "Oh joy! A partner!". And jumped back into my car, backing up slowly thinking she'd jump in. Instead, she ran into the side of my car. Killing her. I then thought "Ofcourse..." and put the pedal to the metal.
• Malaria... It's a nasty disease. Sure. But, and this isn't a spoiler... I was out in some ambush with my buddy Joseph(the Albanian). He got shot down, and was critically wounded. So, as I'm about to kneel over and heal him. The screen turns yellow, and the Press-LB-to-snatch-a-pill thing pops up. Now, lovely enough, the action constantly gets interupted as you're getting shot. So, after a while I managed to take the pill and get down to Joe. Who was on the verge of dying, I healed him. BUT GUESS WHAT!? I died as I revived Joseph. Now, normally the game sends out another buddy that would heal you. But, remember? I killed her.....
• Cars are slow as hell. Really. I expected more from a Jeep with a damn V6 under the hood.
• While the gun jamming is nice and detailed... I can't say having your MAC10 lock up on you in the middle of a fierce firefight of 4 v.s 1 is really that much fun, let alone the challenge of trying to survive while slamming the hell out of your X button is such a big thrill.
• The storyline's quite shallow. Sure, no big deal. But I think I have the definite reason of why it's 30 hours long. 1 hour; Shooting, killing and being a badass. 29 hours; Driving from location to location.
• Camps. Earlier I said that driving around only seems to piss off random campers. But... Who are they? Why the **** are they shooting me? WHO ARE THEY!? It's like the game tries so hard to get you ingaged in a firefight, but with all the driving, do I really have to be scared to take a damn turn at a crossroad!?

Yeah... I've got some big issues with the game. No matter how much I like it, they took realism too far.