...with the Star Wars the Force Unleashed demo. I thought the game was going to be something special and something amazing, but it was very, very meh. The force powers were underwhelming and the lightsaber combat even more so. I was really looking forward to this game too. Oh well. :(

I also bought Braid the other day. Now that game is good. I am on World 5 right now and am stuck, but I know I will work it out once I figure out how to get the shadow guy to work right.

I had my first editorial featured in the Soapbox on the main page. Well, a year and eleven days, but like I said, roughly a year. I remember how exited I was when the soapbox emblem appeared in my profile. :P It is strange to think how long ago that was now.

I think I've lost 25 games of solitaire in a row. What the hell. :evil:

My win percentage has plummeted from 11% to 7% in this streak. This really is getting depressing... :lol:

I got back earlier today. I have to say the trip there sucked. it took 10 hours for a five hour drive. Everything you could possibly imagine that could go wrong did. The whole trip wasn't very exiting, and I got no work done really. I did do a few cool things like a chairlift to the top of a mountain and walking around town, but other than that, it was mostly waiting to go home. The ride home was much better.

Oh, and my house got egged while we were away.

Man, I wish that game was still popular. It was the first game I ever played over Xbox Live, and in terms of quality, in my mind it has yet to be topped. I used to play hours on end of a player made game called "tag", in which three spies faced off against one mercenary, and whichever spy died first (spies had one life each, mercs 3) would be the merc next round. If the merc failed to kill any spies, he would have to play again as the merc. This mode worked perfectly because the spies and mercs had a perfect balance of power between them, and depending on who you played with, it could be a real challenge.

The two main maps me and my friends played on were Warehouse and Krauser Lab. Warehouse was the map everyone played on,by far the most popular map in the game. What made it so interesting and popular was its first area, a two floor warehouse, with plenty of boxes for the spies to hide around. The merc would stay up on the walkway and shoot frag grenades down at the spies, hoping to get a lucky kill, and on occasion, if he was not careful, he would get his neck broken by a spy who ran up and around him. The mercs also had a room of their own to spawn in, with a long hallway leading out with hiding spots, so a careless merc could have himself spawn killed if he let the spies in accidentally. Also, if a merc was grabbed near the door (before the neck break) the spies could use him to open the door, then break his neck inside the spawn.

I remember we eventually made a rule, if you broke the merc's neck, you were immune from being the merc next round, even if you were the first killed, because we hated when people would just sit back and hide while other people died. Then there was the no "double jumping" rule, which requires a bit of explaining. When a spy jumped on a merc's head, the merc went unconscious and fell to the floor. After a few seconds, he would get up, and while he was getting up, a spy could jump down onto him, landing on an invisible wall of sorts above the merc's head, and once the merc stood fully erect again, the spy would bash him on the head, killing him. It was one of those cheap things that they did eventually take out of the game, making the merc electrified when he arose, which some of you may have seen in Chaos Theory.

Then there was the most hated map in the game by many, even though me and my friends loved it, Krauser Lab. What made it fun was the many, many rooms with different properties and vents all around which made the merc's life a living hell. Perhaps the most attractive feature of the map was the elevator, which the spies would huddle together in and press the button right before the merc was able to shoot a frag inside, but of course sometimes the doors didn't close fast enough... and boom, game over.

Of course, I did do more than just tag. Ranked matches offered an intense matchup between two spies and two mercs. Depending on the game type, the spies had different goals, but the most popular by far was neutralization. The goal in neutralization was for the spies to hack into and disarm objectives placed around the map, and this usually took, well, I can't remember the exact time, but it was long enough for the mercs to walk on over and kill the hacker (though progress on hacking was saved). This is where the other spy came in, with the job of killing the mercs if possible (no riles against double jumping in ranked matches) or at least slowing them down with smoke and tazing. It was tons of fun. Of course, if either side ran out of lives, the game ended, and this was probably the more common outcome. Also, if time ran out, the spies lost, so at times stealth gave way to desperation.

When Halo 2 came out, about 90% of the game's population moved on, including myself, to that blockbuster of a game. I still played occasionally, but Halo 2 was so new, so fun... so...everything. (That game would occupy the next two years of my online gaming) I din't really play PT again until I rented it maybe a year later (I traded it in eventually, a big mistake on my end) only to find it all but deserted, as by that time Chaos Theory came out.

I did purchase Chaos Theory soon after its release. I was disappointed to find that Krauser Lab was not one of the maps they chose to port, even though its status as "worst map" probably doomed it. Warehouse was back though, and most of CT's population played it, as most new maps in that game were pretty bad. The game offered so many additions and enhancements to the gameplay, which at first seemed awesome. I loved using the smg for the merc instead of the assault rifle. However, I eventually came to hate that game's multiplayer. The new additions gave the game a much different feel and style, and tag was never the same. Nothing was the same. It really is hard to explain unless you played PT and loved it as much as I did. All the additions felt unnecessary and felt like a failed attempt to give the game more flare. Perhaps PT's simplicity and limited number of items are what made its play so interesting and strategic, much more so than CT.

Double Agent came out a little while ago, and it totally changed the formula, giving the mercs incredible power over the spies, which was supposed to emphasize stealth. I hated it. The balance is what made PT so good (and CT playable... somewhat. None of my friends played more than a week of that game's multiplayer mode, because in my opinion and theirs, it sucked.

Even if none of you bother to read all this, it sure was fun as hell to write and reminisce on days of old. As I look to my left and see Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, GTA IV, and Gears of War sitting on my table I wish I could trade them all in for what I used to have, fun games of tag with my friends from school and from all over the country becausenothing can match what I had four years ago, an amazing, fun game that I was foolish to ever rid myself of.

_____________________

Oh, and I leave for New York tomorrow. Fun fun. :(

Including today, I have two days left. Two days left until I leave for New York to visit my Grandmother, My Aunt, and my two cousins out in Northern Ney York State. It will be nice seeing them and all, but I dread the trip. My Grandmother has to be the cheapest person on the planet, as well as one of the most boring, and my cousins are both very young, and very annoying...

Worst of all, there will be nothing to do. It is a vacation house in the middle of nowhere, like my Grandmother always gets. Every year we go out to visit her while she is out on vacation somewhere, usually in Maine, and every time it is pure torture. She hates eating out, hates anything that costs money, hates fun really.

I guess this will be a good chance to get some summer reading done, perhaps even some calculus summer work. Damn do I dread the four hour trip there and three days spent doing nothing. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to make the best of it, like I do every year.

...and man was it simply terrible. This game was Frontlines Fuels of War for the 360. The single player mode made me want to kill myself. The controls were terrible, the guns generic, the storyline simplistic and idiotic, the sniper rifle whimpy, the tanks impossible to control, and to top it off, the game tried to be cool. But it wasn't. Not at all.

Me and my "stray dogs" (yes, that is the name of your squad) drudged through seven levels of terrible enemy AI and fumbling inconsistencies, such as a propaganda station in Russia that was transmitting propaganda to the population of the area in English, until the final level, which was a pretty big fail. They had maybe twenty guys defending their communications center and thirty their head of government. After those were taken, I had to defend the center of Moscow from a supposedly MASSIVE counter attack with my squad, even though my squad never followed me. :x And in this epic of truly epic last stands, I fought off maybe twenty-five guys, two tanks, and a helicopter. Wow. What an impressive counter-attack. Youd think they'd send like an army in to retake their capital, but nope, they send in a small squad.

Also in that last level, the game really tried to make you hate the Russians. Apparently the Russians forced civilians into fighting to defend the city (even though these civilians fought as well as the regular soldiers) which was supposed to be sick, and the game made this known to you many times. And of course, me and my stray dogs are the perfect knights of salvation, saving the world from the evil communist Russians! Honestly, the whole thing made me laugh.

Another thing, many times the general guy or whatever ordered the stray dogs in to take an objective (which most are taken by sitting on some smoke or holding x) where the US-European Coalition army failed. The stray dogs have like 20 guys though. So when an army fails to kill roughly 35 people and maybe a tank holding a bridge, take them out and send in one squad! Makes perfect sense!

Here is another thing that bothered me (and yes, there were MANY).About half way through the game, at the start of a mission, theRussians deply a tactical nuke and take out 90% of the tank squadron you are in. Fine, I can accept that. The tank I was in supposedly protects me from radiation (which I don't fully buy) so the first half of the mission is in a tank. The second half, however, begins after advancing maybe a half mile, and I'm guessing the nuke (and later a second nuke) detonated maybe 3-4 miles away (they said it was a small nuke...) And after advancing this half mile, towards where the nuke detonated mind you, the general guy said the radiation levels were gone and it was safe to leave the tanks. This is maybe 15 minutes after the detonation mind you. The numbers just don't make sense to me. I didn't realize a nuclear missile's effects totally wore off after fifteen minutes. Oh, and later in the game, after an ICBM I'm guessing detonates after hitting the launch bay doors I closed on it, fallout rains down on the entire area. And while this is happening, everyone is just sitting outside and acting like nothing is happening. It is ****ing fallout for Christ's sake.

Honestly, I didn't even touch the game's online, which is supposed to be better. The controls and gunplay just suck too much. Oh well, I guess I'm glad my brother only rented it. :?

I'm sorry if this whole thing wasn't really that well-written, but it is midnight and I just don't feel like trying too hard. :P

Guess what movie comes out on my birthday, October 24, in NA this year. It is a real classic, one of those movies we will all look back on and say "where were you on the day ____ was released?" One of those movies where others like Citizen Kane are measured against it, and found inferior, one of those movies you will go to see at least ten times, a movie that will surely hit #1 in the box office, a movie that has an unbelievably deep storyline, a movie that makes Jaws look like Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie that we will show our children, a movie that will stay burned in our memories forever....

And that movie is....

*dramatic pause*

Saw V

Whoopdie ****ing-do. I can't wait. And Saw VI is already being planned.

I can't wait to hear 90% of my grade talking about this one. :roll:

Feel the need to yell "double kill! Triple kill!..." as they get them? As if your entire team wants to know what medals you are getting. :roll:

It gets annoying really quickly. REALLY quickly. Especially if there is a guy on your team with the sword, and he isjust sitting around a corner slicing people down one by one, which is great, but sometimes I just want to stick the guy with a plasma if he keeps on yelling "OMGZ GUYZ I GOTZ A TRIPLE KILL FOR THE 3RD TIME THIS GAME! A TRIPLE TRIPLE KILL!".... "DOUBLE KILL AGAIN!"

If you do this, I beg you, for my sanity, please stop.

My house got egged again. Did I piss someone off that bad? I haven't talked to anyone in my neighborhood in weeks. I almost caught the kids, but it was too dark out. I'm going to do a little investigating around the neighborhood tomorrow and see if I can find anything out, because whoever did this is probably bragging about it.