Since everyone else is doing it, I figured I'd give my obligatory list of games that I beat this past year.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Battlefield: Bad Company
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Guitar Hero Metallica
Wolfenstein 3D
Left 4 Dead
Halo 3: ODST
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War

Only 13 games last year...I guess that just goes to show how much busier I'm getting as I get older, and have less time to play video games and/or post blogs...so I'm sorry about that. But I guess that's just life.

Alright well, have a good one everybody.

Yeah, I bought one yesterday with money I had saved up. It's pretty awesome. I got the $500 160GB bundle. I also bought:

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (came with the bundle)
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (of course)
Killzone 2 (loved the first one)
SOCOM: Confrontation (loved all the other games in the series, plus it came with a bluetooth headset)

Taken on Blu-Ray (awesome movie)
Pineapple Express on Blu-Ray (hilarious)

So I've played all of the games except MGS4. I'm saving that one for this summer so I can knock it out all at once. I beat the first level of Killzone 2, and it's pretty amazing. The graphics are astounding, and it seems to be following in the tradition of the first one with due improvements. SOCOM: Confrontation is pretty neat. Easy to pick up and play; I went 14/12 kill/death ratio my first round that I played. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting the bluetooth headset to pair with my PS3, so I'll have to mess around with that some more later. I've gotten through the first few levels of Uncharted, and I like it so far. It's cool how it's like a treasure hunt platformer and everything.

So yeah my PSN ID is Rocker531, same as my 360 Gamertag, so all of you PS3 owners out there...feel free to send me a friend request.

That reminds me, I haven't really been updating my blog a lot on here recently cause I've been really busy and....lazy. So I apologize that I haven't been keeping track of yall's blog as well. I guess I'll just see you guys around on XBL or PSN then.

PEACE

...was yesterday, February 15th, 2009. I don't normally do this, but for everyone's sake, (mine because I'm a little tired right now, and yours to make it quicker to read) I'm going to do this blog in bullet format.

- On Friday, I started Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and I love it. Beat it within a day. Best graphics I've ever seen in a game, and an emotional story that really hits you hard when one of your squad mates gets killed off in a cutscene. Definitely the best in the Brothers in Arms series.
- I found all the recon points/Kilroys in the game, so with those achievements plus the ones I got from just going through the game, this earned me 775 more points added to my Gamerscore.
- Upon beating the last level, that brought my total Gamerscore over the 10,000 milestone, just one day before my one-year anniversary. :)
- It's funny, because I told myself when I got my 360 that I wasn't going to become obsessive over getting all the achievements, and while I'm not quite at that point, I've often found myself going out of my way to get some achievements. (Not through boosting, though, lol)
- So, although I earned over 10,000G in one year, I hardly consider myself to be an achievement whore (*CoughFrankthelizardCough*). Haha, just playing with ya Connor.
- Also, a while back I really got into the game Rainbow Six Vegas 2. It's pretty addicting, and I like it a lot. I strove toward getting 100% of the achievements for it, but I only got to 735/1000 before I put it down for a while so that I wouldn't get sick of it.
- Then, I really started to get into Assassin's Creed, and I'm currently on the final Assassination/Mission. The only achievements I have left for this game are all the flag ones, and of course the ones you get by finishing the game (Conversationalist, Hungerer of Knowledge, Disciple of the Creed, etc.) I plan on getting all the flags before moving on to the final mission though, because I don't see myself having any motivation to do so after beating the game.
- Rock Band 2 is still awesome and addicting.
- F.E.A.R. 2 and Shellshock 2 both look like awesome games, and I really want to get them soon.
- Finally, I started watching the show 24 this season, and it's amazing. I definitely see why everyone likes this show.
- That's it for now, guys! PEACE!

Hey guys, just thought I'd reflect on and mention all of the games in chronological order that I've beaten in 2008.

Conflict: Desert Storm
Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad
Mafia
Conflict: Global Terror
Halo 3
Gears of War
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Perfect Dark Zero
BioShock
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
Grand Theft Auto IV
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
BlackSite: Area 51
Medal of Honor Heroes
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent
Medal of Honor Heroes 2
Medal of Honor: European Assault
Star Wars Republic Commando
Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Need for Speed Most Wanted
Dead Space
Gears of War 2
Call of Duty: World at War
Crysis

All in all, 28 games, which is exactly one more than I beat last year, lol. Yeah, I just beat Call of Duty: World at War and Crysis today. I really have to say that Call of Duty: World at War is drastically better than the previous Treyarch-developed Call of Duty games. I especially loved the ending. I truly got goosebumps during that final sequence on top of the Reichstag. To me, it was an even better ending than that of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

As far as Crysis goes, that game is amazing as well. The story was solid, and the graphics were breathtaking, as was the gameplay. Definitely pick this one up if you have the PC to run it.

All right guys, those are the games I beat in '08! Peace!

Hey guys, I know I haven't posted a blog since August, but I've just been really busy with junior year. I'm always working on a mountain of school work, and when I'm not, I'm just relaxing playing games. Well, as of the 18th, I'm officially on Christmas Break. So, I'll probably post a blog in a couple days telling what games I've been playing over the course of this semester, but right now I'm just gonna let everyone know what I got for Christmas. I was actually kindof shocked at how much my parents and my brother spent on gifts for me, because normally I don't get this much. But yeah, my brother is actually in the work force now, earning a professional salary, which is how he justified spending so much on me as opposed to last year. Plus, he said he got them all for really cheap on half.com, so yeah. Without further ado, here's what I got for Christmas this year.

From My Parents:
- Xbox 360 Games
- Assassin's Creed
- Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
- Call of Duty: World at War
- Left 4 Dead
- Mass Effect

- DVDs
- The Dark Knight
- Iron Man
- Tropic Thunder

- Clothes
- Terrell Owens Replica Jersey (I love the Dallas Cowboys, by the way)
- Terrell Owens T-Shirt that has the same layout of a jersey (i.e. number on front and back, cowboys on the front, his name on the back)
- Alabama Crimson Tide Hoodie (We're big Alabama fans in my family)
- Livestrong T-Shirt
- Family Guy Stewie Underwear

- Miscellaneous
- 1600 Microsoft Points
- 2009 Family Guy Wall Calendar

From My Brother:
- Xbox 360 Games
- Battlefield: Bad Company
- Medal of Honor: Airborne
- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2

- DVDs
- Family Guy: Volume Six
- Resident Evil: Extinction
- Revenge of the Nerds: The Atomic Wedgie Collection

And I got a total of $250 in money and gift cards from relatives.

Alright guys, that's it! Have a Merry Christmas/Happy Hannukah!

Hey guys! Today marks my 3rd year @ GameSpot! It's been pretty awesome, and I plan on staying for a long time (even though I'm at Giant Bomb too)!

- So yeah, I started my Junior year on Monday. So far, it's not too bad, but I am taking a couple hard clas$es, however theres a few easy ones in there to make up for it.

- Today after school, there were tryouts for the Cross Country team. Originally, they were supposed to be at 6:30 this morning, but fortunately, there were some thunderstorms throughout the night and it continued to rain for part of this morning. But there was still cloud cover, which was good, so it wasn't too hot.

- The way they did the tryouts was that everyone there ran 2 miles on the track. The top 25 finishers made the team. 26 tried out, so only one didn't make it. I came in 12th, with a time of 12:46. A week ago when I timed it, it was 12:36, so I think I just didn't have that great of a race today. I started out way too fast for the first lap, and then slowed down kindof gradually with my friend that I stayed with the whole time. But the important thing is that I wasn't last, and that's good, so I'm really happy.

- As I mentioned in my last blog, I got basically a new computer for my birthday, along with Crysis, which I can run on all high settings (check out my blog below for the full specs of my computer). In short, this game is AMAZING. The graphics are incredible, the story is really cool, and all the gameplay features rock. I love this game. So far, I've gotten about 20 minutes into the 3rd level, and like I said, this game is seriously spectacular.

- Regarding my summer gaming goals, I actually had only completed 75% of them by the end of the summer, due to the fact that after I beat Medal of Honor: European Assault and Star Wars Republic Commando, I pretty much just felt like playing CoD4 most of the time until I got my new computer set up with Crysis. By the way, I got to Level 55, which I guess was a bonus for my summer gaming goals. I don't think I'm gonna prestige any time soon because I just want to work on getting all the gold weapons. I don't want to have to rank all the way up again. By the way, another bonus was beating Medal of Honor Heroes 2 which I beat right before I started Medal of Honor: European Assault.

- On a more random note, I've discovered over the summer that I LOVE peanut butter. On almost anything. Bagels. Pancakes. Waffles. Biscuits. SANDWICHES (PB&J, of course. Sometimes PB&Banana, somtimes PB&J&Banana). Rice cakes. Ice cream. BANANA MILKSHAKES, etc. I don't know why, but before then, I used to hate peanut butter, with a passion. But hey, I guess people's tastes change when they go through adolescence.

So that's it for now, guys! See ya later!

Hey guys! I'm finally 16 today! I have to wait until the 8th though to get my driver's license, since I didn't get my learner's permit until the 8th last year, and it's required for me to wait a year after I've had my permit to get my license. Oh well. The important thing is that I will have it before school starts back up for me on the 11th, so I'll be able to drive to school. I didn't get a car for my birthday; I wasn't expecting one, because my parents won't let me get a car until I've earned the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest rank in Boy Scouts (yes, I'm a Boy Scout. Laugh it up and make fun of me if you want.). This is pretty common for a lot of Scouts in my area, some parent had the idea to make an incentive of it so their kid wouldn't get lazy, and a lot of other parents copied them. It's no big deal though, because I already have my mom's old '98 Toyota Camry to drive in the mean time (she got a new car in February), and basically all I have left for completing my Eagle Scout rank is my Board of Review, and then I'm done.

Anyway, without further ado, here's what all I got for my birthday, all of these items were on my birthday list, so I'm pretty happy.

Valeo Pullup Bar - it has adjustable sliders that keeps the pressure on itself when put into a doorway; I need one of these to build up my arms and back because as a distance runner, I need to start doing some cross-training to stay in overall better shape rather than just my endurance
Forrest Gump DVD
Harold & Kumar go to White Castle DVD
ATI Radeon HD 3850 Video Card - Since my dad was building me basically a new computer because he wanted mine to be the same for the one he built for my brother, who just graduated college and has his own apartment now, he started upgrading all this stuff on my computer, and then this video card was just a birthday present for me. I originally asked for an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, but my motherboard wouldn't support it because it used a PCI Express slot, whereas this one uses an AGP slot. It's basically the equivalent of it though.
Crysis - Of course, what good would an awesome new computer be without "system-hog" games to be played on it? Yeah, I look forward to playing this after my dad installs the operating system and other software on my new computer.

And I should be getting some money or gift cards in the mail from relatives sometime soon, so I'll probably buy a 360 game or a new PC game with that, maybe Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2, or World in Conflict or something.

Here's the specs on the upgrades from my old computer to my new one:

New Motherboard - not sure exactly what's better about it, my dad said it was more efficient or something
Hard Drive - 300 Gb, old one was 75 Gb
RAM - 4 Gb, used to have 2 Gb
CPU - Runs at 800 mHz, old one ran at 533 mHz
Power Supply - 650w, old one was 430w
Video Card - ATI Radeon HD 3850, the old one I had was an ATI Radeon 9800

So yeah, that's it! I'm going to see The Dark Knight again with my brother and dad (it's the only movie I've ever even CONSIDERED seeing a second time in theaters), and then later tonight, we're going to a Japanese steakhouse for dinner, coming home and eating some Banana Crunch Cake that my mom is making for me. So this is a pretty awesome birthday for me!

...because I got back from seeing The Dark Knight a few hours ago, and it was definitely the best movie I've seen all year. Even better than Batman Begins. Christian Bale and Heath Ledger are at their best performances in this movie.

In other words, any fan of action films would do well to go see this as soon as possible.

Hey guys, another quick update here of my summer gaming goals.

Last Sunday, I finished Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (Xbox). All in all it was a pretty good game, but I didn't think it was as good as Pandora Tomorrow.

Then, tonight, I finished Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent (Xbox 360). Hands down, this is the best game in the series in my opinion. Slightly better than Pandora Tomorrow, and a lot better than Chaos Theory, all of the gameplay improvements in this game were definitely for the better. I actually liked the game so much that I changed my GameSpot Icon to a Double Agent one.

I guess I liked Pandora Tomorrow and Double Agent the best because they really captured my interest through the amazing story and the beautiful environments. They were both developed by Ubisoft Shanghai, while the original Splinter Cell game and Chaos Theory were developed by Ubisoft Montreal. In fact, I'll probably just give Splinter Cell Conviction a rent at first just to see if it's good enough to buy, since it too is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal.

So now that those are done, I'm through with 4 out of the 8 games I aimed to finish by the end of the summer. I have 4 weeks left before school starts, so I figure that should be enough time to get them knocked out. The 4 games out of the list of 12 that I have chosen to beat are Medal of Honor: European Assault, Star Wars Republic Commando, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, and Tony Hawk's Underground. I've chosen the first two because they are supposedly really short; I haven't played really them yet. I chose Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy because I've had this game for a long time now and have wanted to get into it, but simply haven't had the time. And Tony Hawk's Underground, I'm pretty far into the game, so it shouldn't take me long to beat it.

Next Goal: Beat Medal of Honor: European Assault

So yeah, everyone. Just wanted to update you on how I'm doing with my goals. So until next time, take it easy!

P.S. Just for anyone who was wondering, I've kindof streamlined my Now Playing list so now only games that I play on a near daily basis are on there, and ones that I'm currently working on beating. Before, I had a ton of them up there and it was just really cluttered, and didn't necessarily reflect what I was playing all the time and was more of a backlog of sorts. So now, like I said, it's basically just what a Now Playing list is supposed to be to begin with.

You know that feeling you get when you're planning you're vacation, and you can't really contain your excitement because you know it's gonna be an awesome trip? Well, that's similar to what I'm feeling right now, and I'll tell you why.

It all started when I was reading a blog post by KnightsofRound that he put up about a month ago. He mentioned that he was playing Diablo II: Lord of Destruction sort of on and off. Now at this point, I hadn't really heard too much about the Diablo series, and I wasn't too interested. But in between the time of me reading that blog and now, I've sortof been reading up on the franchise, and I gradually became more interested, particularly over the past week with all the rumors flying about regarding the 2008 Blizzard WorldWide Invitational. After hearing such various theories on the splash pages that had refreshed with a new image each passing day of this past week on the Official Blizzard website that I had seen myself, I began hoping that it was in fact Diablo III that was going to be announced today. And sure enough, it was.

So since I figure that while StarCraft II was announced over a year ago, and it is still yet to be released, or even have a scheduled release date, Diablo III is way off in the distance, and most likely won't be released until sometime after StarCraft II hits the store shelves. This will give me plenty of time to catch myself up on the series, and here's my plan for going about doing this.

My birthday is just over a month from now, and I'm putting the Diablo Battle Chest at the top of my list. This package includes the first two games and the expansion pack, along with the strategy guide. Once I get this, I can start getting caught up on the series in this order.

- Diablo
- Diablo II
- Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Then, once I've beaten all three of those, I'm gonna read all seven of the books that are out in the order that they were published.

- Diablo: Legacy of Blood
- Diablo: The Black Road
- Diablo: The Kingdom of Shadow
- Diablo: Moon of the Spider
- Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy, Book One - Birthright
- Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy, Book Two - Scales of the Serpent
- Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy, Book Three - The Veiled Prophet
...all of which were written by Richard A. Knaak, except the second on the list, which was in fact written by Mel Odom.

So yeah, that's my masterminded plan on getting into the Diablo series and getting ready for Diablo III, lol.

Peace