I have been using the online handle "Shawcross" for a little over 10 years now. I get questions from friends every now and then what it stands for or means.

The name itself is based off a serial killer named Arthur J. Shawcross who was better known as The Genesee River Killer in New York state. I have always had a weird facination with serial killers and the darker side of humanity. Before anyone asks NO I AM NOT A KILLER or anything like that. As a kid I was a hardcore horror movie fan and once I realized there were real life horror stories I became a enthusiast.

Growing up I literally read most of the serial killer books at my local library which caused a few raised eyebrows from the local librarians. Chose Shawcross as my name because my library had the most books on him than any other so I knew more about him.

Since I no longer really read anything on serial killers and its kinda a once in a while hobby I have thought about changing my handle. For years now space has been my main attaction and I have thought about changing my handle to something to do with astronomy. Main problem is that I use Shawcross on almost all my websites and would not want to get rid of those pages cause of the name.

How did all of you get your online names?

So this past weekend I went to see John Carter. The entire movie was actually pretty well done for a Disney PG-13 title and I have no regrets. Would even recommend it to other friends. Good acting as well, especially from Willem Dafoe.

It has been getting a lot of backlash cause of the price the film cost to make and the fact it was PG13. I do not know what planet these parents are from when they take their 5 year old to a PG13 movie then complain about it being to violent and having a couple curse words. Seems like they saw the big "DISNEY" sign on the poster and didn't even look at the rating. When the girlfriend and I were watching it there were at least 3 small children down the aisle from us (sad face).

Overall this movie is two thumbs up. Granted I only judge movies on a scale of two, Good or Bad and this movie is definitely good.

Next up I got Mass Effect 3 the day it released. Finished it yesterday evening on insanity hardness my first time through. The entire game was amazingly well done and pulled at your heart quite often. They made the story more engrossing and you had a sense of hurry while playing since you knew the Reapers were destroying the galaxy.

My ownly qualm with the game was the ending (at first). Everything was fine up till then and I was boggled by it. I had the best possible ending I assume since I had my readiness for the final fight over 6000 and had played the multiplayer enough to have all systems 100%. After thinking long and hard about the ending I am not super disappointed in it since I have my own theory. The first few hours after beating it though I was basically scratching my head asking myself if that really was "IT" for the series.

When thinking about ME3 story wise I feel kinda sad cause my adventure with "Shaw Shepard" is over. Have had that character since ME1 and have grown quite attached to him. I will look back on the ME series with Shepard as one of the best.

Dear Bioshock 2 Developer

I would like to say. Please never make a online game again. You suck at it. The only thing you achieved by trying to cash in on multi-player content is the worst 2009 Online experience. Please keep the Bioshock series single player in the future and don't tarnish the series more.

Sincerely: Jonathan Powell

Well yesterday I posted a blog on here about how I was waiting for my new Splinter Cell Elite 360 Bundle to come in from Fedex. Well it finally came in and its amazing. I already have a Elite but this baby is packing a 250 gid HD. Since I was being nice I decided to give the new console to my girlfriend so we can have one in the bedroom and living room. Since the decided to give me a 3 month Gold card and a Scene It? bundle I gave those to her as well. She isn't a gamer but she does have a gamertag and now with the new card she has Xbox Live Gold yoohoo. Mainly when we set up her console in the bedroom its going to be for Netflix since her and I are huge movie buffs.

After we opened the box yesterday we decided to play Scene It? and let me tell you its really a lot of fun. It was just us 2 playing with the buzzer controllers it gave us and we couldn't stop laughing. She isn't that into games but we played like 4 hours yesterday. She is beating me overall 3 games to 2 as of this writing. I am going to try to tie it up later tonight. For anyone that doesn't know Scene It? is a movie trivia game.

Here are a couple photos of what it looked like when the box was opened. They had the 3 month card just taped to the console box which has me guessing that they just have loose Gold Cards laying around the Xbox Warehouse in the town next to us :) I would like to thank Ubisoft and the creators of Splinter Cell Conviction for putting on this sweepstakes and for the quick replies to my emails.

Well a while back I entered into this Sweepstakes through Facebook called "The Hunt for Sam Fisher Sweepstakes" which was basically a little mini game on facebook using google images and finding different Splinter Cell related characters in cities. Before I started playing I entered the sweepstakes which was being used to promote the new game and the new mini game on facebook. A weekago or so I got a email from Ubisoft saying I had won the grand prize which was a Splinter Cell Conviction 360 Elite Bundle so my jaw dropped.

They sent me the tracking number for my Fedex package and it seems it was delivered to Burbank CA like a month before lol So I was confused and emailed them back that it had not ever arrived a month ago and I lived in Des Moines WA. So yesterday I got a updated Tracking number for Fedex and the package should be arriving today. Oddly enough the Xbox Warehouse is located right here next to my town only like 15 minutes away so its shipping from someplace really close. I noticed in the package they are including a "Scene It Bundle" and a 3 Month Gold Card which I am guessing for their slight mix up with the order/winner.

I will post pics of me opening it later. I have been a Splinter Cell fan ever since the first one but had not gotten around to picking up the new one since I have been engrossed in other games at the moment (Red Dead Redemption) so this is one hell of a surprised and bonus.

Now to start off this blog I will tell you guys how I rate mine. I always ask myself after I beat a game rather or not I feel I got my moneys worth. On my game rating list here you will see quite a lot of 10 ratings simply cause I felt that for the price I got either a lot out of the game or spent a large number of hours on the game. Even if the game isn't great as long as I had a semi enjoyable time on it and the price was not too steep for the "bad" game then it was worth it.

Now I know other people have a intricate system they use for their ratings including Gamespot. I was just curious as to how all of the viewers of this rate your games? What do you take into account and factor when rating?

This has been on Major Nelsons blog for a while so not exactly sure when this promotion will end but if you use these 360 codes you will receive a free Bing search engine T-Shirt for your 360 avatar. The male avatar shirt comes in black and the female one in White.

Male: PHT9P-KXR4Y-BB6BY-VFMPD-THT4T

Female: VFH6P-9FJKK-KKP9G-H4DRH-WTCFM

In case you don't know how to redeem a code. Hit your middle home button then scroll to the far left till you see the option "Redeem Code" from there just type in which ever shirt code you want. You do not need to put the dash since it will do it automatically.

Now as most people who play Modern Warfare 2 or who surf the xbox.com forums have seen in the past 2 days there is a video of a Xbox Live Enforcement Team member named The Pro supposedly abusing his powers. In the video it shows him threatening then suspending people in a Modern Warfare 2 lobby. Original Video

Now I am here to show you how much this video is edited. In the original video iTz LuPo the person uploading it and notorious Xbox Modder said his capture card was messing up thats why the audio is out of sync. I as a capture card heavy user know for a fact that the audio would not be so out of sync as it is in that video even if it was messing up. More evidence of this is the fact that The Pro was on the other team and yet you could still hear him talking for a long while during the match which is impossible and even with a audio lag on his capture card it would not of been that out of sync. Notice also that the video jumps around from gameplay to lobby again and you can tell you are only getting pieces of conversations (pieces that he wants you to hear)

Now a day after the original video was uploaded to youtube and went viral a second video appeared showing a clip of unedited footage of why The Pro was acting the way he did. (foul language)Unedited ClipIn the video you can hear a young kid mouthing off to The Pro in a pretty obscene manner and threatening his grandma.

After watching the second clip you can see how the editing took place to specifically make The Pro look guilty of abusing his powers. Even if his choice of words and tone were not what people expect The Pro is trying to help and probably has to put up with this abuse on a regular basis now. I am guessing he was probably targeted from the start since he is one of the few Live Enforcement members people know about and he posts on the xbox.com forums from time to time warning people which made him a prime target for this.

Around a year ago I used to play Metal Gear Online a lot and that community doesn't have a moderator of any sort on the North American server so I set out to film lag switchers/glitchers during our weekly tournaments. (cheaters used to win every single week with nothing being done) I would film them then upload the videos to youtube and send the direct links to Konami getting ALOT of people suspended/banned from the MGO servers. As I started filming more videos and even showed my face in a couple of them laughing at the cheaters I think they felt I was insulting them personally.

Over a period of a couple months I got harassed and even had people copying my MGO names trying to frame me and get me banned. Even had forum posts dedicated to me on glitching websites that had MGO forums with them all trying to figure out a way to bring me down. Now as this pertains to the situation at hand it is almost the same thing just on a wider scale.

I feel that these cheaters/modders are targeting The Pro cause he is the only real face they have of a Enforcement Team member and he is vocal about banning people. This shows you why most mods try to stay behind the scenes so people can't put a face to a person or in this case a gamertag picture to a person.

Thanks for reading my insight into this.

Is it just me or are other people getting fed up with getting a game a year or two after it is released on the 360 to find that the online portion of the game is totally dead without a single person playing. Just today I was trying to find a match on NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 and it would take me 30 minutes just to get one person into my room and it takes 4 people just to start a match. It wouldn't bother me so much if there was not achievements involved in the online portions of these dead games.

I think that Microsoft and or the developers of the game should release the achievements viral to people who log into the online portion of their games after they have had a very inactive period of lets say 6 months so that people that get the game late can still get the points from the game. Most games that have come out over a year and a half ago that were not AAA titles or well known titles have absolutely no one playing them which makes it impossible to get any form of achievement points.

I think that the games would actually get a boost of players also if they released the games online achievements since people would get the game for the points and then play the storyline to achieve the rest of them. Either way I am just ranting and fed up with this.

Ok so last night my girlfriend and I went to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. My girlfriend was not as hyped up for this movie as I was so I had to talk her into going with me. We went to the theater and the show we wanted to see which was at the 8:50pm time was already sold out so we decided to go with the 12:15am showing (yes we went that late lol) I will recommend seeing this in IMAX or 3D

From the opening to the ending the movie never gets dull and this movie is over 2 hours long. The 3D glasses at our theater were huge so it was funny seeing all these people out at midnight with my girlfriend and I all looking like dorks. The place was sold out even at the midnight showing. From the very beginning when the 3D images come on this movie is just captivating. The CG graphics are totally amazing and are the best I have ever seen in any movie. You can hardly tell that almost the entire movie is CG. (continued below)

All the characters in this movie are so well written and you get attached to them very early on in the film. I actually almost felt like crying when theNa'vi had their home destroyed and with the IMAX audio you could feel the destruction in your chest cavity which gave it a sense of realism.

I totally hope that they turn this movie into a book series since I would love to learn more about the planet Pandora and more about the Na'vi. I have not felt so content and amazed after seeing a movie like I have for Avatar in over 10 years. My girlfriend and I were smiling ear to ear and were still breathless at least 2 hours after the movie. She had better listen to my suggestions about what to watch in the future for now on........ LOL