I'm going to keep this short because I have a nasty habit of wasting all my gaming time bloging.

I started Tron 2.0 from scratch last week and when I switched
over to R6 Vegas (1) I kept getting my butt shot off so I decided to restart that game too. Wow did I blow through that fast the second time through. I got back up to where I was in three nights (maybe 5 hours) and I'm diving back in after I'm done writing this. I'm still holding off on The Chronicles of Riddick because I'm still waiting for the movies to get here. OH TRIXY!!!! UPS only takes three days from your house to mine. :x

I got a new rank Defias Brotherhood. I liked I fell asleep better and I'm not thrilled with having a WoW reference but it's no big deal. To say I'm not a big fan of WoW would be the politest way to put it.

Not much else going on in my gaming world this week but that doesn't mean I'm not putting in a few solid hours of play. I got Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters for DVD (gotta love that title) and I'm going to pop that in while I play.

That's all for now

But I didn't make it. :P

I asked my girlfriend to send me the Chronicles of Riddick movie collection so I could watch the movies while I was playing but she forgot. I figured, no biggie I'll just wait till they get here next week and play it then. Well I installed the game and patched it up. I resisted the urge to play it but well you know, maybe just a little. Ok well just the first level. RATZ! Well I guess I'll just start over when the movies get here. ;)

I finally turned it off and started Tron from scratch. I put the Riddick disc back in it's box so I wont be tempted again. Man that game is fun. I have NFS Most Wanted and R6V installed so I should be fine. I decided to hold off on R6V 2 until the price comes down. I have plenty of games and I remember how incredibly angry I was when the price on the first one went down to $19.99 after I paid $49.99 for it and was still playing it.

~edit~ HA. I just realized that Rainbow Six Vegas 2 doesn't come out for PC until April 15, 2008 so I guess my decision to not buy it was a little premature duhhhh.

That's all for now.

HAPPY EASTER.

***SPOILERS***
This blog contains spoilers for the Call of Duty United Offensive Expanson pack. It has at least one major combat event as well as brief details of the very last moments of the game. Due to formating problems only the last section is contained in a spoiler tag. The rest is in orange text. If you do not want to know details of this game you can skip down to the white text below the spoiler tag at the bottom.

As I mentioned in my last couple of blogs I have been having a lot of fun with CODUO, both last weekend and then finishing last night. I should probably put this stuff together into some sort of review but it's just an expansion pack for a 5 year old game so I don't feel like taking the time. These are just some random impressions and thoughts.

The difficulty is very inconsistent but the pacing is awesome. Most of the game tension is constantly building and subsiding very smoothly. It's obvious when your missing something because everything will just wait for you to figure it out. If your at a point, be it either in the middle of a fire fight or trying to find your way around an obstacle, if you keep getting croaked it's pretty obvious if you should be doing something different or just doing the same thing better. You always know what your supposed to do and you have no puzzles or mystery items to find. I have only been truly stuck a couple of times. One was in the harbor gun section and I was stuck because this stupid soldier was standing right in front of the lever I needed to press to activate an elevator so the icon would not pop up. The other snag was when I was supposed to protect a guy while he blew up a tank but he did not follow me. After being totally frustrated and dying several times I decided to load the previous check point and he finally did what he was supposed to.

CODUO tries to put the events your participating in, in an historical context there is no story per se. It's all just excuses to get you in one situation or another and I must say they are all fun. Even that annoying bridge. I'm going to go ahead and tag the rest of this because I felt I was a bit on the edge with my last blog and I don't want to cross that TOS line. Just click on the SPOILER tag to read the rest. If your not interested in reading my long ramblings on United Offensive then you might just as well skip everything the SPOILERS ;)

~EDIT~ I give up on the spoilers tag It will not allow me to use paragraphs and forces a wall of text. If I try to use paragraphs it gives me the Your HTML is not well-formed - no valid tags were found. error! If I try to use more than one spoiler tag it gives me the error. If try to use html inside the spoiler tag it gives me the error. I'm done fiddling with it. It's not fair that I should have to waste an hour's writing because a glitch will not let me make it readable.

This is your final warning.

***SPOILERS***

You play the first part as an American fighting in the battle of the bulge. The second part as a British airman turned commando and the third as Soviet grunt. You start off the game with a jeep ride that is a lot like the escape from the dam in the first game. A section in the British campaign has you in a side car and while these vehicle sections are fun they play more like interactive cut scenes than actual game play. On the ride at the start of the game you mostly do drive by's on German bad dudes standing on the side of the road and in only a few sections are you required to shoot anyone. Of course if you don't shoot at the guys along the way you will take more damage but at the end of the ride there are enough health packs to fill you up so all your really required to do is survive the ride. It feels like that even more on the British sidecar ride but at least at the end of that you have to hunt out the health packs instead of them being literally right there on a table.

The British campaign has some cool parts and gets off to a great start. I feel like I'm repeating myself because I am. It's hard to find serious flaws in this expansion pack and almost all if it is darn cool. You start off in a B-17 Bomber running from gun to gun trying to keep fighters from shooting up your plane. You eventually drop your bombs right before your plane is mortally wounded. In a very ridiculous Hollywood way your plane breaks in half and you not only manage to live through that but you just happened to have your parachute on and drift to the ground, well sorta. You end up stuck in a tree at night when a big stink was made about your Daylight Bombing run. Presumably you were knocked out and just came to in time to see a German patrol stop so one of it's members can take a wizz and conveniently get wasted by a British commando squad. Still it would have been nice if it was at least sunset instead of clearly the middle of the night. It's all a bit silly but what the heck. It did take me out of it a bit because in-between getting blown out of the sky and materializing dangling from a tree there is a nice loading screen that gave me plenty of time to ponder what had just happened.

Speaking of Hollywood, the game really has a cinematic feel to it and while some of the sections look a lot more grand and large your still pretty much on rails and if you stray to far from the path you will bump into that magic wall we all know too well. The American section in the beginning gives this wide open action feel and it's done well. Lots of action with tanks crossing large areas and planes flying about. It all looks very good. The Quake 3 engine was at the engine was at the end of it's reign in 2004 and this game gets the most out of it. It certainly looks as good as Medal of Honor Hero's 2 on the Wii and that's saying a lot. This expansion pack had a different developer than the original game and to be honest, if I had not read that I would have never known. With the exception of the sprint feature and a few new weapons it plays like it was part of the first game. IMHO this is exactly what an expansion should be. Continuing with the Hollywood analogy one thing there is no doubt of is that the story writers for COD and this expansion have seen their share of WWII movies because all of the scenarios are intact. From the mountain guns in Italy in The Guns of Navarone here in the expansion to the Dam in COD straight out of Force 10 from Navarone and everything in-between the only thing missing is a POW camp and a U-Boat.

Click the **SPOILER** tag to see the rest.

[spoiler] The Russian section has the tanks and man is that fun even though its a very short section. This seriously needs to be expanded on and made into it's own game. I made it through the tank section no sweat but I went back and played through it twice more just because it was so engaging and I wanted to see if I could get through taking no hits. If this was taken into a wider open setting instead of a linear path and allowed you to use this simple mechanic it could really be something. The Russian section seems much more balanced than the rest of the game. You start off with very little and you have to pick up guns along the way. Health is harder to come by and you really get a sense of urgency to get on with it. In keeping with not having much of a story there isn't much of an ending either. The game just sorta stops. It's not like I expected anything other than that but it would have been nice to have a little more excitement to finish the game rather than literally waiting for a clock to run out for the last mission objective. It's not fun to spend the last 15 seconds of a game cowering behind cover hoping the clock will run out before your last bit of health does. [/spoiler]

United Offensive has been a lot of fun and if you have COD laying around and missed this expansion I highly recommend picking it up. Although it is a little short it's as long as some new games and easily lasted me ten hours not including the sections I was stuck on. It's well worth the ten bucks. I have COD2 sitting right here on the shelf but I don't think I'll play that next. It's time for a change of pace. I'm thinking SCI-FI but I have not decided what. I still have quite a few games laying around here waiting to be played. More on that later.

That's all for now.

*** VERY MINOR SPOILERS ***

I made it past that bridge part last night. Like I figured there are key guys you have to take out and then it's easy. I took cover in the middle of the bridge and took out a machine gunner, the trick is you have to take him out and then sprint to the trench, kill the 2 guys and take cover there. After that you take out that machine gunner again and sprint to the next trench. Once you clear that trench and pop a few more guys everything slows down. (the music clues you in) Your guys move up and it's smooth sailing to blow the tank and move on. I'm at another hard section shortly after that now but it will be fine. After I got past that bridge section I went to bed.

I still think the combination of this game being just a touch more difficult than COD part 1 and playing Area 51 that was such a cake walk just prior are adding up to me having a little tougher time than I'm used to with this one. It's all good and I think I'll be up to speed after today.

That's all for now.

I finally got back to COD United Offensive and I'm having fun. I've had it installed for a long time but had only played to the first checkpoint. I noticed the difficulty is up a bit from COD but I think playing Area 51 may have tarnished my skills a bit. I'm not very far into it but I have hit a snag on this one part so I'm taking a little break, making this short blog and then going to try some more. I also took the time to update my now playing list. I have been neglecting it for a while, ever since the Latest Additions tab has been screwed up. If your wondering, yes I still play Tron 2.0 and I'm on my second run through of Hitman 2. I'm trying to get that coveted Silent Assassin rating but it's proving much more difficult than I had expected.

I just finished the section in CODUO where you have to snipe the panzerfaust anti tank units (named weapon used) from a bell tower. I died a few times on that part and now I'm stuck on the next part that has you crossing a bridge in search of a hidden tank. It seems like a no brainer. Fight across the bridge, snipe some machine gunners and move "somewhere" find the tank and blow it up, but I keep getting my *** handed to me as soon as I get to the trench on the other side of the bridge. I've tried just running headlong in guns a blazing, hanging back and sniping for a while then moving cautiously up, moving up and taking up a defensive position in the trench on the other side of the road, then moving up. I might try going back to the bell tower level and picking up some differnt weapons and see is that helps. It's a bit frustrating but I refuse to drop down to weenie.. ahem I mean greenhorn level and I'm not yet flustered enough to resort to a walkthrough. I'll get past it. Just needed a break and to post a little mini rant about it. :)

That's all for now.

Happy leap year day everyone.
This final post on my vacation is mostly about going to NYC
It was great.

We got up very early a few days after Christmas and drove New Jersey Penn Station to take the train into the city. This is a very standard thing the people who commute do every day. I'll avoid the typical New Jersey bashing just say the area around the train station is the same as most train stations around the country. It's very run down and not a very pleasant place to be.

Parking was very easy and took only a few minuets. We gathered up our stuff and headed off to catch our train with plenty of time to spare. I purchased an easy pass that would allow me to pay for my trip to and from the city as well as ride on the subway lines while in NY. You just put your credit card in a machine, select a value and it spits out a card you can use at the turnstiles. It's very convenient. The train station as well as the subway platforms that I would discover later are easily some of the most dangerous environments I can recall ever being in. I'm not specifically referring to the people but more the place it's self. You certainly need to be cautious of who's around you and not put yourself in a vulnerable situation but usually don't have a problem with that. It's difficult to describe and without going into too much detail but let me just say, from construction forcing you to walk within inches of the edges of platforms with speeding trains to long flights of steel stairs with cement landings there is no shortage of ways to get very dead very fast.

I avoided taking pictures to not exaggerate my already touristy appearance and due to the rainy weather and time of day the few I attempted on the train did not turn out.

It was a very unique ride and the industrial architecture was very interesting to me. We passed a stop called Exchange Place that was announced and headed towards the Hudson River. We began traveling under the river and that was kind of weird. We were traveling in what is affectionately referred to by New Yorkers as the "tube" that runs under the ocean. It's essentially a tunnel but I'm the kind of person that thinks of those kinds of things.

As we neared the end of our trip it seemed as if the tunnel on the left side of the train had been cut away a bit and as my eyes wandered to the window it hit me, there it was....
Right there on the other side of the glass was ground zero. I just stared. I cant even tell you what I was thinking, I don't think I was, I was just feeling. All of the suppressed memory's and emotions of that day became instantly real. I looked at my watch and it was just before 9am and here I was retracing the path of so many people that were riding a train exactly like this one and whose lives would end in that next hour.
It was surreal.

As we exited the train I collected myself and quickly realized that I had missed the opportunity to document this experience and whipped out my camera to rectify the situation. Upon doing so I was instantly approached by a man in uniform informing me that pictures were not allowed in in the station and he sited "sensitive construction" that of course sounded like BS. I later discovered that the gentleman was indeed telling the truth. The observation deck was closed and it and the entire fencing surrounding the site was covered in tarp preventing anyone from seeing into the construction. Not being one to take no for an answer unless absolutely necessary I quickly formulated a plan for guide Margie to create a diversion by attempting to take pictures in a nearby area attracting the guards attention while I snapped these few unnoticed for my private collection.

NYC really is amazing. The city feels very alive. One thing I noticed very quickly is that everyone is in a hurry and with very few exceptions nobody is overweight. I enquired to my guide about this and she pointed out the obvious, everyone was walking. The average New Yorker walks about 2 miles a day. Makes sense I guess. Since we had to be back to the car in New Jersey by 10pm we tried to cram in as much of the typical tourist things in as we could. We walked from the WTC through the financial district and down Wall Street to the Hudson to see the Brooklyn Bridge. We had planned to take a helicopter tour but because of the weather they were not flying, I was bummed. We walked to Battery park to see The Statue of Liberty and then back to the Staten Island ferry dock to hop the subway to Time Square. If you don't understand what I mean when I say a lot of people take a look at this picture I took in time square later that night.

I noticed something interesting about this photo when I got home.
There are well over a hundred people in this photo and all but four of them are walking the same direction. Kind of weird huh? Can you spot them? (hint, I didn't count the ***** on the phone standing in the center of the photo. He wasn't moving) We saw way to many things to list including Rockefeller Plaza, Grand Central Station, The Chrysler Building, and to cap of the day we got sandwiches at Carnegie Deli (drool... pastrami yum) By 9pm we were back on the subway heading to the train and home. We just made it back to NJ before the lot closed. It was a great day and I hope to get back there and spend a little more time next year.

This blog is getting very long so I'm not going to write about the rest of my East Coast stay that included Atlantic City and a few other places. We spent New Years in Mountain Top. We had a big party and lit off fireworks. It was a blast. ;)

On Jan.5th I left the my friends on the East Coast and headed to Denver to spend a few weeks with my Girlfriend. We made a lot of plans but I'll save that for another blog. I didn't get home until the beginning of February and let me tell you, I was spent!

That's all for now.

I finally finished Area 51 this past weekend. It was decent especially for the 15 bucks I paid for it. I can see where people that paid 40 for it when it first came out might have been pretty disappointed because it is very routine and had nothing special. Still, the story was not nearly as bad as some have described and if nothing else it has helped me appreciate the games I love more. If I just went on what other people have written then I would have passed on Tron 2.0 and if you haven't already guessed, that's still my favorite FPS. The more I think about it Area 51 really doesn't have many challenges. Finding all the data things that you scan was about it and I only had to go back and look for a few of those, most were right there in plain sight. I'm done with it and I'm pretty sure I wont be playing it again, I have way to many great games sitting on the shelf waiting to be played.

I have been playing a lot MX vs. ATV Unleashed this past week too. (Unleashed not Untamed since that's not out on PC :cry: ) Man that ghost racing is still addictive after all this time. I haven't decided what will be next but I still have R6V and COD United Offensive installed so I'll be playing those for now. I'll update on what's next at some future date. Maybe F.E.A.R. or The Chronicles of Riddick. I've been meaning to get those going for a long time.

I've decided to just write a little bit about the rest of my trip since it's been almost a month since I got home and two months since I was in New York. I just don't feel very motivated right now so I'll post that on Friday.

That's all for now.

I'm back on Area 51 and COD United Offensive.
I know I promised to write about the New York part of my vacation next but I decided to get back to gaming and that means finishing Area 51. I started Area 51 oh so many months ago back in September, got about 1/2 way through it and moved on to other things. It seems like a very long time ago. I looked at my stack of unopened games today and decided it was time to get back at it. I installed Need for Speed Most Wanted last week and have been enjoying it. I'll play that during Area 51 intermissions but I'm not installing anything else till I get the stuff I have already started finished.

So often I find myself doing gaming related things and forget why I hang out here on GS, read all the gaming news, watch gaming shows on TV and so on. I love video games dag nab it! (really, I do) You would think I might play one now and then right? Well I don't, not as much as I would like, certainly not every day like I used to. I'm planning on changing that this month. I played the Wii a lot last month and doing that reminded me of what I have been missing.

GS has changed so much over the past few months with almost all of the celebrities leaving. If you have been living under a rock, in addition to Jeff Gerstmann being fired Alex Navarro, Ryan Davis and freelancer Frank Provo have all left since Gerstmanngate. Tim Tracy left when Jeff was fired as well. Rich Gallup (the host of On the Spot prior to Jeff) also left earlier in the year under better circumstances. To top that all off the brass has put Ricardo Torres in the position of Editor-in-Chief and frankly judging just by his appearance and demeanor he does not seem like he will make a very strong, aggressive team leader although I do enjoy his articles. To me it appears he was the default choice. You know, someone who will not make waves. As far as I know Torres does not even have a public profile and IMHO he does not have much of a connection to the community. I think this is a good thing for managment and a bad thing for us GameSpotters. Anyway, enough about that for now.

Since very few new games come out over the holidays GS has been very slow. Everything combined has served to make me less interested in surfing the site so that's another reason to get back to what it's all about, playing games.

I'm sure it wont be long before I get back to writing and I promise I will finish the tale of my trip but for now I'm hell bent on finishing a few games and Area 51 is where I'm going to start finishing.

That's all for now.

Ahhhh. Home at last.

First blog of 2008, YAY!

It seems as if I have not seen my house in a year although its only been a month an a half. I know part 3 of my vacation blog is long over due but it is going to have to wait for a few more days. I have a lot going on right now. It's good to be home.

Wii ! I played as much as I could for the three weeks I was in Colorado. I have many comments about that too. I have so much I would like to share but no time to write at the moment.

Philadelphia, Scranton, Mountain Top, Newark, Camden (not sure about that one) Atlantic City, New York city Denver and then finally Los Angles and home. Quite a lot crammed into less than two months.

I have a lot of catching up to do.

Stay tuned.

We pick up after the hockey game. On the way back to the hotel in Philly we decide to stop for some cheese steak. Having only been to downtown Philly once we decide to give it a shot and jump off the highway. I had only spent about 6 hours there last year but I was able to remember most of the landmarks and navigate us to Sonny"s Famous Steaks for a couple of regulars with peppers and wizz. Market street in Philly on Saturday night is CRAZY even in the dead of winter so parking was not an option. I jumped out and ran in while my buddy made his way around the block. By the time he made it around once our sandwiches were done and I was waiting on the curb for him. It all worked out great and we had the best Philadelphia has to offer instead of room service.

After braving the snow and driving back to Mountain Top we had a nice few days before Christmas. I got to take ride on one of the townships fire trucks in exchange for some labor and that was a blast. We drove all around the city digging the fire hydrants out from under the snow for easy access. I got some great pictures out in front of the fire house and of the trucks.

Christmas came and went and it was everything you would expect it to be. I'll tell about that and my trip to New York City in part 3.

That's all for now.

HAPPY NEW YEAR