Halo 3

On early Tuesday morning - 12:30 a.m. to be exact - I make the trek around the block to EB Games. I was planning to wait until 10:00 a.m., but as anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm an impatient fool. When I got there, I had successfully waited out the posers who had sat in front of the store since 5 p.m. and was the 4th person in line. After getting home, I tore open the package - nearly ripping the case apart -- popped the most highly anticipated game ever into my XBox 360. I stayed up until 2:30 a.m. that morning playing the game. Then I woke up at 8 a.m. and played another two hours before getting ready for a work meeting. God knows, why my client decided to schedule a meeting on that particular day. Didn't he know it was the greatest day in Video Game History?

After playing another 4 hours or so that night, I'm going to give you my early review of Halo 3. I've played only a little bit of the single player campaign and like it so far, but it's not much different than Halo 1 or 2. The graphics are slightly better and I definitely think the enemies react more realistically than they did in previous iterations of the game. Overall though, but I'm not falling over impressed with the single player campaign. Maybe I'll feel differently after spending a little more time with it.


What I am falling over impressed with is the multiplayer. It's similar to the past two Halo's, but the menus are much tighter, matchmaking is much better and they do a great, great job of charting your progress and success rate on the game and later on Bungie.net. They make you feel a great sense of reward and accomplishment. As you play, your skills are rated and you slowly but surely are promoted from the rank of Apprentice to General and Up.

Bungie.net literally has stats on how well you do on each map of the game, how well you do with specific weapons, etc. etc. I've played 30 or so online matches so far -- most of them taking 15-20 minutes - and have loved it. From King of the Hill to Capture the Flag to straight up shoot the other guy, the multiplayer is everything that it's cracked up to be.

New in this edition of Halo is the ability to tape your matches and later take screenshots of your crazy skills. You'll see a couple of those screenshots in this blog here. I'm a bad, bad man. If you see Tony B 23 on XBox Live, run away as fast as you can.

To sum things up, I believe a game is truly great when you're thinking about it when you're not playing it and when it holds your attention more than an hour or two. Halo 3 does both for me as I want to end this blog and my real day of work as soon as possible to play the game again. It'll be a part of my XBox library for at least the next two years - something that my wife won't enjoy hearing. When our newborn baby cries (in two years or so), I'll tell my wife I'll change the baby after I'm done beating down some aliens in Halo 3.

I guarantee it.

Finish the Fight - T Minus 3 Hours

I drove past EB Games today at 5 p.m. after getting some work done on the wife's car and saw 6 or 7 complete tool bag losers waiting outside of the store in advance of the midnight Halo 3 release. What losers.

At 9 p.m. tonight, I'm still conflicted if I'm going to join them around 1 a.m. or if I take full advantage of my pre-order of the game - from 6 months ago mind you - and go at 10 a.m. when the store opens later in the morning.

Thinking ...

Thinking

Worry
Are you in a damn hurry?
Midnight…
It’s a fist fight
And you’re going for just what’s right…
Can you see me in your sights?
And will you run from all your rights?

Hurry
Why are you?
Bury
Yourself in a pheasant shaped box.
Fuck that heart shaped shit.
Guess only if you think you’re gone
And I bet you already figured out you were wrong.

It was a bad call
And you didn’t guess right
Was it out of fright?
Or just plain stupidity?

I have no idea what this poem means....As the title tells you: Think about it and draw your own conclusions....

And tune in tomorrow for my review of Halo 3, the biggest pre-ordered game in videogame history. I can already guarantee that not a lot of real work will be getting done tomorrow.

I Hate Norv Turner

When I got the Number 1 pick in my fantasy football draft a few weeks ago, I was shocked because I had never gotten the Number 1 pick before. I was estastic, but needless to say I knew that something was going to happen to the unanimous Number 1 fantasy pick Ladainian Tomlinson. I even said that to ten different people that I had no right getting that pick and knew something bad was going to happen.

Something bad to me, meant an injury to LDT. Little did I know that the "something bad" happened months ago when the Chargers made the mistake of hiring Norv Turner, a hideous head coach with a 58-82 career record. It's true that Turner is a great offensive coordinator, but he is a notoriously horrible head coach.

In three short games as the new Chargers head coach this season, Turner has single handingly ruined the best player in fantasy football history along with ruining a Super Bowl Favorite. In 3 games, Tomlinson has 1 rushing TD and 130+ yards rushing. For the last 5 years under the Chargers former coach Marty Shottenheimer, that was Tomlinson's usual stat line for one game, not three. Instead, this year under Turner's regime, Tomlinson isn't running wild on the field, he's screaming at his QB on the sideline and moping in post-game press conference.

While my fantasy team has won the first two weeks of the season, it wasn't because of the usual dominance of Tomlinson. I'm on the edge of losing for the first time in Week 3 and I can tell you that I wouldn't have to worry about a loss this week if Tomlinson was up to his old reality bending 200+ yard, 3 TD games.

Damn you Norv Turner. Your head coaching skills suck.

Giants Win, Chosen One Cries

Well, this was more like it... The Giants defense answered the critics today to take down NFC East leading Washington Redskins 24-17. For the first time this season, the Giants defense came up big time when they stopped the Redskins on three and out numerous times, forced Jason Campbell to make some bad decisions and played excellent in the secondary. Everyone on the Giants defense today gets a big thumbs up today as he made the Redskins offense look entirely mediocre and foolish -- or maybe it was the throwback uniforms that made the team look foolish.

On the offensive side of the ball for the Giants Eli Manning made a few bad decisions today ending the day with 232 yards, 1 TD and 2 Interceptions. Ultimately though, when it counted, he led the Giants to the victory today leading the team to 21 straight points after the Giants were down by 2 TDs to the Redskins in the 3rd Quarter. Jeremy Shockey had a decent day, but dropped a number of balls that were thrown directly to him. Plaxico had another big day with 5 catches for 86 yards and 1 TD.

The Giants are now 1-2 going into a big Sunday night game next week against the Philadelphia Eagles. It's another must-win for the team. Things don't look as bleak for team this week as it did last week...except for the Chosen One. Chosen One, tissues can be purchased at your nearest DC Quik Mart.

Even the Kids are Upset...

Kid Nation

My wife and I watched the already highly controversial Kid Nation on CBS last night.

The first thing that you should know about Kid Nation is that there's a ton of crying on Kid Nation -- not as much crying though as is currently going on in Red Sox Nation.

The show starts off with 36 kids traveling out to an old ghost town in the middle of nowhere. After the kids get off the bus, the bus leaves and in comes in a helicopter with 4 kid leaders that were decided by the show's producers ahead of time. This immediately sets up an interesting dynamic where right off the bat, where the kids wonder why they didn't get a chance to pick their leaders. Somewhere Hugo Chavez is smiling.

After the kids travel a few miles or so to their new wild west home, they set off on finding places to sleep, cooking a dinner of mac and cheese for each other and getting to know one another. Kids cry. Kids bully each other. Some kids, who weren't selected as leaders by the show's producers, become leaders in their own right.

On the second day, the kids are involved in a Survivor-like capitalist challenge - are there no original ideas any longer? -- where they compete to see who becomes the upper class - with a high wage - all down to who is in the lower class. When the competition was completed and the kids were told they would have a Let's Make a Deal choice of having more outhouses or a television set, they surprised me by choosing the outhouses. It was many of the surprises that I saw in this show that confirmed for me that if adults were faced with the same decision they would pick the television set ... or Internet access if it was offered.

While it shares many of the same ideas as the been there and done that Survivor, I'm looking forward to watching to see how the show shapes up and if the kids are able to transform the old Wild West ghost town into a burgeoning township once again.