The show’s story is about an up and coming young movie star named Vincent Chase(Adrian Grenier) in Hollywood; which is loosely based on producers Mark Whalberg’s life. The story opens with him having a movie release and partying like you would think in Hollywood does, and flows from him, going from script to script with his agent, Ari Gold, (Jeremy Piven). He lives and is with is three close friends at all times. Eric Murphy, who they call “E” (Kevin Connolly); who has been his friend since they were kids. “Turrtle” (Jerry Ferrara) who is also one of Vince’s friends from back in the day joined by Vince’s half-brother Johnny “Drama” Chase (Kevin Dillon) who is a has been B-list actor.

The story in the first season was a little slow, only due to the high characterization of the characters. But that doesn’t stop it from going straight into the comedy which makes the show what it is.

The second season is where the show really shines. They focus on constant comedy with a deep story dealing with the morals of the characters of the show.

The third and forth season can really be counted as one based on story because of the small ending of the third season. The show’s best episodes, in my opinion are between these two season as well as the worst.

The show does a great job bringing the real feel of how it is to be in Hollywood to the people wishing they could be there sitting on the couch. The comedy that the show provides is extraordinary seeming how it flows through the story so perfectly. This isn’t a show that you keep watching because you want to know what goes on in the story; this is a show you keep watching because its just that good

The show is in its 5^th season right now on HBO. New episodes air on Sundays at 11:00

The graphics instead of trying to look real, in a sense that when you watch someone playing the game you can mistake it for a movie or TV show (like Call of Duty 4 or Crysis), it looks and feels like a oiled machine. You see the sweet and grief on the characters faces in the dark game that it is. The blood and guts (there is a lot of it) are over exaggerated but shown to an extent that makes players want to see more. The level design is made with few to no flaws at all, while they are seamlessly made for the use of cover. The character models are dark and gritty and feel the way they should through the tone of the game.

The story was not completely original, while using some twists and basic character origins that we have seen before. You play as Marcus Fenix, on an alien planet which inhabits creatures of the Locust Horde. You start out in a prison 14 years after the impact because Marcus had sabotage a mission to save his own father and had been names a traitor. Now as your only friend in the COG help you escape you join the resistance as part of Delta Squad.  Some of the characters in the game we learn a great deal of, while others we know nothing about. For example, we learn that one of the soldiers on your squad, Cole, was a star athlete before the war. While for a character named Baird, well all we know is that his name is Baird. The story twists and turns and the end of every mission and act to keep the player guessing as to what happens next. There was one annoying mission in the campaign, in which take control of a vehicle; and well even for one mission I would want the controls to be better.

Now for a shooting game, let’s take guns. The main gun that you will be using is the Lancer; it is an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet; so if you ever get close enough you can saw them in half. Then there is the shotgun, very standard strong at close week at far, nothing special, until u blow a guy to pieces. There is a sun-machine gun while not as powerful as the lancer it is more accurate. There are two types of pistols in the game each with very low clip size, but they can zoom, so that means easier headshots. There is a standard sniper in the game which I find to be really aggravating on the multiplayer, because if you active reload (explained later on) the gun you get an instant kill shot which can get annoying. A grenade launcher that has an annoying arc to its shot. Then there was the torque bow, I know a lot of people who are fond of this weapon but I never got into it. The weapon has a single shot and has to charge to shoot straight; but it sticks and explodes which is pretty cool. And last but certainly not least the Hammer of Dawn, which comes up a couple of times in the campaign and in a few maps on the multiplayer. The Hammer of Dawn is a gun that pull some sort of blast from a satellite overhead and brings it down like a hammer and kills anything it hits, fun to use, hard to die by it’s a good weapon in the game. The reloading in the game has a new system to it. You can now “active reload” your gun, which if done at a precise moment now only makes your gun reload faster, also gives the ammunition a damage boost.

I have not had a lengthy experience with the online multiplayer of this game unfortunately but I had enough to say that it was fun. With many game types and maps, it is going to be very hard to find it to get old.

As hard as it is to say, I cannot find more than 3 flaws for this game. As a shooting game you would expect some core mechanics to be in the game, like a minimum of 10 guns and the ability to jump seem to just phase out of the game. And the last flaw is that the multiplayer only goes to 4 on 4. People can complain that the cover system is bad and annoying but that is why this game is special.

Overall, this game did a lot of things right with very little wrong. It made excellent use of the concept of taking cover. It is a visually unbelievable game, there were many creative and fresh ideas expressed that make the game my all time favorite.

1.9 Out of 2

]]> http://sayid92.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/review-gears-of-war-for-the-xbox-360/feed/ 3 sayid92 http://sayid92.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/review-star-wars-the-force-unleashed-for-xbox-360/ http://sayid92.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/review-star-wars-the-force-unleashed-for-xbox-360/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:01:46 +0000 sayid92 http://sayid92.wordpress.com/?p=33 ]]> So we know Star Wars, the huge fandom, the movies, the shows, the toys, the books, the comics everything about it. Now on to the game.I’ll divide the review into three points, (1) story (2) gameplay (3) everything else

(1) Story- i think the storey of this game deserves to win an award for its sake. The story ties ine verything from the movies that we needed to be cleared, and some surprising new things we did not expect. it included romance, betrayal, action, senators, droids, sith, jedi; which basically is the game in a nutshell. the story wakes off after episode three and ends before the fourth installment of the series, which was created first. it consisted of a jedis son who is raised to become Darth Vader’s apprentice after his father is killed by Mufasa(sorry had to do it).  He then goes to hunt jedi who didn’t die when operation 66 was ordered. He does this and then…you have to play  the game to see the rest of the story

(2) gameplay- the controls make it easy to kick peoples ass with the force. unfortunately the camera angling along with the targeting system makes it annoying in small areas but its done smoothly for the most part.  There were to many cool things to do with the force, and your saber for all the face buttons that they needed to make a trigger for more. there is your standard lightning shock, your saber slash, jump and push. then the face buttons change when you hold a trigger they make the buttons do different things; so you might forget to use them at times. The targeting is what the character is looking at not the camera which is annoying at times, which is a very small portion of the game. If I wanted to pick at the game, I would say that you cant hold the dash button to run faster constantly only at certain speeds.

(3) eveything else- the graphics and voice acting are superb, some force powers are missing from old star wars game like Jedi Outkast and Knights of the Old Republic that could have use a reimagining. the physics system like DMM is a little broken because they work for somethings but not others like a big tree would break normally but a smaller one wouldn’t. there are  minor bugs and glitches here and there. and people to seem to find this to be a big deal, is that there are god-of-war-like QTEs. for those of you who dont know what QTEs are, its a quick time event, in which buttons pop up on screen for you to press so the character acts out a cinematic battle. i don’t mind that, but people do.

personaly I think the game is far from perfect with a good 8-10 hours of play, and a few mistakes.  but it was amazing and fun and i would recommend it to anyone to play.

1 3/4 out of 2

Bioshock is a very good game that brings a lot to the table. the story moves slowly through gameplay with no cutscenes and the action is a non-stop thrill ride….when there is any. visualy the game is impresive, the graphics nowadays are to good for me to even say this anymore but i thught i might give it a say just for the people the game is as good as how it looks.the plasmids are a very good adition making this a unique experiance.

Now on to the bad.

the game story gets a little hard to follow because of the whole journal thing and how it streems while you are fighting big daddies. the endings are to extreme either way, but it is cool to havemultiple. there is no penalty for death and the difficulty curve is a roller coaster.

its not perfect, but its one of the best

Let me get something out of my system, I HATE EDWARD CULLEN. Now then every girl who has read this book has been saying how they wish they could be his girlfriend but i don’t understand why. he is arrogant thick headed and well sort of an obsessive stalker more than a lover.

Now then. The story leaves parts and questions open for sequels like unknown origins of minor characters. The story moves seamlessly through plot devices, symbols and metaphors to get points across. The writing is unbelievable and the book is glued to your hand from beginning to end.

I am very excited to see the movie adaptation but i cannot see how it is even going to compare to how good the book was.

As much as I like the book, there were some flaws. Some of the plot devices were used with the minor characters where a bit out of place. The mainstream plot of the book was overall slow and could have done more in the 400 somewhat pages the book is. some scenes toward the end did feel rushed although the book needed the pacing to finish the story in time.

favorite quote from book “friends dont let friends drive drunk”

The single player was short, and not challenging. The guns you hold look like they are for 6 year old kids. the enemies, are either big huge monstrous brutes that take a good 5 minutes of shooting before they die while every other enemy is half your size running around and scared. There is a good sense of variety between guns, which helps but doesn’t matter much because of the sense that every enemy just dies within just two shots with any gun, some even with one. the story was a big letdown (yes i did beat the first 2) and had absolutly no depth. the visuals were to bright and even blinding at some points, or dark and imposible to see. the veichle sections are terrible, not because of controls, but because the AI on your team are idiots.

I’ve said the above to a die-hard Halo fan and he said just play the multiplayer and you’ll be satisfied. I replied back to him that a game that is getting an apreciation worth the coming of the messiah does not need anything to excuse itself.

Now lets talk multiplayer. I spent a month of my time on this multiplayer and after i was thinking what a waste of time it was. the online multiplayer was a drag and never really got interesting, while the local is good, not amazingly great like other games out there is still fun.

This game was not only not innovative, it was a game that had exact other mechanics in other games; and they were used better in those games.

Call of Duty 4 (cod4) is a game that not only shows how good and addicting games can be, but also how much fun you can have while playing. I have been playing this game on my Xbox 360 for 4-5 months and I have to say that I intend to play it for longer. The single player had an amazing story which took place in modern times and not in WWII. As you can guess the story involves the use of nuclear weapons, Arabs Russians, America being the worlds police and the British. Now I don’t want to spoil the rest for you because from a writer standpoint the story was fucking amazing and deserves credit for adding such depth to characters in a genre that doesn’t necessarily need it. You either play as the US marines who go up thinking they are the shit and then screw everything up, or the British S.A.S a covert team of special agents who fix everything from the back who are ruthless. The game switches back and forth so you don’t know weather if the next mission is going to be a go in shooting and go in or be a silent but deadly, which means you can not get bored with the system. Although the story falls a little short with an ending coming out of nowhere and it not being long, it ensures challenging players to go back to try on the Veteran difficulty which makes everything so much more harder than it ever was. visually the game is a masterpiece paying attention to the smallest detail.

There are a few moments that i would like to point out that stood out to me that shows this is not like any other games. There was one part where a nuke is used and you control a solider crawling on the floor of his last breathes as he dies in a painful wasteland that was once a city. This shows an obvious message but is also the point where you feel like the game has taken the genre and raised the standards. Another moment was a point in the game where you are a couple of hundred miles away from you target while snipping, and having to assassinate him, with only one shot, calculating the wind and calligraphy to try to shoot the target, which made as the most challenging assassination to ever be in a game (yes i have played the Hitman series and Assassins Creed). Another moment that stood out was the ending which felt like a slap in a face because of what happens.

Now straying away from the single player, lets talk multiplayer. the local multiplayer supports up to four people and lets face it, it is awesome no matter how small a game is. Locally they give you a selection of classes which is described in its title and shown in the perks and guns they give you. There is a wide variety of guns and perks to chose. But the real fun and longevity of this game, comes from its online multiplayer. with  tons of challenges to complete while playing in a variety of different game mods, and the option to do reach the top nine times over makes the game always fresh. You get to create your own classes now, which means you chose your guns and your perks to your liking. The guns in the game are each different in their own way each with a strengths and weaknesses. The perk system is also made that you can choose how to upgrade your character as you level up. Some perks will let you listen to the enemy’s voice chat, others will allow you to drop a live grenade where you die when you are killed.

This is the part where I say the bad things:

1. some guns take to long to reload
2. the story is to short
3. no co-op play
4. you cant bring a friend to join you in playing online
5. no capture the flag on multiplayer

All in all this game has been a must own for any person interested in a shooter. The single playe while being a little short unfortunately delivers amazingly with a deep story and a challenging campaign and a multiplayer that lasts for years