i can do this....

in the past i would kill this super mutant with kindness...now i will steal his wallet

fallout 3 was one of my favorite video games i played this year and probably the first game since gears of war 1 that i had any interest in replaying once i completed the story. i let nam borrow it for a while and i just got it back a little while ago. i decided to restart the game and play it differently, as i simply ran straight through the story without dealing with any side quests.

the first time i played through i of course was extremely good and made choices and decisions in the game that match my natural bleeding heart tendencies. i was always giving water to thirsty people, helping children, always using the polite choice in the conversation path and never stealing or pickpocketing. i was basically the angel that i am in real life.

now i have put in a few hours into my new character that kinda looks like me with a beard and i am again decidedly good. i did not detonate the bomb in the middle of megaton and have not been stealing. i have made my new character less soldiery and more sciency. but i am wondering what i am missing being a goodie-2 shoes. i wanna be bad, but, and this is gonna seem real lame, i feel bad for the npc's. i get wrapped up in the game and don't want to shatter lives. my empathy is powerful and far reaching.

i ran into this same issue when i played mass effect. i would start acting like an ass and people would start crying and responding like, "how could you say that? all of those innocent people's lives are at stake..." then i start crying (me, not my character) and restart the game before i acted cruelly.

so i am gonna give being bad another try. i figure...i am so good and moral in real life and video games are meant to be an escape and to essentially live another life. i am excited about the prospect of being evil and all that goes along with it. i just need to man up and not be affected by the suffering i will cause, cause many will suffer and suffer badly...

ultimate fighting kevin

the new ufc game, ufc undisputed is coming out in a little over a month and i am super excited about it. this game has been in the works for probably 2 years now and i have been waiting patiently since i first heard about it. from all accounts, it is gonna be an incredible game with as good of an adaptation of real life mma as you could hope for. i know all of the major ufc fighters and cannot wait to play as a lot of them and beat up the ones i personally dislike. there is also a create-your-own fighter option that will probably be ridiculous.

as excited as i am...(and did i mention i was excited?) i have a slight concern regarding this game. what if i am really good at it? you're probably thinking to yourself "but kevin, you're not good at any videogame..." i know this, but somehow i could see myself excelling at virtual mma due to my decent knowledge of the sport, as well as my affinity for button mashing.

ok, so i could be good at this game...who cares? i do, so shut up. let me explain the problem with a little background information. i am not a violent person. i have never been in a real fight with intent to injure. i have never punched anyone in the face. i have broken a few bones in accidents, but again, those were not in fights. with this in mind, i realize that i am bigger and stronger than the average person and that if it came to it, i think i could fare not horribly in a fight. i am obviously not nam, but i think in your average brawl, i could get in a few cheap shots before i scuttle away. at the same time, i have never been in a fight, and don't really know how to fight.

being really good at this game could potentially warp my brain and stroke my ego into thinking that this somehow meant it could translate into actual fighting. i would start thinking, "i am kind of a strong guy...i know what the term ground and pound means...i am real good at this game. i bet i could kick some ass." this would leave me open to being drunk at some point and acting like a tough guy, only to have to go to the hospital to have a cast made for my face. or, in a better outcome, have nam (aka jerry chu) roll his eyes before coming in to save me ala beverly hills ninja. i know it sounds like quite a stretch, but i have been known to be delusional in the past.



i can see imaging something like this






i guess we'll see. hopefully i will just be decent at the game and continue my streak of not fighting people. either way...i am real excited! anyone else getting this game?

fore!

dave's most recent blog discussed his recent video game purchase, nhl 09. this has made me want to blog about one of the things louise got for me for my birthday, tiger woods 09. i really enjoy golfing video games and play them with louise and chris all the time. there is something about the pacing of the game that is nice since my reflexes have been going downhill regardless of what people saw when i played hot hands. i also really enjoy the extremely detailed create-a-player option that allows me to create some real freaks that everyone seems to loves to hate on. also i am very good at the game.

anyways, we played it at lee's birthday party last weekend using the official drinking rules, that led me down a dark path as i had to take shots of tequilla for every eagle i shot. even with this obstacle to overcome, i somehow finished with what i am pretty sure is the best game i have ever played. i scored a 48 in an 18 hole course. to give you some historical perspective of how mindblowing that score is, the lowest real golf score ever recorded in history is 55. as far as i know, tiger woods himself has never broken 60 strokes in an 18 hole course. so imagine his reaction when i roll up to his house and shoot a sub 50! it might just make him quit golf altogether...maybe he gets a job at best buy or something, cause he would know my golfing would haunt him forever.

my joining the pga tour would change things forever. i would be crushing my opponents to the point where my lead would be insurmountable after the 2nd hole. you would think beating professional golfers who have been playing their entire lives and more or less making them look silly would get old. to spice things up, i might start to hotdog a little. here are some ideas to makes the games reasonably close, entertain the fans and humiliate/enrage my opponents:

• play a few holes wearing a blindfold
• putt with my driver and drive with my putter
• pants tiger woods when he is trying to putt
• switchhit
• casually engage in a conversation with my opponent, while maintaining eye contact, secretly putt the ball into the hole, then walk away with the opponent expecting me to putt, later realizing i did it while we were talking
• bank shots off of obstacles ala happy gilmore
• steal tiger woods' golf cart and drive it into a water hazard
• play a round with one of those plastic kids golf sets

going too far? i hope so. i bet i could also put that watering can to good use too.







i could go on. i think stuff like this would make me the hit of the pga tour. now some of you may be questioning the transfer of my videogame golf abilities to actual physical golf. has anyone played me in mini golf before? because if you have that's one definite loss on your mini golf record. if you haven't played me before, it's probably best for your general well-being that you avoid the humiliation and frustration that comes from losing to me. so look forward to me making a huge splash on the pga circuit in the near future...maybe tiger will want to be my caddy...

will the 360 become my true home entertainment center?

i have recently enjoyed a renewed interest in video games, brought on by gta 4, which after having numerous conversations with dave where we both spoke as roman, i finally completed last week. i enjoyed that game a lot, probably my favorite since the heyday of gears. once i finished gta, the video game part of my brain craved more video games. so i quickly played through bioshock, which we have owned for a while, but i never really played. it was pretty awesome too. i have 2 more barely-played games that i should at least attempt to finish before i can justify purchasing anything new. they are mass effect and stranglehold. i have played through a few hours of both games and while pretty fun, neither really kept my attention as much as gta or bioshock. louise claims mass effect is the best game ever...i dunno.

so this leads up to some current xbox news via e3. the first thing i would like to note is that microsoft and netflix are now joining forces, allowing subscribers to stream netflix's "watch instantly" movies through the 360. i was actually considering purchasing the netflix box that does the same thing, so i am definitely excited about this service coming to the 360. this is also helping me try to figure out a way to stop paying for cable...which seems unlikely, but would be awesome.

they also refreshed my memory of many potentially awesome games that will be coming out sometime soon.

• gears of war 2 - i have high hopes and if they make even slight improvements, i will be very happy and probably addicted to it.
• resident evil 5 - the gameplay was so well done in re4...the graphics look markedly improved...it's set in africa
• fallout 3 - a briefly played some of the earlier versions of this series...it's an rpg...you get a pet dog
  
• fable 2 - i played some of the first fable...it was good, but i am expecting huge refinements in this version..you get a pet dog
  
• final fantasy xiii - this was apparently a huge shocker...i am a fan of final fantasy, having played 7 and 10....

it's interesting to note that these are all continuations of current series with no new ip's. other games not mentioned in their press conference that i am personally excited about include the new ufc game and the zombie game left 4 dead. there are new guitar hero and rock band games that i could care less about, but lousie will probably want those. she is also ridiculously excited about the new soul caliber game as she and chris play the old xbox version a lot. basically i have a lot of choices to make, especially if i am trying to be more particular with my purchases.

i feel like an asshole

this weekend i was planning on going to see food for animals at some warehouse in baltimore. i was looking forward to it. dave called nick to tell him we would be going and while i'm sure that it really didn't matter that much to nick, dave said that he sounded excited to know we were gonna show up. we lazed about saturday afternoon, gearing it up on insane, cheating by changing the difficulty level for the stupid driving part, only to realize that the game credited us with beating that section on "casual" difficulty.

then we pulled our not really cool maneuver of getting drunk prior to people showing up at our house in hopes that it would lead to someone else driving us. well a couple of things happened. first of all everybody that showed up at our house seemed pretty indifferent about actually going out, let alone driving us there. secondly, dave maybe should not have drank while he was taking his antibiotics. as a result he did not feel well and that left me as the main pursuer in convincing someone to drive. i discovered i am not very good at this and without dave charming his way into getting us a ride, i quickly realized that this was not going to happen.

in hindsight, i should have known that there was a strong possibility that this would occur. i should have just sucked it up and agreed to drive, i know i would have had a much more interesting saturday night if i did. also, i think both dave and i know that we should stop pulling this maneuver on our friends. i even had my little pocket-sized video camera, set to record some of the show and blog about it. instead i am blogging about how i was completely lame.

as i finally gave in on trying to get someone to drive, i texted nick and told him i was sorry that we didn't show up. i really do feel bad, both about us trying to get other people to drive as well as not going to nick's show. i think they're going to europe soon, so hopefully i will get to see them at some other show soon.













i have been playing with photoshop, maybe i will superimpose my head in this picture, so it will be kinda like i was there.

web-based memberships

over the last few years i have been involved with a few different online memberships where i pay a monthly fee in order to receive certain goods. i have enjoyed these for the most part. some are better than others, at least based on my needs. here's what i have learned.

emusic.com

emusic is a music downloading service. it differs from memberships like napster and rhapsody in that the files you download are yours to keep forever. it differs from services like the itunes store i that songs are cheaper than 99 cents/each.



when things were great

i originally signed up in january 2006. after a free trial of 30 songs, i really liked their selection of varying genres of music with a lot of harder to find independent stuff. i decided to go for their highest membership level of 90 songs/month at $20/month. it worked out to be about 22 cents a song and another nice things was that i could cancel anytime...so it was very low risk. it was a great way of downloading stuff legally and on the cheap. the downloading process was very user-friendly. i discovered a bunch of bands that i didn't really know about prior. some of those include:

• antony and the johnsons
• beirut
• the unicorns
• islands
• cannibal ox
• girl talk
• midlake
• the subways
• dozens of other bands/musicians that now fill my ipod

when things went bad

ok, so things didn't actually go bad as much as i started to run out of things to download and i also did not have enough time to really listen to 8 or 9 new albums a month. after a while i ended up with a lot of music that i had not listened to at all. often times louise would play some band on my ipod and i had to ask her what was playing. so my collection grew faster than i could handle. so while i really enjoyed the service and would highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of good and often times not mainstream music, i had to eventually cancel it this summer. i may one day return to emusic after i have had time to digest all of my current music.

overall grade - 8.5/10

gamefly

after spending absurd amounts of money on videogames, wasting my money to feed the evil empire of gamestop, i finally had had enough. all too often i would get excited about a game, but it for $60 only to not be that into it and then selling it back to gamestop for a third of what i had paid. i joined goozex, which is not a monthly-fee service, is a good and fair way to trade games. i also signed up for gamefly, the videogame rental service. it is an online service that send you your games via usps. i signed up for the 2 games out at a time for $22/month.

when things were great

ever since i was a little kid, i have always loved videogames. i have an xbox 360 and they have been pumping out the games this year. joining gamefly would allow me to try out all of these games before buying. it was exciting getting games through the mail. i had heard horror stories about delivery time since they only had a west coast distribution center. well now they had one in pittsburgh. so there was basically a 2 day delivery time. if i were to send a game back through the mail on a monday, they would receive it wednesday, ship my next game and i would receive it friday. not great, but reasonable. on top of this, i found a site, britghspot.tv, where i would watch commercials and they would pay for $10 of my gamefly membership a month! i got to play a lot of games (some good, some bad) and as a result, save some money:

• call of duty 4
• earth defense force 2017
• beautiful katamari
• various sports games

when things went bad

well i am still currently a member, but i won't be for long. first of all, brightspot shut down. secondly, like emusic, i had begun to run out of games that i really wanted to rent. thirdly, the service has begun to slip. now the delivery times are usually 3 days, which is pretty unreasonable if you ask me. on top of that, they just do not carry enough copies of popular games. you really have to time your returns right if you want to have any chance at a new popular game and if you shorten your list to better your odds of getting a new game, they just don't send you anything....which is the case for me right now. i have currently had only one game in my possession for about a week and a half. unacceptable. i plan on canceling this service next week before the membership renews for another month. i would recommend this service hesitantly and only if the person was a huge game nerd.

overall grade - 5/10

netflix

i joined this dvd rental service in 2004. for $18/month i get 3 dvd's out at a time. they have a gigantic selection of movies and they deliver the movies through the mail.




when things were great

movies galore! i love watching movies, especially on my giant tv. the turnaround time shames gamefly's. i put a movie in the mail on monday, they receive it tuesday, send one that day and i get it in the mail on wednesday. now that's how you run one of these services. they have like 5 million (i am making that number up...but it's a lot) movies to choose from that you set up in a queue for delivery. the website is easy to navigate, does a good job of recommending movies based on other movies you have rated. there is even a friend system that allows you to see what your friends are watching as well as leave them notes and recommend movies you think they would like. this year they have added a very nice feature that allows you to watch a number of different movies and shows on your computer. over the last 3 or 4 years...way too many movies to remember.

when things went bad

ok, things never went bad with netflix. their service has always been great. i never run out of movies that i want to watch. they seem like a company that is always trying to provide a better service for their customers. i find their pricing to be very fair. although if i am being picky (and cheap) that is probably the only aspect that they could improve upon. i would recommend this to everyone i know, even if you don't like movies, it's just that good of a product.

overall rating - 9.5/10

the gamestop kid

this is one of my favorite pictures. whenever i am really bored, i find this picture on my cell phone and laugh. it seriously cheers me up. go ahead, look at this guy and try to frown. it was an ad display in gamestop last year. i hate gametsop for a lot of reasons, but my hatred cannot resist the awesomeness of this picture. i like imagining the photoshoot and everyone who was involved.

scene it?

there is a new scene it? game coming out for the xbox 360 this week. i am very interested in this game, especially since it comes with 4 new wireless buzzer controllers. anyways, this got me thinking about movies in general as well as making movies. over the years different combinations of me, nick, dave, louis and others have had different movie ideas. we have made a few with varying success (l.a.u.r.a., the one where louis played the hyper-erotic mad scientist who moved around on little scooters, and the one where i travel back in time to borrow money from myself) but there are many more movie ideas that were never made.

movie plot 1

nick plays a guy (named either autumn or august) who hooks up with a lot of random girls. dave and i play his chaste roommates who for varying reasons do not agree or approve of nick's lifestyle choices.
we convince him that being a virgin before marriage was the best way t live your life. nick sees the light but wonders what he can do now. i tell them about a legend i had heard where if you bathe in the mythical lake virgin you can reclaim your virginity. we all agree that this is something nick should do and we head off to the woods in search of the lake.

along the way nick is tempted by various distractions, like sexy hikers and horny park rangers. with our encouragement he stays strong and continues on with his journey. when we are feeling lost and on the verge of giving up, we cross paths with a mysterious figure. a crazy old man with long white hair and a full white beard, played by simon, approaches us. he asks us what we are searching for. when we explain our intentions, he announces that he is in fact the fabled "great virgin", a 100 year old virgin living in the woods to serve as the gate keeper for virgin lake. he puts nick through a series of grueling and demanding tests and obstacles. once nick completes them, we are granted entry to virgin lake. nick calmly enters virgin lake in an emotionally-charged transformation. the end.

that was a movie idea that had us all laughing. hopefully we will make it one day.

my young brain

i have a nintendo ds and one of my favorite games is brain age, which is weird because i never liked doing work in school, and yet when you present it to me in videogame form 5 years removed from real school, i can't get enough. for those of you that don't know, brain age is a game comprised of a bunch of different mental exercises and activities that were designed to help improve or maintain your mental capacity. it was developed based on the research of dr. ryuta kawashima.

these exercises consist of math questions, reading colors aloud (ex. the word "red" appears, but the font color is blue), keeping track of people entering and leaving a house and a bunch of other fun little mini games that are aimed at activating your prefrontal cortex. the game tracks your progress with the floating head of dr. kawashima offering you praise and/or suggesstions. once a day you can take a series of random tests to determine your "brain age", with the idea that the lower your brain age the better shape your brain is in. the ideal brain age is 20...and you can probably guess what my brain age is. the problem is you aren't forced to take the brain age tests, so when the perfect storm occured and i got my score down to 20, that was it, i was done testing. my brain age is 20 and has been since the last time i took the test like a month ago. if i take the test again, i know things can only get worse. it's nice for showing off to other people:

me: so dave, how do you like that brain age game?
dave: it's pretty fun and addictive. i really like that dr. k guy.
me: yeah, yeah, enough dilly-dallying, let's cut to the chase...what's your brain age?
dave: well i just took the test last ni-
me: my brain age is 20!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!
dave: well i only just started the-
me: 20? did someone say 20? that's funny...cause that's my brain age...
dave: well i have to sit down and kind of figure it out f-
me: well maybe if your brain was of a similar age to mine, then you could easily figure it all out.
dave: shut up, you're annoying.
me: i'm sorry dave...
dave: yeah, well sometimes you can be kinda insens-
me: ...sorry that you brain is real old...old like oldy olsen!!!
dave: why don't you retake the brain age test then?
me: i mean, i was just messing with you...my bad

so now i have a copy of the sequel, brain age 2. they changed the games on me and i am having difficulty. now they throw out either a rock, paper or scissors symbol with a statement of either "beat it" or "lose to it". you have to say out loud, the symbol that either beats it or loses it. it sounds simple, but it's deceptively tough and is making my brain show its age, which is currently at 32. i will figure it out and get it down to 20 and then have another quick discussion with dave.