Tuesday, September 30, 2008

My Jason Statham Obsession


While I was on vacation I watched a bunch of movies that mostly included Jason Statham. I even dragged my lazy ass out to the movie theatre to see Death Race. Me and my nephew really enjoyed it too. Obviously there wasn't a deep plot or story to Death Race. It was your typical brain dead action flick. I like those kind of movies. In the 80's there were a ton of them. There are times when I just want a violent action movie where I can just sit there and take it all in without having to do too much thinking. Death Race was that movie.

I also watched The Bank Job. Not really an action movie, but really entertaining to watch. Supposedly it was based on a true story. Not so sure how true the story is, but it did make for a good movie.

Another Statham movie that I checked out was The Transporter. Yes I realize it's a few years old, but for some reason I just never bothered watching it. There was tons of over the top action that was definitely unbelievable, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. I can't say the same for The Transporter 2. It was just too ridiculous. With that being said I will be going to the theatre to see The Transporter 3.

The other Statham movie that I watched was Chaos. I was mostly bored with this one, but I did enjoy the ending.

As long as Statham keeps doing action flicks I'll be watching them. He's basically the only tough guy action star worth a shit these days. I still haven't watched everything he's done, but I will. I'll probably watch WAR next.

Monday, September 29, 2008

NHL 09 Be A Pro Mode Rules!


I finally went out and picked up EA's NHL 09 for the Xbox 360. Basically the reason for the delay was the fact that I knew I'd be on vacation, and wouldn't get much time to play it with all of the things I had going on. Last night I decided to start with the Be A Pro mode. I'm so glad I did. This is the single most awesome mode I've ever played in any NHL video game, and I've played them all. You start out by creating a player and giving him whatever name you want. If most people are like me they created themselves. You get to decide everything from height and weight to what brand of stick, skates and helmet you want as well as the type of curve on your stick. I opted for my player to be a center who is a sniper. After you've decided what position your player will be playing it's off to pick the NHL team that you will be trying to play for one day. Obviously I picked the Dallas Stars. Then I was shipped off to the Stars' minor league AHL affiliate where I have a bunch of goals that the organization wants me to achieve such as shots on goal, goals scored, and points. It's definitely a challenge to only control one player vs controlling an entire team of players, but believe me it's an incredibly fun challenge.

Be A Pro mode is great for a number of reasons. Only controlling one player feels rewarding when you actually score a goal or assist on a goal. I also chose to play this mode the "authentic" way which means I contols my player and only my player. When it's time for a line change I actually skate to the bench and take a seat waiting for my health to go back up while play goes on without me. There isn't any time for day dreaming while play is going on either. When the coach calls for your line to get back out on the ice you had better be ready. After you take a shift and sit back down on the bench you'll get comments from the coach which can be both good and bad letting you know just what you're doing right and/or wrong. Be A Pro mode is total NHL player role playing at it's best. In this mode you can even pick your favorite NHL player and guide him through a season.

Just playing this mode alone I highly recommend any sports fan to pick this game up.
Even if you're not a hardcore hockey fan like I am I really think you'll love this game.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Vacation Time & Various B.S.


I'm off for nine days! I don't really have any major plans. I'm just gonna kick back and do whatever I please. My next vacation is the week of Christmas. Next year I get five weeks of vacation. Vacation time and benefits are the main reason why I'll probably stay employed where I'm at untill I retire or die.

After five days of playing Viking: Battle For Asgard I decided not to rerent it. I had gotten about 2/3 of the way through this game. At one point in the game it was me against a whole legion of warriors. I came seriously close to kicking all of their asses and then I died. It was a cheap death as well. There was no way in hell I was going back through all of that button mashing hacking and slashing again. At times I had a really fun time playing this game. A lot of the time it was a mediocre experience. I'd say it was worth the rental price. At the most I'd probably pay about 15 bucks for it. I also got a decent amount of achievement points. I could have easily gotten more points, but I just wasn't willing to pay to rent it again. If I had to rate it I'd give it a 6.9/10

Note To 360 Owners: IF YOU DON'T YET HAVE GEOMETRY WARS EVOLVED 2...JUST WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU WAITING FOR???

Stuff I've been listening to lately...

Asphyx - Last One On Earth
Atrophy - Socialized Hate (This is really not very good. Violent By Nature Kills it!)
Megadeth - United Abominations
Exodus - Force Of Habit
Iced Earth - The Crucible Of Man (A lot of forgettable songs...unfortunately.)
Halford - Resurrection
Iron Maiden - Brave New World
Iron Maiden - Dance Of Death
Iron Maiden - A Matter Of Life And Death

Last Movie I Watched: The Substitute

This was only the second time I had watched this. The first time was right after it was released on VHS. As cheesy as movies like this are I always enjoy stuff like this. It's funny to see Marc Anthony as the gamg leader though.

Can you guys tell nothing is really going on in video game land? Things will pick up soon though, and I'll have a shit ton of things to blog about. For some reason I haven't even been inspired to talk about 80's related pop culture.

Olivia Looking Hotter Than Ever!!! (Wipes the drool off of chin)

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Adam Sandler Fan & Damn Proud Of It!


It's always funny to read reviews of an Adam Sandler movie from the critics. The reviews are alomost always crappy. I expect that now. I'm also happy about it. What do stuffy old serious critics know about silly juvenile bathroom humor anyway? Adam Sandler isn't for everyone. If you're immature like I am then chances are you like most of the movies he's been involved with. I've also noticed that it seems like there is no in between with Sandler. You either like what he does or you don't. His humor is right in line with mine and you always know what to expect with one of his movies. I also can connect with him because he's that older guy that basically refuses to grow up. If you're a Sandler fan like me and my daughter are you'll be happy to hear that his latest movie entitled "Bedtime Stories" hits theatres Christmas day. I WILL be at my local theatre on Christmas day for sure.

My Top 5 Favorite Adam Sandler Movies In No Particular Order.

1) The Waterboy
2) Happy Gilmore
3) Click
4) Billy Madison
5) Little Nicky

Tacklin' Fuel

Monday, September 15, 2008

New Game On My Radar, And The Wii Game That Made My Arm Sore


I just got the latest copy of the Official Xbox Magazine. I skipped directly to the review section which I pretty much always do. Most of the review scores for the games they did review were pretty much mediocre scores. Then I see one game that got a 9 that I was totally not expecting to see. OXM gave Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway a 9. I can honestly say that this game wasn't even on my radar, and I'm a big fan of shooters. There are a ton of WW2 video games out. I know a lot of gamers are sick of them, but I'm not. I loved Call Of Duty 2. I don't care what war it is. If it's fun I'll play it. I've never played a Brothers In Arms game, but now I'm thinking about picking this one up. It's being released next week. I'll wait and read more reviews, but I tend to trust OXM because they are usually quite critical of games.

My Wii finally got some attention. I rented Boom Blox and blew the dust off of the Wii. Me, my nephew and the wife played this for quite some time, and had a lot of fun with it. I wouldn't pay more more than 20 bucks for it, but it was fun. It's definitely a game where it can get old with multiple plays. We ended up playing the throwing modes. It's basically Jenga with different modes. After waving the Wii controller a few hours my arm became sore. All of our arms were sore. It was even worse the next day. I knew my arm was going to be sore before I even played Boom Blox because I've heard that pretty much anyone who plays it gets a sore arm. Now I'll sit back and wait for the injured arm lawsuits to start.

Boom Blox Review

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Can't Wait For Those October Releases


The new triple A titles can't get here soon enough. I'm dying for new games to play on my 360..new games that rule anyway. There are plenty of mediocre games to play. I own a few of those games. NHL 09 is out right now. I figured I would rush out and buy that, but for some reason I'm not as excited about it as I thought I would be. I've owned every EA NHL game since the Sega Genesis. Last year NHL 08 was awesome. I know I'm gonna get more of the same with a couple added features, so maybe that's why I'm not running out to buy it. I guess the games that I'm really waiting for are Fable 2, Fallout 3, Gears Of War 2, Call of Duty: World at War, and Left 4 Dead. There are a few others, but the ones I just listed are my must haves.

There are some games that I plan on renting. I went to my local movie/game rental store today to rent Mercenaries 2: World In Flames, but all of their copies were out. Then I planned on renting Too Human, but those were out as well, so I had to settle for Viking: Battle for Asgard which is mediocre at best thus far. I've played it for a couple of hours and have gotten over 100 achievement points, so it's not all bad I guess.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

30 Minutes Or It's Free


Remember back in the day when Domino's Pizza had the 30 minute delivery guarantee? I sure do. In the 80's I loved Domino's. They had great pizza, and they would ALWAYS deliver it in 30 minutes or less. This couldn't have been a small feat. Back in the day there weren't half as many pizza delivery choices as there is now. Every weekend my family would order from Domino's. Every weekend they would deliver our pizza in 30 minutes or less. I know because I timed it every time. Seriously, I did. I wanted that free pizza just so I could tell everyone that Domino's blew it for once. It never was to be though. Why am I bringing this up you might be asking yourself. I'm bringing this up because no matter what pizza chain I call these days it's always a 45 minutes to a 1 hour wait! In this day and age pizza places can't deliver a freakin' pizza in 30 minutes? Domino's sure as hell could back in the glorious 80's!
I'd go into just how much costomer service sucks at pretty much every business here in America, but you probably already know that. Pizza delivery has taken a step backwards, and my stomach isn't happy about it.

Domino's Commercial From 1986

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

My Metal Story (Short Version)


This year marks my 25th anniversary of being a "metalhead". Back in 1983 when I was in the 6th grade I discovered heavy metal. Back then heavy metal was exploding with bands like Quiet Riot, Dokken, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Dio, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and so on. Quiet Riot's "Metal Health" is the album that pretty much got me heavily into metal music back in 1983. After that album I pretty much searched high and low for every metal band I could find on vinyl and cassette. A few years later I would discover heavier bands like Metallica, Megadeth, King Diamond, Savatage, Anthrax, and of course Slayer.

For a few years Motley Crue was my favorite band. I just couldn't get enough of "Shout At The Devil". I swear I wore the grooves out on that album. One band made me pretty much forget about the might Crue. That band was Metallica. In late 1986 I heard "Master Of Puppets" for the first time and was floored by it's heaviness. Of course I had figured that I would be a Metallica fan for life. My first ever concert was Metallica on the Justiice tour with Queensryche opening. My love for Metallica ended when I heard an album called "Under The Influence" by my STILL favorite band Overkill. I could devote many blog entries to Overkill, but I'll spare you for now.

Thrash was definitely my main choice when it came to metal, but I longed for some heavier stuff. Don't get me wrong I loved bands like Overkill, Nuclear Assault, Kreator, Death Angel, Testament, Exodus, Metal Church, Coroner, and so on, but I knew that somewhere out there there had to be heavier bands.

One day while looking through a Metal Maniacs magazine I saw album covers that were just evil and scary looking. I knew I just had to have the albums pictured! My first introduction to Death Metal was the band Deicide. I bought their self titled album used for cheap. This was sometime during the summer of 1990. I remember this because I had bought a Sony Discman around this time when I was working a crappy Burger King job. What came out of my speakers at the time sounded like shit to me. LOL It wasn't untill my birthday of that same year that Death Metal would takes it hold on me. A friend of mine bought me Obituary's "Cause Of Death", and I was hooked. I had to have more of this brutal sounding Death Metal, and I had to have it now! From that point on my friend and I would read thank lists from every Death Metal band's cassette inlay card to find more bands that we could check out. We didn't have the internet back then, so it was a lot of looking at band logos, and pics of the band on the backs of cds and cassettes to determine if they could possibly be what we were looking for. Sometimes we'd come up with crap, but most of the time we would hit death metal pay dirt!

Those days were awesome. Those days were fun. Now the scene is stagnant as hell...in my opinion anyway. I still pay attention to all of the bands that I like, but rarely bother checking out new bands. After 25 years I've pretty much heard it all before.
I'm rarely ever excited about anything by a new metal band these days. That's pretty sad, BUT I still love all of that old stuff, and listen to it regularly. I've got 25 years worth of stuff I love to listen to, and I'm fine with that.


E-LIMINATION!

Monday, September 8, 2008

Controller Throwing


First let me just say that I'm generally NOT into throwing my gaming controlers no matter how frustrated I may get playing games. I know that many gamers have though. Years ago I was a controller thrower, but never to the point of breaking said controller. I doubt if there is anyone out there who hasn't at least thrown a controller down in frustration. Once in a while I'll get pissed off at a game and toss my controller down on the couch. A few years back I used to throw my Sega Genesis controller on the floor, but never broke one before. These days they are just to damned expensive to be breaking them anyway. I'm not about to slam my $50.00 360 controller on the ground.

Back in early 1994 I worked at a car wash with this guy named Mike Langan. We became friends after a while. I would go over to his house and we would play NHL94 on the Genesis. I've always been really damn good at all of the EA hockey games. I would play them religiously every day for months at a time. None of my friends could ever beat me, and the scores would always be lopsided. Mike was a controller thrower. Let me rephrase that. Mike was the master controller destroyer. One day we were playing and I was beating him really bad. I probably had like 12 goals to his 1 or something like that. He was getting sooooo pissed off. He kept throwing his controller on the ground saying things like "THIS IS BULLSHIT!!!" or "STUPID FUCKING CONTROLLER". After a while enough was enough. He stood up and slammed the controller on the ground so hard that the controller exploded and the buttons flew all over his apartment. Can you say anger issues?

If you're reading this I want to know if you are a controller thrower or have ever thrown one out of frustration.


Very Stupid Angry Gamers.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Mmmmm Pumpkin Ice Cream & Other Crap


It's that time of year when Edy's Pumpkin Ice Cream is made. YUM! I love pumpkin pie, and I love pumpkin ice cream. It's heavenly, I tell you! I'm tempted to buy a ready made pie shell and just put this ice cream in the shell for the filling. I don't even feel bad eating it because it's LIGHT pumpkin ice cream which means it's way low in fat. You wouldn't know it by eating it though.

I picked up the new album by The Hold Steady entitled "Stay Positive" today. Man, it's been a long time since I bought an actual cd. I usually download all of my tunes off of soulseek unless it's a band that I love and/or just plain can't find it to download it. I listened to the first tarck in the car. My wife hated it, so she ejected it and handed it back to me. What does she know? She had me buy her the new Kid Rock cd today. BARF!

I also finally got around to picking up Iron Maiden's Live After Death dvd. It's actually two dvds. The first dvd has the famous Long Beach Arena show from the World Slavery Tour. You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this on dvd. Live After Death is easily my favorite live recording from any band ever.

I start my vacation in two weeks! WOOT! My nephew will be staying that week. We'll be playing tons of video games. We're also taking a trip to Indiana, so we can show down at the Essen Haus. The food is to die for.

Watch this crazy bastard almost get swept over the Niagara Falls.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Pure Demo = Pure Fun


I was looking to kill some time tonight after playing RSV2 and STILL being stuck in the same damn level. I started browsing the 360 dashboard. I then got a bit excited to see there was a demo for Pure. A while back I expressed how awesome this looked in one of my blog entries. After playing the demo this is a buy for sure. It's got fun pick up and play game written all over it. The track I played on was beautiful. It had zero frame rate issues. It ran smoother than butter. For a high speed racer I'm happy that there were no frame rate issues. 30 frames per second never looked so good. Yeah, that's right ONLY 30 frames per second. You'd never know it though.

Hopefully people on my friends list will be picking this game up as well. I think online multiplayer will be a blast.

One Of THE Greatest Songs Ever!

RSV2 Is Killing Me...Repeatedly


Months ago my wife bought me RSV2 on the day it was released. I thought the game was awesome. I was having a ton of fun with it. Then I got stuck. All through the game you get two soldiers to go through the levels with which in this game you pretty much need. At least I'm learning that I do! I've been stuck on the level where for some ungodly reason the game developers have decided to take my soldiers away and make me go it alone. Man, is this level a BITCH! Of course it's a dark level with tons of barrels and obstacles in your way, so it's tough to see your enemies. Even with night vision and thermal heat vision it's tough. On top of all of this your enemies are nearly perfect. Funny how it seems like they can always see me even though I can't see them. The worst part of all is that every time you die you go way back to the last checkpoint. You have no idea how bad this level is pissing me off. When it comes to shooters I'm definitely not a n00b, but this game is starting to make me feel like one.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

There Are Certain Movies I Can Watch Over And Over


After deciding not to play any video games thanks to a massive headache I decided to watch a movie. I still own several movies that I haven't watched yet, but decided to go with a movie I've seen at least 20 or so times. That movie being my favorite movie ever, What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I don't know what it is about this movie, but I can watch it over and over again. I probably watch it at least twice a year. Johnny Depp and DiCaprio are just amazing in this film. It's not often when I can seriously say that every actor involved did a top notch job.

Other movies that I find myself being able to watch over and over include...

High Fidelity
Revenge Of The Nerds
Fast Times At Ridgemont High
The Last American Virgin
Good Fellas
First Blood
Rocky 1
Rocky 2
Rocky 4
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Exorcist
Risky Business
Better Off Dead
Rain Man
Beverly Hills Cop
Donnie Brasco
Casino
The Breakfast Club
Youngblood
Airplane
Caddy Shack
Mask

Those are the ones off of the top of my head. You get the idea though.

Classic Scene From Better Off Dead

Monday, September 1, 2008

September Is Finally Here!


Holy crap it's September already. I know I'm happier than a teenage boy watching his first porno because of this. I hate the heat. I hate bugs. I hate having to lather on sun block. I hate the fact that there isn't any hockey to watch. I hate having to see chubby/fat women wearing next to nothing...these women actually think they're sexy. Summer sucks ass. It's my least favorite season. Bring on fall! It's my favorite season of all.

The only thing that sucks about September is that I'm going to be a year older when the 21st rolls around. I'll be 36. Ugh. I'm really NOT looking forward to my late 30's.

As soon as October hits I have big Halloween themed blog ideas. Get ready for 31 days of spooktacular blogging frights.

The summer video game drought has hit me. I am still having fun with a couple of games, but damn it I want those triple a titles now.

Watched "Drillbit Taylor" last night. I expected it to be lame, and it was. Me and my nephew were bored, so we said what the hell and checked it out.

Metallica can kiss my ass. It seems they are trying to be "metal" again. Too late, homos! You've sucked since the black album was released in 91. You still suck! Only a moron with shitty taste in music would buy your new album.

Last but not least I used Google image search for the word September. The second image was the world trade center on fire. Man, it's lame that the month of September has be known for that day. BTW I decided to go with the above picture even though it has nothing at all to do with September. I think I made a great choice. She has talent!

September
Games I'm Playing:

Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360)







About Me

My photo
Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States
I'm 38. I'm addicted to Xbox 360 gaming and Dallas Stars hockey. I make a decent living at a boring job where I run two autoclaves and do various other tasks. My escape from this boring as hell life is video games, hockey, and music. I generally listen to Metal music, but I also love 80's tunes as well as 70's tunes. I have an unusual love for the band Overkill. They do it for me for some reason. Blitz is GOD!

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