Your fitness matters: – Your game can break down on the court if you are not fit off the court. You need to train a specific muscle that is most used on the court and strengthen the glutes, quads, lower back, and hips to help you with deep lunges and the shoulder and forearm muscles so that you can repetitively hit the ball. Do not forget to do yoga for flexibility of your body and maintaining inner strength. Cross Fit can be perfect for improving that squash specific fitness since it involves high- intensity full body workouts with small breaks.

Gripping of squash racket: – Even though it sounds simple but gripping your racket involves technicalities. You are required to form a pincer movement with your thumb & forefinger after gently shaking hands with the racket grip with your playing hand. There should be a nice formation of V shape by the gap between your thumb and forefinger. Hold your racket like an egg and do not squeeze too much. When you open up your hand, the grip should be closer to your fingers than palm for more control. You can find more info about squash racket here

Deception strategy: – It is essential to learn how to deceive your opponents at the very beginning of your squash classes. This means students or players will find ways to finish off rallies successfully from the very early stage. They will try to put deception and creativity in every shot and will work on their shots.

The “T” area: – Dominating in this area is likely to improve your chances of success. You should combine the hitting and move back to the T area in such a way that they become one action. This technique can help you in saving fractions of seconds which matters a lot in squash matches.

Use height on the front wall: – In squash, both players occupy the same space as opposed to separate by a net. Sometimes this might lead to traffic problems where both players try to hit the ball as hard as possible at all times. If you are not sure where your opponent is you should use height on the front wall to lob the ball and you will get time to prepare for the next shot.

Follow professional matches:- Watch and learn all the latest squash matches from the PSA World Tour on Squash TV. You can visit live tournaments for learning the footwork, mentalities, and the techniques of the professional players. Instructional websites, such as SquashSkills can also teach you a lot.

How to end rallies: – A player should attempt to have proficiency in every shot including tricky and luxury shots. It is necessary for the students to learn deception, strategies and every hitting nick and learning all sides of the game is essential for the full development of the player.

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So…hi.

What an amazing four months it’s been.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

That’s but a fraction of what this site has missed out on while I was too lazy to update it!

Well no more, now it’s time to make up for lost time.
Let me start of by telling you a little bit about a relatively unknown* game called Starcraft II.

*I lie, it’s like one of the most famous of all time

I got into the beta for it a little while ago and it’s looking very promising. The graphics look pretty good and there have been some major changes to units, strategies and tactics even though they aren’t that evident from the surface.

All the races retain their basic units from the first game, like the scvs,probes and drones. Terran have their standard issue marines as basic attack units, zerg have their zerglings and protoss have the zealots. After that there have been some big changes to units you can produce.

See here for the changes in units and abilities

I must admit that I haven’t played the game that much and I’ve only gone against the computer because I’m still trying to learn all the new tactics and how to use the new units.

There are still some balance issues and the beta I’m playing now can still change a lot because of some units being dropped/replaced. I’ve also had some crash issues but overall the game works surprisingly well for a beta including the replay option.

Will it become as successful as Starcraft 1 was? Well, I think so. It has received Blizzards usual attention for quality in build and style so it simply can’t fail. I don’t know about it replacing Starcraft 1 completely because you know, people are nostalgic in nature and while Starcraft II is familiar on the surface, some major changes in how people play the game are necessary.

The soundtrack is okay, but I miss the music from the first game though. Terran music could be a little more upbeat. Zerg is the usual mix of annoying sound effects and sort off music and Protoss remains similar to how it was in the first game.

For now it’s time to sign off and perhaps play a match or two!

Oh and soon, my thoughts on God of War III!

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Konami’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance [sic] starts off on a bad look, introducing in the very title what is arguably the most useless portmanteau word ever devised in the English language. “Revenge” and “vengeance” are, after all, synonyms, so the combination scarcely expresses anything new, does it? It’s the morphological equivalent of a mash-up of a Britney Spears track with a “live” performance of the same track. This kind of thing does not amuse the crew at Left Gamer Review, although we did graduate high school before the “school reform” craze took hold, and thus underwent an exposure to books that is hard to live down.

MGR is the ninth major title in the now-legendary Metal Gearseries, which debuted in 1987 [sic!] and deserves much of the credit for introducing stealth into the video game mainstream. Especially since Metal Gear Solid 2 blew past the limits of what people thought was possible on the PS2, the games have been renowned for their technical excellence–and their strikingly baroque plotting. MGR, for its part, breaks almost completely with the stealth framework of the Solid subseries, while following–albeit more modestly–in the tradition of technical strength and story strangeness. The result is a fine, anodyne action game soaked in a narrative oddly harmonic with its unfortunate title: an over-complicated expression of a rudimentary idea.

MGR takes places a few years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4, after the fall of the all-consuming Patriots conspiracy, an event that seems to have solved more or less zero of the world’s problems. In particular, swarms of cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries manipulated and controlled by private military companies (PMCs) and servile governments continue to stoke the fires of endless global conflict. Raiden, our skinny and notably hairless blonde friend from MGS2, has taken up with one of these PMCs; we catch up with him providing security for an African prime minister as his motorcade is fallen upon by a rival PMC that has, shall we say, “major concerns” about his peace policy.

Actually the Africa plot doesn’t make much difference–sorry Africa!–since it’s just the jump-off point in Raiden’s quest for (sigh) “revengeance.” After a thorough ass-kicking in the “dark continent,” Raiden gets another round of cyber-surgery and chases his quarry, the PMC Desperado–who turn out to be just one part of a greater corporate-government conspiracy, natch….

The big feature of the improved Raiden is the ability to slow down time around a weakened enemy and slice him into bits with your cyber-ninja sword; slice in the right place, and a button press will have you rip out his cyber-spine and crush it in your hot little cyber-hand, instantly refilling your cyber-health. If it sounds excessive, it’s because it is, although it’s also pretty fun, especially since the developers have done a pretty nice job of being “true to the slice.” That is, Raiden can slice along any diameter of the circle, and the enemy is actually cut along that line; slice again, and the new cut is superimposed on the original cut. It’s nifty game physics, and more impressive than the typical practice of having enemies expire in a few cookie-cutter ways, regardless of how or where you hit them.

Outside of the slicing mechanic, MGR plays very much like other “modern button-mashers” like God of War orAsura’s Wrath. In particular, MGR shares these games’ penchant for “crazy” boss battles. It’s not as ridiculous as Asura’s Wrath–where you’re literally throwing planets and supernovae at one another–but strikes us as somewhat more careless than God of War. Kratos does plenty of impossible stuff, of course, but there do seem to be some general limits to what he can do; a big part of the amusement in GoW boss battles is watching Kratos get around his limits through a series of (admittedly implausible) improvisations. Raiden, on the other hand, sometimes pulls a move out of his pocket that’s glaringly inconsistent with what the player has experienced so far. For instance, he can run right up the side of a building during a boss battle–but a large part of the game involves him working through a building from the lobby to the top floor. So why didn’t my man, you know, just run up the side and cut through a window? Because he wasn’t sufficiently “angry” to invoke his super-powers at that point? Riiight.

We should also point out that MGR commits the grievous video game sin of repeating bosses. Admittedly this can sometimes be done creatively; here it is not. It is pure filler. There might have been some legitimate excuse for this back in the days when games came on floppy disks and cartridges. Now there is none.

And anyway, if Konami was truly hurting for DVD capacity, maybe they could have excised some of the long cut-scenes? Now LGR is more tolerant of cut-scenes than the average gamer–hell, some of us even likedXenosaga–but MGR’s are mostly boring discourses on the same played-out debate: “the strong must dominate the weak” versus “the strong must protect the weak.” (Which are, incidentally, quite compatible ideas.) One of the later bosses even says, “You’ve heard enough long speeches at this point,” which alas is but another manifestation of that weird postmodern belief that being ironically self-aware of one’s faults makes them OK, since the declaration by no means indicates the end of long speeches.

To take the thing more seriously, though, the Metal Gear series has always been, in a somewhat contradictory but characteristically Japanese-game way, against war and violence. The series has also been increasingly willing to point the finger directly at the United States: the “War on Terror” is regarded with regret and dread by all the “good guys” in MGR, and the final boss engages in an extraordinary “anti-American” rant that suddenly reveals him as a somewhat sympathetic, albeit quite cracked, character. This is perhaps vulgar anti-imperialism, but as someone once said of vulgar Marxism: 90% of the time it’s true.

But all this raises a very good question: how do you convey the message that war is bad in a game where enjoyment is derived from war-making? We think that only Spec Ops: The Line has answered this question correctly by saying: “Take away the enjoyment.” As we pointed out in our dialogue on Spec Ops, Metal Gear–and not just Metal Gear–tries to have it both ways, delivering awesome combat gameplay, graphics, and sound while talking at you about the evils of combat. There’s something inescapably preachy about the experience, in the classical sense of the fornicating preacher who thunders against sex.

If you’re a big fan of this genre, or a die-hard Metal Gear nut, by all means play MGR; otherwise it’s a entirely fine but mostly forgettable experience, with a touch too much moral hectoring thrown in.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

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Bioshock: Infinite is a “more is more” expansion of the Bioshock template, this time moved from an underwater city to a city that floats in the sky. Infinite inherits the strengths and shortcomings of its predecessors, but also makes some adjustments in level design and pacing that make the overall experience more satisfying.

More challenging, though, is Infinite’s complex plotting. The original Bioshock famously integrated philosophical concerns into a first-person shooter–quite an accomplishment considering that the FPS is the least philosophical (read: most dumb) gaming genre. Left Gamer Review, ever vigilant, thought many ofBioshock’s accolades were a bit excessive. The game’s critique of Ayn Rand was not particularly sophisticated, albeit well more sophisticated than Rand deserves. Much more interesting was the way thatBioshock told its story. The game hinges on a mid-game twist, handled so deftly, that it wasn’t until Spec Ops: The Line that we would encounter something comparably mind-bending.

Infinite has few philosophical aspirations, save for some wouldn’t-it-be-weird-if musings about parallel universes and quantum physics. These all collapse into a finale that is a bigger and louder ride than anything in the previous games, yet leaves one with the inescapable fear that it might not have made the slightest bit of sense.

You play as Pinkerton/private investigator Booker DeWitt, sent to the floating city of Columbia to free a woman named Elizabeth from captivity at the hands of Columbia’s leader, a religious zealot named Zachary Comstock.

Somehow, LGR is the only section of the commentariat interested in discussing the ways that Infinite borrows from The Tempest. (Or, perhaps more precisely, Infinite borrows from The Forbidden Planet, so this is Shakespeare by way of fifties-era science fiction–no need to be too impressed.) Aren’t modern gamers and publishers always trying to brag about how artsy and literary they are? Why aren’t the people at Irrational Games beating us over the head with how Prospero is Comstock and Miranda is Elizabeth and Caliban is a combination of Elizabeth’s dead mom and that crazy robotic bird-monster thing?

Admittedly we’re stretching a bit with that Caliban comparison, but still, the similarities are too many to be accidental. This main plot–finding Elizabeth, figuring out why she’s being held captive, learning Comstock’s secrets, and trying to escape back to New York–is extremely compelling. Unfortunately, it’s bogged down by an uninspired subplot and gameplay elements that have been a downside for all three Bioshock titles.

Comstock is a racist demagogue, so it’s only natural that he faces an opposition. The Vox Populi are introduced early on as a secretive, rebel formation that seeks to overthrow Comstock’s forces. LGR’s attitude toward the Vox Populi passed through a sort of Kübler-Ross-style stages of video game grief:

1. Denial: Ooh, these Vox Populi guys could be pretty cool.
2. Suspicion: Hmm. Seems like Infinite is cynically suggesting that the anti-racists are just as bad as the racists.
3. Anger: Yup. Called it. Infinite is warning us that “the rabble” will go too far and end up being even worse than the racist dictator! Save us, Batman!
4. Confusion: Wait, what’s happening?
5. Acceptance/Boredom.

The story goes almost completely off the rails by the midpoint, so analyzing the Vox Populi feels about as important as debating the class nature of Koopa Troopas. Both are simply game obstacles. We would take the politics of the Vox Populi more seriously if Infinite did, but at about the third time–SPOILER ALERT I guess? Maybe? Is it a spoiler alert if I don’t understand it?–you cross into an alternate universe, the Vox Populi are completely dropped. They stick around as villains, but there’s nothing more to learn about them, and they disappear as a source of plot tension, and hence matter only insofar that they want to shoot at you, for some reason, and thus you have to shoot back at them.

The hops between universes are bafflingly complicated, but also pretty sweet. To Infinite’s detriment, though, they’re introduced in a cumbersome way, and feel at first both annoying and extraneous, even though they ultimately prove to be right at the center of Elizabeth’s mysterious captivity and Comstock’s villainy.

This brings us to LGR’s longstanding gripe against Bioshock. All of these games feature gameplay elements that interrupt the mood created by lavish art and sound design. The floating city of Columbia is splendidly rendered from start to finish. The previous games took place primarily in cramped, dark, underwater environments, so to see the spacious exteriors of a floating sky-city handled with equal grace is truly remarkable. It would feel even more remarkable if Infinite didn’t ruin the mood constantly with nasty little reminders that this is, indeed, a game, and games are, at their core, arbitrary collections of rules.

Each Bioshock interrupts itself with an excessive amount of “gaminess.” Here we’re using the word “gaminess” as the opposite of “immersiveness.” When a game is working at its best, the player feels won over by its logic. At no point when watching theater do we truly forget that we’re watching actors playing parts, but if we’re watching a great play, we tuck away the knowledge that everything is fake in a corner of our brain, and instead get caught up in the drama unfolding. A game works the same way, and this does not necessarily have anything to do the quality of its visuals or sounds. An old game like Super Mario Bros. feels immersive, not because we’re worried about the princess, but because every element of the game fits. We never say, “Fireballs? From a flower? Preposterous!” In the world of Mario, nonsensical elements are organized together into a coherent system such that little feels out of place.

Infinite, on the other hand, is such a mix of realism and silliness that you consistently feel snapped between moments of immersion and reminders that, yes, this is a game, and it has silly rules. You buy ammunition at a vending machine. You put on magic shoes that give you power bonuses or whatever. You heal yourself by looking in trash bins and seeing if someone has thrown away an apple. You see a whole pile of apples where a fruit stand was destroyed by the Vox Populi–but you can’t eat those, because they weren’t discovered in a trash bin or a crate, duh.  A real low-point comes toward the end, when you search a chocolate box at an empty candy shop and discover a hot dog, and then you eat it because your health is low.

These are common game elements, sure, but they’re outdated, and they’re at odds with all of Infinite’s remarkable atmosphere. Infinite adopts, unaltered, most of the gameplay mechanics from the previous entries in the series, often in ways that make little sense. For instance, Infinite gives you special powers called “vigors” that are fueled by “salt,” which are identical in function to the “plasmids” fueled by “EVE.” The original Bioshock featured villains devoted to eugenics and DNA-manipulation, so these quasi-magical powers felt like they meshed well with the story. The vigors feel out of place.  You gain powers by drinking different tonics, and then collect salt in order to maintain them. Why salt, exactly? Don’t know. Not explained. Mostly, it just seems like the special powers are part of the game because it’s a Bioshock game, and you get special powers in Bioshock games.

The skyhook is a new nonsense weapon that is more or less analogous to the Big Daddy drill. It’s a nasty looking thing, the skyhook, and does ferocious damage to people when you smack them with it, which makes sense. What makes less sense is how it allows you to fly. The first time the skyhook helps you leap into the air, Dewitt decides that it’s magnetic, and that magnets help you fly. Grand. Fortunately, speeding around on rails, roller-coaster style, courtesy of the skyhook, is super fun, so I give it a pass. It’s sometimes confusing to figure out exactly where you’re supposed to go once you’re on the roller-coaster, but it’s a nice diversion from shooting at things.

In the first two Bioshock games, the enemies seemed related to the overall story, too. The Big Daddies were part of the machinery that kept the whole realm functioning. They have analogues in Infinite that aren’t explained, like enemies who seem to be made out of clouds of crows, “firemen” with flamethrowers, and winged robotic George Washingtons. Fighting the robot George Washingtons is fantastic, and fits nicely with the way that Comstock draws on America’s foundation myths to support his racist agenda. The firemen and crow-cloud people, though, just seem like video game nonsense thrown in for an extra challenge, with little attempt to square them with the rest of the story.

And so, when we learn that Elizabeth can create tears between dimensions, it just seems like another silly, arbitrary thing in a game full of silly, arbitrary things. You can see where, say, a better weapon is available through a dimensional tear, and if you ask Elizabeth, she’ll expand the tear, and then you can grab the weapon.

But what feels like a gimmick for fight sequences eventually emerges as the central mystery. Why does Elizabeth have this power? How is Comstock controlling her? Is Elizabeth the key to understanding how the city floats in the first place? And what’s the deal with that robotic bird-monster thing?

In the end, I felt like I never learned any of the things that I wanted to know, but instead was handed some dizzyingly dramatic twists that told me a lot of things about DeWitt, who is not very interesting. Perhaps we can debate in the comments whether these end twists make sense, but they seem somehow both exhilarating and deeply unsatisfying, both illogical and predictable. It’s almost narrative reverse psychology. Logic dictates that the biggest surprise will come from the ending that makes the least sense, so we expect a “surprise” ending, and even when the ending twists feel completely unsupported, it’s still hard not to get to the end and say, “Eh. Saw it coming.”

This is not to say that Infinite doesn’t do a lot of things extraordinarily well, because it certainly does. It would be hard to overstate the excellence of the Columbia cityscape, or to exaggerate how exciting it is to explore this big, steampunk world.

Previous Bioshock games were often weighed down by repetitive action sequences, and though Infinite isn’t terribly inventive, action-wise, it wisely puts some space in between fights to let tension build. It felt like hours before DeWitt even got around to punching anyone, which is an excellent departure from FPS tradition.

There’s an interesting discussion over at Kotaku about the violence of Infinite, which argues that the actual first-person shooting is at odds with the rest of the game. The moments without fighting are often the most interesting, plot-wise, which again speaks to the unevenness of the plotting. The intriguing, violence-free moments all relate to Elizabeth’s mysterious background, whereas the Vox Populi “plot” is really just an excuse to keep guns blazing.

Infinite does feature some particularly chilling moments, the best of which are outside of fight sequences. The moment when Columbia’s endemic racism is revealed is quite a shock. (In real life, seeing so many religious white people in one place together would’ve made us assume they were all racists, but this is a game, so the surprise worked.)

It’s a small, background detail, but when DeWitt and Elizabeth go looking for a gunsmith to get supplies for the Vox Populi, you encounter a terrifying “auction,” in which day laborers “bid” for work based on how quickly they offer to complete a task.

But Infinite ultimately must succeed or fail based on how players feel about the ending. We will, at least, give Infinite credit for trying. Rather than producing yet another game fighting through tight corridors under the ocean, Infinite expands its universe. Bioshock 2 merely grabbed hold of the story elements of Bioshockand offered an uninspired rehash. Infinite tells a big, thoughtful, complicated story with a lot of moving parts, but doesn’t always succeed in arranging these parts in a satisfactory way.

Bioshock: Infinite is available for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Mac, and Windows PC.

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The knee-jerk reaction of gamers to any suggestion of a link between video game violence and actual violence is to strenuously deny that such a link exists–which is basically correct (as most knee-jerk reactions are, their low place in rhetoric notwithstanding). Gamers are rightfully fed up with media-hungry charlatan “experts” like Jack Thompson and Carole Lieberman–not to mention (far more dangerous) political opportunists like Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper and the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre. Or in somewhat more peppery language:

Video games, like rock music in an earlier age, is perfectly suited as a political punching bag for ritual post-disaster “discussion”: basically every young person likes them, but the old fucks that comprise the political class don’t, so it’s a great way for the people who decide basically everything to blame things on the people who decide basically nothing.

This is quoted from my piece on the Newtown mass shooting, the bleak pessimism of which is perhaps offset by the fact that it was entirely accurate.

The increasingly articulate resistance of gamers to America’s perennial morality police is a welcome development, but I don’t think that this exhausts the questions raised by violence in games. As I go on to say in the piece just quoted, “Some games deal with violence intelligently; some decadently; and some without much reflection at all. That all merits scrutiny….” So, let’s scrutinize.

LGR sympathizer Tom A pointed me to a recent Kotaku article by Jason Schreier that surveys a bunch of behavioral research on video game violence. It is fairly clear that there is no direct link between game violence and violent acts; that is, playing a violent game can’t be shown to produce violent behavior. In that sense, gamers’ instincts have always been correct–and the point must be obvious now anyway, as the explosion in gaming over the last 30 years has coincided with a general drop in violent crime (as conventionally recorded; but see below).

On the other hand, credible researchers continue to debate whether violent video games increase the immediate propensity for aggression, a much broader and “softer” category of behavior. For my part, I could easily believe this, in the same sense that sad movies make one sad for a while; or that listening to Obama makes one’s own speech briefly more pedantic. What’s the big deal? Art provokes the emotions, and only an idiot thinks that solely the “positive” emotions ought to be provoked. Even when an artwork is the proximate “inspiration” for a regrettable act–like the young men who imitated Goethe’s Werther in romantic suicide–we don’t say that the work “caused” the act.

Actually, it would beuseful to ask whether violent games can dissipate aggression by allowing someone to “play out” their anger in a harmless fashion. The claim seems common-sensical, and anecdotally even indubitable. What’s more, we know–from our friends the gun-hustlers themselves–that young people’s interest in gun sports is in secular decline, for which video games surely deserve much of the credit. Hence video games have quite likelyreduced the potential for actual violence, inasmuch as a Bushmaster rifle presents a more substantial threat to one’s well-being than a Wiimote.

However. While one can (and I did) reply to the prevalence of violence in video games with something like, “no shit video games are violent, because the world is slathered in violence already,” that’s not quite sufficient. Video game violence, while obviously a reflection of the general culture, also helps to constitute it. So if we dislike how violence permeates our culture–which surely all we leftists do, attitudes to pacifism notwithstanding–then we have to adopt an actively critical attitude to game violence as a particular manifestation thereof.

In this vein, thinking gamers need to call out one of the most execrable trends in the art: the growing collaboration of the gaming industry with the military-industrial complex. This reached a particularly stupi-comic peak with the cameo of “Secretary of Defense” David Petraeus in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2–but as theNew York Times exposed in a December 2012 article, the military, arms manufacturers, and major game developers have formed an unholy trinity for “realistic” product placement in marquee pro-military titles likeMedal of Honor and Call of Duty. It’s a doubly disturbing phenomenon when set against the pronounced rise in “legitimate” violence over the neoliberal period: mass incarceration, “free hand” policing, and constant military interventions abroad.

One might note, in fact, that the biggest tub-thumpers against video game violence always manage to “forget” the chauvinist titles when they want to bash gaming, even though these are precisely the games that might teach somebody concrete violence tactics–courtesy of military and arms industry consultants! Thus LaPierre will rant over Bulletstorm–a manifestly cartoonish farce–and Thompson will howl about Grand Theft Auto IV–an unusually intelligent tragedy. But do you ever see them take the Department of Defense to task for promoting militarism in its favored franchises? To ask the question is to answer it.

[In the next part, I’ll discuss why we enjoy violence in video games.]

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Hey there, it’s been awhile hasn’t it..

Going through a rough time right now, usually happens when the weather gets worse and things around here start to get really dark and gloomy due to the sun going into hiding.

Two things are helping to cheer me up at the moment. First, finally getting my hands on Halo 3 after waiting a week. As I expected it’s fun, it’s not the messiah of gaming or the cure for cancer(wish it was…) but it’s still nice game. I haven’t had a chance to play four player co-op yet, but me and Chris took a game earlier today and although it was very lagged it was still a lot of fun.

The other thing is Team Fortress 2.  I got into the beta ages ago when they first started offering getting into it by preordering the Orange box on Steam. I fired it up and shortly after getting it, I entered the first game and it crashed on me. After that I put it off and it was just this Friday that I gave it a shot again and boy am I hitting myself for not playing it more back when I had the chance.

Words can’t describe how much fun this game is, I haven’t felt this way since back when I played Unreal Tournament for the first time(my all time favorite multiplayer FPS). I have been cycling the classes and as they should, all classes have their pros and cons. The balance seems to pretty good, although I’m expecting they will do some tweaking and nerfing at some point after the game is released. At the moment I’m favoring the Medic. I like being the healer, whether it’s in mmos or FPS, it’s a vital role in all FPS/mmo games so mastering it will come in handy if you want to gain reputation.

Since I’m writing about beta testing but I’m also in the Crysis mp beta. It’s another game I haven’t been giving nearly enough attention, mainly because it runs so poorly on my system. To have a chance of running it with decent framerate I have to run it in low settings, ugh is my PC really that outdated… Clearly this game is meant for the future PCs, not even a 8800GTX SLI setup can run the highest setting without fps dropage.

I’m also in the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta but I haven’t had a chance to play it yet because it’s a stress test so getting into the server is impossible. Last time I tried I had to wait for a few hours to get in..

I think I’ll just wait for the game to come out instead.. I hope it’s good because Pirate mmo is needed, arrrr. I can make my very own Captain Zack Jarrow!

So, we should do this again sometime….No, don’t call me, I’ll call you!

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I’m a working man again!

Which would explain the lack of posts on my part the past few days.
Still  adjusting to the physical and mental strain of  the sort work I’m in so bear with me while I get to the point where I’m not falling asleep and aching all over when I get home.

I’m sure I don’t need to mention that two days ago the third and final sequel in the Halo franchise was released. In turn this lead to another world record sale figures and Xbox live traffic, go figure.

I don’t get it…Sure Halo are good games and I enjoy them plenty..but it’s not THAT good.

If I were to pick between Bioshock and Halo, my obvious choice would be Bioshock. It’s a much better game in almost all aspect especially since the single player campaign in H3 is apparently disappointing(very short).

The Halo franchise is possibly the most hyped series of games that’s ever been released. I can name plenty of other games I think are far superior and better games yet Halo always gets reviews like 9.9/10, 10/10, 12/10 “Most awesomenest game of all time!!!”
It hardly  deserves these kind of reviews,  because frankly it isn’t some  near  perfect masterpiece. That would have to be Bioshock in my opinion, which I think has all that is needed to deserve those kind of reviews as seen above.

The graphics, sound, story, length of game architecture and imagination behind Bioshock is almost perfectly put together to make a game that I’ll remember 40 years from now.

I haven’t received my copy of Halo 3 yet *thinking: FUCK!* but hopefully I will have it by this weekend or I think I’ll go crazy and kill someone…or something.

Been spending some time with a buggered game named Spider-man 3. I can say that if you suffer through the first 3-4 hours, it actually starts to get pretty fun. The camera view angles can be a real pain in the anus though. The only real reason I’m going through it, is because I don’t have anything else to play and I bought the game so it’s best to try to return the value from the game by playing it, because I hardly think anyone would buy it from me, plus I need gamerscore.

Well of to bed I go before I hi ho to wrok I d’oh!

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Is gonna be awesome.

This coming Sunday The Simpsons and Family guy new seasons starts. The Simpsons is easily my favorite Comedy show of all time, though the series has lost a lot of what made it so great back in the day. Family guy is great but they sometimes take things a little too far in my opinion.

Monday sees the premier of Heroes. I loved the first season and I can’t wait for the new one to start.

Tuesday is perhaps the biggest day of the week. Season 4 of House starts. House is the only Medical Drama that I find really great.

Perhaps the biggest new thing coming out that day is Halo 3. I’m sure we’ll hear the squeakers cry out in unison of excitement that day.

Another overly hyped game sees the light of day but the Crysis demo for PC will be released. Bad timing on their part, I mean who the hell will be playing Crysis when Halo 3 is out? Not many.

The Sunday after that American dad’s new season will debut as well.

Finally the summer dry spell is over and this bombardment of Digital and TV goodness starts again.

Q4 is looking out to be a gamer’s delight and a gamer’s hell, games such as Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Mass Effect, Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, Half life 2:Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Guitar Hero III, Rock Band, Gears of War on PC, Call of Duty 4 and if I include January Starcraft II and many many more.
How the hell do they expect us to find the time to play all these games..

I’ll have to figure out a way to fit it all in, but probably some of those games are gonna feel left out.

If someone would pay me for playing Video games, well then I would be set but alas I’ll probably be tied up in heavy work schedules during Oct/Nov, so my time will be limited.

Anyone wanna offer me a job playing Video games? :p

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