That’s right, there are no Spartans in this game, which changes up the gameplay more than you would imagine but we’ll come to that later. The new hero in the series is a strong silent type named “Rookie” who drops into the city of New Mombasa soon before the events of Halo 2 for all those who keep up on the Halo lore. Rookie, as an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST), drops into the city to free it from Covenant control when disaster strikes, spreading his squad over the destroyed city and knocking him senseless for a fair amount of time; this is the basis for the story in ODST, a surprisingly engaging tale.

The player controls Rookie as he wanders through the dark, destroyed city trying to reconnect with his lost squad and when he comes across a clue leading to their whereabouts, players are taken back to later in the day when that squad member was out and about. An interesting way to tell the story but it will keep players in their seats and their thumbs on the controller.

Remember in previous Halo games when grunts would stick themselves and run at you in a last ditch attempt to take Master Chief down, and remember how it never worked? You are not Master Chief, you do not have shields, you cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound, you cannot stop a speeding bullet and you most certainly cannot play this game like any other Halo game. Enemies are taller and more intimidating and that adds something, you will think twice about confronting a Brute head on if you’re low on ammo and health. And the game is hard! Heroic is challenging and Legendary is almost impossible without help from the co-op aspect. ODST’s have low light vision that will help you navigate through the dark city and sometimes its better to pass up those three grunts than to take them on.

The new Firefight mode is excellent, pitting you and your friends against as many enemies as you can handle. You get guns, a shared amount of lives and luck against Brutes, Jackals, Grunts and Wraiths; all at the same time. ODST also comes with a second disc that has all of the Halo 3 maps (Legendary and Mythic) and this disc is used to play with your friends who are too poor to pick up ODST yet. It’s a nice addition if you didn’t splurge for the map packs earlier.

Whether or not you buy this just because it’s Halo or it was a new release, ODST is a very respectable stand alone story compared to the Master Chief saga. The game is a must for any Halo fan and any first person shooter fan. This game gets five heroes that aren’t Master Chief out of five

Maybe a bit sketchy I know but this is along the same lines of a picture we saw of the PS3 slim before it was announced.

And a picture like this from a catalogue emerged mere days before we saw Microsoft’s answer to Sony when they dropped the 360 Elite down 100 dollars.

Substantiating something like this with a blurry photo used to be grounds for a good laughing at but after these two developments and the way the market is going right now I’m going to side with the sneaky worker at Toys R Us with a hidden cell phone camera.

The picture goes on to reveal that the drop will be happening somewhere around September 27th, which just happens to coincide with the Tokyo Game Show. At this point I don’t think it’s coincidence that Sony and Microsoft both announced their drops at large events to draw enough buzz and people to their cause.

The next question that begs to be asked is whether it will actually work? And the answer as of now is: maybe. An interesting fact this year, Nintendo is playing catch-up in hardware sales this year, the first time since the Wii was released. Sony and Microsoft are intruding onto the casual gamer niche that Nintendo though they had wrapped up with their low prices and new games. This on top of the fact that games for the Wii are quickly becoming mundane copies of the ones that launched the Wii to it’s pedestal in the first years. And now with the 360 coming out with Natal and the PS3 coming out with their own motion senor control, Nintendo better keep ahead now or they will fall behind quickly when those come out. Nintendo doesn’t want another Gamecube situation on their hands (being way behind Sony and Microsoft) especially after dominating the market for this long.

Let’s cross our fingers for Nintendo’s sake and hope that the trendy topic of price cuts boots their sales as it did for the 360 and the PS3.

For those who aren’t aware of the greatest threat to human kind since the swine flu, the Madden Curse is the series of interesting and most times unfortunate coincidences between the players that appear of the front of EA Sport’s football game Madden, and those players being hurt soon after appearing on the cover.

Lets take a trip back in time to 1998, true to the pattern that Madden games follow, Madden NFL 99 has been released. Most will remember that John Madden himself graced the cover but, there was an edition of the game that featured Garrison Hearst, and it all went downhill from there. Hearst suffered a gruesome ankle break when he tried to spin away from a defender during a playoff game against the Atlanta Falcons. The rest as they say, is history.

Madden 2000 once again had John himself but there was a recognizable Barry Sanders in the background. Barry heard the injury train coming and escaped an undesirable fate by retiring in the 1999 off-season. Lucky him.

Eddie George, the star of the Madden 2001 cover seems to be the exception to the curse and mysteriously escaped an ill-fate but it does stand to be noted that the 2001 season was George’s only season with less that 1,000 yards and only had 3 yards per attempt, both career lows for the legendary half back.

Madden 2002 was released Sept. 12 of 2001. On Dec. 2 of that football season Daunte Culpepper suffered a knee injury against the Steelers and missed the final five games of that season.

Not only did injuries finally catch up to Marshall Faulk after he appeared on the cover of Madden 2003, he ran for 500 less yards between the 2001 and 2002 seasons. And thus began the downfall of the Rams.

Madden 2004 featured the now infamous Michael Vick on the cover. If you put aside the dog fighting and jail time and all that, Vick broke his leg and missed the first 11 games of the season after being on the front of that box.

If anyone is a winner in this whole curse, it would be the cover-boy of the Madden 2005 game. The ferocious middle line backer of the Baltimore Ravens, Ray Lewis suffered a hamstring injury in week 6 and missed the rest of the season, but he’s has the best career after being on the cover of anyone else.

2006: the Eagles poster-boy became the Madden poster-boy and ended in disaster, as we have been establishing. In a week eleven game after appearing on the cover of the video game, Donovan McNabb tore his ACL as he was jumping out of bounds and consequently ended his season. That’s a good way to go isn’t it?

Shaun Alexander, the half-back for the Seahawks broke his foot after being posted up on the Madden 2007 cover. All hope was not lost for in the same game, Alexander set a team record with his 102 touchdown.

When Vince Young announced he’d be on the cover of Madden 2008 people immediately said he would fall victim to the ruthless curse. But he was wrong. Not only did he miss a game during the season due to injury, but he’s no longer the starting quarterback in Tennessee.

2009 was supposed to be Madden’s comeback into greatness so they decided to put someone who was also coming back on the cover, the future Hall of Famer Brett Favre. Missed no games but played absolutely terrible in the later half of the season and annoyed a generation of football fans with his retirement flip-flopping.

And that brings us to this year, Madden 2010; the first Madden to feature two players on the cover, and will probably take them both down. Troy Polamalu is already down, he tore is MCL in the first game back against the Titans and is expected to miss 3 – 6 weeks.

My advice to Larry Fitzgerald: retire while you can! You had a good season last year and proved your dominance at wide receiver and we would all hate to see you go down. Just because you don’t get hurt in the first week doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The curse is out there, and it’s waiting to claim more victims.

I’ll start where every other review of this game starts: we live in a post-Dark Knight era for comic books. That movie defined not only Batman but all other superheroes and charged them to step up their games/movies/personas to appeal to our tastes these days. That being said, Arkham Asylum does a good job of distancing itself from the movie, while still carrying a good story and creative gameplay.

I don’t want to hear people complaining about how the Dark Knight and Arkham Asylum are showing a darker side of Batman. If I remember correctly Batman is possibly one of the darkest characters (that is still a hero in some sense) that comics have ever seen, aside from the Punisher maybe. He watched his parents get gunned down as a child and had to grow up alone, you can’t just look past these facts when making a Batman IP. This is something Arkham does well, this Batman has depth, and even more than his muscles in that new Batsuit they have for him.

The other interesting dichotomy to Batman is that not only is he a master in martial arts, but he is also Gotham’s best detective, maybe the best in all of the DC universe. This opens up so much variety in the game, giving players the choice to sneak around in the corners and silently take down enemies. Or you could run in, fists blazing and just take down a posse of guards without breaking a sweat. Personally, I like being the silent Predator, swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle, taking down enemies one by one and watching the rest of the grunts shoot into the air as they get more and more terrified. When I am forced to fight though, the controls are tight and lead for some absolutely KICK-ASS fight scenes when you link all your combos together, but grasshoppa, it is not all about button mashing. The game offers a surprising amount of strategy within these completely one-sided fights. It keeps you coming back for more every time.

The story is ingenious, and hits a home run on a curveball that plagues every comic book story, “how to get all the good villains in one place while still making sense?” Why not go to the prison where Batman put them all? It’s been done before but as far as I know, never in a comic book spin-off. And these bosses aren’t easy either. Each one whether it be enormous Bane or creepy Scarecrow, causes Batman to use different tactics and his awesome gadgets to defeat them.

On the downside, the story can be very linear sometimes with you retracing your steps multiple times and crawling through the same ventilation system different times. Sometimes it feels like you’re doing these mundane tasks instead of actually confronting the Joker, who is always on the other side of a TV screen or a glass wall.

Overall the game is by far, and I mean a very very long FAR there, the best superhero game to have come out in a looooooooooooooong time, again I use hyperbole for a reason. The qualms with the game are small and few and far between and overall the game is just awesome overall. Everyone who dreamt of being Batman as a kid will feel that age again as soon as you take down a group of 6 guys with just thinking about it. The game gets four batarangs to the head, out of five.

My dwindling bank account and how much more it’s going to dwindle this fall.

I love all the games coming out this fall but I don’t love the price tag. Assassins Creed II, Froza 3, Guitar Hero 5 (coming with Guitar Hero Van Halen for free, YES!!) are just the start of the list. And now being in college, money is even more strapped than it was back home. I was fortunate enough to find some funds to pick up Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box and I have loved every second of it.

I intend to have that feeling with all my games that I get this fall.

Now just because I don’t have the money to buy the games, that doesn’t mean I’m going to complain about the prices and boycott them until they drop (which they won’t). You know what I’m talking about, Left 4 Dead 2. How low have fanboys sunk that they have turned on the company that makes the games that they love because in THEIR opinion, the company hasn’t made enough “improvements” from one game to the other. Last time I checked, Valve gets paid to make games and you don’t. I’m going to take their expert stance that they have added more to the game than what your adolescent tantrum believes. And the argument that they haven’t “made good on their promise to provide DLC for L4D” doesn’t hold water either. Valve released quite possibly the most addicting gameplay mode, Survival, along with a new map, FOR FREE. And with Crash Course on the way, which sounds immensely fun from all the bits and pieces I’ve heard, people should have no reason to be whining and crying about the game.

I’d rather not get started on the other group of people who cry foul and say that L4D2 is racist, that should probably saved for another blog.

(Valve, continue doing what you do best. Half of the people who are “boycotting” the game will end up buying it anyway so don’t sweat it. I just ask for a little more info on Half Life 2 Episode 3? Please?)

The only thing that all these games coming out have persuaded me to do is work harder to scrounge together cash for each release. Bank robbing is low on the list of possible ways of getting money and high on the lost of possible ways to get arrested so we’ll see if I have to resort to that anytime soon.

Like everyone else, I’m not exactly sure if this is fan-made or from the production company itself but either one wouldn’t surprise me. This clip has everything that the original Cloverfield had; shakey hand-cam, first person narration and the random splicing in of personal video clips into a tragedy caused by a giant monster.

I, unlike most, actually enjoyed the original movie. It was innovative and slightly unnerving to see a disaster happen from that point of view, it was a good idea altogether. I didn’t really enjoy all the misdirection that the first viral campaign lead me through though so heres to hoping for a fresh start and another good sci-fi monster flick.

Hypocrites all of them, except not really.

It’s not their fault that they dont want to spend 69 cents for every room in every hall on campus, I don’t blame them. It actually enforces their cause a little bit more. If you want your door to be open to all the fun people that walk by and interesting things that follow, you damn well better get off your lazy freshmen ass and do it. And I kinda already went and did that before I came to this shocking realization, so I am currently waiting for my prize for unraveling that enigma.

But the damn doorstop is too small, it won’t keep it open! -shakes fist-

Last night I had a group of sorority girls who were rushing that were walking up and down the hallway finding entertainment. I was in my room reading and everytime they passed my door I was forced to play the game “Make this guy remember all of our names.” Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad having a group of 7 girls walk into your room every 5 mins, I enjoyed it. And I hope that my open door policy will keep things like that happening. Because thats what college is about.

Meeting sorority girls.

Except not, I do want to meet people, no matter what their gender, hair color or major. So if you’re reading this and currently attending the University of Missouri, the room is 2100 College Ave.

What’s the difference between Xbox Live and Facebook?

Gather a bunch of like-minded people together in one place, offer them activities to do with one another, ability to share pictures and communicate, brag and compete against each other and violia! You have Face… I mean Xbox Live. Back in 2002, one of the things that made Microsoft the frontrunner in the console market (back then, it’s not the same now) was the ability they gave their players to interact and play with their friends relatively easy. In 2004 when the Facebook creator decided to move from a “hot or not” website out into more mainstream website, Facebook began to look a little bit like Live. And I’ll admit paying for Live is a little bit of a hassle but to manage over 1 million people on this network, let them have access to servers so they can play each other and have constant maintenance all at the same time is worth the price.

Live is only separated from Facebook because it’s main focus is the games in which it’s users play. But even that isn’t too far of a stretch from Live now. Mafia Wars and Scrabulous have turned parts of Facebook into a competitive arena for social gamers who don’t want too much commitment. Both of the networks strive to bring people from all around the world together. Facebook’s main page is a globe even while on Live you can play Call of Duty with your friend down the street along with someone in Japan at the same time. It’s the same level of creepy that you get on Facebook, but if anyone says anything, you can silence them with a headshot.

So excuse me if I choose to spend my time gaming instead of seeing who has broken up with who and what events are going on tonight that I’m not attending anyway. I would much rather be defeating Lucien in Albion or fighting through hordes of zombies. Next time I walk by the computer room with my mother tracking down my sister on Facebook, I’m going to suggest her to go to rehab.

I had to get all existential on myself and decode what a blog is. Why do we obsess over people reading our every thought and whim as we take time out of our lives to type it down and publish it to parts unknown? For most it would seem that this is their way to leave their mark on society, for some it’s just an attempt to try and be funny but for me it would seem that I just need somewhere to leave my thoughts. Since having a diary is so 1994 and I’m pretty sure I’d never have another date in my life if a female found said diary, I come here.

My dream job is to be writing somewhere, be it a newspaper, an online blog such as this or somewhere else I just want to be reporting the news to people in some form, (TheFeed if you’re reading this…. I’m unemployed at the moment!). This will be my job at some point in my life so while some housewifes are wasting their time uploading pictures and mindless comments about their latest book club meeting, this is where I’ll be preparing for my future all while looking at games, people and other funny stuff. Stick around if you’re brave enough.