Didn’t feel like writing a review, so I made a video instead! This my first video review since June 2008 (my last video review was for Age of Empires III). Tell me what you think.

There’s too much driving and not enough shooting.

…But the story’s good!

…and replaced it with something a little more classier.

As you can tell, I’ve re-designed my entire blog from the ground up. I’ve updated the blog with a new theme and a new name. I’ve also done a number of other things to make reading and navigating the site more convenient. I’ve categorized all of my recent blogs and I’ve also provided the dates for when I wrote each of my reviews on the “Reviews” page. I’ve also re-written the “About Alex” page and I’ve re-populated my “Favorites” link category with new websites for you to check out. Finding me on other websites is easier then ever, as I’ve organized them all into their own category called “Find Me Here”, which is viewable from any page on the blog. Last but not least, I’ve also added the new Twitter widget, which shoots out short updates on what I’m doing at all times.

How do you like the new coat of paint? Did you prefer the old way best?

Happy Easter! How has everyone been and what did I miss?

As you probably don’t know, I’m a Catholic and tomorrow is the beginning of Lent. During Lent, Catholics are supposed to give up things that are important to them and not eat meat for forty days, because Jesus spent forty days in the desert fasting and telling the Devil to go screw himself.

For this Lent, which happens to be my first, I decided to give up a number of things. For starters, I decided to give up the Internet. In exactly one hour and 38 minutes, Lent will begin and I won’t sign onto the Internet for anything (mail, news, nothing) for another forty days. I’m also giving up playing PC games, as I’m finding myself playing waaaay too much Rome: Total War, and dammit that game drives me insane and why do I even play it. I’ll still be on Skype (Alex.Marra), AIM (AJMarra117), and MSN (alexattaf) if you want to talk to me, and you can still send me messages over Xbox Live if you want.

Just wanted to inform you duders of what I’m going to be doing for the next forty days, so you don’t think I ran off and died again. See you all on Easter!

Is it just me or is Sony starting to look a lot like Sega from the ’90s?

Kotaku is just getting littered with these types of articles every day: Click Here Yo

Well Sony, if you are following in Sega’s footsteps, I coined my own term you can trademark if you like:

“Sony’s hard while Micro’s-soft!”

Get it? Get it? Do I win?

Me and my friend Andrew are going on a double date on Saturday. We were supposed to go last Friday, but one of our lovely lady’s unexpectedly had to go to an all-weekend Super Bowl party jamboree. Since we’re classy gentleman and do everything with utmost chivalry, we’ve created invitations to be given to the girls as momentos of our upcoming night of food and fun.

I thought, since I haven’t made a new blog in God knows how long, that you might want to read the invitation we wrote out for one of the girl’s:

–

Dear Voluptuous Chelsea,

Due to the circumstances of last Friday; we were heart broken and our mindset shattered. We would like to, once again, invite you to a fantastic bomb-bastic evening at the local Denny’s of your choice, at the corner of Cooper and Merill.

You will be expected to be inspected and proper at 7:30 P.M. SHARP, as we will arrive at 8:00 P.M. to arouse your evening and propose our burning desire to elope at the Denny’s.

You will be expected to wear a formal dress with little to no cleavage displayed, though ass is acceptable. High heels are to be worn comfortably. Cleats are strictly prohibited.

Hair is to be done professionally and with grace. Pope Andrew and Sir Alex have a strict policy of not desiring the presence of nappy headed ho’s.

Due to being stood up, put down, and slapped around, dinner is still to be provided, though a rambunctious evening of guitar solo’s, drum burning, and singers singing must commence posthaste immediately afterwards – a.k.a. we want to play Rock Band.

Please, our dearest Chelsea, do not stiff us up once more, for our hearts are broken, lips chapped, mouths soured, and our asses go unwiped.

Yours, in love,

Andrew Ausi and Alex Marra

–

See? What did I tell you? Classy. Not only with the invitations, but we’ve got the whole sha-bang-a-bang going: roses for the girls, tulips for the mom, and we even baked a cake for the dad. We’re all going to some ghetto ass Denny’s in suits and other formal attire and then we’re hoping to rock out to a little Rock Band afterwards. I’ll post some pics if we take any.

On Monday night, I headed over to my local GameStop with a $20 bill in hand and walked out with a game called Rome: Total War. Though I didn’t think my computer could handle its somewhat low requirements because of its proclamation that it could show over 10,000 soldiers on screen at once, I said what the hell and bought it anyway. Due to me watching my friend play it four years ago, my own general interest in the Total War franchise, and the thought of a new way to play an RTS game, I didn’t think I could possibly pass it up.

So, with the game in hand, I brought it home, installed it, and intended to play it for an hour before going to bed. What should have been a quick run-through of the tutorial to get a feel of the game became a non-stop gaming session that lasted until 4 in the morning, at which point I finally realized what time it was and begrudgingly turned off the computer and headed off to bed.

If the previous paragraph was any indication, the game is extremely addicting. It combines part RTS game, part board game, as you can create armies, take on missions for the glory of your faction, lay siege to cities, and a great deal more. It’s sort of a World in Conflict/Civilzation IV hybrid, as land battles has you taking your army and using it strategically to conquer your foes (no base building here), while when not fighting, you control your empire in much the same way you would in Civilzation IV, albeit with less options.

Basically, the game is a shoddy Civilization IV set exclusively in the 3rd Century which allows you to take control of the battles you fight rather than have the game determine the outcome by probability (though that’s an option you can choose). In other words, I like it.

I’ve already put a large amount of gametime into the Imperial Campaign, in which you lead one of the three great families of Rome on a tour of European conquest. Here’s a bulleted list of my ups and downs with it so far, along with some screenshots I took:

• The fact that the battles can accompany up to 10,000 soldiers (most I ever had fighting at the same time was 2,000) is simply astounding and puts other RTS games to shame.
• Thumbs up for the dead soldiers never disappearing during battle, but thumbs down for their not being any blood or gore in the game. Ah well, I guess it needed the T Rating.
• Navies are effectively worthless in the game and are only worth building to blockade enemy ports and transporting units. There are no real-time navy battles in the game, meaning each sea battle is played out through probability, which is extremely lame.
• The battles are pretty basic in themselves and don’t really require an enormous amount of strategic skill, granted you and your enemy have around the same number of troops. The game really shines when you’re outnumbered or are trying to defend a city under siege.
• Speaking on the other side of the fence now, it’s a wonder why the AI enemy will even bother to fight you when they’re greatly outnumbered. One of my battles actually consisted of 1,000 of my best troops against barely 100 rebel light infantry. They were all slaughtered in less then two minutes.
• Laying siege to a city isn’t as fun as a regular battle out in a field. Catapults are a must when trying to knock through the walls of a large city, unless you want to watch your army riddled with arrows.
• Incendiary pigs? What?
• The load times can get extremely long when transitioning between the battle field and the campaign map.
• The realism can sometimes be off-setting and it effects you emotionally. You feel depressed when your army is forced to flee off the battlfield, but a sense of happiness if you’re left to cut down the enemy as they flee off the battlefield.  Battles are quite the experience, if everything you set out goes according to plan.

Now it’s screenshot time!

1.

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Ah, the Death Gate. The dirty Carthaginians thought they could take my town easily, with a force of over a 1,000 men and four battering rams to knock down my wooden walls. They were wrong and paid with their lives.

2.

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As the rest of the Carthaginian forces were fleeing from the battlefield, one unlucky soldier found himself in-between a charging Calvary unit and a group of angry infantrymen. He was crushed between the two converging forces and left to rot in the baking sun.

3.

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Ah ha! It appears our unlucky friend was none other than Captain Milkherem – the general of the Carthaginian army! What a fitting and hilarious end to another Carthaginian dog!
4.

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Soon afterwards, the battle was declared over and I was presented with its results. I knew I had done well, but not that well! It turns out my scant force of 600 managed to not only hold the gate, but decimate nearly the entire Carthaginian force of over 1,000 as well! Victory to the Gods!

I’m not sure if I’ll do a review for the game soon, as I’m too sucked into it at the moment, but if I ever get the ability to do video reviews again; I’ll review this one…along with like 40 other games I’ve played over the past two months.

As for right now, I’m heading back to the Third Century to slaughter some Egyptians.

Was Bioshock a horror game? When reading a lot of people’s impressions or reviews of Dead Space, they sometimes relate the game to being as chilly and as terrifying as Bioshock. That always confuses me because I didn’t even think there was anything in Bioshock that was supposed to be remotely scary.

I mean, a horror game is having six bullets, a butter knife, a useless rusty key, and a Beretta handgun, not a flamethrower in one hand and a fistful of lightning in the other. Pro-tip to anyone that’s scared by Bioshock: You have a shotgun. Use it.

So, instead of doing an Internet search of whether Bioshock was classified as a survival horror game or something, I’m going to ask you guys. Is Bioshock a horror game? If so, did it creep you out or were you too afraid to play it? I really and genuinly want to know because I just thought it was an action FPS.

I’m not too far into the game, but so far, it’s left a pretty solid impression on me. As with my Dead Space Impressions, I’m going to lay everything out in a bulleted list for convenience:

• It feels very familiar to the other Spider-Man games Treyarch has made.
• Swinging around the city is fun like always, but the button layout (which has differed slightly from Treyarch’s past Spidey games) will make long time devotees to the franchise a little discombobulated at first.
• The voice actor for Spider-Man is terrible. TERRIBLE. It’s the equivalence of replacing the voice of Venom with the Count from Sesame Street. It’s just not Spider-Man.
• Mary Jane’s a whiny bitch.
• The combat is a lot more fun and polished when compared to the other Spidey games, but is still nothing really special. The combo moves get old rather quickly.
• Being able to switch between the symbiote costume and the normal red and blue on a whim was a brilliant design choice on Treyarch’s part. The differences between the two are slim, but noticeable.
• The moral choices in the game is another thing I must applaud Treyarch for implementing. Being able to choose between the choices of a misunderstood 20-something just wanting to save his city from an alien menace to a badass name taker with no thought of others safety in mind doing what he feels is right is truly awesome, and really opens up a wide variety of places this story has the potential to go to.
• Speaking of the story…there’s not much to it. Basically Venom whoops your ass but then you get a little bit of his symbiote attached to yourself, which then enables you whoop his ass, and that’s about it.
• The crime in Liberty City New York is both outrageous and outlandish. The place is a warzone! From common gangsters having gun fights at gas stations to giant mechs parading down the street, it’s a wonder why the citizens of Manhattan don’t flee in terror.
• There appears to be less missions involving saving citizens, but I haven’t free-roamed a lot and have just been doing story missions, so I can’t really comment on that.
• I miss Bruce Cambell.
• The new destructible environments is a welcome addition to the Spider-Man franchise. It’s incredibly cool to freefall 18 stories off a building, build up some momentum through a web shot swing, and drop kick a gangster through a nearby building.
• The game is littered with (nearly) game-breaking bugs. Enemies will occassionally find themselves falling through the floor or getting caught in buildings, which doesn’t allow you to complete the mission, needing to restart from the beginnning. This has happened several times throughout my first hour with the game, so that’s not a good sign of things to come. One humerous bug I saw when I was watching my brother play the game was that, in a fight with the character Wolverine, he got uppercut which sent him reeling backwards, but Spidey’s animation froze halfway through, leaving my brother defenseless and dangling in the air. Wolverine, just realizing his new time-stopping abilities, gleefully went to town on my poor brother, ripping him to shreds and leaving him to restart the entire battle.
• The skill tree is easy to use and easy to upgrade.
• The blood is amazing.
• The game has stupid cineractives, as seen in The Force Unleashed and every other game that’s come out within the last year. Why do developers keep putting these things in games?
• The graphics look terrible, and I’m not giving Treyarch any leniency for this. GTA IV somehow managed to make a recreation of New York that’s not only bigger than Treyarch’s, but also a whole lot better looking than Treyarch’s. The only thing I can compliment with on the graphics is that they’re a lot more colorful than GTA IV’s were, and Treyarch decided to go with the classic red and blue suit rather than that stupid movie one that Tobey Macguire wears all the time.

As stated before, it’s a very solid game that I plan on finishing shortly. Leave a comment below stating your own impressions with the game or to those that haven’t played it yet; do you plan on picking it up or letting it slide?