Halo

I was playing through the Halo series with a friend a while ago and I thought I'd share my personal experiences playing the game through on legendary.

First of all I would like to point out a few flaws in the game.

#1 The plot was awful, C rate sci-fi that was written by a lobotomized chipmunk on crack.

#2 The enemies sucked ass, they made 3 models for enemies and then just changed the colours depending on the difficulty...

And what is with the zombies, come on, use some imagination. Doom had more variety for christs sake. Then there was The Flood... THE FLOOD? What? Are you serious? Am I supposed to be shitting myself now? Well I'm not, so you FAIL. Small yellow balls on legs that jump on me and turn corpses to the living dead. Have I seen this formula before somewhere? Let me think now... oh yeah, Half-Life.

#3 The map design. Oh my god, don't even talk about it. It was horrible. It's nice that you forgot to make the rest of the game after the middle. You just turned the whole game around. First we go from A to B and when we get to B we go back to A.

Not to mention that the first trek to point B was frustrating for the boring monotonous design where they just reused the same design over and over and over and over and over and over again.

At some point in the game I actually had to open the door and we had a short break for coffee and when we sat down to play the game we had no idea on which way to go and actually backtracked for a while because the level design was so identical. Thank the gods for corpses that stay on the ground.

#4 There are only 2 good weapons in the entire game. The shotgun and the sniper rifle. There's also the pea shooter that is supposed to be your main weapon throughout the game but damn it sucks. It's good with two players when the other player carries a shotgun to actually kill something and you use the pea shooter to fend off THE FLOOD!

#5 No save option in the between map changes. Oh my god WHY? When you just want to stop playing because you don't want to hurt yourself anymore you actually have to play through the map just so you wouldn't need to start it all over from the fucking start of the level. Trust me, you'll damn Bungee to hell for not making a save game option.

There was a moment while playing when I really wanted to stop because I couldn't take it anymore with the map for it was more horrible than Cthulhu's underwear. But no, we had to play more because we knew that if we had to play the map again we would have to go kill someone or at the very least 20 kittens. What kind of a game would want to make someone want to kill kittens? Well I'll tell you, Halo.

#6 The ending. Just play the game through and you know what I mean. I don't want to spoil it mostly because it was so traumatic that I don't want to remember it anymore. Let's just say I still need therapy after the ordeal.

#7 It was way too easy.

#8 There's more of them

Now let's point out some of the good points of the game just so I can say I said something positive too.

#1 The multiplayer experience is fun. Jeah, I said it. It was fun. Well mostly cause we didn't need to take it seriously and there was someone to cry with at the horrid fact that this game actually got rave reviews.

#2 The shotgun. Now that is a real weapon. No game is complete without a shotgun.

#3 The sticky bomb... I mean plasma grenade.

#4 It's short

I tried to think of more good points but I think I'm stretching with these already.

Anyway, those are only my thoughts on the game. If I can muster my courage to write about the sequel I'll do it. Now there's a game worth remembering, on how not to do a game. If possible it was worse than this.

Thanks for reading
-toby

Batman - The Dark Knight

I just had to write something about the movie because I was wondering what all the hype was about the whole shenanigans.

The movie was ok. Not excellent, not bad, ok.

That said let's grade it the Toby way. I give it 3 hammers out of 5



Let's talk of some of the things that annoyed me in the movie.

First of all, the plot was way too long and tried to do a lot of things in a time limit and didn't really manage it. The beginning of the movie was boring but it managed what it wanted to do, it wanted to prolong the tension we had in the theater waiting to see the Joker.

The whole movie was about the Joker. Seriously. The Joker was the main character, not Batman. Batman was somewhere along the lines of a minor character who talks in a stupid manner. The talk is supposed to be threatening but comes off ridiculous, and the chin isn't threatening or good looking enough to keep Batman interesting.

But I think it's not entirely the fault of Heath Ledger's death that the expectations were so high on the Joker hype. Facts are that the Joker is the most enigmatic Batman villain and the last time we saw him in a live-action movie was in the Tim Burton classic, portrayed by none other than Jack Nicholson. Because Nicholson made such a memorable show out of the whole movie of course the old generation wanted to see what would they do with the character this time around and everyone wanted to compare Nicholson to Ledger.

I say that Nicholson was amazing, but so was Ledger. The Jokers are different and that's great, both portrayals of the character are awesome and it is a shame that Ledger went off and died because I would have wanted to see him take another shot at the role. Give me more Joker!

But let me whine about something else. The school bus. It backed through a bank wall full speed. I have never heard of a bus that could back through a wall. To top it all off the bus didn't get a scratch. Not one scratch in the perfect paint job and just drove off from the hole to join the ranks of passing school buses that seemingly didn't even need to slow down to let the bus join in. And of course the next scene isn't a high speed car chace with Joker vs cops. Bummer.

The whole bank heist thing was quite old-school anyway. Couldn't you come up with anything better than making the Joker steal money from a mob bank and so connecting him to a whole huge mess of mob power struggling that has no sense or is in any way interesting. If he loves pure chaos why does he need to do it the hard way, I would have just torched the bank.

And when you really stop to think about the movie and the characters in it... it was an emo-flick. Let's all cry together for the world is eewul.

!!!Here be spoilers!!!

"Hi! I'm Batman and I have some anger issues and I like to dress up while I beat the living shit out of people who laugh at my costume. Oh, and don't mind the speech, I know it sounds stupid but seriously, if I look like this I better but some icing on the cake."

"Well hello Batbaby, I'm the Joker. Wanna know how I got these scars? Well I was a whiny bitch and my trucker mom fucked my face up with a tire iron while I was jerking off to some dog-porn. I too have anger issues coz nobody loved me when I was growing up and my best friend was poo on a stick."

"I'm Harvey Dent. Yes I know I'm the knight in shining armor in this movie but since my woman was blown up by the clown on crack I decided to take it out on everyone else because, well... I dunno, he was so convincing in that skin tight dress, an that make-up. Oh my god I'm gay!"

All in all, not a bad movie if you like watching 3 grown men dance around in dresses and whine about their problems.

Go check it out.