clarividencia

Having stared at that picture of Batman kicking someone in the nuts for months and months, I figured it was time for an update. Its been a crazy few months, what with the move and all. After a few weeks, we are settled into our house but still feel like things need to be done. For starters, I really need to mount my speakers in the man cave/room/throne/kingdom/possibly heaven. I am still missing two speakers to complete the 7.1 setup but have otherwise been blown away by how awesome DTS HD sounds. It literally feels like the floor is going to give out.

The alarm in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 sounds so unnerving on DTS HD + War Tapes setting that I had to turn it down. As of right now, my Onkyo system can go up to 100 but I don't even need to set it past 50 for fear of blowing a sound crater in the room. I know I tell this to people over and over, but surround sound is one of the most immersive things you can own to compliment your movies and games. Nothing makes you feel like "you are there" like a good speaker system.

Eventually I'd like to figure out a way to sound proof the room so as to be able to blast it without getting Wendy to divorce me. Usually, I have to prep her before I-according to Blink-do battle on my tv. "Baby, gonna go game upstairs...its going to be loud for a bit, sorry". I'm not really sorry, I mean, how can I be sorry when I am in Sound Heaven. All I can think of is how great it is to hear the bass resonate throughout the room. Bliss.

I'm excited to hear what God of War 3 will sound like, if the Demo sounded like that then I'm sure the rest of the game will be amazing. Final Fantasy XIII is hitting tomorrow but I doubt this game will be a sound juggernaut. I know for sure it'll be drop dead gorgeous but it doesn't strike me as a game with great use of surround sound. Who knows, maybe I'll be proven wrong.

Meanwhile, its about lunch time and Harry Potter needs to be read.

Our Softball league is in full swing and boy am I having fun. As of now, our record stands at 1-1 but that loss was merely good luck on their part. Not saying that as a sore loser, but just how I saw the game. We made less mistakes on the outfield, whereas they made more but our few errors cost us that precious extra run. Either way, that last catch was nothing short of a miracle.

Next time people! We got this!

As you know (because of my Tweets) Batman: Arkham Asylum hit stores yesterday. Its not much to say that this is the best Batman game ever made (it is) but it is also the best comic book game ever made. Not just because of the gameplay/graphics/sound but because they took the original material seriously and crafted a story true to its origins. The Joker is fucked up and the rest of the cast seems brilliant. I say seems because I've only run into a handful of them at this point.

Not only did they respect the original material, they (Rocksteady) created a near-perfect rendition of what a Batman game should be. There is platforming, solving Riddlers puzzles, detective mode, challenge rooms and fighting. Not only are all these instances fun, but the fact that you get Batman's technology makes them even better. Being able to hang upside down on a Gargoyle and pick enemies off is brilliant.

Though, out of all of those mechanics that I mentioned, the fighting mechanic is by far my favorite. It's fairly simple, one button attacks, one counters, one stuns and the other evades. The fact that you only have ONE attack button would seem to make the fights fairly mundane and boring but they are far, far from it. Eventually the amount of strategy that goes into stunning, reversing and chaining critical attacks goes beyond the simple push of a button. At that point, you are anticipating attacks and avoiding those that can't be countered and only avoided. The animation of Batman reversing and critial attacking is fairly impressive. Most especially his counter-attacks because they make him look like a badass ninja.

The Challenge Rooms, both in the single player game and in the Options menu offer some fun Batman Silent Predator sections. For example, you will enter a room that is being patrolled by armed bad guys. During these instances, Batman must use his gadgets and wit to take these guys out without alerting the others in the room. How you tackle these rooms is entirely up to you. Some rooms vary it up with Hostages where other ones have both armed and unarmed bad guys. In other words, its never boring.

I haven't even mentioned the moments where Batman must save lives, including the lives of enemies. Or the simple fact that his suit eventually starts showing battle damage from this night of hell on Arkham Island. If you consider yourself a fan of the Dark Knight, this game is a MUST buy. If you are  fan of great video-games, this is also a MUST buy. Oh, did I mention the PS3 version of Batman comes with playable Joker maps? Available for free on PSN.

Go ahead, treat yourself.

-Alex Out

I checked out my trophy list for Battlefield: Bad Company. I thought that getting some of the tougher trophies was never going to happen, like beating the game on Hard and hitting a Helicopter with a laser designator. Hard isn't such a big deal, because if you die, you don't have to restart, instead the game pushes you back to your drop point and you can keep fighting until you beat the current section. Hard became a problem towards the end of the game, where dying meant you DID have to restart a big section of the game. Luckily, I found a path that allowed me to meet very little resistance and get passed the tough sections. Getting to the last mission, I was able to hit a Chopper with a laser designator and bam!, just like that, I had gotten two of the toughest trophies.

The only other trophy that would prove to be a hassle, is getting 10,002 kills online. Not because its hard, but because getting that many kills is going to take a LONG time. Its a bit easier to get plenty of kills when you have a squad that kicks ass. Also, you just get lucky sometimes. You can crash a server with up to four people (I think) and if you play together, you can kick a lot of ass.

Ozzy jumped online for the first time as well as Zamir. The first few maps they were having trouble because 1) they don't know the maps and 2) Getting used to the FPS mechanics in this game are a little tough.  One thing I'm loving is the fact that the mics work pretty decently. Chris and I played online when the title first hit, and it was a godamn choppy mess. It was practically unusable.

Now though, communication is pretty good and after a few maps we were kicking a ton of ass...even if the rest of our teammates sucked. We were playing as Defenders and the Attackers were kicking our asses pretty good. They had pushed us back twice and at the third gold-checkpoint, we were down to our last defensive point. Our team was doing jack shit because they were getting killed off in different parts of the map, while our squad (Ozzy, Zamir, Chris and me) were trying to keep the last checkpoint from being destroyed.

Because Zamir had the Sniper Kit, he was able to throw out Sensors (they give you enemy locations whenever they are in range) to the outskirts so we could tell where they were attacking from and if they were flanking at all. Because of this, we were able to stop advances before they even got within firing range of the last gold box. This also gave me a chance to switch kits to the Demolition, and attack Tanks that were on the way up the hill. Chris and Ozzy were stopping flanking attacks and this made the last checkpoint a bitch for the attackers because anytime they even saw the gold box, they would die a few seconds later.

Not to mention that on-squad respawns would mean that we'd have fresh reinforcements on the spot to quell any new attack. We were pretty much on an ass-kicking roll. We won and the map ended up being fun as fuck.

Playing online is always nuts, especially when you have mortar fire coming in and tanks firing on other tanks going on all around you. It gets pretty fucking crazy. The sound design is badass too. Add to the mix that blowing up walls and trees will eventually get you a trophy, and this makes for some crazy mayhem. I guess time will tell if I'm patient enough to get 10k kills. We shall see. Blink is picking it up today and he always randomizes the games, so it'll at least be interesting for a while.

Just got Ender's Game yesterday. I'm excited to read it, even if I'm late to the game. I've heard some pretty exciting things about it. I started it last night, and all I have to say is: A six year old beat the shit out of another six year old. Not because the kid is evil, but he did it in order to avoid future confrontations with his cronies. Very much like, 'see what I just did? You bother me again and it'll be much worst.' I can already tell, this book is going to be awesome.

-Alex Out!

Lets face it, most super hero games suck ass. I think the only game to do Super Heroes a little bit of justice, has been one or two of the Spider-Man games but even those don't compare to the badass inFAMOUS.

The game plays like a 3rd person shooter without guns. You only have one super power, and that's the use of Electricity. You might think, eh, sounds boring but trust me there is plenty of destruction to be had with just this one supercharged power. From electronic pulse grenades, to thunder drops and finally shockwaves, killing enemies is never boring. You have the option of playing the good guy or the bad guy and leveling up your powers adds to the overall addiction of collecting and completing missions.

Good Guy:

Bad Guy:
 

The game does a lot of things right. Free form climbing and urban exploration works like a charm, using a sort of "spidey sense" allows you to locate Dead Drops and Ray Spheres that adds additional battery cores and the gameplay mechanics are rock solid. There are a few graphic hickups here and there, which is expected in an open world game like this. Despite that, the engine holds up well during some impressive firefights where explosions rock the entire screen. Cars will be flying all over the place as you wreak destruction upon anyone who gets in your way.

The fact that you can shoot from just about anywhere, even when gliding down is simply awesome:

Once you get the glide ability, jumping from rooftop to rooftop makes traveling much faster.

Its kinda funny that the best super hero game ever released is based on a super hero that has never graced the cover of a comic book. Still, you'd be doing yourself a massive disservice if you didn't check out this amazing gem of a game.

-Alex Out

So, David Jaffe (Creative Director for God of War) has an awesome Doctor. So awesome, that I'm super jealous because I feel most Dr.'s are full of shit and don't care to pennies about you. Just ask Wendy, our Dr. never called to get on her ass about her high cholesterol! Why can't these fools be more like the Doctors on Scrubs? Anyhow, Jaffe's Dr. sent his patients an email over the weekend regarding this new Swine epidemic that's quite interesting to read:

Just wash your hands.

Every year, hundreds of viruses pass through the pediatric and adult community. Many of the bugs are disruptive and keep kids out of school and adults away from work. Some of the viruses have unique signs and symptoms, but most just cause amorphous aches, sneezing, coughing or intestinal upset.

Influenza viruses, especially new ones, trigger more news stories and can be made to seem much more frightening and dangerous than they really are. Government agencies and media don't supply statistical context and make it sound like you've got a "fifty-fifty" chance of contracting this new virus. They then make it sound like a lot of people who get this influenza end up in the hospital and may die. Statistically, nothing could be further from the truth: The chance that the new virus is really dangerous is small. The chance that you'll get it is much, much smaller, and the possibility that you or a family member will be harmed by the virus is so slim that the news should be on page twenty, not page one.

Swine Flu is a virus for which there is no vaccine, no threat to your family and there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of harmless undiagnosed cases throughout the world. The news stories are probably taking a hundred questionable respiratory deaths in Mexico and guessing.

There actually is a very, very small chance that this virus could cause severe illness and whenever this occurs hospitalization and even fatalities are reported. The likelihood of a pandemic is miniscule, but newspapers, governments agencies and the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals do their best work and make their biggest sales when people are scared.

Tamiflu is recommended for treatment and prevention of this influenza virus. The company which gets the drug's royalties (Gilead) has as a major stockholder--previously Chairman--one Donald Rumsfeld.

Local pharmacies are already running low on Tamiflu.

Connect these dots.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

The usual boring admonitions apply: wash your hands, stay well-rested and well-hydrated. You do not need to buy Tamiflu. It is an effective antiviral drug but has possible side effects.

As far as our office prescribing Tamiflu, we would rather not, but we will if you insist. I promise you that I personally am purchasing none for my family and would recommend the same to you.

Best,

Jay
JNG, MD FAAP

-Alex Out

Fuck the man!