jg32

 Well I've been playing Just Cause 2 on and off for about 5 hours of game time now, good enough for some initial observations. 

First off, this game is booring! There is very little varity in the weapon types, vehicle selection, enemy encounters or mission goals. Everything feels the same no matter where you go, and you will go a lot of places. 

That brings me to the second point, the map is too freaking BIG! I'm actually fond of of sandbox style games, and I've played a fair number of them and they usually have the same issue. Moving from one end of the map to another takes forever. This can be ameliorated with fast travel options but in Just Cause 2 it can only take you to places you have been before, and once you get there you will discover that getting to the next interesting place takes a long time. Now the game does have some vehicles you can try and take advantage of such as helicopters, and planes but when flying you will discover that the lush tropics are actually pretty barren of locations and unique things to do.

There a a ton of little out of the way small towns, and each seems to be like the next. You do sometimes encounter enemy installations like radar stations, comm towers, and antennas. Destroying these gets you a message that enemy communications have been effected but there is no effect on the game world. Enemies will still call in air strikes and radio for backup even when you've gone to the trouble to destroy every communication tower in the area. Is having our actions actually have an effect too much for the programmers?

Now that I've mentioned it, lets talk about the enemy helicopters. These things will stick to your ass like glue, raining down an infinite number of bullets and rockets. You can try to hijack them, but what usually happens is that while your hijacking one, another will come by and attack you and the copter you're on resulting in the destruction of your new ride.  Oh, and trying to shoot down the copter yourself is almost an exercise in futility.  Your weapons seem to do so little damage that it's worthless just to try. 

While I'm talking about vehicles let me talk about the driving controls. How do controls be twitchy and stiff at the same time? If you haven't played then it's kinda hard to explain but the vehicle controls are just awful, somebody needs to go back to school and relearn how to program controls. 

Lets now talk about mission type, there seems to be three of four mission styles and they just get cycled, go there push a button, be a turret defender for a little while and repeat.  I want some freaking variety here people!

There's one thing that bothered me playing this game and it took me a little while to figure it out. This game is trying to be a poor mans Mercenaries 2.  Merc 2 is a sand-box style game where you basically accomplish missions for hire and destroy a lot of things. There's even a cammiao by Merc 2 character Jennifer-Mui in Just Cause 2. The thing is Merc 2 had a better sense of style, size, and was all around just far more fun. You could call in air strike from your crazy Russian Mig pilot, get supplies from your Crazy Irish helicopter pilot, or call in favors from the various factions you work for. It just seemed like a much bigger game, but it still much more fun and playable. 

My final verdict is, give this game a rental but save yourself the dough and don't buy it.

 So the Olympics are finally here right? Time to party right? Not so fast. 
A little back story, being a student without much discretionary spending money I had chosen not to buy tickets to various events. I figured the prices would be astronomical and looking at the security rumors and concerns I figured it was going to be more hassle than it was worth. Turns out I was right, so what's a guy with a little money and some free time to do? Why check out the free international venues of course!

Here in lies the problems, you would think that the various pavillions would want to put their best foot forward and encourage tourism in their home countries right? Well a sure fire way to do that is have cheap, or even free ethnic food. 
This becomes a problem however, it seems like all the countries had decided to recoup their expenses through concession sales to hungry Olympic tourists. 

That's right folks, some of the food prices are outrageous! Checking out the Saskatchewan pavilion nets you a $8 dollar dry bland bison burger and a $6 plastic cup of Molsen's Canadian. Want to try a little French cuisine next door at La Masion du Quebec? Think they might have some decent poutine? $12 gets you a (very) small portion of poutine and you can wash it back with a $10 Quebec beer.  Wanna enjoy a little French wine? $12 a (small) plastic glass. 

My sign is cancer, we're a very food orientated people. Food makes us happy and we like cooking for people we care about. Making food very expensive hurts us. There are litterly hundreds if not thousands of restraunts in the lower mainland, each offering better value for money than the Olympic venues. Do yourself a favor and check out the local options. 

Here's the problem. The recent copy of the SFU student newspaper contained an article stating that SFU was planning to privitize residence. The article claims this is becasue of the high cost of reparing some of the buildings and maintence. It also mentions that the dining hall has lost money for the last three years in a row and that students are demanding their money back at the end of the semester.

Let me clarify a few points. SFU IS NOT BROKE!! The could afford to build the ASSC buildings, they could afford to build and run the surrey campus, they can afford to run Harbour Center and they can afford to open the new school for the contempery arts downtown in the woodwards building. Each of these projects cost a shit load of money and three of these locations are in prime real estate areas. Harbour center is right next to gas town and directly across from the sea bus terminal and sky train station, the Surrey Campus is next to the Sky train station, and the woodwards building is right downtown.  

Next, first years are getting milked for all they are worth. SFU's housing practice is to place first year students who live on campus in the single room accomedations known as the towers. Because these facilities do not have their own kitichen facilities, and because SFU signed a shitty contract with the Chartwells corperation these students are forced to sign up for meal plans. The meal plans average 1500 dollars per semester and is only valid at chartwells locations. Here's the kicker, the meal plans are non-refundable. If you find chartwells food to be not very good, and many people do, you don't each much of it or you go for the smaller ticket items.  This raises problems around the end of the semester when people discover they might have money left on their meal plans. The money does not roll over to the next semester nor is it refundable. 

The problem with the dining hall is that the food is crap and no one wants to eat there on a regular basis. Chartwells runs all the cafeterias on campus and they all suck. I've actually seen people go out of their way to avoid eating in the cafeterias. I'm a student, I live on campus, I might eat in one of the cafeterias maybe once a month when I run out of groceries or am not feeling like cooking and don't want to go off the mountain. Every time I've eaten at the cafeterias I've had stomach problems. I keep trying different things and different dishes looking for one I can stand but there doesn't seem to be anything beside overly expensive sandwiches.  I'm not talking about the really fancy kinds of sandwiches either, I'm talking about two pieces of sandwich bread some lunch meat and a few pieces of lettuce. It's $8.50 people!!! The only decent thing I have found in any of the cafeterias is something I call a guilty pleasure. The dining hall has halfway decent poutine, and that's probably the best dish they serve on a consistent basis. 
I know the staff are trying their best, I've talked to many of them, the quality of ingredients they have to work with is crap. Any dish involving rice uses something like Uncle Ben's instant rice, and thing with vegtables uses a frozen vegtable mix you can find in the supermarket. The cuts of meat on offer just look and taste horrible. I should not have to fight to cut a piece of roast beef the thickness of paper. 

Okay this rant is turning out to be much longer than I imagined, but I'm a cancer and we get annoyed when hearth and home is threatened or our food is subpar. 

Okay so this is going to be a review of the movie Watchmen. I saw this movie at the 4:15 showing on Sunday March 8th. I'm writing this the next day so I can give something of an unbiased review.

I have to begin this review by saying that I know nothing of the watchman comic so really I'm like 90% of the people who are going to see this movie. That said this wasn't a bad movie but it suffered from a case of too many plots.

I should also mention that beacuse I'm writting this the next day I might have some of the  scene order mixed up but there should be nothing major.

The opening of the movie is acutally pretty good, it establishes a continuity of superheroes starting in the 40's. We are then treated with a montage of just how their lives fell into pieces. We end the opening with the death scene of an aging superhero, living alone, surrounded with his past glories. 
I should mention that I'm going to try and avoid spoilers here. Many people haven't seen the movie yet and I don't want to ruin it for people. 

After the opening we are introduced to possibly the strongest charecter of the movie, a sociopath (everyone in the movie is aware of this) who's like the punisher only without the guns. He even narrates a journel throughout the movie in the great tradition of film noir detective movies that no one will admitt to likeing.
All told the movie has six main characters, including the guy who dies in the opening but is in almost every flashback and backstory sequence.  Most of the backstory is interesting and really fills out these characters as human beings who might have become a bit more than man but are still human with all the human failings. 

I do have to give the movie proffs for answering the question no one really wanted to ask "What if American Superheroes got involved in Vietnam?" The results are handeled pretty realistically but I must ask the question, WHERE ARE ALL THE OTHER SUPERHEROES!?!
That's the problem with this movie, we follow five different characters, four of them are people with no super powers just a lot of skill and gadets. If it is so easy then were are the rest of the superheroes. One of the plots revolve around a standoff between the US and Russia over AFGANISTAN! Total destruction of the human race comes within seconds of happening because the soviets invade a place no one has ever been able to conquer since Alexander the Great! COme on people this is just lazy script writing!

As the movie progress it becomes clear that this isn't so much a superhero movie as a character study of humanity. Each of the five characters comes to embody some part of the human condition As such it has sequences that are so dialogue heavy that you just want them to be over. I was actually in the movie theater giving the movie clues that it should wrap up the scene and get back to a better plot. 

That brings me back to the main problem of the movie, the multiple plots. As I have said there are five main characters, each charcter gets his own backstory, explaind though flashbacks and plot arch. There's a backgound plot about nuclear brinkmanship with the soviets but it's purely there to establish the ending. None of the political characters act like people and are more like one dimensional parodies of themselves.  Some, well most of the plots are good and the define the characters well. Two of the plots don't give us much to be concerned about. It's so obivious how they are going to turn out that within twenty seconds of realizing they are there I had figured out their resolution.  In fact there's one scene that if they had added one line of dialogue it would have made that characters plot much more interesting. I'm not going to spoil the sence but heres the dialogue.
Character 1: "Do you ever miss it?"
Character 2:"No, do you?"
Character 1: "no."
They then should have had chatracter 2  respond with the line "We're terrible liers you know that?". Go watch that scene and tell me that line does not deserve to be there. Adding this line would have foreshadowed the character, given him more depth, and setup his plot arch in a much better way. 

Without adding specific spoilers I can't really say much more. I can tell you that there is a sequence that seemed like a natural stopping point for the movie. I was actually getting ready to get out of my chair and the leave the theater when instead of ending the movie they extend it by another 20 mins.  I do have the say that the ending SUCKS BALLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on one level and works on another. If this movie is really a character study of humanity then the ending works and can be understood as such. If this is a SUPERHERO movie then the ending SUCKS BALLSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! who the hell ends a movie like that!?! 
Well that's my movie review of the Watchmen, a decent movie with some problems. Now let the Flaming by the fans begin!

I wear glasses, that's nothing new I've worn them since I was about 15. I always have two pairs of glasses, a main pair and a spare pair. A while back I broke my main pair and now have to wear my backup pair.
Tomorrow I'm going to go to lenscrafters and try to find a new pair I can use as a main pair. Lenscrafters is currently offerning $125 dollars off any prescription eyewear and sunglasses. I'm planing on taking advantage of this offer to get some regular glasses and maybe some sun-glasses.
 

Well, here's my first post and not a lot to say. I joined because of a girl (and really that's the reason most guys do anything). I'm probably going to fill this thing with reviews and rants. 

Really that's all I have to say at the moment.