I played through Kane and Lynch back when it first came out.  I heard the various reviews and took a chance on the game.  In the end I really enjoyed playing it despite the flaws in the gameplay.  I really was taken in by the two characters and the things they are forced to do during the course of the game.  I even went as far as buying the game a second time on the PC (I played it on the 360 the first time I played it.)  Even on the second time playing I really really liked the overall experience.  But I wonder why I'm in the minority when it comes to this game.  Other games with just as many problems have been more popular with people but I have thoughts as far as that's concerned.  I think the overall dislike of this game comes from the two main characters.  In most games you get a hero someone out to do good, save someone or save the world.  Some games offer the anti-hero a person forced into the act of good or changing the way they do things due to a betrayal.  In Kane and Lynch you play as one of two just down right evil people.  Two men that live outside the law and are willing to kill anyone that gets in their way to accomplish their goals.  You would think by the end of their journey they would have some kind of redemption or a change of heart but no that doesn't happen.  Many innocent people die by the hands of Kane and Lynch and they do not bat an eye.  Lot's was said about the "No Russian" level in Modern Warfare 2 but this game had basiclly the same thing in the bank level where the player playing as Lynch kills all the hostages during a psychotic episode.  In this way I think people would have a hard time relating to these two because most people aren't going to go out and do the things these two do.  But while Lynch is just straight up crazy Kane is a man that's made the choice to do what he does, killing stealing and just living on the other side of the law.  One thing that sets Kane apart from Lynch and many of his comrades is the fact that Kane is a coward someone who buckles and backs down at the first sign of being outnumbered or if the situation will end in his defeat he just lays down and accepts it.  I'm thinking of the part when the 7 confront him with his wife and daughter.  When they're all there Kane is ready to let them kill him but when all but those two leave he beats the Mute to death with a shovel and kills the guys in the dump truck, if the situation changes he will quickly make an about face and fight back.  When pushed he can resort to striking at his enemies to get revenge.  This is shown in the prison level of the game.  But if it couldn't be done under the mask of a riot I personally don't think he would of gone through with the attempt to get an ex partner out of jail.  In the end Kane loses the only thing that matters to him, his daughter but only through his own actions which I would say ties him to Lynch as Lynch was responsible for the death of his wife but that was by his own hand.  I know I'm talking about this stuff like it could of gone any other way as the game doesn't let you decide to not go to the prison or any other big choices but it's just one of those stories where I like to play around with in my head and imagine how it could of gone.  I never thought this one would get a sequel and I'm glad it is because personally I love the two characters and want to see more of what they can do.  This overall isn't really a lot but I just wanted to share some thoughts.

I'll start off with saying this, I'm going to spoil some games here.  The first Far Cry and both Uncharted games are top on my list.  I guess by reading the title and this first couple of lines has spoiled something already but I can't help it.   
 
Anyway, most games have a clear cut setting and purpose to the game.  You're in this area or environment and you're going to be killing this certain enemy or whatever.  Now some games can take a twist and throw you in a completely different direction and it's for the better.  The first Doom comes to mind as a game that did this well.  You're in a marine base fighting soldiers and some demons but by the end you're wading through Hell killing what I guess is suppose to be the devil.  While Doom isn't know for it's story telling it was the first game that came to mind when I was thinking about games that did this change.  But really there isn't a whole lot of games that do what I'm about to say.  This thing I hate so much I usually refer to as "All of a sudden, monster."   
 
First up Far Cry.  I liked Far Cry I played it when it first came out and I thought it was a good FPS.  Controls felt great and for the time it was an amazing looking game.  You spend a big chunk of time going through the jungle killing soldiers not the most original thing but it was fun.  Now it's been awhile sense playing this but I don't remember a big setup for what happens about halfway through or more towards the end of the game but it happens.  All of a sudden you have to fight monsters, these mutated super soldiers things gone wrong.  (It totaly hints at these monsters.  I just loaded the game again and it shows them to you in the opening cinematic, I still hate that they're in the game)  It completely ruined the game for me.  I don't remeber if this was a twist I knew about going into the game but it still ruined the game for me.  I killed one or two of these things and then closed the game and uninslalled it.  I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. 
 
Then a few years later I played a little game called Uncharted (This all applies to Uncharted 2 as well), you're Nathan Drake in the jungle hunting treasure and smoking dudes along the way.  Now I know this was never brought up before it happened but BAM!  You're fighting zombie monster Nazis out of nowhere near the end of the game and it makes no damn sense.  I was so close to the end of Uncharted when this crap happened I finished the game but in the end I thought it made the game just seem stupid.  Uncharted 2 does the same gimmick but with these blue guys with bows and the same thing that makes these blue men powerful making the final boss just cheap and not fun to fight at all.   
 
Another game from Crytek was Crysis and this game did the here are some monsters in the form of aliens but they were hinted at very early on and not just thrown at you with no rhyme or reason.   
  
Now why does this bother me?  For one if it doesn't match with the story it's just unneeded.  In the case of the two Uncharted games it just wasn't needed, ever.  They would of been better games without all that supernatural out of left field crap.  But my one big time complaint with this happening is the game is never balanced for it.  The whole way through these three games the challenge is fair and the guys can be taken down with your guns easily.  The monsters appear and they are always way to powerful.  In Far Cry after I killed a couple of the Trigen monsters I was completely out of ammo with none in site and more of those things in my way.  Same thing in Uncharted 2 fighting the blue dudes.  I know they're all suppose to be monsters and have poweres but half of an AK-47 magazine to somethings head should kill it, or how about you put the needed ammo around as you fight them.  It's just ends up frustrating me, not at the challenge I like a good fair balanced challenge but when it's plainly broken it's just not right.  What got me thinking about this stuff is I'm considering firing up the first Far Cry to try and finish it but having to deal with those blasted Trigens makes me not want to bother.  I did finish both Uncharted games but in the end I thought the stories were crap even though I love the characters and how they interact with each other.  I don't want to get into that right now so I'll end this here.

 
I'm a person who likes to play his video games on the hardest setting possible.  I'm a person who likes to play his games on the hardest setting possible the first time through a game.  I'm big on games giving me a challenge.  I like it when I'm just so angry at a game I want to snap the game in half and swear off playing games forever.  The feeling of relief when you see "Checkpoint" reached after an extremely tough section is pure bliss.  I'm one who tends to get through games very quickly, ususally I can finish an average game in a few days a week at most.  I don't get much of a challenge out of most games.  The COD games on Veteran are a favorite of mine becuse they are ball bustingly hard, well except for Modern Warfare 2 that's a joke on Veteran.  Two games that come to mind that had Hardest modes that felt just right were Gears of War 2 and Halo 3.  Gears 2 was a steady challenge through out the whole game.  I had some trouble when you're riding the rigs to go dig into the planet and you have to shoot the Reavers down but besides that a very balanced experience.  Sniper rifle in hand I plowed into Gears 2 with a mission to beat it on Insane by myself and I succeeded.  Halo 3 was a similar experience for me a steady pace of challenge that I enjoyed all the way to the end, except for the "Cortana" level.  It's just a broken mess of never ending Flood spawning that just rapes you every chance you get.  I had to just run to each checkpoint and hope they triggered without me dieing, again another game done solo without any co-op on Legendary.  Back to the Call of Duty games, COD 4 is one of the hardest games I've ever played.  It was a two week struggle to get through it on Veteran.  The Ferris Wheel outside of Chernobyl, The level Heat where you run down the hill and No Fighting in the War Room were torture.  Not to leave out on of the biggest screw yous in the history of gaming, The Mile High Club.  MHC was a 5 day ordeal of me trying for an hour getting so mad I wanted to put my hand through the wall then playing multiplayer for awhile then trying for an hour.  Now I'm not one to get super excited to a point that it shows often when I beat that plane I was jumping up and down in excitement and yelling how awesome I was because I did it.  My roommate at the time knocked on my bedroom door to see if I was okay.   
 
Another hard game that I played recently was Demon's Souls a great game that came out last year for the PS3.  It's a action RPG that has a huge learning curve due to the difficulty, the game makes you earn your progress you feel a sense of accomplishment when you progress.  No check points you die and it's back to the beginning of the level and you lose all your souls (money) and you don't get back any items you may have used in the coarse of the level before you died.  I went into this game expecting hell and I got it, at first.  Once you get a feel for the combat and how everything works Demon's Souls actually isn't that hard of a game.  Still enjoyable for the hardness but not as will breaking as people make it out to be. 

 
The games of today do not have the overall difficulty of game of the past.  The thing games from the past had going for them especially the NES game were most of them were kind of broken.  Enemies would respawn if you left the area of the screen they were on or they would endlessly respawn due to a glitch.  Some of these game featured the dreaded knock back, Castlevania and the Ninja Gaiden games come to mind.  You get hit and the character would fly back in an arc to land usually in a pit.  While usually cheap this mechanic added some extra challenge to these old school games but in the end it was just frustrating to watch your dude fall to his death over and over again.   
 
A series that was pretty much very tough but well balanced about itself was the Mega Man series.  I mean Mega Man, Mega Man not all the off shoots and side games and all that jazz just the main series.  Even through they were tough if you knew what you were doing the games were very beatable.  Even the spawn of hell that is Mega Man 9, it's hard but all you have to do is memorize the levels but trying to jump into a single space pit off of a moving platform that is flying over said pit and not hitting all the instant death spikes that surround said pit is a pain in the ass the rest of the game is beatable with as I said memorization.  I remember not having a lot of trouble with Mega Man 2 but I've heard people talk about how hard it is.  It's been a long time sense I've played Mega Man 2 so I wonder if age has caught up to me on that game with my old man reflexes I wonder if it would be to hard to play now?  I think I need to download it on the Wii and give it a shot to see if I can still beat it.   
 
One more game to talk about here and that's Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I popped that game in picked hard and away I went.  It's one game I regret playing on the hardest mode right out of the gate because I think it hurt my overall enjoyment of the game.  Now I wasn't a big fan of the game overall.  I thought the story was weak and all the boss encounters were just dumb.  Even the Scarecrow parts I had heard were so cool were just kind of a let down.  But playing it on hard was brutal because I had no idea how the combat worked.  I know on the lower settings they give you clues on when to hot the button to fight but I think the reason for that is the combat is just straight broken.  I would love a pair of the rose colored glasses reviewers were wearing when they played this game because it's not a great game, I don't even know if it's a good game.  The amount of collectable sets in it rival Donley King 64 which was overkill.  It's the best Batman game ever made but that's like saying this is the best tasting turd I've ever eaten, in the end it's still crap.

  
With part two of this I'm going to talk about the later stages of gaming.  Pretty much all the machines that have come out since the game format has gone disc based.  I'm not going to go into as much detail about these systems because I didn't spend a lot of time with each one.  The main reason was a got my first real PC Between my SNES and my PS1.  After I got my hands on a real PC I pretty much forgot about console games.  I had many years of PC gaming to catch up on so I spent my days playing through dirt cheap old PC games.  Old Sierra games, Some of the early FPS games, whatever I could get.  The PC in question was a Packard Bell, 75hz Pentium with a whopping 4 MEGS of RAM and at the time a massive 1.2 gigabyte hard drive.  I ended up upgrading the ram to 8 MEGS (OMG!) so I could run Quake a little better.  I had played lots of PC games at friends houses but never owned one myself.  I would say at that time Quake was the most important game I'd played because it introduced me to online play.  I would sit up at nights and play Quake over my super fast 56k modem, it ran like mud but I had a blast.  That turned into an obsession with Red Alert online later in the year.  But eventually the hard drive in that PC died and I was unable to afford to replace it so my PC gaming went into hibernation.   
 
I got the PS1 the year it came out but it only got a little love as I was playing the PC.  Resident Evil 1 and 2 were the stand out titles for me.  My absolute favorite game on the PS1 was Castlevania Symphony of the Night, definately in my top ten of all time it was so good.  Taking the best parts about Castlevania and adding what I loved about Metroid but anyone reading this already knows that.  I played Final Fantasy which I'm sure anyone with a PS1 at the time played that one.  Speaking of Square at that time this was when they started to release more than FInal Fantasy games in the US.  Einhander was one of those games.  With my love of Shmups be it verticle scrolling or sidescrolling this game was near perfection for that genre.  Everything about it melded together in a way that was just borderline perfection.  With all the PS1 classics being released on the PS3 I'm sad this has not been put on the PSN yet.  Freaking Final Fantasy 8 is on there and it wasn't that good a game.  But I digress, basicly I played all the big name games on it but some of the lesser known titles slipped by due to my PC gaming. 
 
  
With a new job at this time I picked up a Japanese Dreamcast with Soul Caliber and Sonic Adventure.  I didn't have a lot of import games for the Dreamcast but I did get the US release when it came out.  I had Ready 2 Rumble and Blue Stinger which was okay but had some really bad crap about it gameplay wise.  Everything in life grinded to a hault when I picked up Phantasy Star Online.  That was like crack, I was addicted like you wouldn't believe.   I was only getting a couple hours of sleep a night because I stayed up so late just playing that game grinding for the next rare item.  After my addiction to PSO came to a close I decided I wanted to try a real MMO.  With my new PC which I had played Half Life and other games of that time on I decided to play Everquest.  I couldn't get into it.  I was looking for something closer to PSO but Everquest was a more complicated game.  The first Dungeon Siege was a game on the PC I really enjoyed I blew through it in a three day weekend with very little sleep.  I think in those 3 days I only slept about 5 hours.   
 
I eventually got a PS2/Gamecube/Xbox but this was a generation I passed by for the most part.  I played GTA 3 on the PS2, KOTOR on the Xbox and Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and not much else.  I ended up getting Star Wars Galaxies when it launched and the next year was spent playing that.  I love Star Wars and this game while not being really Star Wars-ey was just enough to scratch that Star Wars itch.  I really enjoyed the game and I was not a fan of the giant overhaul they did to it over time.  The only two breaks I took from playing it were to play KOTOR and Jedi Academy.  After I stopped playing SWG I played a couple different games on the consoles I owned but one by one those were sold to upgrade PC parts.  Eventually I got into World of Warcraft and that was it, I don't need to go into detail about this but it was more consuming than SWG.  It would be the only thing I played for 2-3 years.   
 
So now I sit here typing on my PC, with a PS3, a 360 and a Wii sitting next to my TV.  I haven't played the Wii in months, Madworld was the last game I played on that.  I've been through some games on the 360 but the RROD crap has burned me on the system, I'm on my fourth 360.  The PS3 is my go to console for the moment but if the game is on the PC I play it on that.  Because no matter what I own or what I play I will really be a PC gamer for life.  It's just what I enjoy the most but I like all the platforms out there for some reason or another and that's really all I have to say about that. 
 
So that's a brief history of my gaming stuff.  I glossed over some stuff but I'm pretty sure I hit the important parts.  I just wanted to share some things about how I've enjoyed the hobby I've had for almost my entire life.