I beat the Modern Warfare 2 campaign last night.   I was blown away.  Mostly because I felt really disoriented near the end.  Was I supposed to feel that way?  Was that a cliffhanger ending?  Did it seem at all trippy to any of you?  I honestly don't remember all of it, I wasn't in the right state of mind.  Should I feel stupid because a game's ending is confusing me more than the ending of Taxi Driver did for about 10 minutes?  Am I over-thinking it?  Is there anything to get?  It's surely not as convoluted and confusing as a Metal Gear Solid story.  Should I mention I have ADD?
 
I think most people who bought MW2 probably went right into the multiplayer modes before trying campaign, I know I did.  But the campaign is definitely a dynamic and intense experience to say the least.  I'm not gonna say it's "like a movie" because that's not necessarily to the game's credit.  It's not like a movie.  But it can be very immersive.  Some really fucked up things happen.  I have to play through it again.  It's equally as engaging as the multiplayer, even though it lacks the longevity.  I'm just rambling now.
 
And those ending credits...what the fuck?  It's not a bad wtf, just a really unexpected and slightly bizarre way to play out end credits.
 
I think Infinity Ward, on their website at some point, have mentioned they like to pack in as many "holy shit" moments in their games as possible.  I'm sure they actually used the term "holy shit moments" too.  They sure delivered in that department.  I wasn't the least bit interested in this game when I first saw the footage.  I thought I was done with FPSes forever, but Infinity Ward really went above and beyond the call of...something...with this game.  It may just be the novelty of it, but I think I'm even more impressed with this as a sequel than I was with Street Fighter IV (my other favorite game).
 
I'm getting sleepy...yawn...

Ok so I recently got two mediocre XBOX360 games for free.  Let me explain:  someone gave me a $10 gift card for Blockbuster, because the Blockbuster near their house was closing down and they had no use for it.  I visited another Blockbuster and they had a shelf of used XBox games, all $14.99 and under.

The only cash I had was a dollar.  Yea, a single dollar.  The game Fracture was $9.99 and Dark Sector was $6.99.  Which one do I get (I was curious about both)?  Luckily for all these games it was buy-one-get-one-free.  So I got Fracture with the gift card, and Dark Sector for free.  All I had to pay was 59 cents of tax.

I had played the demos of both of these games earlier and they both left me a little underwhelmed.  Yet both seemed to show promise, despite both of them having lukewarm reception.

However, so far I've had a blast playing through both of them.  Maybe I just suck at games more recently, but I died A LOT in both of these games.  It took me about halfway through Dark Sector to realize that I liked it the better of the two.  Not only that, but I also realized that this is a pretty damn good game in general.  I for one now consider it very underrated.  I had soo much fun playing through this campaign.  Periodically gaining powers and decapitating zombies was extremely exhilirating.  I also found the voice acting pretty top-notch, and while the story was pretty vague, it was definitely engaging and the cut scenes often had me saying "fuck yea!" in my head.  By the end of the game I felt like a bona fide badass.  I love games that make you feel like an unstoppable force of nature while still presenting you a challenge.

I beat the game about an hour ago.  There's something about end-bosses that always disappoint me.  They're always either too easy, too hard, and most of the time are just plain underwhelming.  The final boss seemed like it belonged in a Zelda game, not this one.  It was just tedious for the most part, which is also a huge problem with end-bosses.

I'm still working on Fracture.  It seems like the designers of this game focused 90% on the weapons first and then tried to design a game around it.  Don't get me wrong, I do get a blast out of playing it from time to time, but some of it is just so monotonous, and much of it feels like diet Halo.  Plus many of the enemies take way too many hits to kill...even on the default difficulty level.  I have plenty of other complaints, but at least I basically got this shit for free, so it's way more enjoyable than if I paid full, or even used, price for it.

I haven't yet played the multiiplayer of either of these games, but I'm guessing Fracture's multiplayer would be much more exciting than its single player.  I wish I had an XBox Live membership right now, I'm actually pretty eager to try it out.  I bet I wouldn't even be able to find a game on the Dark Sector servers, and I have a feeling it's multilpayer would be pretty standard.

What do you guys think of these games?  Are there any other games that you feel went overlooked but really shouldn't have?

What are your favorite underrated, overlooked, or just plain forgotten games?

I'm a huge fan of comedy in general...stand-up, movies, TV shows, etc.  Yet there are very few things nowadays that can actually make me laugh out loud.  I've been in kind of a comedy slump recently.  I want people to recommend to me stuff they think is funny, that I may not have heard of.  It could be anything, really.

My favorite TV shows:
Mr. Show
Dr. Katz
Home Movies
Seinfeld
Curb Your Enthusiasm
most of the stuff on [adult swim] I find funny but don't necessarily watch all the time

My favorite comedians:
Louis CK
David Cross
Bob Odenkirk
Paul F. Tompkins
Patton Oswalt
etc.

My favorite voice actors, etc. that may also do stand-up but I have only really heard their voice work:
H. Jon Benjamin
Jon Glaser
Dana Snyder
Tom Kenny (he's in anything that's animated really)

I'll also just throw out there that I think all the guys here at Giant Bomb are funny and make me LOL from time to time.

Recommend something that you don't see on the list.  I'd greatly appreciate it.  Conversely, f there is someone/something on this list you haven't heard of I'd suggest you check it out as well.  I value laughter more than anything, it's definitely the second best medicine, next to actual medicine of course.

I've had a subscription to the Official XBox Magazine ever since I moved into my current apartment, about 2 years ago.  My mom got it for me when I moved because she's awesome, but she didn't realize that OXM wasn't awesome.  Apparently she got a good deal because when I get the magazine, it doesn't come with the CD of extra content that usually accompanies it.  This is actually fortunate because usually the CD just includes demos that I can download myself anyway...sometimes it has "exclusive gamerpics" and shit, but if I don't care about my gamerscore then there's absolutely no chance of me giving a shit about tiny squares of color to accompany it.

I used to only read the magazine for the reviews, but since then I've found that there are way better, more immediate sources for reviews...and ones that are way more in sync with MY sensibilites as a gamer, and the best source is actually the website I'm using right now.  Now I just read OXM whenever I'm on the toilet, not that taking a shit makes me want to read about XBox games, it has more to do with the fact that reading anything somehow faciitates my shitting experience, and I'd rather read some guy getting WAY too excited about Fallout DLC than the ingredients on shampoo bottles.

Maybe I've been too harsh so far.  USUALLY I actually enjoy reading the magazine (I can't help but think that's mainly because it's free) but there's always stuff in it that bothers me.  For one, OXM...you just can't convince me that you're completely unbiased.  You constantly say that the "Official" in your title just means that the magazine comes with the aforementioned CD, but still...you chose one console and one only and that happens to be the XBox.

Also, the language used in the writing is very stale and unimaginative.  If they're talking about Left 4 Dead, they'll say something like "Is there really anything better than shooting zombies in face with a shotgun and yelling to your teammates to give you painkillers?"  If they're talking about Fallout 3, it'll be a little different, saying something like "is there really anything better than shooting GHOULS in the face with a ROCK-IT LAUNCHER and COMPLETING SIDE-QUESTS?" 

Reviews never give a good clear picture of why to stay away from a game if it's bad, or why a game's enjoyable if it gets a good review.  The scoring is from 0 to 10, in .5 increments and I see way too many perfect 10 scores, and the other most common seems to be 6.5.  This scale is supposed to be very precise but it seems to be applied so arbirtrarily...almost like the hype of the game ultimately dictates what number gets slapped on it.  I imagine everyone around the office was going "oh yea, Fallout 3, that game feels like a 10...I can just sense it, man" at one time, then some unlucky bastard gets to write 4 pages to try and justify this, when they obviously see clear flaws in the game. 

They gave Dead Space a 6.5 I believe, with only maybe 5 paragraphs along with it explaining that they didn't like looking in containers for health.  Around this time there were commercials for Dead Space that got my little brother really pumped for the game, he'd constantly ask "hey have you played Dead Space yet?"  After I read the review I felt oh-so-informed and confidently told him that OXM gave it a bad review so I wasn't really interested in it.  He laughed and said "so...you're not going to try it?  that's stupid"  Yes, that is stupid little brother.  From then on I was very skeptical about reading opinions from this magazine.  They then gave Mirror's Edge at least a 9.0 and I was baffled.  I had only played the demo but I was positive this game was just a well-polished piece of shit.  And no, I wasn't expecting an FPS, I was expecting a good game.

I'm not expecting OXM to approximate my own feelings of a game in words and numbers, I'm just saying as a source of information that is supposed to guide my wallet towards worthwhile games and away from lackluster ones, OXM sucks.  But easy fix, right?  Just avoid the reviews, get my information from a great site like GiantBomb that looks at games with a much more scutinizing eye.  But I still have to take a shit every now and then, and I'm still curious about what this publication has to say.  Plus, the point of this blog is my beef with one article in particular, not with their reviewing process, so I've been way off track so far.

The latest issue of OXM has a four-page article titled "Loud, Dumb, and OUT OF CONTROL."  This blurb of text sums up the spirit of the article:

"Dismissive attitudes and dangerous assumptions make non-gamers as destructive to our hobby as a clueless chimp with a chainsaw.  Here's 23 of our pet peeves about ignorance that you can help fix."

I thought it was going to be talking about politicians who speak out against violence in games and stuff like that.  But the tone of this list seems to be that people who don't play games "just don't understand" and it sucks how not everyone in the world can relate to the excitement of skipping school to complete more side-quests in Fallout.  I'm gonna ressurect the word "angst" and apply it here.

Most of the entries in the list are pretty much the same thing.  Here's #21:

"Learn the Language of Gaming: A grace period for learning is understandable, of course - we're all beginners at the beginning, right?  But if you can't muster enough patience to sit through a five-minute tutorial, don't whine when you forget the controls.  Don't complain when you end up having a conversation with a clearly non-interactive crate instead of the glowing, obviously interactive computer right next to it.  And exactly how many times do we have to remind you which screen is yours in a multiplayer match before you memorize that simple, binary piece of information?  This isn't calculus."

The whole article is written like that.  It's unfair towards people who don't shit themselves in anticipation of what Cortana will say to them next.  I think of my interest in games as a blessing and a curse.  It's clearly a handicap in most situations.  In other ways it's greatly enriched my life.  I don't apologize to people for getting excited about Megaman.  But I also don't speak to them so condescendingly and get angry when people don't know the basic rules of gaming.  These are rules that have basically become instinct from a life-time of experience.  Clearly I have a leg up over people who are new to it.  If my girlfriend can't understand why you need one stick for body movement and another for camera movement, then big deal...we have sex instead.  It's good that other people can tolerate the geeky things about me, I applaud them for it, and that's really all I ask of them.

And this article is nothing more than preaching to the choir, and sharing pain.  Clearly if you subscribe to magazine that focuses completely on games, let alone only the games on one particular console, then you are not part of the non-gaming crowd.  And if I showed this article to a non-gaming friend, trying to give him/her some insight into the oh-so complex innerworkings of the gamer's psyche and shared frustration, I'd get fucking laughed out of existence.  And I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that whoever wrote this doesn't have any non-gaming FRIENDS.  If they were friendly towards anyone outside of the gaming world, they wouldn't passive-aggressively publish this overzealous nonsense that demeans anyone who doesn't agonize over whether to give their avatar a cute hat or not.

Other than that, OXM...keep doing what you do best, which is helping me shit.