DaemonicGrim

So, plenty of chatter in recent weeks over Black Ops. Big surprise there. 
This story starts with me buying it about half a week after it's release and after my due restraint thinking something along the lines of "let's blast through the SP for some quick and easy practice to get me ready for MP and maybe even entertain me a little." Oh how foolish a thought to think, I set it to veteran; as we all know that CoD is plainly simple on anything lower. Then I set to work mincing through enemies with occasional bouts of storyline, unfortunately my joy was cut short at the end section of the third mission where I discovered a small tunnel of infinite enemies (oh yes, that's accurate, that's all kinds of "time wasted" accurate, they are definitely infinite for a given value of the term) each of whom had some stunning sharpshooting abilities. After about half an hour of tedium and zero progress I figure my lucks out for the day and I decide to hop into MP anyway. 
 Now I'm pretty far from what you'd call a skilled gamer, in fact, I'm not too embarassed to admit that in the multiplayer CoD world I'm essentially SHITE. But fun was had! And in large amounts too; I even had my housemates join in with some online split screen action for a while here and there and so the evening descended into blood, violence, bullets and merriment. 
 Day 2: Returned to my dismal approach at that veteran corridor of infinity... where I stayed for quite some time before reaching the same conclusion as the previous day and simply killing/being killed online for a large portion of the day. Now, I'd like to say at this point that as much fun as I was having online I was also starting to find little gripes here and there that were lessening my love for the game. The matchmaking was slow, the spawns random and occasionally the maps felt like they lacked direction or organisation and were simply a box filled with random objects at random points. Now I'm willing to forgive the poor map design to a large extent because lets face it, the world we live in is not designed with imminent gunfights in mind. But really, the spawns were a mess, though I'm told that this has been patched and I have admittedly seen a slight improvement, I still think that there is further for Treyarch to go in terms of correcting this. 
At last I returned to my single player campaign when my scores online were telling me it was time to take a break. I allow myself a few failures before getting disgruntled and knocking it down to hardcore. This is the point at which the single player broke for me: I completed the game with very little trouble and in a short space of time. I mean come ON! I put it down by 1 single setting and suddenly I can muscle through damn near every little bit and occasionally have to cover when I'm protecting my Hazmat suit? I've not returned to the veteran again yet but if and when I do I hope it was all in my head and that I'm greeted with a structured, difficult but completable challenge for me to enjoy and feel proud of finishing rather than a corridor with bodies wall to wall, floor to ceiling. 
And now for me to return to my final and by far the LARGEST gripe with the game. I have typed this entire post whilst in matchmaking without finding a single match that failed to connect. I've reset my xbox. I've tried different game types. I've tried to join friends in progress. I've reset the damned router. This is quite simply the worst matchmaking of any game that I have ever experienced. This isn't even an isolated incident, on several days I've simply given up on trying to get into a game in favour of going for a walk, staring at space, juggling, drinking etc. How are we supposed to enjoy a game we cannot play? I'm not sure whether to blame XBL or BLOPS matchmaking, but neither is especially good at resolving or even identifying these issues.  
 
As a small note for those of you that make it this far, I'm very grateful for your time and patience in reading this and I apologise for the long drawn out ranty nature of the post, but damn I've been sitting here a long time doing fuck all and I just needed to type it or get drunk (and I'm broke so drunk wasn't an option) 
 
Kindest Regards my fellow duders 
Grim 
 
(also, anyone else got constructive solutions to crap matchmaking that doesn't involve waiting for a better patch or XBL service?)

<3 Gish.

whoop whoop. Something about X-men. 
  
edit:
honestly probably not going to be interested in this at all, but I may now take a look at more recent xmen brawlers out of a sense of nostalgia...

fuck, I know there's not much to be said that can help but I sincerely hope your mum recovers fast and that there's very little long term damage. With any luck the cervical strangeness won't be cancer, if I was the praying type I'd spare one for you and your mum.

First, I fucking love Dead Rising 2 and the pain it put me through the first time. But after the first play everything becomes a breeze because you know what you need and when you need it, so you're always prepared. (and the extra levels don't go amiss either) It's just plain fun, it might not be great in controls, looks, AI or anything else, but it's so damn entertaining. 
 
As for enslaved, I have not yet stolen this from you nor bought my own copy but my god do I want to play it so badly. The thing you mention about stealing from uncharted 2 feels redundant to me since at the time of uncharted's release that same chase scene was pegged as an homage to crash bandicoot, so why shouldn't other games endorse it even if they're not made by the same studio. Also, the platform some, kill some methodology is used all across almost any games that involve platforming anyway, and it works, so why the hell not :D 
I can honestly say that I'm not surprised that the acting in the game is above standard because I actively enjoyed andy serkis' performances in heavenly sword. 
 
PS, pub soon?

ya cunt, how am I not on your dead rising coop buddies list?

you may also want this:  http://newcenstein.com/deadrisingmap.htm 
that map will do a lot of work for you.

lecture more important than an expo? can't imagine it... especially in the first week. 
 
You should try to get lecturers going :D imagine Ari there...