I'm writing this after playing game after game of being screwed out of any reasonable chance at winning. This game is BROKEN. there are technical issues with connection, lag and hit detection, there are balance issues with grenades and other explosive weapon splash damage. at least in gears of war 1, if someone got the boomshot, you had a decent chance that their lack of skill with it would allow you to win against them. with this boomshot, you have no chance, grenades too. if an explosive weapon like the boomshot, frag grenade, or mortar land within 10 yards of your character, even if you're incover like a building with walls or a roof around you, forget it. You're f'ing dead. Even with the recent patch that improves matchmaking time, your game remains broken. it breaks my heart to see a game that i loved so much become such a steaming pile of **** when most of this stuff could've been fixed in say, a beta test in a live environment. I'm actually stunned that the multiplayer could turn out any worse than the 1st game as that had a lot less money and effort thrown at it, but you blew me away there. Epic Games, you can take this game's multiplayer along with all the technical bugs and balance issues and shove all the multimillion copies of them up your collective asses, i won't be playing this till it's fixed like it should've been in the 1st place.

I recieved my beta key for CoD:WaW on saturday night. For the sake of this blog i'll just call it CoD5. initial impressions: It's a reskinned version of CoD4. it's as if Activision handed over the "blueprints" for CoD4 to Treyarch and said here make this but make it seem different. Everything in the multiplayer is virtually the same and somehow not as good. Blasting someone with an M16 1 year ago was definitely more fun then than shooting someone with an SVT40 now. UAV's are replaced by Recon planes, Airstrikes have become Artillery strikes, and the once feared Helicopter has become a pack of Attack dogs that run around the map seeking out enemy soldiers. Trust me, the implementation is much less impressive than it sounds. Other changes are things that seem meant to satisfy message board whiners for CoD4. Having been an active member of the CharlieOscarDelta.com message boards, I can honestly say that a lot of the "changes" in CoD5 seem oddly similar to the "inifinity ward, please fix this" minorities that complained about the last game. If it was broke (which there wasn't a lot that was in CoD4) they tried to fix i and if it wasn't broke they tinkered with it. Again this is my impression of the BETA build and i'm looking foward to seeing how the finished product turns out.

I've been putting my pocket change in a ziploc sandwich bag for the past few months. It didn't start out as much but with the rough count i did today i realized that i have about $37. After realizing how much change i had accumulated, I designated that bag to be my GTA4 fund. while i was bored at work today, i decided it may be entertaining (to me anyway) to purchase this game using my massive bag of change. I'll post updates in this blog and in this thread over the next 20 days and include pictures of the actual purchase and any interesting events that occur. Wish me luck.