Vertically Rising

I tried both Bulletstorm and Crysis 2′s demos yesterday.

Bulletstorm was neat. Felt like Unreal Tournament meets Gears. Or a strange GoW in 1st person. The concept and weapons were different enough from Gears to make it fun. While the level was short, they made it so you can keep replaying the demo over and over again to improve your score. How do you do that? Well, the whole slogan of Bulletstorm is “Kill With Skill”. The game gives you various powers to start combos (sliding kick, telsa cable, boot-kick). Then they’re put into a StreetFighter type juggle move where they hover in the air for a few seconds which gives you the opportunity to shoot at their helpless floating body with your weapons. Various different things can be done from headshots, to attaching a sticky grenade to them, kicking their body, and exploding it when the body is near …

For those not familiar, PAX stands for Penny Arcade Expo, a convention of sort for gamers that was started by the website/web comic Penny Arcade. Starting in 2004, it’s grown every year, and even added a PAX East hosted in Boston in the Spring of 2010.

For me, this’ll be my first PAX. I’ll be hanging probably with the ASTRO Gaming crew and a bunch of the Destructoid guys (BTW: As a plug for Destructoid, if you’ve haven’t visited their site yet, you should. They do a great job of bringing in people into a gaming community close to you with NARPS (No Apparent Reason Parties). Going to one this weekend. ). Being that I haven’t been to a PAX before, I’ll probably be like a kid in a candy store, only this “store” has tons of great free play stations with the games that are coming …

So I’m currently in the process of trying to restart my blog. Of course it takes compiling all of my old blog entries from…3 different sites, all of which don’t have an easy way to import into WordPress (I guess MoveableType would, but that site isn’t hosted anywhere anymore, and I don’t have the archive of it either). So I’m going through and manually cut and pasting 7 years of postings. It’s tedious, but kind of entertaining as I’m passing by some good memories of college life. I’m currently at around March 2002, so that’s only about 8 months into my blogging life and I’m already at 243 posts… yikes. …

Wow. Looks like most things work for this. This is amazing!!! …

Well here goes the 2nd time trying to post this. Let’s see if I can.

Since I don’t have an entry in this catagory yet, or have not really talked about this at all, I’ll share about what guitars and gear I use.

// Guitars //

1999 Takamine EG-334 – This is my first guitar. Ovankol backs and sides, spruce top, all laminated. It doesn’t sound that great unplugged, but plugged in it sounds pretty good (with good highs). It’s something about that takamine pickup. I’m actually surprised I still have this guitar after this long. I hardly use it anymore, other than when my Taylor may be at church or in San Francisco, and I may be selling it to my roommate soon (at the end of the summer).

2000 Taylor 810BCE – Ahhh, my bread and butter. Mmm, mmm, I love this guitar. It’s my workhorse, and I …