Just quickly...

For fuck sake.

I know, I don't write much, but check this out.

One of the fathers to one of the children that was shot dead in the Sandy Hook massacre is trying to speak out on why anyone could possibly need to own an assault-grade weapon, and he's heckled. You can clearly hear someone say something about not infringing their rights.

Ahhh, once again, so refreshing to see Americans so compassionate towards their fellow man. His son was only 6 years old! For what's such an extremely patriotic nation, the degree to which so many clearly don't give a flying FUCK about each other is absolutely second to none.

"Oh, I'm sorry your son was shot dead, but we should still have the right to own a firearm."

Say, you're a real decent human being mate! That is, of course, unless the same thing should happen to someone in YOUR family. Might give a damn then, mightn't ya?

I took the liberty of searching for information on one of the main pieces of equipment that seems to be being used these days, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

And wow! The fully-automatic version of that fucking thing can fire 800 rounds a minute. What are you expecting, a crowd??!

Yes, I know a car can be a weapon too, in the wrong hands, but that's a mode of  transport. Guns are built with but one purpose, there can be no ambiguity about that.

I'm all for being able to protect you and yours if you're the victim of a home invasion or the like, but who thought selling guns to the public was a particularly good fucking idea, I mean, seriously?

Have you met many human beings these days? They're fucking morons. Most of them still believe in a 'God', for crying out loud. And you want to arm these idiots?

Bad, bad, bad idea.

I read another article too, about how a man pulled up into the wrong driveway accidentally, and was shot.

Yeah, I get it, it's your right to own.

Moron. Your fucking rights need to change, and in the meantime, a hell of a lot more blood is going to be spilled.

Of course, America's in a hole, because anyone attempting to change that will effectively be committing political suicide. That'd be the public showing it's overwhelming compassionate side, once more.

Christ guys, what a problem. Hell of a hole you've dug for yourselves.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

The game I have been anticipating for a good six months arrived a little over four days ago.

I'll be honest about where I'm at. I've only completed three or four missions from the campaign, and I haven't touched the Spec Ops missions, nor multiplayer.

What I have done though, is achieved the rank of level 49 in survival. For those that don't know, there are 50 all up.

The game's Spec Ops survival mode is, of course, what I bought it for. I mean, I bought Treyarch's World at War, and then Black Ops, because of their zombie survival mode, so it seemed to make sense. I get a lot out of these sorts of game modes.

At first I was chuffed that survival was playable on all 16 of the game's multiplayer maps. It seemed like great value. I'll admit though, that I'd have preferred to have been able to choose the level of survival difficulty on each map, rather than them having difficulty levels already assigned.

I can live with that though, but what I'm really not keen on, are the maps themselves.

They may be quite good as multiplayer maps, but in survival for me it's all about making use of a map's choke points, and many of them don't really seem to have any. Everything seems to be setup so that there are always a number of ways to get to any one location.

Survival has three resource crates available in each map; weapons, equipment, and air support. Unfortunately, they've chosen to position them in each map as far away as possible from each other. I've figured out that the best thing to typically do is pick a spot that's reasonably close to one or two; the flipside being, of course, that the third will be fucking miles away.

Granted, I think survival is really meant for two players, and while I've dabbled in coop play, my teammate's shaky internet connection all but ruined the experience. Considering just about everyone else on my Steam friends list seems to just want to play Skyrim all the time, it looks like solo is all I've got.

It's a great mode though, and there are several maps where I just know I can better my current best, so I'm often tempted to have "just another go". There's been quite a lot of tasty stuff to unlock, and the variety of different mobs types do spice things up in there.

If there's one thing I'd like to see though, it's a map or two designed specifically for the survival experience. Plenty of choke points, crates not deliberately placed as far apart as possible, and the ability to choose your own difficulty on it.

Now that would be something.

Battlefield 3 vs Zombieville USA 2

We've had a long weekend here in Perth, Australia, and I haven't spent my free time playing the $90 Battlefield 3 game, no...

I have spent it playing a $0.99 App Store game for the Ipod Touch and iPhone called Zombieville USA 2.

Over the last couple of days, I've hardly touched Battlefield 3. I was close to having finished the campaign, but came up against a showstopper bug that literally would not let me proceed.

The train sequence at the start of the game is something you will actually go through again later on, and like many of the sequences in the game, it's full of annoying quicktime events. Something happens, usually a melee struggle with a terrorist, and at the prompt, you have to press the right key at the right time. If you're not on time, or you accidentally let loose with another key, you die, and have to start the section over.

Anyway, this event required my pressing the space bar (as prompted), at which point my character would then die. This happened over... and over... and over again. When I think about it, my own personal Groundhog Day.

I couldn't even figure it out by googling it, and the last time it happened, I was so frustrated with the game, I forced it down with Alt+Ctrl+Del.

That's when you know I'm not happy.

It's ironic sometimes, though, how things happen, because I ended up browsing the Ipod App Store once again, and noticed the sequel to one of my old favs, Zombieville USA, had been released.

$0.99 later, I was ready to rock and roll, and I'll be damned, but it has occupied my time so much more than Battlefield 3 was. It's got a number of different levels to fight in, zombie types to slay, and weapons and skills to both unlock, and level up.

Great, great game, and at the price, an absolute steal. Battlefield 3 at $90? Not so much.

As it turns out, however, I once again googled the problem preventing my ability to continue in the Battlefield 3 campaign, and this time, actually found the solution. Yes, apparently if you have rebound your jump key to something other than the space bar, you have to press both that key AND the space bar.

Once again, some great game testing going on over there at DICE.

It's academic really, because like most of the campaign, the bit that I had left to do was utter rubbish.

Battlefield 3

Yeah I know, I said I wasn't going to get it.

What can I say, I've been so very bored. Waiting for MW3 has been driving me positively insane, and there are only so many times you can play the MW2 campaign over and over.

Granted, thanks to a nice trade-in at EB, Battlefield 3 didn't actually cost me anything. As it turns out, that's just as well, because if I'm being honest, I'm not really having the time of my life with it.

That's partly my fault though, because as you know I'm not really a multiplayer gamer these days, so it was arguably pretty stupid of me to invest in what is primarily a multiplayer game.

They have gone to the trouble of creating a single player campaign this time around, along with a couple of missions that you can actually coop with a friend, so you could argue there's now something for everyone.

I must be about 2/3rds of the way through the campaign, but I'll admit that I'm really not enjoying myself all that much with it.

I'd have to say the biggest problem I have with it is that the game's AI completely sucks. For both the bad guys, and also my teammates.

Teammates have not been programmed to adjust to what you're doing atall. A number of times I've actually been pushed out of a cover location by an AI teammate who has just decided that it's a spot he will be occupying instead.

This complete indifference also includes running out in front of you while you're busy shooting at bad guys.

Speaking of which, most of the bad guys will pretty much only ever shoot at the player. I've completed a number of escort quests during the game, and I've lost count the number of times they've focused just on me.

Basically, each and every play is a setup, and a rather obvious one at that. We advance to a certain area. Bad guys show up. They take cover, my teammates take cover.

At this point, they could all shoot at each other until the cows come home for the difference that it will make, because advancement is only ever made when the player caps all of the bad guys. A number of times, it's actually been obvious that my teammates aren't even really actively trying to kill anyone in particular. The job's always up to me.

And that's pretty much how it is. That ever constant reminder that you're just playing a videogame, it breaks the immersion every time. Takes you right out of it.

I don't know how else to describe it, and it's such a pity, because it's a great, great engine. Nothing else looks or sounds quite like it, and I should be having the time of my life.

Something went terribly wrong.

Modern Warfare 3, hurry up!

I am chomping at the bits, so to speak, for Modern Warfare 3.

Call of Duty, you ask? What are you, a 'console kiddy'? No, I'm a married 37yo gamer, and I do the vast, vast majority of my gaming on the pc.

Check this out. It's the trailer showing off Modern Warfare 3's new survival mode. That might be me you can hear in the corner, drooling.

It's pretty popular these days to hate on Call of Duty. I've been seeing a lot of that. Either it's got something to do with the fact that it keeps smashing its own sales records, or that it's made by Activision, and people just love to rain shit on Bobby Kotick.

I kept an open mind though, I promise you that. You may remember that, back at E3 time, it was all about MW3 vs BF3 for me.

I tried, really, but following E3, it all went to shit. Every news item that has come out about Battlefield3 since then has sucked. Firstly, no bots. Well, I knew that already. What with not being a multiplayer gamer, there goes any kind of longevity I was hoping for. What am I going to do, play the campaign over and over?

Then they announced it wouldn't be on Steam.

I remember first installing Steam back when I bought Half Life 2 on release day. It was a necessary evil, granted, but in all fairness, it was worth it to play that game.

Since then, Steam has just gotten better... and better... and better. I now have over 30 available games for it, and it's great being able to uninstall games knowing that they're always available again, if I ever want to play.

Battlefield 3 not being on Steam is a pretty big hit for me, and the game requiring EA's Origin service, well, that shit certainly ain't helping.

By about the time they announced that Battlefield 3's co-op campaign was only going to support two players, I had long since stopped caring.

No, it's all about Modern Warfare 3. It doesn't help that survival gameplay footage has just been absolutely rocking my socks.

No, I even preordered the fucker.

*gasp*

Do you have any idea how long it's been for me since I did that? It's been at least a couple of years.

And I'm not talking the preorder where you pay a $20 deposit or some shit, I'm talking about having paid in full.

I'm making a commitment to myself, with this. My wife and I may be buying a house, and our funds may be stretched to the limit, but nomatter how tight my funds are, every year come holiday time, I'm buying a game.

This year it's Modern Warfare 3, and it'd better not suck.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon #2

I had to do this.

The truth is, there's a pattern emerging here. With every Michael Bay movie I watch, my IMDB rating of it starts off high, and then drops over time.

I'm now at 7/10 for Dark of the Moon, where after my first showing, I was at a full 10/10.

I think I'm going to stay at 7/10 here, but even though ordinarily 7 is a great rating for me, if it's all I'm giving the latest and greatest Transformers, you know that means I'm bitterly disappointed with it.

Yeah, I raved about the movie in my previous post which was just after I'd just seen it, but you know what, I did the same thing with Revenge of the Fallen after I'd first seen that too, and that's now at 7/10 aswell.

So why the change? Well, when you have a deep interest in something, it's really easy to get caught up in that first (or even second) showing. My hunger for Transformers, hunger to see more of Optimus Prime, boosts my enjoyment of a show.

Time passes though, you watch it a couple more times, feel like you're able to look at it more objectively... and that's where it all falls apart.

There's so much that just doesn't make sense. I really liked the character of Sentinel Prime, but would someone who had evidently been leader of the Autobots for so long have been able to betray them so easily? To shoot Ironhide in the back?

Speaking of which, why wasn't Ironhide's death mourned? Hell, why wasn't it even mentioned? I realise they didn't have a whole lot of time to think, but would it have killed Bay to have included something like Prime kneeling over the remains? He wouldn't've even had to have said much, perhaps a line about revenge, or at the least, goodbye, old friend.

While I'm at it, what were all the Decepticons doing on the moon? How'd they get there? Correct me if I'm wrong, but considering it was a long lost Autobot ship that crashed there, if anything, shouldn't it have been Autobots out there? That or, I think I figured out exactly why the Decepticons keep losing the war, because one of them apparently summised that the best way to stage an attack on Earth was to hide underground on the moon and wait for a portal to be opened.

As far as Bumblebee being captured later on, there really needed to be a scene showing exactly how that happened, if just because of how that was used to inject so much emotional content into the proceedings. How many of the ladies weren't at the edge of their seats when it was looking like they were actually going to assassinate him?

Which of course, leads me to another point. Every time the Autobots get a chance they'll kill a Decepticon, but the Decepticons take prisoners? It felt like the Shanghai op from Revenge of the Fallen all over again, as we have the bad guys basically keeping to themselves, while being systematically slaughtered by the good guys.

Now, I love Optimus Prime as much as the next guy, but Bay's Optimus, I'm fucking glad he's on our side, because truth be told, he'd make one hell of a Decepticon. Some of the things he was doing, don't tell me he wasn't enjoying it. It's a CGI treat, of course, but does it always have to be at the expense of the character?

A lot of people have raved about the building sequence, but I hate it. I hate it because it only exists because of Bay's idea to have a building cut in half. There's no point to it. They go up because they've only got one rocket and they have to get higher to be able to use it, but then they get shot at, escape in spectacular fashion, and then... I don't know. They don't try again, or anything like that. No, Sam and Carly get separated from the rest, and then...

Sam kills Starscream. This sequence was like, the epitome of what Bay's movies are all about. So long as it looks great, to hell with common sense. It's just so fucking implausible.

And then there's the humour.

If it was a step up from that found in Revenge of the Fallen, it was only just. The whole thing with the Asian guy in the bathroom stall, I could do without, as I could also do without the parents lecturing Sam about how he's not gonna land another hotty like Carly unless he's got a big dick.

Urghh.

I still do like Michael Bay, and Dark of the Moon's very impressive CGI guarantees my purchase of that Blu Ray on day one, but a 10 out of 10 movie, it ain't. If I'm being brutally honest, I wouldn't rate it a whole lot better than Revenge of the Fallen, and as it stands now, I would more than welcome another director taking a shot at reviving this franchise.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

Fucking awesome!

What can I say, definitely my cup of tea. CGI action for the win, baby!

It ain't perfect, mind you, but no movie has been. That said, it's closer - for me - than anything I've seen thus far, and it will definitely be my number one Blu Ray when it arrives.

Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy, rocked. So damn good. Awesome character, and an absolutely shocking betrayal about halfway through on his part. Anyone who says they saw that one coming is a fucking liar :)

Pretty cool really too, because Michael Bay had us all thinking Shockwave was going to be the main badass in this one. Nicely done, Mike.

That said, 'ole Shockwave could've used more screen time though, I'll admit to that one. Like Megatron basically sitting on the sidelines during much of the show, he was a bit underutilised.

I didn't think much of Sam's new girlfriend (outside of having a great set of legs and an arse to die for, of course). While I wasn't a big fan of Megan Fox back in the day, this new chick actually has me missing her. I'll admit that I think the chemistry between Shia and Megan was better than with Shia and Rosie.

That's not necessarily fair, mind you, because Sam started with Megan and was with her for two movies, compared to Rosie being the newcomer in just this one movie.

There have been a couple of long threads over at IMDB about the death of Ironhide. I always really liked Ironhide in the cartoons, tough nut that he was, and up until this third movie, it's fair to say he hadn't gotten anywhere near his fair share of screen time. Most of the combat that took place in the first movie showed him getting his arse kicked, and in the second he did absolutely nothing.

He redeemed himself though, and I felt good for Ironhide fans, because he was involved in a huge fight just prior to his demise, and we did get to see him finally kick some arse. He went out like a boss, and it's not my favourite expression, but it is fitting.

At the end of the day though, I'm always rooting for Optimus Prime. At first I didn't like how Bay made him so different from G1 Prime, but now, I fucking love him. And I've come to fucking love that truck.

Part of the reason I'm still so fond of Prime is that he continues to be voiced by the great Peter Cullen. He captured my imagination 23 years ago in the animated cartoon, and the son-of-a-bitch is still doing it now. There's a reason why Peter Cullen has made a living out of voice acting, and his game is as good as ever in Dark of the Moon.

I just fucking love him, too. If Peter Cullen knocked on my front door right now, there's nothing I wouldn't do for him. He wouldn't even have to speak like Prime.

Like I said though, there are things I didn't like about the movie. I don't care for Sam Witwicky and his personal life. You have a new girlfriend? Don't care. Trying to get a job? Don't care. Don't like your girlfriend's boss? Don't care.

Overall though, great. Pretty much exactly what I wanted.

Which brings me to my next point...

I got home after the first showing, and logged straight into IMDB. And the movie's rating was at a rather abysmal 6.9 out of 10. What the fuck?

People love to hate Michael Bay. As I've said before, I don't think it would matter what the man could put out.

I see IMDB ratings for movies typically start high when they're released, and then lower, and my guess would be that it's because the more passionate fans are among the first to register their (typically higher) votes.

Bay movies don't follow this trend though, and I think that's because there's always a legion of haters just ready to swarm. If anything, they see the viewing of the movie as a formality, because they've already decided they don't like it.

Just because it's Michael Bay.

So the quicker they can get the actual viewing out of the way and get that 1/10 vote registered, the better. Some even have more than one account ready to go, so that they can make their opinion weigh more than yours or mine.

I don't really care about their opinions. I mean, it's all subjective anyway, and just because I like Dark of the Moon, that doesn't mean I expect anyone else to.

The difference between us though, it would seem, is that I don't feel threatened by their opinion.