1) Take The Spoiler Warning podcast beyond Episode 13:
As some of you know, I recently launched a podcast called The Spoiler Warning with a friend from work my friend Nathaniel (extremely gratuitous plug added). The podcast is a reimagining of a project I started my last year of college. The podcast was a new media project for my Visual and Performing Arts Capstone. Unfortunately when the semester ended, so did the project (just after episode 13). On December 11th I restarted the podcast. This time with a revised format, better equipment, and a lot more experience. I’m really excited about the project and that’s why I’m making it my first resolution. I want the project reboot to surpass what we were able to do in our first attempt.

2) Read Watchmen before the movie is released:
Watchmen is hands down my most anticipated movie of the year. The source material is, from what I’ve heard, ‘one of the greatest graphic novels of all time’ and believed to be ‘unfilmable’. So, I want to experience it in it’s original form before seeing the movie. I’ve picked up a copy of Watchmen and now it’s really just a matter of making time to read through it.

3) Read a book:
‘Colbertian’ might be the best way to describe my track record with reading books. That is to say that I simply don’t do it. With the exception of the Ender’s Game series and The Way of the Peaceful Warrior series, I just never really got into reading books. If I total up every book I’ve ever completed, I think the grand total is around 8 books (not including children’s books of course). This is something I’d like to change. So I want to read a book. A friend of mine at work has been saying I should read the Harry Potter books forever, so I figure the first in that series would be an easy start.

So there it is. My list of resolutions for the new year. Sure they’re nothing that exciting, but they are very attainable. The way I see it, there’s no sense in making resolutions that I have no chance of keeping.

posted by Christopher Schnese

The only thing worse than walking into a public bathroom is walking into a public bathroom where the previous occupants failed to clean up after themselves. For a person like me, someone who’s an anal-retentive clean-freak, this causes a huge paradoxical situation. On the one hand there’s a mess that needs to be cleaned, but on the other hand that mess is disgusting and I wouldn’t want to risk germ transfer. Ordinarily my quest for germ-free self-preservation would win over my OCD, but there is a third factor that has to be weighed in.

You see, being born with the god given ability to piss while standing up, I could easily ‘do my business’ over the mess and not worry about it. The problem is that this would only really work at a ball game, movie theater, or concert where people expect the bathrooms to be destroyed. It’s a lot harder to pull off at the office or at a friends house. Here, when someone notices a mess, they’re going to automatically associate that mess with the last person they know was in the bathroom. Unfortunately, this means that any mess I choose to ignore I’m also choosing to take responsibility for.

So, even though it disgusts me, I often find myself cleaning up after other people when I use a public bathroom. It’s extremely annoying, but at least it saves me the embarrassment of being blamed for other peoples inability to clean up after themselves.

posted by Christopher Schnese

Earlier tonight as the rest of the world sat down to watch ‘The Big Game’, I sat down with a group of my friends to play a little game called Munchkin. This amazingly fun and clever card game, created by Steve Jackson, is a complete spoof on the role-playing game genre. The word ‘Munchkin’ itself is actually a gaming term referring to a player in a non-competitive game who plays all out in a overly competitive way. This game not only encourages this once annoying behavior, but makes it the sole element of the game play experience. As the tag line states,  your main objective is to “Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. [and] Stab Your Buddy”.

Though seemingly daunting at first, the rules to the game are relatively simple. Flip over a card and if it’s a monster, you fight it. Every time you defeat a monster you gain one level and the first player to level ten wins. Ok, so there’s a little more to it, but that’s the the basic premise.

The game is played with one six sided die and two decks of cards (one of door cards and the other of treasure cards). Before the game begins, each player is dealt two cards from each deck. These cards can be any combination of Monsters, Curses, Traps, Monster Enhancers, Character Classes, Character Races, or Equipment. All of which can be played at relatively any time during play.

At the beginning of your turn, you flip over a door card. If there’s a monster there, you must fight it. To defeat the monster, you add together your level and the bonuses from all your equipment or character abilities. If that number is greater than the level of the monster, it is defeated and you get treasure (items, equipment, and such). If that number is lower, you can either ask for assistance from one other player, or you can attempt to flee by rolling the die for a five or six. Additionally, each monster card has a list of “Bad Stuff” that happens to your character if that roll is four or below.

Sound easy enough, right? Wrong! While you’re working on defeating your monster(s), your opponents can play any number of cards that can boost up your monster’s level or give you some sort of penalty. This makes for incredibly fun gameplay as the power slides from person to person as you all blissfully backstab each other and barter treasures for help in combat.

As if the gameplay wasn’t enough of a selling point, the actual playing card names, descriptions, and illustrations (by John Kovalic) are a riot in and of themselves. With monsters like “Level 14 Unspeakably Awful Incredible Horror”, “Level 14 Insurance Salesman”, “Level 6 Pukachu” (which, as its name suggests, attacks with projectile vomit) and Curse cards like “Sex Change” and “Chicken on your Head”, you’ll be laughing out loud with your friends while you stab each other in the backs as you clime your way to level ten.

The bottom line is that Munchkin is an incredible game. Whether you like RPGs or you don’t even know what those letters stand for, this is the perfect game for anyone. If you’ve never played Munchkin, you need to try it for yourself.

posted by Christopher Schnese

In our constantly evolving gaming industry, it seems like the only way to measure a games worth is by viewing against all the games that came before it. Whatever game innovates the most and revolutionizes it’s genre the most “in the now” becomes the golden standard for all games to follow. However, there has been one game that has really stood the test of time. A game who’s genius is so simple that… well, it’s just genius. That game is Tetris.

If I had never heard of Tetris before and I had someone explain it’s concept to me now, the concept being you drop puzzle blocks down into rows which then disappear, I would have thought the person crazy for loving the game. Yet somehow the game is simply amazing. It’s something you can pick up in a split moment and play as your waiting for a class to begin, your clothes to be done in the dryer, or your cookies to pop out of the oven. It doesn’t have online co-op, fancy graphics, a complicated battle system, or any of the gimmicks that accompany the modern games of today. However, it holds a special place in my heart and fills a void that few games can. That is until Geometry Wars: Retry Evolved.

Now I know that I’m a few years late to the party, however, judging from the game’s lack of presence on the gamer score of my friends on Xbox live, there may be a lot of you out there who’ve missed this game. Basically, for those of you out there who’ve never seen or played it, the game is akin to the classic game Asteroids, with a few caveats. 1) The color pallet is mesmerizing as well as epilepsy educing, 2) You can set the trajectory of your main weapon independent of the trajectory of your ship, and most importantly 3) there are some 10 different “asteroid” types, each with their own behaviors and Artificial intelligence.

The game is amazing and I’ve become completely addicted to it. It’s something that you can pick up and play though a full round of it in 5 minutes or so. I play though at least a few rounds of it every day when I get home from work and then again before I go to sleep. In fact, I’ve played through a round in between each of the paragraphs in this blog post. If you have an Xbox 360, you need to download the free demo of this game and take it for a spin. I promise you wont be sorry. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more rounds to play though before I have to start getting ready for work.

posted by Christopher Schnese

If you’re like me and you prefer to purchase brand new game, then you’ll never notice the problem with GameStop. However, if you’ve ever attempted to purchase one of their used titles, you will notice that it’s simply not worth your time. For instance, right now you can walk into GameStop and purchase a used copy of Gears Of War for the Xbox 360 for the “special discounted” price of $54.99. The thing is that if you wanted to spend a measly $5.00 more at the suggested retail price of $59.99. If the five dollars really enough to make you want to buy a previously opened, previously played, possibly with no manual, dinged up box, copy of this game? I for one would not.

In fact, I just did a search on Amazon.com and what do you know. Their used price is only $34.99. And that’s not even the best part. They’re actually selling the brand new copy of the game for $55.99 and if you order it in the next six hours you’re eligible for free super saver one day shipping. I just don’t know how GameStop gets away with this kind of thing. Now I shop there for the simple fact that it’s right by my house, but I would never buy a used game from them. However, every time I’m in the store there’s some kid there buy a used copy of some random game that wouldn’t even be worth it at half the price. When I see this it almost makes me want to hand the kid a fiver and just tell him to buy a new one. I just can’t stand it. But it’s economics I guess. There are enough suckers who pay this price, I guess there’s no reason for them to lower it.

It does make you wonder where all these used games are coming from. Well, I really wish I didn’t know, because the only thing more enraging than their used game pricing is their used game trade in “deal”. So yesterday I went in to GameStop on my lunch break to pick up a copy of The Orange Box (Half-Life 2) for the Xbox 360. As I was checking out, the clerk decided to inform me of their gracious “game trade-in deal” they had going on. Basically it works like this. If I brink in any two games for any next-gen system, they’re going to give me $10 off the purchase of another game.

So basically, GameStop is telling me that any title I bring in to them is only worth $5, even though they’re going to turn around and sell it to someone else for $54.99. What! That’s like over a 1000% markup on the title. Are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe this “deal” the clerk was trying to tell me about. I literally had to hold back from laughing in the guys face. I couldn’t believe it. I wish things could change, but as long as people keep bringing in trade-ins and buying used games, it will never end.

posted by Christopher Schnese

This was a huge week for gamers everywhere. The biggest game series, probably in the history of gaming,released it’s third and final game to the masses as we let out a collective “nerdgasm” at 12:01am Tuesday morning. Since it’s launch, I’ve completed the campaign on Heroic and logged well over 50 multi-player battles over Xbox Live. I figured I’ve had enough time with the it, I might as well reconnect to the world and share my thoughts on Halo 3.

Now the entire series is one that is near and dear to my heart. Even when compared to the the entire Final Fantasy franchise and World of Warcraft, I’ve spent more man hours planting bombs, stealing flags, sticking nades, and eating bullets than I have on any other game. Not surprisingly, the ramp up to Halo 3′s release was long, tiresome, and full of excitement.

In the hours before the midnight launch, I set up my master command center in the living room. I moved our dining table in front of the couch, set up my Xbox 360 connected to a Dell LCD monitor over VGA, and connected up a pair of Triton AX360 5.1 Surround headphones to improve the game experience (if you’ve never played a game in surround, do it! You’ll be amazed at how much your experience improves when you can just close your eyes and hear where the enemies are coming from). Once everything was set up, it was time to head out for the launch.

The midnight opening was insane. There was easily several hundred people lined up around the GameStop and you could easily feel the excitement. As you might expect at a like minded event such as this, I began chatting with the people in line around me and we quickly became friends and started exchanging our Gamertags so we could meet up in “the game world” when we all returned home later. After the hour and a half of waiting, I got my copy, raced home, popped it in my 360, and dove into a 12 hour marathon of gaming goodness, during which I completed the game on Heroic and tested the waters in multi-player.

So how is the game? In short, the game is absolutely amazing. While it’s not the 10 out of 10 that I’d have liked it to be, it’s damn good, clearly worth the three year wait, and makes my purchase of an Xbox 360 completely worth it. Since the good far outweighs the bad, let us start with my complaints.

Now I love video games, but more importantly I love a good story. Some of my favorite games of all time (Final Fantasy VII, Xenosaga, KOTOR, etc.) are those where the story takes center stage over the gameplay itself. The Halo series, though it does have a really good story, doesn’t go into it very deeply. We’re given the story through a series of cut scenes, but with each of the games it feels more like the cliff notes than the full story. This feeling was further exaggerated by a series of interstitial flashes which never really get resolved and feel almost gimmicky. In fact, the game doesn’t really provide any new information to the story at all. It simply exists in the world and plot-line that was previously established. Though the trilogy does come to a somewhat satisfactory end, I was left wanting more.

My only other complaint about the games was it’s second to last level, which was completely broken in my opinion. Though I was playing on the Heroic difficulty (one step above normal), the level seemed almost impossible to beat at time. You face hordes of enemies in very tight passages and you literally have to change your play style from aggressive to completely passive. You find yourself constantly out of ammunition with no hope of resupply, picking up the almost useless weapons from the few corpses that carry them, and constantly heading backwards in the level desperately searching for a clear room to let your shields recharge. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that 90% of my deaths in the campaign were direct results of this level. It just felt so ridiculously out of balance from the rest of the game that it truly took be out of it for the time I was stuck on it.

Even with the above mentioned problems, the game is amazing. First off, the environments you’re set in are simply beautiful (with the exception of the above mentioned level). Unlike many of the small and locked down levels of the previous games, Halo 3 features large open environments the really give you the feeling of isolation and a real sense of fear for earths survival. When you combine this with intense battles, such as those with the scarabs (large quadruped machines standing several stories tall), you’re simply left in awe.

Though the campaign is amazing, every die-hard Halo fan knows that the multi-player is where it’s really at. I still remember the feeling I had when I played my first Halo 2 game and then attempted to go back and Play Halo: Combat Evolved, and this is no different. Having played all the games online that I have, I don’t know how I could ever return to Halo 2. The onslaught of new weapons and equipment mix the game up so much that each game feels fresh, new, and different. From the very first time you jump in an enemy bubble shield melee you opponent to death to the first time someone sets off a flare and you watch your screen go bright white just before dying, this game is just amazing every time. In Halo 2 there were only a limited number of encounters you could enter. You always knew or at least had a good idea, based on the weapon combination you and your opponent were holding, what the outcome of that event was going to be. Now, with all the combinations available to the players, every situation changes and it’s almost impossible to guess what piece of equipment is going to be thrown down or where the enemy is hiding. This almost makes it impossible for teams to camp on top of “the best” weapons on a map and dominate.

In short (lol, as if I hadn’t rambled on already), this game is simply amazing. If you own an Xbox 360 and haven’t purchased this game, you should. Everyone else who doesn’t own an Xbox 360, should pick one up with a copy of Halo 3.

posted by Christopher Schnese

Those close to me know that I’m no fan of Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has done very little that I’m proud of. Often, my hatred of the company is often associated with my love for Apple, Inc and I’m simply accused to being to much of an Apple Fanboy. Now I recently bought an Xbox 360, which I think is proof that if Microsoft can do something right, I’ll give them a chance. So far I’ve been very impressed with the 360 hardware and even the software that operates the device. I was utterly happy until Microsoft Points came into the picture.

For those who aren’t owners or 360s or simply don’t use the box for anything other than playing the games purchased in a store, Microsoft has implemented something they call the Xbox Live Marketplace. This online store allows users of the service to purchase and download content such as game demos, complete arcade games, television shows, movies, and themes. The problem is that unlike Apple’s iTunes Store, Microsoft decided they’d shy away from actual cash transactions and thought it was somehow a good idea to move to a completely obscure points system.

In theory, A points system would be ok if there was an easy way to calculate the dollar amount of a purchase on their site. However this is not the case. Unlike an arcade where a token is equivalent to one quarter, one Microsoft point is equivalent to one and a quarter cents. Let’s move on from this though, one can argue that a price by any other name still costs as much. The real problem with the system is in the purchasing.

Microsoft points are only available in increments of 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 from their website and increments of 1600 and 4000 in retail stores. Here in lies the main problem. After playing the demo for Geometry Wars, I decided I would purchase the full unlocked game, which requires 400 points. So, if I want this game, which is all I want, I have to spend $6.75 to buy 500 points to purchase a 400 point game. If you’re bad at math that leaves me with 100 extra points or a wasted $1.25. This is annoying because you can’t buy any games for 100 points. I think I could buy tip a tip video for the game I’ve already beaten, but nothing worth it. Astonishingly, this isn’t the worst part.

I finally said screw it and decided to buy the 500 points so I could play my game. I logged in, selected the 500 point package, selected my already confirmed credit card they had on file (you know the one I used to purchase the 3 months of Xbox Live from an hour earlier), and clicked the confirm purchase button. After a moment it gave me back an error. “That’s strange” I thought. I wondered if Microsoft was worse than I imagined and forced you to buy the $20 package to start things off, so I click on it. Once again I received an error. Well, I said screw it and just settled for playing more demos all night.

Well the next day, I went out for my lunch break at work. At the register, I attempted to pay with my VISA Check Card. Blamo! Denied. “Do you have another card sir?” the woman behind the counter said. I told her no, she tried it again, and in the end I had to cancel my order. Quite upset and a little embarrassed (to have my card rejected in line at a Del Taco), I walked out to my car pulled out my phone and called my card provider. To make a long story short MY BANK PUT A HOLD ON MY CARD BECAUSE I ATTEMPTED TO MAKE A PURCHASE FROM MICROSOFT’S POINTS SITE.

What the hell? Are you telling me that besides making a stupid, obscure, customer screwing points system for their Xbox Live Marketplace, Microsoft didn’t even bother to make sure their service was flagged as a legitimate site by all major banks and credit card providers? What the hell indeed. Oh, and since I cannot add points to my account with my check card without it having a hold placed on it, I had to purchase my points from a retail store which only sold it in the 1600 points for $20 package. Which, again, means buying $15 worth of points I didn’t want. Congratulations Microsoft, you’ve managed to tarnish the one thing that I thought you had done right.

posted by Christopher Schnese