10. Sandstorm - Mario Paint Composer

The song isn’t quite as full bodied as others, but still a good recreation of a classic electronica song we ALL know.

9. Don’t Stop Believin’ By Journey on Mario Paint Composer

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. Took the midnight train going anywhere. . . . I think I just cried a bit.

8. Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone (Top Gun) on Mario Paint Composer

We all loved the movie and at the time no one really realized how homoerotic it is. HEY GOOSE YA BIG STUD!  TAKE ME TO BED OR LOSE ME FOREVER!

7. Take On Me by A-Ha on Mario Paint Composer

I went through a big A-Ha stage a couple years ago (we would listen to 80’s pop interent radio stations at work because it was the only genre of music that we all equally disagreed on) that this one had me dancing in my chair again.

6. Thriller by Michael Jackson in Mario Paint Composer

I don’t care how freakish he is now, at one point we all loved him and we will keep it at that.

5. Beach Boys - I Get Around ( Mario Paint )

Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did?

4. What is Love? on Mario Paint Composer]

This recreation is absolutely full bodies. The only thing it doesn’t have (and I honestly think Mario Paint Composer is unable to recreate) is the high pitched singer in the back yelling “WHOOAAAAAAAoooOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOHHHHeeeeEEEEEEooooOOOOEEEEOOOOOOO” or something like that.

3. Still Alive (from Portal) 2.0 in Mario Paint Composer

The cake is a lie! This song is great because of excellent use of background vocals (or should they be background marios?).

2. Through the Fire and the Flames - Dragonforce

Everyone knows this song for it’s legendary status in Guitar Hero 3, well a Mario Paint fan decided to tackle it himself and did an EXCELLENT job making this recreation that is rediculously faithful to the original.

1. The BEST MARIO PAINT SONG EVER!!!!!

Made you click.

P.S. Santa, for Christmas I want another new valve game. Seriously they have the Midas touch of video games.

What did I find? MY BRAIN IS LIKE 50 YEARS OLD!!! After having a it for a week or so my progress on most tasks has stayed about the same. Does this game really help your squishy bit of grey matter? I hope so because I need to get sharp! I’ll try to give you updates as they happen!

The New Xbox Experience is clean, smooth, and very Web 2.0. I love how they retained the blade system in the new guide and the Netflix streaming is easy, beautiful, and works flawlessly. The ability to install games is nice, not great or earth shattering, but nice. Now I can play games without having to hear my loud-ass 360 disk spin up. The avatars are more hip and fun than Mii’s, and definitely less Japanese (which is a good thing). I haven’t tried parties yet (I don’t personally play many games that use parties), but it looks fun and very polished.

The Bad

Netflix WHY CAN I ONLY WATCH THINGS IN MY INSTANT QUEUE?!?! WHY CANT I BROWSE FOR THINGS TO WATCH?!? This is a big hang up for me. Before this came out, I used a plugin for Windows Media Center to watch “Watch It Now” movies on our tv. This was handy because we would often just browse for an old movie we haven’t seen in a long time and watch it. Now on the 360 we have to have everything we want to watch in our Instant Queue. This works great for TV shows, becasue you can just go to each one quickly and see the episodes you’ve watched and watch the next one, but if you are in the mood for something unexpeceted the system leaves you somewhat helpless.

Installing games is nice for the disk noise, but other than that the feature is totally worthless. I was hoping I would be able to install a game and then play it without the disk. This would be handy for games like Madden 09 where I’m always playing it, but the wife might have a movie in the disk drive or I’m playing another game from Gamefly. No such luck, the 360 requires you have the game disk IN THE DRIVE when you play it from the hard drive. This would be okay if installing to the HD had any tangible benefit (such as loading faster, etc) but it doesn’t. Load times are identical to when you are playing from the disk. I hope in the future they will allow you to install to the HD and only require you put the disk in once a week so there is a healthy mix of security/anti-piracy and convenience to consumers.

While the avatars have more clothes customization than the Mii’s, the faces of avatars have about 1/5 the customization ability of Mii’s. My avatar has a bear that covers half of his mouth, but I cant’ move his mouth down to fix it.

The Ugly

Avatars are a stupid Mii rip off and completely unneccessary. While they have pros and cons compared to Mii’s, they are still dumb in my opinion.

The new slide system is just annoying. I have a hard time finding things and sometimes will be completely over to the right on a slide line and have no idea where i was originially. They tried to mimic thier UI for Windows Media Center and I think it is a flawed model.

So what do you folks think of the NXE?

My thoughts: VERSUS MODE IS FUN AS HELL. Nothing beats being an infected setting up an ambush on the survivors. I personally like being a Boomer and vomiting all over the survivors (calling in the always fun horde), but it’s also very satisfying to be a hunter and pin someone down tearing at their flesh!!

I do feel, though, that people’s worry about L4D’s lack of content and multiplayer staying power is warrented, but hopefully Valve will keep us in downloadable content so that this game will be fresh and fun for quite some time.

If I can get a crew of people together I’ll be sure to play as much of the game as possible and give the entire game a full feldged review soon.

Go buy this now and support people in the industry who actually make quality products and don’t shovel out shit games *coughEAcough*.

First off….

Dead Space (PC)

This game pretty much takes survival horror and re blends it.  It feels like it takes pieces from Resident Evil 4 and Bioshock and mixes it with some RPG elements.  This game uses the over the shoulder 3rd person view which seem to work better for immersion and the scary factor then the First person view.  This game kinda reminded me of what Doom 3 would have been if it was more than a flashlight simulator game.  Its dark in space but its overall dim lit and not completely black.  Doom seemed to get this wrong.  Immersion in a Horror game is all about the aura and the vibe that the maps give you.  And when you just plain old can’t see the map it kind of kills it and turns it into, “I’m scared because there is just shit jumping on me and I can’t see”  Don’t get me wrong Dead Space is full of cliche horror scenes like the typical monster comes out of the wall and attacks you.

The game rides on the pretty common theme of Alone in the Unknown.  The story line is pretty lame though, I’m not going to spoil it but its a bit predicable.  I did however like the weapons.  When I play a game i like to see some originality with the weapons.  Typically in many games there is the pistol, machine gun, and heavy weapon shtick.  Though this is how the weapon cast system is in Dead Space they seem to change it up with the Power node upgrades.  Its a system that allows you to modify and unlock attributes to your weapon with a series of branched out upgrades.   Another thing about this game that I haven’t seen in any other game is that you DON’T want to head shot, you want to take out the limbs.  This adds a fun element to the game.  And craftily flows over to some of the weapons.

As you may have seen from screen shots or videos, some of the weapons shoot out ammo in a line.   These are denoted by the 3 laser sights.  The fun thing is, is that you can choose on the fly how your gun is positioned  to shoot i.e. vertically or horizontally.  So if you want to shoot off an arm the best position is to have your gun shooting top to bottom.  And if you prefer to slow down the enemy you can adjust the weapon to shoot a line of ammo from left to right and take off a leg pretty easily.

The game had a good length to it as well.  It was just long enough to keep you from getting bored of the scenarios that it could throw at you.

Moving on..

Farcry 2

At first I thought I really liked this game.  I had the mind set that it would run just as shitty as Crysis which actually takes away from the overall game play experience.  When I launched this puppy, I found a gorgeous world that actually ran like butter.  Which was surprising, and a total bonus.  A few hours in I was even content with the story.  But after being let out on your own to do whatever (sandbox), it just got old.  My train of thought was lets get some good weapons going immediately.  Well to upgrade your weapons you have to talk to a dealer and he will give you a mission to unlock said cool weapons.  The missions given to you by the dealer are fucking identical every time.  Go to (X) on the map and take out convoy.  The convoy consists of a Truck and 2 Turret mounted hummers.  No difference, every single time.  Which leads me to my next grievance.  The roads are pretty repetitive too, it goes something like this.  1) take out map, 2) find location and drive, 3) drive past check point 4) get out and kill everyone, 5) continue till next check point and repeat.  Its kinda like GTA but the roads have nothing cool on them, its not like your driving down a street and have someone to run over or something to look at.

So at this point I am bored and go to get back on the main story line, which turns out there really isn’t a main story line.  Its pretty much run around and help out whatever faction or what ever friend you make.  I was pretty disappointed.  I tried to go back to the butcher to continue my quest but he wasn’t there.  I walked in and was getting shot at from all around.  And on my objectives all it said was get a mission from random person i.e. gun guy or faction, which I was bored out of my mind with. I need some drive to keep me from continuing.  Some story line to keep me involved.

I’ve had some time on my hands as of late so I have played an beaten most of the game I play.  I will have to talk about Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: WoW and even my aspect on Left 4 Dead.

Because of this problem I haven’t been able to play some of the best games out there. Good examples are Bioshock, Doom 3, and any survival horror game out there (the Resident Evils, Elmo’s World). If I play a scary game for any length I am absolutely exhausted! I will inch through the levels peeking around every corner the whole time having my body extremely tense. I get done playing and I’m not even relaxed (which is why I play video games). Luckily some companies are coming out with solutions to this problem, such as cooperative play in Left4Dead. If i have one of my hard chargin’ buddies with me it’s just not as scary!

How about you guys, you like scary games?