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Yeah…I am a Gears fan boy…

The other day my Gears of War box set figures came in and damn do they look good. The box set has highly detailed models and weapons, featuring Marcus Fenix, Cole Train, and Two Locust Grunts.

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The picture quality zoomed in is not the best, thanks to the camera on my phone and the reflection of light on the plastic cover, but nonethless I have the figures and they look bad ass next my other figurenes on my desk at work. Was debating to take them out of the box but they look better in the orginal packaging.

Speaking of Gears of War and me being a total fan boy for it, tons of new Gears 2 footage was released recenty with both single and multiplayer footage!

Single Player Footage:

Multiplayer Footage of the new map Day One:

Gears 2 really shows a lot of improvements over the first game and looks more brutal as well! More bloody executions FTW! Nov 7th is the release date, can’t wait!

On completely unrelated matter, I have temporarly locked commenting, why you ask? Spam…it’s really pissing me off getting email after email of comment updates filled with nothing but gibberish or canned replies from what I assume are spambots. To those that do leave me spam or use spambots…FUCK YOU. To everyone else that does not leave me piles of spam I apperciate your visits and please continue to, the hits keep going up and forces me to actually write something every so often.

So until I can find a nice and simple way to ‘Bury those ‘Cockroaches’ of spammers, comments will be down. Not that I got that many anways but nonetheless spam sucks….

Posted in Games, Misc | Comments Off

Community Bonus Pack 3 Released!

It’s finally here, the long awaited Community Bonus Pack 3 (CBP3) for Unreal Tournament 3!

The CBP 3 is a collaboration of some most talented level designers in the Unreal Community, including yours truely. I had the privelage to make two levels for CBP 3, DM-CBP3-Iron Maiden 2 (which is a revamped remake of my somewhat famous Ownage level) and WAR-CBP3-Airlock.

CBP 1 and 2 were both quite successful for Unreal Tournament 2k3/4, but now for the first time ever the CBP 3 will be available on both PC and PS 3! Yes you read that correctly, these bad ass levels will be available for the PS 3 console.

Here is some cool release media created by one of the level designers on the team, Daniel ‘Green’ Rozanski.

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For more screens of my levels head on down to the level design page.

Also this won’t be much of a release without links, both the download for the PC and PS 3 releases can be found here:

http://cbp.beyondunreal.com/download

Enjoy!

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Progressive Nation 2008

A few hours ago I came back from one hell of a concert, Progressive Nation, featuring Three, Between The Buried and Me, Opeth, and of course the masters of prog metal/rock (whatever you wish to call it) Dream Theater.Aside from the show, I got to meet Mike Portnoy earlier in the afternoon at one of the local music shops in town. I would have not known about the meet and greet if it were not for one of my fellow co-workers who visits that place often. There were a lot of people at the meet and greet, but being a fan boy I showed up to the place around 2pm and waited for two and half hours, though being earlier I was like the fourth person in line for the event! So I got a picture with the man, had him sign one of my Dream Theater CD’s and got a free Tama t-shirt. Cool thing was that before I left the desk where Mike was he asked if I wanted an autographed mini poster, of course no one would decline that! So he took a few seconds signed the poster and handed it to me. I am sure others got the same thing but it was cool that he sort of reminded me to get one before I walked out.

Anyways enough about him…on to the show! Again being early I got to venue and stood in line for an hour or so. Though I told a lot of my buddies to come down to this show none of them came, however, it turned out I was not alone as I thought I was. Bumped in to one of the QA guys from work and enjoyed thes show with him, had no idea he was an Opeth and Dream Theater fan, but the more the merrier.

Before I get into the break down of the acts, I have to say the sound setup/acoustics were awesome. For all four bands the bass guitar and kick drum acoustics were well done, so good that each time there was intese bass work or heavy kick drums I felt an eerie vibration, or an attack of sound waves hitting me, I assume that’s a good thing, but still felt odd.

Anyways, the band Three took the stage first, never heard of them before but now I got to find their stuff. This band was pretty progressive with a rock edge, but was unique about the group was that their keyboardist was also a precussionist and had an array of cymbals and hand drums near him. Man did this guy have skills, switching between the keyboards and precussion and playing in unison with the drummer! The lead singer and rythym guitarist was also amazing, he was shredding pretty hard on an acoustic guitar and at the end of the set kept shredding on the guitar then tore out the strings, that’s hardcore!

Next up was Between the Buried and me, not my cup of tea. I enjoy some screaming in the metal I listen to or even a lot scream is good if done well like Opeth, which I’ll get to. Nothing against the band it’s just my taste, becuase musically those guys are extremely talented when they did their instrument sections. Now I am not to familiar with their music but they only did three songs, each almost ten minutes in length with intesne screaming vocals, I am sure the singer probably throws out his vocal chords after each show.

Now Opeth, one word amazing! Recently I have become a fan of their music and they played some of the songs I really dig along with one song of their upcoming album. The only songs I recall off their set were, Wreath, Master’s Apprentices, and The Baying of the Hounds. The lead singer/rhythm guitarist was having a good time chatting it up with the crowd between sets and making simple jokes, such as asking the crowd if his guitar is tune, telling all of us to go eff ourselves then apologizing for it, and before the last song stating that at least two members of the band need to go take a serious dump… too much info… but funny in the moment.

Dream Theater, was kick ass, their set was similar to what I saw last time given that this was sort of the unofficial second leg of the systematic tour. Here are some of the songs I recall: Constant Motion, Take the Time, Surrounded, Strange Deja Vu, Through My Words, Fatal Tragedy, Dark Eternal Night, Panic Attack, and a medely of Finally Free, Learning to Live, In the Name of God and Octavarium. Oh and the coolest thing they did before the encore act was Mario themed medely complete with a video showing edit clips from the first Mario game. They did not play this live but their pre-recorded medley to the mario theme merged with the Dark Eternal Night was bad ass!

Well that’s about it, I still have a ringing in my ear, my voice is shot from singing all the DT songs, got a tour poster, met the drummer of one the best bands ever… I’ll have to say for now this is the best concert I have been to thus far.

That’s all for now… must sleep off the ringing in the ears.