I'm not to fond of this review, i was tired when i wrote it. Great game though, my favorite online game of 09' so far

ok, google chrome is being an ass, and not letting me copy the link to the review, so you'll have to to it the old fasioned way. click on profile home, scroll down to the bottom, and click on the review. sorry for the inconvinience.

I decided to ignore the sleugh of warnings about the messy release of the latest edition of the United States Armies most creative recuitment tool, America's Army 3, and give it a download. I mean, after all, it is free. The difficulties began when I had trouble making an account. Fifth try is the charm it seeems, and I am in! Now, to get past all this training and delve into the sweet online play that the AA series is known for. Before I even load up the first training mission, I quit the game and force Anti Alaising through Nhancer, to get rid of those ugly jaggies. It seems to have worked, so I start up the first training level. Its an obstacle course, i manage to get through it, but am surprised that there is no HUD and no instructions on which key to press to perform various actions.

Next up is the shooting range mission, which is surprisingly difficult. I manage to Qualify, barely, on my thrid try. Then, disaster strikes. I'm sent back to the main menu, and all my training progress is deleted. Balls. Discouredged, I quit the game and go back to my old friend Dawn of War II (which i will be reviewing soon). Later on, i try the training again, and manage to get past the first two training missions, this time the first training saves, but not the second. Oh well, at least i'm making progress. The next time i play I manage to get through the shooting range and advanced weapons training in one fell swoop, although my heavy machine gun dissapears at one point, but, they both save.

But after this is my greatest challenge yet. Medical training, where i have to pay attention. I go through the practice Prodecures, but keep getting stuck at one that I cant seem to finish. I try a few times, and eventually give up and go for help on the forums. Its the Anti Alaising, it removes the HUD! I guess i'll have to live with the jaggies. I manage to get through medical training after a few tries, and the advanced course on my second try. It all saves, i'm happy.

Now its time to jump online for the meat of the game; the fun part. Instantly after joining a server i am sent back to the main menu. Same story for a few others, then success! i'm in. Dear god, the lag is horrendous. I glitch about for about 30 seconds then get shot up. For those of you that don't know, the gameplay is about the same as counter strike, where if you die, you have to wait for the round to finish. Discouredged, i quit. I try again later, and this server is much better, but 3 rounds in, when i'm finaly getting the hand of things, my gun dissapears. Great. Next round, i take cover behind a hay bale only to find i cant move, shoot, or turn in any direction. I manage to kill myself with a grenade. So far, things arent looking very good (and my blog is looking longer than i anticipated).

The next day, i give the game a try, and have an absolute blast. Three hours of uninterupted play, and i'm getting really good. My team is very good, several of us have mics, and were are coordinating attacks and winning rounds. The healing mechanic is excellent, i never though the medical training would actually come in handy, but it really does. My best moment comes on the pipeline map, where i hang back a bit from my team, go to the right of an enemy building and see a door open and gun come out, he's camping, i throw a grenade in and get a kill. I join my squad in the basement of the main building, and hear gunfire up ahead. I find most of my squad dead or wounded, I heal and revive those I can and manage to pop an enemy in the skull as he tryies to limp away. My squad goes of to the left, while me and another guy go to the right, we know of a secret way to get to the objective. We climb up a ladder into the rafters of the building, sneak along, i look down and see an enemy hucking grenades at my squadmates who are still in the basement. I taake him down, and keep moving, drop down from the rafters right above the objecive, and no one is there. I secure it, and we win the match. Damn that was fun.

So if you have a PC, and are looking for a glitchy but really excellent online shooter, check out America's Army 3.

I got Dawn of War II when it first came out for the multiplayer, but ended up getting totally engrossed in the campaign mode. eventually i lost interest and forgot about the game. When i reinstalled XP, i was bored of the games i had been playing, and was snooping about for something else i could install, and remembered Dawn of War II. I installed it, and have been playing the multiplayer steadily ever since. Its fun, but also very hard as many of the players are very experienced. This can work for and against you, if you have one or two of these experienced players on your side it really helps, but if your on a team with other new comers to the game and the opponents are all of high level, you are totally screwed. I'be played about 15 games so far and have only won 4, and only about 4 or 5 others have been close. The rest have been total sh*t shows where me and my team get trounced.

When you do have a good team, the game is very, very fun. Battles can last for very long periods of time and become incredibly intense. Later on, when some of the bigger and more powerful units show up on the battlefield things can get really hectic. I just played a game where my team was losing badly, and all three off the enemy teams had gathered around our base. my team talked amongst ourselves, and managed to coordinate a double ion cannon strike, which totally decimated the enemy army, we then went on to win the game. I don't think i've had this much fun with a multiplayer rts since World in Conflict two years ago.

I'm also looking to buy the newly released Prototype, which looks very promising indeed. I've heard multiple reports that the PC version is very well optimized and looks better than the console version, so i'm looking forwards to getting my hands on it, its been a while since i've played a good action game. The idea of being a totally overpowered beast appeals to me, i'm probably going to get the game on saturday (tommorow), i'll blog about how it is after i've had a chance to play if for a while. I'm hoping to continue playing Dawn of War II because it seems like the type of game where you have to play it constantly to get good, which is my goal. I've already improved a lot since i started, but i have a lot to improve on. I'm currently unemployed, but am sitting on a huge pile of money, and have no major expenses in the near future, so i hope to get a fair bit of gaming done and catch up on some sleep in the next month before I start looking for work again.

I'm really pissed off right now. In my last blog i explained how my hard drive had died. Today i went out and bought a new one, installed it into my system, booted, set the bios to boot off that hard drive first, then i restarted. I placed the XP cd into the cd drive, but it still told me to place a bootable device into the computer. I tried taking out the disc and putting it in again, still no luck. I go back to the bios, and notice that my CD drive is not being recognozed, neither is my DVD drive. I open up the computer, and see that the IDE cable has become detatched from the motherboard adapter. I try to plug it back in, but the right side wont go in. I try with another IDE cable, same problem, its the adapter for sure. I take a closer look, the prong on the far right side has been pushed back. I spend about 30-40 minutes grappling with it to try and get the prong back in place, but no luck.

So because a single prong has become slightly bent, i cannot use my gaming computer at all until i get this fixed, or go out and buy a SATA DVD or CD drive. this is the stupidest problem i have ever had by far.

EDIT: After much cursing and the use of a dry wall screw, i managed to repair the bent prong. xp is installing now. woot.

god dammit, you should all be glad gamespot enforces language cencorship otherwise i'd be spewing forth a stream of language so foul it would offend people of all races and beleifs. After going through a huge overhaul of my system, having to buy new hardware and spend many days recovering data, my new hardrive, not even two months old, had failed. Words cannot describe how annoyed i am. I dont have time for this nonsense. This is almost enough to make me give up on self built and maintained computers; i never had so many and so frequent problems with my good old 2004 dell desktop. All the money i saved building my own system has been long since squandered on repairs and replacement parts.

What really agitates me is that the series of hard drives i bought was known to have some issues with corruption, I found this out shortley after buying it, and i was sent to a website where i could check to see if my particular hard drive was affected with this problem. I jumped through the required hoops, and was informed that the hard drive was problem free. Then, one and a half months later, i start having issues with slow startup into windows. Not virus related. I manage to fix the problem using system restore, but it occurs a second time, i fix it using system restore, it occurs a third time, system restore doesn't work. All of the sudden, my sound stops working. I try an xp repair install, and boom, hard drive failure. First and last time I buy a hard drive from seagate.