Who the hell is the skinny 15 year old hanging out with Jeff and Ryan?

Where do I send my Questions of the Week entries again?

Also, where can I send the crew all these crappy energy drinks I've been saving in my hot, hot pantry?

Is Jeff like a level BAJILLION in Star Trek Online now?

Really? HE'S a MOD now???

Why is Kessler still a thing/breathing?

What in the bloody depths of Hell is a Voxel?

Have people stopped saying "Maybe" yet?

And where my nigga Biff at?

Hey Duders, new and old. Been awhile since I've posted in these parts. And for good reasons too (I'll get to that later). How is everybody doing? Good? That's great for you. Bad? Drink up and forget your troubles. But I'm not here to talk about you. I'm here to talk about my favorite website, Giantbomb dot com. Its a website about video games. A website where you can click on links and 90% of the time that link will bring you to a different page with video games on them. I like that. Which is why I have loved the layout of the site ever since it has been in beta. No BS ads about how I can make my dick bigger. But I knew at some point, the guys running this joint would have to stop taking out of their mom's savings. 
 
Now it's been awhile since I've been roaming the boards, but I am still up to date with the bombcast (even though it may take a month for me to catch up) and I still watch the majority of their quick looks, mailbags or whatever random shit Jeff, Ryan, Brad and Vinny very well wish to throw up on the front page of their website. And I wouldn't have a problem if these guys shot a video of Dave taking a piss. You know why? Because these guys' charisma is so likable. Vinny, Brad, Ryan and Jeff are all very lively (maybe not Brad, but he is still very.... er.... bradley) and bring character to an otherwise characterless journalism. I have always felt this way since GB was in beta and I felt that they haven't lost any of that, but instead have gained more with new writers, interns (Fuck whatever you guys say, Kessler had more balls than the half of you to say whatever the hell he wanted, even after taking shit) and merging some events with sister Wiskey Media website's editors (A couple years ago, I couldn't imagine Alex working in the same office as the GB dudes again. All I can say is YESSSSSSSSSSS) 
 
Now here is where my problems come up. I hate people. After being a forums browser over at Gamespot for some time, I've learned how bitchy, incoherent, idiotic, selfish and ignorant people can be sometimes. Which is why I stopped posting over there. I'll come clean right now, I didn't leave GS because Jeff was fired, I left because I couldn't stand the idiots over there anymore. This is where Giantbomb filled the gap. GB was a new website created by a dude who I thought was pretty dope. So I thought, hell, maybe people like me will leave GS because of the assholes and come over here. Maybe this website can be the manifest of intelligent conversations (as intelligent as they can get through the internet). Maybe our jokes wouldn't be just old memes. And you know what, it was pretty awesome for a while. Sure we had trolls, but I always thought a few good trolls are infinitely better than a shitload of bad ones.  
 
I became a regular visitor to Giantbomb forums and met a lot of cool people who shared my interests. We all hung out, threw back a few brewskies, and played horseshoes by the setting sun. (If any of them didn't live in effing England). But then I started noticing something. Assholes. Everywhere. Suddenly treating every user like they are below you became the hit thing on these forums. For some weird reason, Giantbombers felt like they were the elite in the game community. At some point I did feel our forums WERE elite because of the quality out of them, but I did not feel this gave everybody the right to try to put down newbies and non-frequents. That was a year ago. Since then I have not been able to visit the forums as much I'd like because of school, but I'm starting to not even think of these forums the same way I did before. I don't want to spend hours talking to the cool people I met before. Sure there are still a lot of cool users still making it interesting to stick around these parts, but there are also all those pricks running rampant similar to when I tried avoiding them back in the Gamespot days. 
 
(Continuation forth coming. Going to be about the subscription, bombcast and you assholes. just kidding about the assholes part <3)

When searching "Review" in Youtube, the first video to pop up is, our very own, Jeff Gerstmann's review of Kane and Lynch from when he used to be an editor for Gamespot. Although it is not the highest viewed review on Youtube (I would guess that dude with the 70 min review of Star Wars Ep. 1 has that), I am still very surprised to see how popular that event was. 
 
Try it for yourself.

 The game industry is under a change. This change has nothing to do with technology improving or game publishers growing bigger. Yet I feel this change will be the biggest thing to hit the video game industry in it's history. Over the past few years, the budget to make games has been increasing exponentially. For these past few years, I felt the publishers granting this budget were doing this because of IP's of the game being created. It makes since to spend big money on a new Gears of War simply because the name of the game is "Gears of War." However, after recent events, I have come to realize that big license names aren't the only things pushing the industry forward. Similar to the movie industry, the big names creating the names of these people are going to be the thing making the sales. 
 
Probably the most recent example of this is when Jason West and Vince Zampella were both fired from their position at Infinity Ward. These two names have been floating around the media so wildly that we now refer to them as the people who made Call of Duty, not Infinity Ward. A development team can change so rapidly there is almost no point in expecting them to employ the same people for consecutive games or even in the development of a single game. That is why the game industry now follows these big names.
 
After the canning of West and Zampella, they were picked up by the Creative Artist Agency, the largest talent agency. There hasn't even been a handful of game developers who have been represented with such high regards, but having two being picked up at the same time, it seems like this is just the beginning for a way for "free agent" game developers to get around.
 
The next big news in this story comes when EA Partners seeds these two men, with nobody else on their team, money. Two men, that is all it takes to seed money from one of the biggest game publishers. This has hardly happened in the game industry. It would usually take an entire team with a laid out plan before they may even approach EA to ask for this. In this case, the two names were big enough to grant them the money. 
 
I find this very similar to how the movie industry works. A movie is not sold by the studio making the movie, it is sold by the directors directing the movie and the actors acting in the movie. The movie industry has faces to push the material it tries to sell. To me, it seems that the game industry is slowly gearing toward this new marketing strategy. We already see Tom Clancy's and Sid Meier's name on the front of the box. How long until we see "Cliffy B's Gears of War 3?"

Similar to how Guitar Hero has introduced a lot of older artists and bands to a younger generation or to a demographic that hasn't been exposed to too much hard rock, I believe this game could be the best thing to happen to Metal in years. For example, I am not a huge Metal Head, but the approach this game takes by combining Tim Schafer's hilarity ,the great art concept and the simple fact the Jack Black is featured (as well as more well known artists like Ozzy) means this will attract a lot of attention. And with that attention will come curiosity to what the big deal about Heavy Metal is and after spending time with the game many will find the reason it is so beloved by hearing the great bands everybody talks about blasting in the background.
 
But with the new comers, there is bound to be elites who claim to be the original lovers of the music and and constantly shit on "bandwagon jumpers." This cannot be avoided and I do not look forward to this during online matches, but it's something you have to put up with when you involve online play.
 
Thoughts from any "veteran" metal fans or people who are interested in the game yet weren't a fan of metal before hand.

Alright, it's been a year since Pineapple Express, so you know what that means? Time for another Judd Apatow movie! I love this guy's movies. He is a comic genius when it comes to cinema. The guy has been very inspirational with the style of comedy that can be very raunchy, yet still appeal to so many people. He's one of my favorite current writers and the guy's directing skills can be pretty impressive for somebody who focuses on comedy.

Enough with my JA dick riding, now let me talk about his new movie, Funny People. When I first saw the trailers for Funny People I thought it would be a more sentimental approach. If you don't know, FP is a movie about a stand up comic/actor who finds out he has a very rare disease and doesn't have much longer to live. The trailer doesn't give much more information than that so it was hard to determine how much actual comedy would be in it. However, the jokes in those trailers were enough to make me believe it was a Apatow movie so I knew I was going to see it.

I saw the movie opening day (tonight) and I haven't laughed for so long and hard for the entire summer. Before you ask, yes, I have seen The Hangover. That movie was my old summer comedy king. Well, that movie was just dethroned. FP offers more than just rehtard jokes and slapstick comedy. FP has much more witty writing, almost all the jokes were hilarious and no tiny penises flying at your face!

Funny People gave off a fresh comedy taste by giving us a complex plot and quite a few subplots. The movie focuses on character development (which you should expect out of a JA movie) but it was really entertaining to see how much shit the main character must go through before he realizes he needs to makes some changes. It came off feeling very natural. There was plenty of drama, but it was all sped up with a constant barrage of funny quirks and comments.

To all the people who are usually turned off by Adam Sandler movies, don't fear. Sandler doesn't do his known "is he retarded, or just really stupid?" role he has done in the past. Sandler gives a good emotional performance that can almost rival his from Punch Drunk Love. He goes back to his roots and gives a great performance of a stand up comic as he delivers all of his funny lines perfectly.

The only real drawback is that this movie is looooong. It's a little more than 2 and a half hours. I felt like they could have cut out some of the more dramatic scenes involving the main character's ex, but they back this by beefing up the comedy. Overall, Sandler and Rogen were both hilarious. There was great writing, great delivery and the stand up comedy portions were all great. There are some hilarious cameos (Eminem cussing out Ray Romano had me in stitches) and this is hands down my comedy pick of the summer. It's a shame that I have a feeling that this one will be lost at the box offices.

Hello. Greetings. Salutations. I've come to tell you all about an online comic strip. Yep, you heard me right. Online comic strip. Amazing what technology has brought us. It's like a new revolution. A first of it's kind (Penny Arcade? What's that?) You can't get this stuff in newspapers. Newspapers wouldn't even dare put this stuff on their boring, drab pages. These comics are too good for newspapers. Newspapers couldn't generate an audience anywhere close to what the interwebs could draw. That is why I bring you, Cyanide and Happiness. Behold in it's amazing sense of humor, revel in it's deep artistic visuals, and fall in love with it's deep character development.

Thanks to everybody who gave me feedback on my first review. I'm glad people got the sense of it and I'm going to keep my word of writing more reviews with today's poor candidate, Far Cry 2. Unlike last time, where I reviewed a game I loved, I didn't enjoy Far Cry 2 nearly as much so I wrote the review in a different direction. I gave credit where no credit was due and praised the worst aspects of the game. Here is a sample (Full review here) And please leave more feedback and thanks for reading.

"Continuing with the emersion aspect, using emotions to convey me being the character was done very nicely, but the thing that still amazes me to this day is the injury be gone mechanic. Whenever you get pumped with enough bullets, your body will develop an injury that anybody who was in African firefights would receive. This means lion bites, sun burns and malaria. I watched in awe when my character put sun tan lotion onto his beautifully crafted 2 degree sun burn marks. I closed my eyes, injected morphine into my body and clenched my teeth onto a wooden plank every time my character sewed up his lion wounds. And I felt the pills run down my dry throat as my malaria was instantly cured. What other game can do that to you? None, I tell you. I must warn you that these injury be gone mechanics may make the queasy puke. (Yeah, it’s that awesome.)"

Looking back at what I've done for Giantbomb, I haven't done a lot other than a couple blogs and some forum posts. So I thought I'd start writing reviews. But then I look at some reviews already written and thought "Damn, my reviews can't touch this." That's when I figured I'd give my reviews my own spice. In case you don't know (You probably don't) I'm a pretty sarcastic person. I'm going to write sort of "fake reviews" of games. I will call them "The Idiot's Review of Sarcasm (Great name, I know)" They are meant to be taken for fun and not to offend anybody's secret love affair with the game I'm reviewing. I will have played all the games I review so I have a good grip of what they are and poke fun and points I think deserve to be poked at. I will give the game a score in reality I think it deserves so it won't screw up the system. Here's a sample of my work, so enjoy and look out for future reviews :)

The Idiot's Review of Sarcasm - Persona 4 (Full Review Here)

"The main character of the game sets foot in a Japanese high school, which is similar to any other high school except the teachers can abuse and say whatever the hell they want to kids and when a student yells "rape" nobody listens. At this high school, you'll meet your friends who accompany you on your journey. The game tries to emotionally connect you to these characters through a dating sim system (Yes, it is as lame as it sounds) in which the character would forcibley bawl out their inner most secrets about how their uncle touched them as a small child. All of which went over my head because I could give a bigger whoop about these problem childs. You see, most of the game is set up to make the player connect with the characters, but I had an easier time connecting with the latest cast of "Rock of Love." Just because somebody is on the edge of suicide and I am there to comfort them doesn't mean I actually like them, I'm just trying to keep them from killing themselves. But by the end of the game, I didn't care whether my friends ended up getting killed in the television because I was starting to suspect the main character was the one throwing them in tv's just to shut up the annoyingness. Seriously, Yoskue, if you talk about your Saki-Senpai one more time, I'm going to drown you in actual Sake."

You are all very brave men and women. As you know, today is now April 1st. The day we are currently living will go down as the internet "D-Day." The Cornficker virus is said to be a worm that will storm anyone's and everyone's computer if they are connected to the internet.

However, we are going to need you to sign in so that your stand for the internet will be remembered by your grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren. Your blue screen shall not go in vain!

For your bravery of standing against this monstrosity, I salute you.