Alright, so it's no big secret that this site has lost some key personalities, but it seems to me that the past few video reviews I've seen on this site are just plain bad. The most recent one I've seen is for The Bourne Conspiracy. This guy just drones on for five minutes about the combat mechanics. It never mentions the game's strong points or weak points, how many hours of gameplay, technical performance (graphics, framerate, etc.), in fact the video review doesn't even show the review score.

Bourne punches and shoots, I get it. Tell me whether the game is worth my money or not. This site is going downhill fast. Is giantbomb.com finished yet?

Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution.

Release Date: Early June or early July, depending on who has the right info.

Unreal Tournament 3 (X360)

Release Date: July 7

Yeah, I know this game is already out on ps3 and PC, but I don't have a ps3 and my pc sucks.

Command and Conquer 3 Kane's Wrath (X360)

Release Date: June 23

These are the games I will be buying shortly.

So I switched internet browsers today, from IE to Firefox. Man was this ever a great idea. Better performance; yeah, straight up faster performance from the Firefox browser. Plus I like the way it handles RSS. The real reason I switched was because IE had started giving me problems on random sites, i.e. I havn't been able to go to yahoo.com in like two months. Every so often I'd try to go to a site and IE would just lock up for no reason, so I finally got fed up and downloaded firefox. It also appears to handle AJAX a lot better, which gamespot uses a lot of, so there's another perk I'm enjoying.

Right, the comic book. Well, I've never been into comics, but I went and got an Iron Man graphic novel. I didn't notice till I got back to the house that it was written by Orson Scott Card, the guy who wrote Ender's Game - one of my favorate novels. Anyway, so I actually enjoyed the comic book. Prolly won't become a collector, but maybe I'll get one from time to time.

Over the weekend I of course saw Iron Man (see my previous blog), and also the Stephen King movie: The Mist. Aside from Schindler's List, and a few other holocaust movies I can think of, The Mist was the most brutal movie imaginable. I really wasn't expecting an ending like that at all. Speaking of Stephen King, don't know if you knew this but I'm a huge King fan. I've read twenty something of his novels, including all seven Dark Tower books. Some of you may know that they made a Dark Tower comic book series. lol. I have to read them. There's just no choice in the matter, I'm a Dark Tower nut. Details will follow when I get around to it.

Yeah, it deserves to be said twice.

So I went and saw Iron Man on openning night. I don't normally do that, nor am I a big fan of comic books or their movie adaptations. But I just had a feeling about this movie, and I'm happy to say that I was right about it. The story was cool. The acting was well above par for this kind of movie, and the special effects were amazing. It was just a very entertaining movie. I had no idea that Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges were in it either. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper, Iron Man's assistant, and she's delightful . Jeff Bridges plays Iron Man's business partner. He did a fantastic job with this role. The acting in this movie really stands out as being of a much higher quality than we're used to seeing in action films. I may go see this movie again while it's still in theaters, and I havn't done that since the first Bourne movie.

So I layed the groundwork for my own website. I got the domain and the dotnetnuke framework set up. I don't think I'm allowed to say the name of it on here, because it will eventually be a pay-site and mentioning it here would be advertising. It's a site about game design. You may or may not know that I make small video games in my spare time. The site isn't fully operational yet, and won't be for several months, but I've gotten the ball rolling.

In other news, it looks like I'll be over here at my mom's all next week as well. Her new husband travels a lot for work. That's why I've had to be over here so much. I really don't mind being here at all, but my mom lives on the complete opposite side of town from me which makes my drive to work incredibly brutal. I drive completely across Houston in downtown rush hour traffic. lol.

My sister came over here tonight also to spend the night. Apparently she and her husband have been fighting. I hate to put it like this, but that's not exactly suprising news. They fight a lot. I'm sure they'll make up just fine. They always do. Meanwhile, older brother (me) hasn't had a steady girlfriend in over a year now. Granted I havn't been back in Houston for that long and it's tough to meet new people, but I honestly just havn't been putting any effort into it. I hardly ever go out anymore. I just work, come home, and recoop. So I've decided to make an effort to go out more and meet new people. I've even thought about trying speed dating. I've always been good at the initial meeting part. I'm just a flirt. This would prolly give me an advantage in speed dating.

I've also found some new leads for a better job. If it doesn't work out with that internship with Jacobs, there's another complany I can go work for immediately doing what I do now. An old coworker of mine is starting with them next week. The pay is 22 bucks an hour, which is a significant raise from what I make now. We'll see though. If I don't here back from Jacobs by tomorrow, I'll call them and see what the score is.

So I got a new game (sort of). It's Moto GP 07. I saw it used at the good old gamestop and decided to buy it. I have 06 and got pretty good at it. I was expecting a big improvement with 07, but it really seems like they just added a few more trees on the sides of the tracks. lol. The rider models definitely have better animations in this one, along with some slightly improved bike physics, but to be honest I'm a little let down by it. I know it's an older game, and a lot of people don't play the Moto games anyway, but you know what? I took the time to learn all the tracks and get pretty good at the game, so there.

In other news, I still havn't heard back from Jacobs Engineering yet about that internship. Got me pretty worried but I'll be OK either way. I've been trying to get my union tournaments organized and started, but I've been working overtime hours this week so far. This will probably last through wednesday.

My mom is slowly getting better. She's due for a check up in three weeks to see if her bones have healed properly. I'm still over here taking care of her through this friday at least.