Mike wanna be

OK, my 360's down for about a month. Somebody point me in the direction of some good PC games (the cheaper, the better), please?

Horseshit, I got 3 red lights again. Anyone that's had the problem recently, how are the turnaround times? The last time I had it I called the day they announced the 1-year warranty upgrade, had the box the next day and had it back by the end of the week.

The Chicago Bears offense's troubles are solved.

Because Julius Jones went to Notre Dame.

Seriously, Polaroid? Watching your friend get vegetablized in a car crash is a Kodak moment if I've ever heard one. Nice to see that selfish arrogance runs in the orange-skinned family.

Played the Simpsons demo on XBL; typical EA fare, looks great, sounds great, gameplay blows. Bart is the only one really useful in the demo, so Homer ends up being a decoy. Lard Lad seems to randomly choose which one of your two options he's going to target, so by the time Homer lures him into place LL has probably already leveled Bart out of position (and if he hasn't, the mini Krusty dolls that can somehow climb buildings have). The camera works great 1/3 of the time; the other 2/3 it's either clipping through a wall and giving you a great view of how your television displays the color orange, or it's slamming into an invisible wall and forcing you to go the other 359.5 degrees to see what you wanted to look at (and by the time you twirl it around your opening's probably gone anyway). Other than the characters & the "Video Game Cliches" portion involving Comic Book Guy, it's a subpar platformer. In other news, I fired up NCAA 08 again and as USF I ran up 120 on FCS Southeast and "forced" 11 INTs. In even more other news, I downloaded that new Oblivion expansion and boy does it suck. You head to the castle, you kill about 4 marauders and you're GIVEN the castle. You then go to the Imperial market, drop about 25,000 gold and buy all the upgrades...go back to the castle and get a note that says there's one more upgrade you can buy. Warp back, buy it for ~3000 gold and....that's it? I could eventually be asked to pay money to kill four things, spend ~30k in gold and my "reward" is a castle that's about a 3 minute walk from Chorrol on the side that's so far away from anything else you're better off warping to Chorrol itself? Super useful, guys.

What did Michaels have to lose? At best he's jobbing to Orton at the next few PPVs (with perhaps a token title run, if he is indeed finished with the business) to keep the spot healthy for the only other face who's anywhere near title-ready, and at worst he gets buried before he retires and by the time he makes his inevitable return nobody will remember the burial anyway.

Why is there a body just jammed into the O?

Speaking of t-shirts, never thought I'd see one of these:

Kaberle's an offense-defense hybrid and a very good player on both ends; McCabe & Kubina are slapshot-only offense, "Wait what do I do back here?" defense.

It sounded like Sting's ribs broke when Angle landed that knee drop...and I can't say as I blame them if that were the case.

I don't particularly want to support HHH, but damn if he isn't making it difficult with back-to-back badass shirts.

You mean Burress, the guy tied for the league lead in touchdown receptions despite the fact that a) he never practices, b) Shockey and Toomer are the other two "primary" options, c) they have a very good running game and d) their defense is so smothering of late that they rarely need to pass the ball in the fourth quarter? Somebody must have impressed the Dolphins brass in the college game, because they're sending the all-out blitz for #1.

WHAT?!?!?!!?!? The Should Have only been a 1 time only MATCH!!!!!!!!! DAMMIT!!!! Looks like someone paid full price for a TNA PPV. That said, I wasn't that impressed with the match the first time; unless this is Kurt putting Sting over clean without the baseball bat assistance, I'm not interested.

What's the deal with Marvin Harrison? Is he turning into a Williams sister that goes out there hurt, stinks, and then continues to go out there hurt instead of taking the necessary break to recover?

Turrets aren't usually placed in the open any more. If they are it's because the other team has at least 3 of them camping an exit. Soldier rockets can take them out, demoman grenades/stickies can take them out, the problem is that 1) you have to be dead-on with the shot, and more importantly 2) you're getting obliterated by anything more than a first-level sentry (and the first-level is probably being camped/assisted by a shotty-toting engineer so the damage evens out). You've really only got 2 chances to take out a sentry without a sapper. If you fail both of those, the engineer gets the metal from your weapon, upgrades it to that bazooka sentry and it becomes a double-death scenario (in which case the engineer merely goes back, collects the scraps of you & the sentry and constructs a new one) In the very first game I was in (attack/defend on Dustbowl the day after release) we couldn't even get out of our spawn. By the time 30 seconds was up and the round started there was a level 2 sentry in the back corner behind the building, a level 3 on the roof directly across from our spawn exit and a third sentry at level 2 in the doorway to the capture point. This was 6v6, so we also had to deal with a heavy/medic combo, 3 engineers with shotguns pegging us and the gnat-like scouts flying about alternating between shotgun blasts and aluminum-bat dinks. I agree that when it's teamwork v teamwork the game is hella fun. But teamwork v individuals running around is just a massive victory for the teamwork team, and "Kill the sentry" is just incredibly boring. I shouldn't have a K:D ratio of under 0.2 because of one turret that just won't blow up, but I've got to choose between knifing the engineer (which costs me my camo and makes the sentry gun me down; in the meantime of respawn the engineer respawns and goes back on guard) or sapping the sentry (which all but unloads my cover for the engineer, who promptly blasts me and whacks the sapper off with the wrench) because every other class is just "OK I fired a shot at it and I took a rocket to the throat, death for me". However, good news is on the horizon for the 360ers: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3163671

TF2 is unbalanced. There, I said it. There are hardly any good sniper points. Any good sniper points are immediately gummed up by engineer sentries. Engineer sentries are massively OPed to the point where most CTF/Attack-defend games turn into "Team of engineers camped out behind their sentries v. team with alternating spies, soldiers & demos trying to blow up the sentries so they can actually mount an offense". Engineer teleporters take too long to charge and only warp one person, so the time "saved" by using the teleporter is completely wasted (and then some) by having to stand around and wait for it to recharge. Scouts have way too much health for their doubled running & capture speed. They also have a shotgun, so they do very good damage for their class. And I don't know why, but capture speed is doubled once more on the final capture point. Basically, if you're a scout by yourself and you can hit the final capture point for 4 seconds you've got the win. The center point, by comparison, is a 10-15 second wait for one scout. The medic needlegun does squat for damage; playing medic is occasionally fun, but the rest of the time it's just running in an oval pointing the healgun at whatever teammate is nearby because you've got no offense of your own. Lag continues to be an issue for any non 4v4 game. I don't mind having 16 players max, that's not a big deal for me. What is the issue is that several other games have 16v16 (COD3 has this, for god's sake, that's last year's game) games lag-free and I can't find an 8v8 game that doesn't have lag, and several 6v6es also lag. I don't know how they screwed this up, but they did. In effect, you're going to play as & against either a scout, engineer or spy 90% of the time in TF2.

I'd have to look up his stats against other teams, but is it possible it's the heat & whatnot of Miami, considering he played at Michigan and now spends 8 games in New England, one in Buffalo and one in Jersey?

White boots on Angle; does it mean what it means when HHH wears the white boots?

Ahahahahaha. Don't ban the feed supplier, folks. Don't ban the feed supplier.

Just got in, might as well view the feed. Yes, Apollo Creed all the way. Ahaha Truth or Consequences, I get it. Cactus Jack run in ahoy. This feed makes him look somewhat like Human Tornado but I can't say for sure one way or the other, it's just too blurry. Tomko, give me a beat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T9A2HAgYeM

Question: How many "good" games does Vinny need to take the starting job away from Carr? And why on Earth did that Arizona cornerback just stop? Was he unaware of who he was covering, thinking "Well if he overthrew me, there's NO way there's a receiver that outran me to the...oops."

QFT. You can only get a Sabres ticket for under $100 if you're in the second section and it's a "Bronze level" game (read: Someone who sucks); for comparison, I can get better Bills tickets for that price and last summer I picked up 2 seats for RAW (which hasn't been back since, coincidentally) in the fourth row on the floor for $60.

So Angle has to job a title to a guy from another promotion. TNA's going to break Panda's bank shipping in enough guys to run-in on that finish unless Angle gets his way. Also, nice to see that a Japanese federation has to send someone across the ocean to talk to Jarrett because TNA can't be bothered to send an email or return a call.

Well, there goes any hope of affordable downloadable content or decent online multiplayer for any of those games. Why release episodic content for $5 on the marketplace when you can burn 3 of them to a disc and sell it for $60 as the pre/sequel?