Gear61's Blog of Everything

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.

2012-02-06T22:34:00.000-08:00

So I was walking back to my dorm with my roommate Derek the other day, and the conversation somehow shifted to the mantra from George Orwell's absolutely brilliant novel 1984. I've actually thought a lot about this mantra from the book, and I decided to post it on my blog because that's what blogs are for. It is as follows:

"War is peace.
Ignorance is strength.
Freedom is slavery."

Ignoring the fact that these may be out of order and I'm too lazy to check whether or not they are, these are some seemingly paradoxical statements. The words appear to be complete opposites, but the statements actually make quite a lot of sense and reveal some powerful messages once you delve into them.

First of all, we have "War is peace". 1984 is about a dystopic society, which literally controls each and every aspect of its citizens lives. This means that their control is so powerful that it transcends the physical level and delves into the mental level. The citizens of 1984 actually have their thoughts fed to them by the government, and this strangehold is so dominant that it even bends their basic interpretations of reality. For example, the citizens of 1984 actually believe that 2 + 2 = 5. One of the ways that the government preserves this status quo of a docile, brain-dead populace is by claiming that they are always as war (well, it never says in the book that they aren't actually at war, but it's pretty obvious IMO). Why? Because war is peace.

Now this doesn't really apply to a country at war fighting on its own turf, but what this statement is trying to get across is that when a country is at war, the situation at home becomes a lot calmer. Let's examine this by relating it to a real-life scenario. After 9/11 and Bush's declaration of the war in Afghanistan, his approval ratings were through the roof. They were consistently hovering at around 90%, which is simply absurd for any president. American flags were worth 10, 20 times their original value, and everyone, no matter what political party or ideology they were affiliated with, came together as a single blood-thirsty, I mean justice-seeking, force. Yes, we were chanting "Kill the terrorists" (among other less politically correct things), but it's important to notice that essentially all strife within our own country was eliminated. So what's another word for this? Peace.

For any country with any sort of nationalism (pretty much every country on Earth), war has a very powerful effect. It stops internal strife cold, establishes a calm, tranquil status quo, and perpetuates it. War is serious business, so when your country goes to war, everyone's embedded nationalism erupts and a single mindset is established: "The country is having a hard time. As a citizen, I must do what I can to support my country." This includes eliminating dissenters. This effect is especially powerful in a country as militarily inclined as the United States, which is why opposition against Bush's 2 wars never concretely surfaced for several years. War establishes a tremendously dominant "Us vs. Them" mentality, pitting the entire country as the "Us", making any opposition too afraid to voice their disagreement in fear of being decimated by the mob that is their countrymen and their government.

So now we've established how war is peace. Now how is ignorance strength? A couple months ago, I was having a conversation with another gamer, and he was talking to me about a topic he did for a commentary of his. The topic was confidence and its role in strengthening your actions. Having the ability to do something isn't enough; you have to believe that you can do it. Someone who is perfectly capable of accomplishing a certain task is still capable of messing up and failing that task, and this chance of failure is heavily dependent on that person's confidence, or more fittingly, lack thereof. In other words, confidence is strength.

"Ignorance is strength" is easier to handle than the rest of these supposed paradoxes, because strength and ignorance are not polar opposites. Ignorance is the stubborn refusal to acquire knowledge, particularly on matters one has strong convictions on. Ignorance is an intellectual pitfall. Strength on the other hand, is a very, very broad term. It's mainly thought of in the physical sense, but it can also be thought of in mental terms. However, viewing strength from a mental standpoint turns it more into an issue of confidence rather than an issue of ability. The smartest person in the world could be very weak mentally (low self-esteem), while the dumbest person in the world can be very strong mentally by being an individual who is very sure of himself and his actions. In summary, ignorance is more of an issue concerning intellectual ability while strength is more of an issue concerning physical strength (not relevant for the purposes of this post) and self-esteem/confidence.

An ignorant person is someone who refuses to learn, particularly when it comes to stuff concerning them. This almost always involves introspection: Ignorant people often refuse to look within themselves and learn who they really are, discovering their weaknesses along with their strengths. As a result, ignorant people are often times very sure of themselves, despite being incapable on almost every level. The person who 100% believed that his sword could match a tank and consequently died a quite hilarious, pitiful, and sort of valiant death was indeed strong; he was just an idiot as well. Just because a person is strong doesn't mean that he is capable. Again, intellect and confidence are two different things, despite them both being connected to the mental aspect of our being. In the end, ignorance is often a facade meant to cover up some sort of deep, internal flaw, but it does provide some form of confidence, some sort of sureness behind one's actions. Hence, ignorance is strength.

And now we have the last one, "Freedom is slavery". This one is the one I have the most trouble with, because it actually doesn't make much sense to me. This is what I've done with it. Viewing this from a logical standpoint, this statement is stating that A = B, with A being freedom and B being slavery. So, I could make sense of this by trying to equate B with A, which ends up with me turning the statement around and trying to make sense of "Slavery is freedom". So let's try to prove that "Slavery is freedom" isn't simply a paradox.

How I see it is this: When you're a slave in the traditional sense, you are merely controlled on a physical level. The slaves of Southern American plantations were controlled by being forced to till the fields and perform other physical actions. Unlike 1984, their minds were not controlled. Yeah, they weren't allowed to learn how to read and write or get proper schooling, but they were free to think whatever they want as long as they continued doing the menial labor their masters required of them. Unlike non-slaves who have to devote time and brainpower to figure out what they're going to do on a physical level (am I going to run to school or bike there?), their physical actions are completely controlled for them, turning their physical bodies into drones rather than complex machines that have to be constantly maintained by the control center that is the brain. Yes, these slaves didn't have access to any sort of intellectually stimulating material, which meant that their mental ability almost certainly simply atrophied into nothing, but hey, the potential was there. However, my defense of this statement sort of falters when you're looking at a 1984 level of control, because that renders your mind completely useless.

My friend suggested that freedom makes you a "slave to your choices", which doesn't really make any sense to me because the ability to make your own choices is pretty much the definition of not being a slave/controlled entity, so... yeah, I don't know. I mean, when you make choices, do you think, "Man, I'm being controlled by my choices"? No, your choices are controlled by you. And if your choices really suck, the aftermath sort of "controls" you, but that's on your own head and you chose to go onto this path.

So there you have it. A tiny sliver of 1984 explained. Feel free to copy-paste this into your high school essays as I'm sure that this won't turn up in any TurnItIn database.

Destiny

2012-02-06T22:05:00.000-08:00

So in my blog post Perfect Information, which I wrote a white ago, I posited that everything since the beginning of time has been "fated" to happen. If you aren't willing to read my tl;dr post, here's a great summary that somebody posted in the comments.

"Because everything that is inorganic is predictable (which is true, though no being other than a god will be able to have all of that information), and organic beings are simply a process of inorganic chemical reactions, all of our actions are predictable."

In other words, because everything in our universe has to obey the laws of physics, with the proper information and knowledge of these laws, one can predict the outcome of anything. This leads to interesting question, "Do we have free will?", which leads to the subsequent question, "Is there such a thing as destiny?"

In my AP Literature class in 12th grade, my teacher told me that the Greeks believed in both free will and destiny. This seemed completely ludicrous to me because free will and destiny are polar opposites, and the Greeks weren't idiots. However, after listening to what my teacher had to say about it, and mulling about it for a while, the idea made more sense to me. I still don't have a really solid grasp on this issue, especially seeing as how most of my ideas on the concepts are rooted in semantics, but I do think that it's impossible to accept what I wrote here AND believe in free will.

In the end, everything is relative. To prevent myself from getting sidetracked, I won't expand on such a powerful claim, but I will say 2 things. First, think of The Matrix. Then, find Plato's short story "The Cave", and then read it. To summarize, it's basically The Matrix but by a Greek person, bearing the exact same message that we can never truly know whether or not what we perceive as reality is actually reality; there is always the possibility of a higher reality that transcends us. Moving on, there's no definitive, objective reality, because in the end, we perceive reality through our senses, which we know for a fact are limited. Our eyes are only capable of seeing a minute sliver of the electromagnetic sliver; someone without a knowledge of science would most likely claim that our universe only consists of 1 type of electromagnetic wave: Visible light.

My point here is that everything is relative, including probability. Let's go back to the coin-flipping example I presented earlier. Let's say 2 people are flipping a coin; winner gets the other person's phone. Like I said before, the coin is "destined" to fall on a certain side; an ultra-powerful intellectual can predict it given the proper mountains of information. But when the coin flip happens and one person inevitably loses, you wouldn't expect him to say, "Hey, you cheated, it was bound to land on a certain side to begin with!" Even though according to what I said earlier, one could calculate the exact outcome of the coin flip, the loser knows that the winner almost certainly doesn't have the intellectual capability to perform such a feat. From their point of view, it was a perfectly fair 50/50 game. My point is that, similar to reality, probability and whether or not things are "destined" to happen is actually a matter of perspective.

The issue of free will is a tricky one, because I think it often times devolves into a semantics issue. The phrase "free will", is tricky to deal with because our capability are naturally limited, and in the end, it's still more of a spectrum than it is a concrete definition. I want to be able to create gold out of thin air, but human bodies are quite limited when it comes to physical ability and that would violate the law of conservation of matter, so I can't. Do I not have free will when it comes to this issue? Now consider a robber is holding a gun to a father of three and says that he will kill his family if he doesn't help him open the family safe. Does the father have free will here? He technically still has the physically ability to foolishly not open the safe. I think the definition of us having free will is simply us not being controlled by some all powerful puppeteer.

Destiny is also a tricky one, because it turns into a semantics issue. The problem with the Free Will vs. Destiny discussion is that a lot of people believe that if one is false, then the other is true, and vice versa. This is why I say this matter as much more of a gray one than a black and white one. I believe, that from the universe's perspective, all of us do have a "destiny", because the entirety of the universe contains all of the necessary information to pull the perfect reconstruction and construction of the past and future. However, I don't believe that this negates our free will, because it implies the universe is a sentient entity controlling our actions, which I believe it isn't. This is how I think the Greek's simultaneous belief in both destiny and free will works out.

Oh yeah, there's also multi-verse theory which proposes that an alternate universe is created whenever a timeline reaches a decision tree. In short, clusterfuck, and we choose our own destinies if that makes any sense.

I don't know why I wrote this post. On to more concrete things.

Fullmetal Alchemist - A Review and a Recommendation

2012-01-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

At the end of Winter Break, my friend Rajan recommended the anime Fullmetal Alchemist to me. Even though I'm Asian, I actually don't watch that much anime, so I was a bit skeptical at first. Regardless, I agree with most of Rajan's taste when it comes to TV shows and movies, so I decided to give it a shot. I began watching the first episode with most but not all of my attention, and as it progressed, I slowly got drawn into it more and more until I was completely immersed in it. After about 2 weeks, I had finished the entire series, all 51 episodes of it. So yeah, you can probably tell that I think that this show is ridiculously good, and boy are you right.

Before I proceed with this post, I want to say that I watched the 2003 version that drifts off from the plot of the manga, not the 2009 reincarnation, Brotherhood, which stays loyal to the manga and seems to be better according to everyone I've talked to. Rajan actually told me that he watched Brotherhood and wanted me to watch it instead of the 2003 version, but I was already 3-4 episodes in so I was like, "Fuck it." Anyways, I am watching Brotherhood now, and hopefully I'll finish the series before midterms come along and ruin everything. Until then, let's talk about the 2003 version.

Fullmetal Alchemist follows the journey of 2 brothers, Edward and Alfonse Elric. They reside in a fairly normal looking world in a time span which seems to be the early 1900's according to their technology. There's one weird thing about this world though: Certain individuals are capable of performing alchemy, a magical science which allows its users to rearrange the molecular composition of any object. There is only one rule, the conservation of matter, which they refer to as the law of equivalent exchange: You can't make something out of nothing. In order to obtain, something of equal value must be lost. So for example, you can turn a candy bar broken into two pieces into a complete bar once again: You aren't creating any molecules, you're merely rearranging them so that the molecules responsible for the break are linked together again. Other examples are the boiling of water, since you are merely making the molecules vibrate more, and the turning of a bar of metal into a sword, since you are merely reshaping it.

Ed and Al are both alchemists, a talent which they picked up from their father, who was also an alchemist, and his massive library of alchemy textbooks. However, their father left them when they were little, leaving only their loving mother to take care of them. One day, their mother passes away from an unknown illness, and it turns out that she was actually hiding it for quite a while in order to seem strong for Ed and Al and prevent them from worrying about her. Devastated, Ed and Al try what is referred to as the "ultimate taboo" among alchemists: Human alchemy, otherwise known as the bringing of the dead back to life. The operation is mainly led by Ed, and while Al is reluctant, his love for his mother and Ed's persistent insistence persuade him to join the effort. After lots of studying, both of them gather the ingredients of the average adult human body, offer a blood sacrifice to appease the laws of equivalent exchange (Ed rationalizes that every human originally started off as a single cell, and since their blood contains their mother's genetic information, this should work), and attempt alchemy. Their attempt fails disastrously, and what they create doesn't resemble their mother in the slightest; it's some sort of monster that you find out more about as the series progresses. The reason it failed is because there's no equivalent exchange for a human soul, so whenever human alchemy is attempted, the process goes haywire and takes something random but also of massive value from those who try it. Al ends up losing his entire body. Ed is much luckier and only loses his left leg. However, in order to bring back his brother's soul from the afterlife and into the real world once again, he offers his body as a sacrifice to fulfill the law of equivalent exchange and attempts alchemy once again. He ends up losing his right arm, but in return, he rescues Al from the clutches of the afterlife, tethering his soul to a suit of armor that was conveniently lying around.

Ed replaces his missing limbs with metal counterparts, known as automail, which eventually leads to him earning the title "Fullmetal Alchemist". After this, Ed and Al set out on a quest for a mystical item known as the "Philosopher's Stone", a powerful object that is rumored to allow its users to ignore the laws of equivalent exchange for alchemic reactions. Ed and Al have given up their quest to bring back their mother; now they only want to bring their bodies back, and the stone is their best shot. To aid them in their quest, Ed becomes a "state alchemist", an alchemist that is officially employed by the country's military, which appears to be a part of some sort of fascist regime. As a state alchemist, Ed gets access to a pocketwatch that amplifies his alchemic abilities, money, and many rare alchemic texts; however, he must do the bidding of the military, no matter how foolish or inhumane their desires may be. As Ed and Al look for the stone, they are exposed to the darkest corners of alchemy and see many horrific things. The pair are constantly faced with tough moral decisions, many of which involve the balancing of their loyalty to the state, which guarantees their continued access to its vast amount of resources, and their loyalty to humanity, which guarantees their continued ability to live with their consciences.

The first thing I want to touch upon is the two brothers, our protagonists, Edward and Alfonse. This show is incredibly character driven, and it doesn't take very long to fall in love with these characters and their depth, especially if you have a sibling of your own who you (hopefully) care for. The bond between them is incredibly powerful, and as the series progresses, it becomes more and more clear that, in the end, they live only for each other. While their strong love for each other is always apparent, the show doesn't resort to the generic "love conquers all" cliche that many lesser TV shows and movies often times do, remembering that all relationships need to be realistic in order to leave a substantial impact. Both Ed and Al have their strengths and weaknesses, and like any part of brothers, they also fight. As a result, the dynamic between them is easy to relate to, allowing it to easily resonate on a personal level with the viewer. Each brother contributes certain personality traits that are vital to their continued success, unlike many stories where a certain character sort of does everything (*cough* Hermoine *cough*). Ed, being the older brother, naturally takes the lead, spearheading most of their initiatives. However, Ed is more of the "Act first, ask questions later" type of person, a characteristic which usually ends up leading him straight into trouble. He also acts far more out of emotion rather than reason, thinking with his heart rather than with his mind. While this fuels his courage and determination and allows him to sometimes make the right decision quickly in dire situations, it sometimes leads to him doing really stupid things like I mentioned before. However, this flaw also makes him very easy to relate to on a personal level, both for us, the viewers, and for the other characters in the show who eventually deem him as a "champion of the people". Emotions are ultimately what define the human experience, and Ed is a wonderful representation of this fact.

Al, on the other hand, is far more calm and collected. Al is much more of a follower than a leader and often times acts as the voice of reason that Ed sometimes desperately needs. Because Ed is a very emotional character, an aspect which is amplified by his guilt for causing his brother to lose his body, his behavior is often times very swingy and drastic. Al is essentially the opposite. Al almost never acts unless he's completely thought things through, and he's a lot more quick to sympathize with characters that are flawed and have done bad things, unlike Ed, who is always ready to attack and destroy them. As a result, Al does a great job making allies for the two brothers, often times turning characters that were originally hostile towards them to their side.While Ed's character allows him to easily get caught up in the depressing atmosphere of their situation, Al is always there to provide optimism and encouragement, even during the darkest of times. The problem with Al though is that he's sometimes too trusting and forgiving; he often times gives bad characters a chance only to have it all blow up in his face afterwards. Additionally, Al rarely acts on his own; like I said, he's the follower while Ed is the leader. Without Ed, Al would almost certainly be lost. But without Al, Ed would get himself killed in a heartbeat. Ed provides the flawed core of their efforts, and Al provides the supplement necessary to perfect it.

The dynamic between Al and Ed very much reminds me of the dynamic between Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings. Because of the ring's effects and his own personality, Frodo's emotional state is very unstable, and as a result, his decision-making and behavior are often times swingy and drastic, similar to Ed. However, despite his flaws, he is still the leader, spearheading the mission of destroying the Ring and saving Middle Earth. Sam, on the other hand, is much more about loyalty than leadership. No matter what, Sam is always by Frodo's side, just like Al, and he's always there to lift up Frodo's spirits, also just like Al. But in the end, Sam is still the follower while Frodo's the leader, even pointing out at one point in Return of the King that he isn't capable of carrying the ring on his own. Sam also relies a lot more on reason than emotion, providing the cautious, more logical choice when Frodo throws all caution to the winds and does whatever he can to get extricate himself from danger (putting on the Ring) or get rid of the Ring as soon as possible (trying to make it through the gates of Mordor with the mercenaries). In conclusion, just like Frodo and Sam, Al and Ed are two halves of a wonderful whole; neither would accomplish much without the other, and the powerful relationship between them is always heartwarming and marvelous to watch.

What really surprised me about the show was how intelligent it is and how real the dilemmas were. Starting from episode 1, you're automatically plunged into a situation that can easily be extrapolated to real-life. Because of alchemy's scientific yet magical nature, there are many analogies within the show than can be drawn to the effects of religion and the dynamic between religion and science in real life. The show isn't afraid to get its hands dirty, delving into several dark issues that are all to real, including human experimentation, human sacrifice for the "greater good", genocide, and capital punishment. Like any great book or movie, Fullmetal Alchemist delivers many complex questions without giving real answers to them. Why can't we play God, even when we're trying to do good things? Does every life have some sort of intrinsic value, no matter what it's done? Exactly how far can you go when you are "following orders"? Should every life be weighed equally? Is there such a thing as a human soul? Is there some sort of flow to this seemingly everlasting chaos we call our existence?

An important topic that the show constantly brings up is what it means to be human. While this is constantly touched upon by its intense, difficult moral situations and wonderful character development, the show's discussion of the topic is mainly embodied by Al, because even though Al isn't human on a physical level, he is one of the most human characters in the entire show, similar to WALL-E and EVE in Pixar's masterpiece WALL-E, two very human robots stranded in a world of humans that are so brain-dead that they're essentially drones. Even though Al is merely a talking suit of armor, he's one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire show, realizing that in the end, every human being is a human being, no matter how heinous his or her actions have been. He's always ready to forgive, and amidst the sea of constant atrocities within this show, this personality trait is incredibly noble, to say the least. His relationship with his brother further highlights his humanity. Who would have thought that a talking suit of armor would possess a love so immensely powerful? Who would would have though that a boy who's half robot and a suit of armor would have a relationship so strong that it easily dwarfs any other relationship within the show? This topic is furthered highlighted when Al's identity as Ed's brother is questioned with a villain bringing up the possibility that whatever is tethered to Al's suit of armor is merely a collection of false memories fabricated by Ed, rather than an actual human soul.

Next, I want to talk about FMA's setting. Similar to a Miyazaki or Pixar movie, this anime earns massive points simply off of how creative the concepts behind it are. Alchemy is not only cool; it's brilliant. While alchemy is obviously a form of magic that couldn't possibly occur in real life, it's still tethered to real world concepts like the conservation of matter. The problem with many fantasy environments is that they're so over-the-top and unrealistic that they fail to resonate on a deep level, serving merely as forms of visceral entertainment. This limitation of alchemy to make it something more than just magic and render human alchemy impossible allows it to seem real. This really helps drive in the point that there's something more to humanity than what's on a physical level, that there's something more to us than the atoms that we're comprised of. The setting of FMA within this almost dystopic government is very effective too; similar to 1984, it presents the horrors of a government that's too powerful. Ed's position as a state alchemist is also brilliant, allowing the show to analyze the toll of being a soldier, a position that essentially requires one to assign greater importance to following orders over listening to one's conscience and acting in a way that preserves their humanity. This issue is expanded with the "Ishbal massacre", a "war" committed by FMA's government that is essentially a genocide, which resembles the Holocaust and left a massive emotional toll on those who committed atrocities within it because they were simply "following orders".

In conclusion, Fullmetal Alchemist is an amazing, incredibly intelligent anime that really caught me off guard, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Remember, this show is quite dark overall and definitely isn't for the faint of heart, but its rewards are immense and it really makes you think. There is also a lot of comedic relief in the show, which does wonders to brighten the tone and alleviate the tension. There's a very Back to the Future-esque gag of Ed becoming very angry whenever someone brings up his small stature, and even though it may be annoying initially, you realize its necessity when you fully understand how incredibly dark this show can get. Also, this show's ending unfortunately doesn't provide closure. It makes you watch a movie in order to see the storyline completely resolve, and even when you finish the movie, you're left with a feeling that's quite bittersweet and without the complete closure you desperately want. But despite this, the storyline, setting, characters, and everything else about Fullmetal Alchemist are all simply fantastic, and if you have some free time, check it out on Hulu or YouTube with a simple search. Make sure to prepare yourself for a ridiculously crazy ride though; this show is an emotional rollercoaster to say the least. Enjoy.

Gear61's Guide to YouTube

2012-01-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

Over theyears, countless people have asked me something along the lines of, "Howare you so successful on YouTube?" or "How can I become big onYouTube?" After... around 3 years of when these questions started rollingin, I have decided to give my incredibly long answer, because that's what blogsare for. In this most likely large series of posts which I probably won't endup completing, I will detail my YouTube experience and divulge the tricks Ilearned from countless hours of tending to my YouTube channels.

It allstarted in early 2007, when I first started my YouTube channel, I just uploadedrandom videos that pertained to my interests. So I uploaded all the musicvideos of my favorite songs I could find off of Limewire along with theoccasional Halo video, which was usually something really good like Itwasluck's5th and 6th Halo 2 montage. After getting around 50 subscribers or so after amonth or two, I, being the impatient teenager that I was, decided to give upall this YouTube crap. Going mono-Halo videos definitely surfaced as apossibility, but Airguitar901 was doing an amazing job with it all and he had awhopping 1,200-ish subscribers (making it impossible for me to compete) so Idiscounted the option.

Cue early2008. The original owner of Airguitar901 had stepped down and was replaced witha guy named Blackout. Blackout did a LOT for the channel, and I respect him alot for it, but given his schedule, he was only able to upload on one day ofthe week. This led to Airguitar posting 6-7 videos at once every weekend. Heactually did a fantastic job getting all the videos, but the problems with thisway of doing things are:

1) Peopledon't like to wait

2) A bunchof videos all showing up at once clutters the subscription box, and this annoyssome people

3) When aton of videos are all uploaded at the same time, it's a simply a giantclusterfuck which ends up with all the videos taking views from one another andno video getting a good amount of views (unless it's ridiculous)

I saw anopening for a new Halo channel to rise up, and this spotted opening alongwith... my lots of free time, I guess, led to me starting up the channel again,this time as one dedicated purely to Halo.

I startedoff by uploading EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING. If I saw a video onHalo2Forum with a download link attached, I downloaded and posted it 99% of thetime. My bar was essentially non-existent, and this led to me uploading upwardsof 7 videos in a day. The theory behind this decision was that I wanted to go adatabase-esque purpose with my channel, simply having everything imaginableHalo video-wise. I mean, how can someone simply not subscribe if I haveeverything they'll ever need to satisfy their Halo desires? Another thing I didwas put all-caps descriptors (you know, those "AMAZING" and"INCREDIBLE" labels I'm ultra-mega famous for), on pretty muchanything of any quality whatsoever. In short, I was a view-whore.

Halo2Forumhas ALWAYS been a spring of great Halo material and even the average stuff fromH2F is pretty good by YouTube standards, because YouTube was, and still is,absolutely infested with horrible, horrible videos. So despite me being a viewwhore that uploaded everything and put all-caps adjectives next to half mystuff, I wasn't constantly flooded with comments telling me how much of a liarI was with my videos. Slowly but surely, the subscribers started to roll in,and my videos started getting more and more views. As an unknown uploader, Ihad to do something to stand out, and my method, as dishonest as it was, wassomething that stood out, which I why I think it worked.

So in thebeginning, my strategy was fairly simple: Upload everything and have appealingtitles. After I reached around 1,000 subscribers, my approach to YouTube gradually began to change. The ridiculous 5-7 uploads in a single day moments began tohappen less and less, and soon I was averaging only 2-3 uploads a day. 3 of thereasons for this are exactly the same as the logic behind why Blackout's way ofrunning Airguitar was poor. None of my videos were taking full advantage of mysubscriber base by getting views from each, or at least most, of them. This isbad for 2 reasons:

1) Goodvideos don't get the views they deserve

2) Videoswith small amounts of views have a very small chance of making it to stardom(I'll explain this more in depth later)

Even though1,000 subscribers certainly isn't nothing, I knew that stretching my subscriberbase by posting shit-tons of content everyday wasn't the way to go. The otherreason why I slowed down my upload rate is because when you consistently exposepeople to a certain standard, the standard eventually becomes boring/too low,and they want something better. So when people subscribed to me, theirstandards naturally rose as they became accustomed to the caliber of thecontent on my channel, which meant that I had to raise it somehow. The easiestway to do this was to become more selective, and this in turn led to meuploading less. While uploading a bunch of videos may get more views from yoursubscription box, it lowers your chances of your videos being discoveredoutside of your subscribers because all of your videos will have poor launches(a phenomenon that will be explained later). To illustrate my example, a videowith 100,000 views in its first week will pull in more views in a year than 100videos that each got 1,000 views in their first week. In the end, it's an issueof balance: You want to upload frequently enough so that people don'tunsubscribe, but rare enough so that your uploads actually mean something andthey're given a chance at longevity.

Speaking ofhow I began uploading less and less to meet my fanbase's standards, let's talkabout fanbase maintenance, because this is something that I've tangled a lotwith over the years and still consider a vitally important issue. Obvious pointalert: Your fans are important. In the end, you are nothing without your fansbecause they're what provide you with views, favorites, ratings, subscriptions,etc. After I had developed a sizeable fan following, I began cultivating myrelationship with my fans. I read almost all of my comments, replied to many ofthem, and listened to all of my fans' opinions and demands. And similar to whatI sometimes do now, I responded to hateful comments politely, tried to quelltheir hatred, and turn them into a respectful, contributing member of the Halocommunity. The difference between now and then was that I responded to ALL ofthese comments. These were the glory days. Not many people hated me, and therewere very few people who were disrespectful of other people's comments and thevideos on my page. This effect lasted until I hit something between 5,000 to10,000 subscribers. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think why I wasable to do this was because I was in touch with my community. So here's mylesson to you based off of these experiences: When you're a small channel,take advantage of how small your fan following is. Positively interact witheach and every member, build relationships, and create loyal fans. They are theinitial core of your channel, so give them the respect they deserve. They WILLreturn the favor.

Naturally,as your channel becomes very large, it becomes difficult to maintain everythingfan-wise. There's simply too many comments/messages/people. It will bephysically impossible to keep track of every member due it being a massivetime-sink. This happened to me a while back, and after a while, I just went,"Fuck this, I can't do this anymore." I stopped commenting on videos,I didn't prevent flame-wars by calling out troll/dumb posts and logicallydeconstructing them, and I didn't respond to personal messages. Don't dothis. Never ever forget your fans. They are what made you, and if youlet your fan base get out of hand, your channel will suffer greatly. Theimportant thing here is balance. Obviously, you don't want to spend your entirelife answering to every single message, comment, and hater, but you don't wantto neglect your fanbase completely either. No matter what happens, ALWAYS try tomaintain some sort of connection and always be trying to come up with ways todo it more efficiently. As an example, I will use Hutch, who, as we all know,is one of the biggest names on YouTube. The man has over half a millionsubscribers, so obviously responding to things one at a time would beincredibly inefficient and therefore stupid. Hutch recently uploaded a Vlog tohis page updating his fans and delivering a heartfelt thanks to his fans. Youcould easily tell that his appreciation was genuine and that he appreciatedeach and every one of his subscribers. The response was overwhelminglypositive, and from the comments, it was clear that a ton of his fans still feltvery connected with him despite him doing more stuff for Machinima instead offor his own channel after he got a job there. This is one of many examples ofthe way to go when it comes to tending large fan bases.

To wrap thisup, here are the perks of having a loyal fanbase:

1) They'remore tolerant of when you fuck up (upload a bad video, don't upload for awhile)

2) They'remore likely to do things that build your channel (share your channel with afriend, comment, favorite, thumbs up, etc). Of course, it's always good to getthese things because you post quality stuff, but it obviously can't hurt to getthese things using the "Wow, this guy seems like a genuinely good personand I will do this because of that" effect.

Now, let'smove on to issues that are less obvious: Stuff involving numbers, statistics,and all that other awesome stuff. Why are moving into this? Because we'removing into the point in time when YouTube Insight (which is now YouTubeAnalytics) came out. If you somehow don't know this, Insight/Analytics is atool that YouTube provides to analyze the numbers behind your channel.

When YouTubeInsight came out, I was pretty excited. I've always loved working with numbers(Asians and math stereotypes go!), and I could finally gain a concrete,mathematical glimpse into the inner-workings of YouTube. Here's one of thefirst things that I noticed: Around half of my views came from the relatedvideos/suggestions sidebar that appears to the right of any YouTube video. Thisdiscovery led to me developing a technique that I coined as "videobatching". I used this technique to maximize the amount of related videosviews I got by making all of my videos relate to each other. In other words, Iwanted to prevent the views from my subscribers to "leak" outside ofmy channel, getting me more views and giving less of a chance for my competitorsto grow.

Peopleusually view tags as a place to dump each and every popular word that isconnected with their video in any way whatsoever. To illustrate my point, thisis something a newbie YouTuber would use as a set of tags for a Halo video of his:

"Bungie,double, triple, overkill, killtacular, killtrocity, killimanjaro, killionaire,BXR, BXB, MLG, pro, Walshy, Sniper, Snipe, Headshot, Spree, Killing, Halo: CE,Halo 2, montage, stick, Phurion, Kampy, Dutchy, Warthog, 343, Industries,Bloom, DMR, Battle Rifle, Invincible, Perfection..."

And the listgoes on and on and on with the rationale being: If I have everything ever in mytags, my video will show up for infinite YouTube searches and therefore getinfinite views. Yeah, that’s wrong. Here's a tip: Tags aren't very relevant,especially what you use for tags and how many of them you have. Here's whattags are good for: Being the driving force behind determining the relatedvideos of a video. Back then the trend was this: The more similar the tags oftwo videos are, the higher their chances of being linked via related videos.This meant that videos with the exact same set of tags would pretty much alwaysbe related with each other. This is part of the basis of video batching. Assoon as I discovered this, I started using the same set of tags for all of myvideos. Eventually, smaller channels caught wind of this and started using myset of tags for their videos to sneak their videos into the related videos ofmy stuff. When a substantial amount of videos had snuck into these spots, Isimply changed the set of tags I used. These smaller channels would followsuit, and then I would switch again, and again, and again, until they just gaveup. Anyways, after I had started posting massive groups of videos with the exactsame set of tags, I began to see a pattern, which I will illustrate with this example:

I startusing a new set of tags for my videos. I upload video 1 with this new set oftags, then 2, then 3, all the way up to 8. A couple videos after video 8, let'ssay, video 15, I start noticing something interesting: For every video aftervideo 8, the first 8 related video slots are occupied by videos 1-8, andusually in a fairly accurate semblance of the original 1 through 8 ordering too(video 1 is always on top, video 2 is always 2nd, etc...). Naturally, thesevideos accumulate a TON of views over time because almost every single videoafter video 9 is linking to the 8 of them. I call videos 1-8 the"seeds" of a new batch of tags, and I will now explain to you whythey're important. Oh yeah, I should point out that this strategy doesn’t workout that well anymore with YouTube having changed 9352 times since late 2008(when I discovered this).

Seeds areimportant because they let you control which videos of yours soak up all therelated videos views, which, when you're running a large channel, is obviouslya lot. So let's say there was this video or group of videos that I wanted toget a ton of views. Back in the day, when this strategy worked very well, Iwould start up a new batch of tags with these videos, and after they becameestablished as the seeds of this new set of tags, they would start racking upviews at an insane pace. I did this accidentally when I first discovered videobatching. This is why Gernader Jake's Halo 3 montage, "Extermination",got around 100,000 views in its first year on YouTube; it was the #1 seed ofthe tags I used during this time. This also explains why it doesn’t get anyviews anymore; it’s not a seed of anything I upload nowadays.

Before Ifinish the section on seeds, I want to point out that copy-pasting the tags ofsuper popular videos like those of RayWilliamJohnson or whatever doesn’t work.Tons of other people have the same theory, so there will obviously be a lot ofcompetition, related videos are established primarily right after uploading, sounless you know a video’s tags before it’s uploaded, it won’t work, and even ifyou do get in there, people probably won’t go from the popular video to yoursif it looks unrelated. If you’re completely unknown and you make similarcontent to whatever video you’re trying to leech off of, go ahead and try thisstrategy, because you have nothing to lose, but if you have any sort offollowing, it’s better to concentrate the related video views within your ownchannel instead of trying to get other channels to lead into yours. If you ignore what I say and try this strategy anyways, in the end,you’ll most likely end up feeding that video even more views while receivingnothing in return, and I know this because I’ve actually tried this acouple times.

Moving onfrom seeds, let’s delve into something that’s infinitely more important:Discovery. Discovery is when people who don’t know about you stumble onto yourmaterial. Nowadays, for small channels, the main source of discovery is search.So how do you get your videos to appear when people search things? Well, firstwe need to establish an important concept that I call “hot terms”. Hot termsare simply words or phrases that people search very often on YouTube. Hot termsare important because you obviously want your videos to appear at the top ofthe lists of commonly searched things. Now how do we identify these hot terms?Well, there are some that you can deduce by simply asking yourself, “When I goto YouTube, what do I want to search?” When I was trying to think of hot termsrelevant to Halo, I came up with stuff like “Halo montage”, “Halo machinima”,and other obvious phrases. To verify that these were indeed commonlysearched phrases, I searched them and made sure that their corresponding firstcouple of results all had high view counts. Nowadays, you can discover hot term byentering something into the search bar and using the auto-completedrelevant phrases, which are usually listed in order of popularity. Another way offinding hot terms is by looking at the “Discovery” tab of your videos inYouTube Analytics. If one of your videos is randomly getting a lot of views,there’s a high chance that this is because it’s showing up for some hot term.This leads me into a somewhat off-topic point: ALWAYS analyze anomalies. When avideo of yours is getting a lot of views and you don't know why, open YouTubeAnalytics for that video ASAP, identify the source(s), and try to takeadvantage of the source(s) for your future videos if you can.

Now onceyou’ve identified hot terms, how do you take advantage of this knowledge? Well,when it comes to search, it’s always been mainly an issue of video title.Everything else has almost no bearing on the matter, including tags. This iswhy whenever I post a montage, I always try to include the phrase “Halo _montage” in the title, even when it’s customary to name it a dualtage ortritage when there’s multiple people in the video. This is also one of thereasons why I put “100% MLG” or “Lots of MLG” in the titles of montages; “MLG”is a very commonly searched word and I've gotten many views from people searching itand finding an MLG montage from my channel. There’s obviously a lot ofcompetition to appear at the top of search pages, so here’s a tip: The closerto the beginning your hot term is in a video title, the higher chance thatvideo has of appearing at the top of the list for that hot term. In otherwords, the title “(Bunch of stuff) – Halo 3 Montage” has a smaller chance ofbeing one of the first results for the search for “Halo 3 Montage” than “Halo 3Montage – (Bunch of Stuff). So to summarize this paragraph, this is what you wantto do with all your video titles:

1) Cram inas many relevant hot terms as possible

2)Prioritize the more popular hot terms by placing them closer to the beginningof the title.

Nowadays,search pages are a lot more stagnant. Once videos have established their placeat the top, it takes a lot to budge them. Back in the day, whenever I wouldpost a Halo 3 montage, it would become the first result for “Halo 3 montage”almost automatically, and it would stay there for a day or two, because therewas some priority mechanic that highlighted fresh material relevant to thatterm. I got a LOT of views that way, and even though search pages are prettystagnant like I said, there’s no harm in trying and there’s always hope tosqueeze your newest video onto one. Let’s say you make a Halo montage, and it’sentitled, “Destiny”. Yes, the thumbnail clearly indicates that it’s a Halomontage, but there’s absolutely no harm in adding “- A Halo Montage” to thetitle to try to get a couple views from search instead of merely titling it, "Destiny".

Now let’smove on to other sources of discovery. The next one is networking. This is whenyou get views from famous people and big websites linking to your stuff. Bothare achieved through putting out super good material which eventually reachesthese 2 sources by word of mouth, but there is definitely a role that you canplay to make it happen more often. First of all, you can submit your own videosto these people and websites, but if you’re unknown to these people and onthese websites, this usually won’t amount to anything; your messages and postswill be ignored. You can change this by:

1) Trying tomake friends with powerful people. Now the best case scenario is themapproaching you because your stuff’s awesome and they stumbled upon it, butyou’re generally going to have do some of the work by approaching them. Whendoing this, make sure to be polite, take the time to punctuate and spellcorrectly, and be grateful. These people probably go through dozens of messagesa day, the least you can do is sound intelligent, be thankful for them spendingtheir time to read a message from someone they don’t even know, and not seem asif the only thing you care about is getting more views and subscribers.

2) Making aname for yourself on websites such as Reddit, Digg, etc. This one's prettysimple too, similar to number 1. Sound intelligent, be polite, post goodthings. Done.

The lastsource of discovery is the YouTube awards list and their featured content. Bothare pretty irrelevant, because it's pretty impossible to get views from eitherof these sources. YouTube is naturally an industry that's hard to profit fromseeing as how they're constantly hosting several terabytes of material withanother terabyte being added every day or whatever, so they're always doingeverything they can to plug the material of their biggest partners. As aresult, the featured YouTube stuff is always a RWJ or ShaneDawson video orwhatever, though Just Mad's final Halo 3 montage and Salaya's "TheExperience" were somehow featured back when they were posted. Moving on tothe awards list, this one's hard to take advantage of because it's completelydominated by large channels, and the large channels nowadays are freakinggigantic. Back in the day, I could pretty easily get videos onto the Top Ratedand Top Favorited sections for gaming because the CoD boom hadn't happened yet.In fact, LBYL 2 used to be on the Top 100 Rated videos of all time for all of YouTube,because back then, the system revolved more on how high the average rating wasrather than how many ratings there were. In simple terms, super good videosused to get a lot of views because super good videos usually have a high ratingto view ratio along with a high average rating, which lead to them making itonto awards lists, which in turn got them a lot of views. This leads me into mynext point: Remember, views have to come from somewhere. A video won'tmagically get views because it's super good. With how dominant thelarge channels are nowadays, this statement is even more true than it wasbefore. This makes begging for likes, favorites, and comments to get more viewspretty irrelevant unless you're a large channel and you land a video on an awardspage every time you do this. So if you aren't a large channel, you should dothis sparingly in order to not cheapen the message, and when you release avideo that you think is really sick, go all out and hope that this is enough to make it onto these lists. Ask for the whole shebang, andif your video is actually as good as you think it is, you should get a reallyhigh feedback ratio (ratio of likes/comments/favorites to views) due to thecaliber of the video and your message having more weight because you don't useit very often. This is why I try to use all-caps adjectives in titles verysparingly nowadays; I want it to count when I do use them.

Anothersimple way of getting more views is to simply know where your fans are from andwho they are, and using this information to upload videos at the right time inorder to have my videos be at the top of as many sub boxes as possible when myfans go to YouTube. For example, I know that most of my fans are Americanstudents. This is why I upload my videos between 2-4PM PST (Pacific StandardTime) on weekdays; everyone has either just gotten back from school or has beenhome for a couple hours. You also want to try to release your better videos onweekends, because that's when everyone is home and your additional effort willbe rewarded the most. If my fanbase had an even split between Europe andAmerica, I would upload when it's afternoon in Europe as well. And now Idigress into the process of "championing" videos (inventing termsftw).

"Championing"a video is when you go all out to give a video as good a launch as possible.The launch of a video is its most important time, because how well a video doesin the first week or so of its release usually determines how well it will doin the future. This is because the fresher a video is, the higher chance it hasof making awards lists (the weekly list is obviously less competitive than themonthly list), making it onto search pages (age is still one of the factors),and getting views from outside sources (people hate old stuff). In other words, a video's beginning is the best time for it to become noticed. Championingvideos is important because it helps you ensure that your best videos aregetting the most views. Similar to how money makes money, views get views. Avideo with a lot of views (generally with at least 100,000) will naturally keepon getting views because it's established in many search pages and relatedvideo sidebars, and it has a lot of appeal simply because it has a lot of views(the rationale being, "Hey, this video has a lot of views. It must be goodif it has so many of them, so I'm gonna click on it."). This means thatyour most viewed videos will be responsible for a lot of your discovery, andyou naturally want your most viewed videos to be your best ones because thiswill give people a good impression of your channel. Furthermore, sorting achannel's videos by most popular/most viewed is one of the most common thingspeople do when they check out your channel page, and you want your best stuffto be up there so they can give good impressions and do this faster and fasteras they get more and more views from the most popular/most viewed tab. Anyways,this is what you do when you want to champion a video:

1. You cantry the seed trick by starting a new set of tags for it and getting all yournext videos to have it as the number 1 related video.

2. Get itonto awards lists by asking for comments, likes, and favorites. There's also afairly overlooked "Most responded" awards list, which is based on howmany video responses a video gets. When "Legacy" came out, Iresponded to it with a couple hundred videos to instantly put it on that list.When you're asking for feedback, you can do it via annotation, but since youcan turn those off now and some people probably have them turned off bydefault, having something within the video is obviously the most effective,especially if it's actually you delivering the message and not some textscreen.

3. Post itat a good time. For me, this would be during a weekend afternoon PST.
4. Have a flashy title. In my case, I add in all caps adjectives. And make sureto still jam in as many hot terms as possible.
5. Don't upload anything new for a while so it can soak up as many subscriberviews as possible.
6. Have it as the featured video on your page, and sticky it in your videosand/or favorites list for redundancy if you want it and are still using the oldYouTube layout.
7. Post it everywhere.

Now I wantto go into networking between your videos. This goes over how deeply yourvideos are interconnected to one another. We've already gone over one aspect ofthis with the section on related videos. Now I want to move into annotationsand video responses, and there really isn't much to say: Link your videostogether via video responses and annotations. It strengthens the possibility ofthe dream scenario happening: Some person stumbles onto your video or finds itin his subscription box. He sees it, likes it, and proceeds to another video ofyours via related video, response, annotation, whatever. This continues and bythe end of the day, this person has contributed 50 views to you. If you can,incorporate those nice title screens at the end of your videos that plays clipsfrom your other videos in boxes which you hook up with a spotlight annotation.The last thing I want to go over is playlists. I overlooked playlists for awhile because I find them to be pretty useless, but one day I did a search for"Halo 3 montage" and saw a couple playlists as the second result, oneof them being my "My Top 10 Halo 3 Montages" playlist, which I neverupdate. I was shocked, and I proceeded to look at the YouTube analytics for thevideos in the playlist: The first video in the playlist had gotten over 10,000views from people checking out the playlist! What's really awesome is that thisone playlist took the space of one video in the search page but was gettingviews for 10 videos at once. It was essentially a super-video since theplaylist started with one video and then auto-played into the rest of them andeven looped when the last video was done. So yeah, playlists are awesome. Theyappear via searches, and they raise attention for several videos at once. Whenyou can, make playlists containing hot terms; it only takes a couple seconds,and it can do you wonders by appearing on search pages. Also, try to make themseries playlists when you can. This nifty, new little feature makes the firstrelated video slot of any video in a series playlist whatever playlist thatvideo is in. So if some video of yours is in a series playlist with 50 videos,the first related video slot of this video essentially links to 50 videos. Efficiencyftw.

To end thevideo networking section, I want to go over a neat little trick I learned quiterecently: Let's say you want to link video A via an annotation in video B. Nowlet's say video A is in a playlist. When you're making this annotation, go tothe playlist that A is in, and click on A. Now use the URL of this page foryour annotation. When people click the annotation in B, they will go to videoA, but it will be in playlist mode. If the person's paying attention, there's achance they'll check out the rest of the playlist, and if they aren't, youmight snag a couple extra views from the auto-play function of playlists.

On tochannel views, which is when people view your channel page. Channel views areawesome because they lead to subscriptions (obvious), and you can easilyconvert them into video views. The easiest way is through your featured videoplayer, which now has an autoplay option for everyone, not just YouTubepartners. If you haven't already, make your channel default to "Featured"instead of "Feed" and turn on auto-play. However, if you're confidentthat people care about your feed enough to actually click on the things in it,continue using your feed as your default page and favoriting and liking your own. Anyways, then remove modules that can't provide views such as your listof friends, subscribers, and subscriptions. Channel comments are pretty uselesstoo, and they're about 90% spam once you have any sort of fan followingwhatsoever. Lastly, jam as many playlists as you can onto your video page,because like I said before, playlists are awesome.

And now morenetworking, and by more networking, I mean social networking. Socialnetworking, mainly Twitter and Facebook, not only provide a better way for youto interact with your fans, they also essentially provide you with anothersubscription feed. Let's say that you post a video, and after a week, it's notdoing as well as you would have hoped view-wise. You can post it toTwitter/Facebook, and assuming it got muscled out of a lot of people'ssubscription boxes, it should get a wave of extra views. You can also do thiswith your older videos for your newer fans. The YouTube subscription box is acompetitive arena, and Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sitesessentially give you another subscription box to broadcast your contentthrough. And speaking of extra subscription boxes, since YouTube feeds alsobroadcast general activity now, take advantage of your "likes" and"favorites" in a similar fashion to your Twitter and Facebook pages.Try to set up "box4box"s with large channels, if you somehowhaven't figured that out already.

Lastly, Iwant to talk about content. Besides the obvious "make good content"and "do what you want" pieces of advice, I want to go overaccessibility. If you're reading this post, you're probably a gamer, andsubsequently, if you want to start a YouTube channel, it's probably onededicated to gaming. Your potential demographic is automatically limited,because not everyone is a gamer. And if you're going to post material from acertain game, you're limiting yourself even more. If you're looking to go big,remember to keep your options open from the very beginning. If you settle intoa niche like I did with Halo montages, you're severely limiting the amount ofattention you can get because you only appeal to a certain demographic, and inmy case, a certain piece of a certain demographic. The "from the verybeginning" part is relevant because your fans will come to expect acertain type of video from you, which means that any attempt to shift or branchout will be met with some amount of negative reception. In summary, if you wantto become the most subscribed gaming channel on YouTube, don't only upload MLGHalo 3 montages.

Superlastly, don't get hung up when you're not getting the amount ofviews/subscribers you want, especially with subscribers. In the end,views are the only thing that matter; subscribers don't mean anything if they don't watch your video. This is why "sub4subs" are stupid; you're merely increasing your sub count, which is a useless number unless it gets you onto an awards list. I would much rather get 100,000 views pervideo with only 10,000 subscribers than 10,000 views per video like I am now.Even though caring too much won't really hurt you directly, it can show whenyou're networking with other people, and it's not good for your reputation,which decreases the chances of people helping you out and giving you attention.If you're going to connect with your fanbase like you should, it's best if youdon't seem like a view/subscriber whore. But in the end, it's a balancing actand a gamble. If you don't have that annotation asking for a like and favoriteon your newest and greatest video, it may never reach an awards lists andsnowball into stardom, but the more of these you do, the lesser your reputationis.

Whew, Ithink that's all I wanted to say. To summarize this monster of post, here arethe bullet points in non-bullet point format:

1. Connectwith your fans and give yourself a face. During a time where talent isspringing up everywhere, human personality is a great way to distinguishyourself.

2. Connectyour videos together via related video, annotation, video response, and playlist.You want to turn every view into a cascade of several views.

3. Know whoyour fanbase is so you can take advantage of time-zones.

4. Network,network, network. Establish a presence on large websites, get to know people,create pages on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and dobox4boxes.

5. Makematerial that is accessible to as many people as possible.

6. Don'tcare too much about numbers. Have fun with it. Be natural. It'll pay you back,don't worry.

7. Find thehottest terms and jam your video titles with them whenever you can. Do thiswith playlists too.

8. Championyour best videos.

9. Takeadvantage of your channel views. Have it be on "Featured" instead of"Feed", jam as many playlists as you can onto the page, and eliminatemodules that don't get you views. Also, limit your news feed so that it onlycontains relevant information.

Underrated Montage of the Week #10 - illcomposed

2011-12-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Gameplay by: Rhis and KayEmX

Edited by: GTS

Date of Original Release: 5/5/2011

Current View Count: 12,145

Prior to the Halo 2 Vista montage "b2p", I had no ideawho GTS was, and after the Halo 2 Vista montage "b2p", I was leftwondering how I didn't know who GTS was before and when his next project wouldcome out. Similar to "b2p", this montage's editing impresses on everylevel, and this review won't be very long because there isn't much to say aboutthis montage besides, "Holy fuck, this video is amazing."

Gameplay: The gameplay is great, showcasing nolackluster clips and a good amount of incredible, memorable ones like theBXRRX-RRX killtacular from under pressure on Midship, the stick from atop bigtower on Ascension, and the finale stick on Beaver Creek. In terms of diversityit is lacking a bit, falling on the mono-MLG maps side like many other Halo 2montages (Warlock, Midship, Lockout), but it does have stuff like Ascension andthe less common (not Lockout or Midship) MLG maps like Beaver Creek.

Editing: Well, where do I start... First of all,the syncing, the most important aspect of editing, is fantastic, and as aresult, the flow is simply phenomenal. Moving past the basics, the editing issimply oozing with a boatload of creative, well-applied effects that add evenmore to the flow of the video while being incredibly pleasing on an aestheticlevel. Like I said in the video description, the transition with the flag isone of the sickest transitions I have ever seen in a Halo video, and the many,many effects GTS added to emphasize sync points were all spot on. On top ofthat, the color correction is simply perfect. Since the dawn of time, editorshave been throwing on random, ugly color correction where it doesn't belong,and this video is certainly not the case. The colors GTS uses add an incredibleamount of flair to the video, and they go perfectly with the wonderful,original soundtrack, another important strong point of this video. GTS elevatesthe editing in this video to an artform, and the eye-candy (effects that aren'tnecessary but are merely there for visual enjoyment) is amazing. All of it ismasterfully done, including the recycled concepts like added in medals, andalmost all of it is new and innovative. Clip placement was also great; thetriple kill no scope on Beaver Creek is a fine clip, and the stick at the end,which is also on Beaver Creek, is simply ridiculous. Lastly, I want to pointout that the cinematography in this video is also incredible, a feat that ismagnified by the fact that this was a Halo video. The editing in this is prettyclose to perfect and is easily in my top 5 examples of Halo montage editing ofall time.

Flaws:

- Too short

- Adding in medals have been done to death, and I actually feltthat the medals didn't have to be in the video despite how nice they looked.

Like with GaryUK's "Rush", this was released way afterHalo 2's era, and as a result, it got little to no attention. And unlike"Rush", this video wasn't even featured by the Bungie Blog. At 12,000views, this video is criminally underviewed, and with its great gameplay,unique soundtrack, and stellar editing, you simply HAVE to check it out if youhaven't already.

Previous Underrated Montage of the Week: TheFuntageCrew's Halo 3 Community Funtage 6

Underrated Montage of the Week #9 - TheFuntageCrew's Halo 3 Community Funtage 6

2011-12-13T13:12:00.001-08:00

Because copyrights are adamant on being full retard, I can't embed the video (again), so here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1gi0CJCRe0

Gameplay by: The Halo community

Edited by: Marruk

Date of Original Release: 7/2/2009

Current View Count: 25,789

Like I said in my review of "Bliss 2", I love Marruk's editing. I also loved TheFuntageCrew back when it was around, and I actually was around for when they first started making videos. Auron (one of the original members of the crew who pretty much disappeared after the crew moved into Halo 3) was fucking hilarious, and right after seeing a couple seconds of his live moments, I became an avid follower of the group. Anyways, when TheFuntageCrew was revived by Marruk, Dutchy, Nepr, and friends, I was eager to jump on board and gain more attention for their Halo 3 community funtage series, which I'm sad to say still never got the attention it deserved. Anyways, let's jump into the review.

Gameplay: The gameplay is great, and I was really surprised at how high the caliber of the footage given how TheFuntageCrew has never been incredibly well-known. There is a wide variety of Halo hilarity, going from your WTF moments (falling underneath Valhalla) to your fails (the clip where an Elite shoots his teammate who has the sniper and backs off, leaving this teammate to conclude that the Spartan currently watching him fired the shot and betray him due to said conclusion). The gameplay in this video is sure to bring a chuckle here and there, and there's a lot of original content too.

Editing: The editing, while not as developed as Marruk's later work, is still good. While it has more of a "solid" feel instead of an "incredibly well-done" feel, this is a funtage after all, and there's no problem with that. The editing really is just syncing, and it does it rather well, establishing flow while keeping the clips very intact. Like all other cases of relaxed editing, I can't say anything negative or glowingly positive about it. One thing that does set it apart from other instances of laid-back editing though is Marruk's trademark injected humor, which I really liked as usual. Clip placement isn't as much as a concern with funtages being more laid-back and all, but I think a stronger clip could have been used in the beginning. The finale clip (the weird snipe on Narrows) and the random post-finale humor were both awesome, and I think they were placed well.

Flaws:

- Messy camera work

- Poor quality, even for SD

I have a couple theories as to why this series didn't take off despite its good song choice, stellar gameplay, and great editing. First, the stagger between releases due to TheFuntageCrew's constant problems (the 8th installment came out nearly a year after the 7th), there wasn't much motivation for people to submit their clips because they didn't know when they would be given the spotlight they deserved. Second, "funtage" isn't as much as a known term as "montage" (the amount of searches for "Halo montage" dwarfs the amount of searches for "Halo funtage", and this is most likely because it's simply harder to get funtage clips. Funtage clips are spontaneous, while montage clips can be forced by following certain formulas or by simply being ridiculously good at the game like Kampy. Third, there was the much more popular "Dancetage" series, which was concurrent with this one, producing an effect similar to that of CoD's current crushing of Halo. The Dancetages got more views and because they had so much of the spotlight, there wasn't much left of it for TFC's community funtages and people were naturally more inclined to send their clips to the Dancetages instead of TFC. Lastly, YouTube is stupid. Anyways, theorizing aside, this series is great, and you should really check out the link above if you haven't already.

Previous Underrated Montage of the Week: Phurion Fluxy 2

The Decline of the Halo Community - My Theory Behind Its Cause

2011-11-19T00:55:00.001-08:00

Well, this is something that I've addressed already in this video I did for GFC, but when I cover an important issue via a GFC video, I never say everything that I want to say, a result of not being good at commentating and simply forgetting things because I'm a durdle. On top of that, this is such an important issue that I felt that it was worth expanding on. A couple days ago, Axilo told me that only 2,500 people were playing the Halo CE remake, and only another 5,000 were playing Halo: Reach. Now people on YouTube bring up these scarily low numbers all the time, but Axilo's someone I trust, so I really doubt that these numbers are very far off. Yes, Axilo told me this at around 2 in the morning Pacific time, but these are still some shocking figures.

One thing that I didn't address in the GFC video was how this crisis came to be; the video was merely full of ideas to turn things around. Obviously, this isn't that relevant now, since actually doing something to fix all this is of a much higher priority than sitting around theorizing the reasons behind everything going downhill, but I like sharing my thoughts with the community and this is definitely something that I want to contribute my 2 cents on.

The obvious culprit here is Call of Duty. Call of Duty has always been a solid franchise, but with the release of Modern Warfare 2, the game exploded, plain and simple. Its release shattered several records, and within months of its release, numerous YouTube superstars emerged off of its success. It also led to a plummet in Halo 3 activity; for several months after its release, the majority of my Xbox Live Friends were still playing it. Keep in mind that a lot of my Xbox Live Friends are people I meet through my YouTube channel, which is a channel dedicated solely to HALO. So why exactly was Call of Duty a sleeper hit up until Modern Warfare 2? Well, I really don't know, and I don't have a theory that I strongly support. My best guess is a brilliantly executed ad campaign, but from what I saw, there wasn't anything incredibly extraordinary about how the game was marketed. Another theory I have is that because Modern Warfare 2 was such a massive step down in terms of competitive viability (otherwise known as a massive step up in "noob friendliness"), it made the game more accessible to the casual gamer, who constitutes the majority of the gaming population.

All of us know by now that Call of Duty is by far the strongest video game franchise in existence and probably the strongest video game franchise in the history of gaming. Every Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 2 has had the same record-shattering effect, and when it comes to gaming videos on YouTube, it has been absolutely dominated by Call of Duty. So why does this game have so much staying power? This I have several answers for.

First of all, as I proposed and supported in excruciating detail in this post I wrote explaining my perspective on the whole seemingly-eternal Halo vs. CoD debate, Call of Duty is nowhere near the competitive title that Halo is and is a pretty accessible game overall due to its severely limited skill gap, which allows even the worst of players to go into a game and rack up a couple kills. Before people start complaining about how that is exactly what a douchebag snobby Halo fanboy would say, I would like to point out that I own Modern Warfare 1 and 2, have enjoyed them thoroughly, and have no problem with the series' lesser competitive merit. The last part is because the quality of a game shouldn't be determined purely off of its competitive viability. Gaming is still a recreational activity, and people who think of games purely in terms of how well it lets them "wreck noobs" take gaming far too seriously. Anyways, in the end, this, like I said before, makes Call of Duty more accessible to the everyday gamer. And speaking of accessibility, a very, very powerful advantage that Call of Duty has over Halo is that its multi-platform, which maximizes their potential player base.

The next thing I want to touch on is post-release exposure and the online community for video games, two things that are heavily tied together. Post-release exposure is attention that video games get after their release. The online community is the communal aspect behind the game that isn't playing it (forums dedicated to the game, montages, MLG). The more of these 2 things a video game gets, the stronger it is, and the cool thing about them is that they feed into each other. The online community creates more post-release exposure for the game, this post-release exposure drags new people into the community, some of these new people become part of the online community, and the cycle continues. Simply put, Call of Duty has been getting a TON of post-release exposure. How? Through YouTube, the most powerful tool and medium for post-release exposure on the planet. And how exactly did it come to reign over YouTube? Because it has a group of incredibly intelligent, talented, and charismatic commentators.

Not delving into commentaries ASAP is one of the biggest mistakes the Halo community has ever made, albeit an understandable one. Montages have been around in the Halo community for forever, so that's pretty much what most people understood the Halo community on YouTube as, a montage making one. Yeah, we have Machinimas and stuff, but montages have been the driving force behind Halo's post-release exposure for over 5 years, a phenomenon that was heavily fueled by the rise of Airguitar901's channel and my own. Simply put, the idea of making commentaries never really dawned on us. I've been watching Halo videos on YouTube for the longest time and visiting Halo2Forum.com for even longer, and prior to 2009, the commentary boom, I NEVER saw a single Halo commentary.

So why is commentary so powerful? Why does it kick the crap out of montages? Similar to the benefits of Call of Duty being a more casual game, commentaries are simply more accessible to the average gamer. As much as I love montages, they, for the most part, appeal to a very narrow segment of the Halo population, let alone the gaming population. Montages are absolutely dominated by plays with the most skill-intensive weapons, mainly the sniper, BR, DMR, and Pistol. This is because montages are primarily made by hardcore players. The average player hops on for a couple hours every week or so; he doesn't have a deep enough connection to the game to record himself playing it, edit this footage together, and post it on the super hostile Internet for the world to see. And because these videos are made by hardcore players who play a certain way, their game footage is naturally the most accessible to those of a similar level of dedication to the game, in other words, other hardcore players who care passionately for the game like I do. To us, those sniper killtrocities and overkill outBRs are awesome, because we've used these weapons a ton and we know how challenging it is to get these types of plays. To the casual gamer though, it's just a bunch of kills with the same 2-3 weapons that melt into one monotonous blur. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass either; I have strong evidence supporting this assertion. If you never visited Bungie.net from 2008-2010, you should know that Bungie used to regularly feature my content on their blog, which was smack-dab on the website's homepage (a favor that I will forever love them for). Each time they featured one of my videos, that video got something between 5-50k extra views, and with these views always came a bunch of YouTube comments from the Bungie.net community, which is dominated by the casual Halo population. What I noticed is that pretty much whenever Bungie featured a non-Salaya montage on their blog, that montage would get a bunch of comments saying something along these lines.

"Why can't people get kills with weapons besides the sniper or BR/DMR? It gets really boring."

A lot of people discount this statement as some lame "noob philosophy", but these people really need to see things from the casual gamer's perspective. The casual gamer doesn't care about getting sick snipes and outBR's all the time with a 100% headshot percentage. The casual gamer often sticks to his starting weapon, grabbing the sniper if it happens to pop up but preferring to use fun weapons like the needler and spiker when they can. Sure, they can appreciate a good sniper overkill or two, but when a montage is about 90% comprised of those good sniper overkills, it becomes boring for them, because they naturally can't relate.

Meanwhile, gameplay commentaries have something for everybody. My friend Rajan, who follows a bunch of CoD commentators, introduced me to them, and even though I'm not a hardcore CoD player, I was immediately drawn in. Why? Because these commentators clearly had charisma and intelligence, two of the qualities that I admire the most. Even though most of the commentaries focused on their thoughts of the game, they were presented in way that was easy to follow for anybody, which obviously includes me, and were structured and delivered very nicely. On top of that, they often discussed topics that weren't gaming-related at all like monogamy and morality, discussions that literally anybody can follow and take part in, along with stories from their personal lives that all of us can personally relate to. In short, commentary is tremendously powerful because it capitalizes on a universal, human character. From what I've seen on a YouTube, thousands of people are like me; they watch these gameplay commentaries mainly for the commentary, not the gameplay. And of course, for the people who don't like commentary, there's still something in these videos for them in the form of a sick gameplay. To illustrate my point about commentary, just take a look at these titles, and tell me which one is more appealing.

"I Hate My Teeth" (A Commentary from Hutch) and "Quiggy :: No Soul - A Halo: Reach Montage"

Even as a Halo fan who loves montages, the first one draws me in more. The first title is an interesting statement that anybody can understand. The second title is a collection of words that only a certain piece of a certain population can understand. The first title trumps the second in terms of both appeal and accessibility.

The fact that commentators can connect on a deep level with their fans is a powerful asset for their respective communities, because it makes the community more of a community instead of a mere collection of fans. Because the Call of Duty community has these great champions for them such as Hutch and SeaNanners to galvanize them, it's easy for the Call of Duty community to unite behind a certain cause, whether it's helping a sweet video become viral or fix a flaw in the game. The Halo community lacks such figures. Sure, we have people like Kampy and Dutchy with massive fan followings, but they don't really take advantage of their dedicated fanbase by making commentaries to connect with their fans on a deeper level and expand their chances of reaching out towards super casual Halo players and non-Halo players. Also, Machinima has been instrumental in the CoD community's success. I remember back in 2008 when Machinima only had a 100,000 subscribers or so; now it essentially runs all video game media on YouTube. The majority of the gaming titans of YouTube are where they are now because of Machinima, and most of these guys were recognized by Machinima because of Call of Duty and are very loyal to Call of Duty. Another great thing about the Call of Duty community is that their champions are often times creating other champions. I've seen a lot of dual commentaries from popular commentators done in order to raise attention for new, talented, up-and-coming commentators, and given how powerful the champions are, it isn't long before this new guy is bringing attention to the new up-and-comers. This quickly became a cycle, and since then, Call of Duty's initial dominance has been fueling its further dominance.

Call of Duty is only one part (though still the major part) of the bigger issue I'm trying to get at here, the bigger issue being that there's simply more competition now. Many other games (pretty much all sequels as well) have followed in Modern Warfare 2's footsteps and simply exploded. Battlefield 3 has been getting its fair share of attention recently, and a couple months back, Portal 2 and Crysis 2 were in the spotlight. As soon as Halo came out, it became the poster child for the Xbox. I don't even remember how many times people told me, "The only reason you buy the Xbox is for Halo", when the Xbox was a new gaming console. Halo 3 was in the same vein as Halo: CE when it came out; the Xbox 360 wasn't that well established yet, and it needed a defining game to make it appealing. Halo 3 was that game. However, it's been years since then, and naturally, Halo 3 has fallen out of the limelight and other games have come in. I would also like to point out that Call of Duty fucked over Halo chronologically as well. Casual gamers aren't very loyal to any particular video game series; they tend to drift between games and what they stick with is usually what's the newest. So even though Halo: Reach had a very strong release (stronger than that of Halo 3's), it all went to hell when Black Ops came out 2 months afterwards. Now why didn't this happen with Modern Warfare 1 and Halo 3, I don't know, but what I do know is that my channel was doing ridiculously well when Reach came out and then proceeded to tumble downhill after Black Ops happened.

So we've clarified that Halo definitely has a lot more competition now and that the spotlight is much harder to get now, because CoD simply has so much of it and is gaining more and more of it every day. But has the series itself become weaker? Specifically, did Reach fuck over Halo by being a shitty game? Reach sold more copies than Halo 3 did, so why didn't it retain its player base and community better?

This is a pretty tough question, because in order to answer it properly, you have to put your personal preferences aside and evaluate the game from the casual gamer's perspective. This is because, like I said before, the majority of the gaming population is casual. Therefore, changes that cater to the casual gaming population are favorable. Here's a shitty commonly brought up reason why Reach is NOT a weaker title.

"Reach murders the skill gap and allows noobs to easily kill good players."

No, fucking NO. Every time I see this rationale, I want to reach through the Internet and slap whoever said this repeatedly. First of all, this is, 95% of the time, simply a complaint from the Halo 3 kids who got good at Halo 3 and couldn't adapt to Reach. From what I've seen in MLG and what I've experienced playing Reach myself, its skill gap is fairly similar to that of Halo 3's, especially with no-bloom. The only time the skill gap in a game should matter is if it's essentially completely annihilated, turning every game of Halo into the equivalent of SWAT rockets. Reach did NOT do this. Again, we have to keep in mind that the majority of the gaming population is casual. While we view the "dumbing down" of the game as a decrease in a quality, the casual player views it as a favorable balance shift, which gives them more of a chance against good players. Not many people like picking up a game and going 0-50 in their first 100 matches. In other words, the smaller the skill gap, the more accessible it is for the average gamer. In fact, one of the reasons why I think Halo 3 was so successful is because it was considerably "dumbed down" from Halo 2, mainly through the stupidly powerful Assault Rifle and the broken beatdown system, which made trading 1 for 1 easy as fuck. In Halo 2, you really didn't have much of a chance to do any damage against a good player with a Battle Rifle or sniper in his hands. In Halo 3, especially with the shitty spawns, it's pretty easy to take out a solid sniper or BR guy given how broken the AR is, especially if you pulse. This is the reason why I abhorred Halo 3 and simply couldn't play it if I wasn't playing with friends or on a 1 month; however, I acknowledged that this smaller skill gap was healthy for the game and its community.

Something I do think weakened Reach though is the lack of a ranking system with levels that try to be indicative of your play skill. Like many people have said before, the ranking system is indicative of how much you play, not how good you are. Personally, I don't give a fuck about ranks, because I don't care that much about the game anymore, but I do acknowledge the fact that a ton of people do, even a lot of the casual players. Now, the casual player doesn't have the "50 or bust" mentality that a lot of the more hardcore players have, but they are aware of their level, and it is something that they strive for, something that drives them to play that extra game or hop online that extra day. Even when the level system meant nothing in Halo 3 due to the BS true skill system, people buying their 50's, and 50 being much easier to get when it wasn't even possible in Halo 2 without cheating, people cared about it. Of course, with every level system, there's going to be people that try to break it (bought 50's, modding, boosting, host booting), but I really think that it would help the game more than it would harm it.

Lastly, the community is far too splintered over this Halo 3 vs. Halo: Reach thing. Of course, there's going to be this backlash from the previous generation with the release of every Halo game (When Halo 2 was released, a bunch of Halo 1 players saw it as a failure, when Halo 3 released, a bunch of Halo 2 players saw it as a failure, etc), but it dies out pretty quickly, just in time to let the new game blossom. This doesn't seem to be the case with Reach. It's been well over a year since Halo: Reach came out, and I'm STILL regularly seeing comments attacking Reach while lauding Halo 3. Yes, freedom of speech, yadda, yadda, yadda, but there comes a time when you need to put your contempt aside and act in a way that's beneficial to the community as a whole. Again, I hated Halo 3, but I still loved the Halo community, and I still loved watching Halo videos. While I could have only uploaded Halo 2 montages and complained about how shitty Halo 3 was in the comments section of every single video I posted, I didn't. I had no problem with people complaining about Reach initially; it was bound to happen and all of us need to vent, but now it's become an incredibly annoying broken record. When a new game comes out, we want the newcomers who start off in this new game to feel welcome. We don't want to make the environment seem as hostile as possible towards them by constantly attacking the new game.

So, in conclusion, why do I think the Halo community has been in such decline recently? First of all, the Call of Duty monopoly, which is heavily backed by Machinima. Call of Duty is the driving force behind Halo's downfall, because the populations are so intertwined and it has a much stronger capability of drawing in new fans. I really think that a lot of the casual CoD players would be playing Halo if it had simply come out after CoD did, and while CoD has stupendous growth, Halo has negative growth. Second, Reach needs a ranking system. Lastly, the Halo 3 community is whiny as fuck, and they splinter the community terribly. Sucking Halo 3's dick and bashing Reach in every Halo 3/Halo: Reach/Halo 4 video got old forever ago, and it scares off the new Halo fans, who, by definition, started playing in REACH.

I was originally going to outline a course of action to revitalize the Halo community in this post, but it's long enough already, so I'm going to make a separate post for that, hopefully soon.

Halo 2 vs. Halo 3 (Unfinished)

2011-11-16T19:31:00.001-08:00

Don't really have the urge to finish this, especially seeing as how I'm a billion years late with it.

Better maps? Halo 2 has both Lockout and Midship so there's really no competition here, and it also has many big maps that are great for casual play like Halo 3 does. Halo 3, on the other hand, lacks good small to mid-sized arena-style maps for competitive play.

Larger Skill Gap? This isn't even close. The BR and Sniper are infinitely more capable with hit-scan instead of a projectile based bullet system along with the increased auto-aim and magnetism. Also, the BR has increased efficiency due to the double shot and close range combat is infinitely harder to master due to button glitches, the melee being weaker, and the victor determined off of reflex time instead of shield amount. 1 for 1 trades are lot less easier to pull off, meaning that the best players were almost infinitely capable when they were on fire.

Balanced starting weapon? The SMG was very underpowered, but I would say that the Halo 3 AR is more overpowered than the SMG is underpowered. Also, an overpowered starting weapon is a lot worse than an underpowered one because it's devastating to the skill gap AND a balance issue, while an underpowered starting weapon is more of just a balance issue.

Pace? - This is very related to skill gap and Halo 2 wins again for pretty much the same reasons I mentioned for skill gap. When you're on fire, the pace is at its fastest because you're getting kills as quickly as the game will allow you. This maximum pace is much higher in Halo 3 than in Halo 2, and similarly, the average is as well.

Overall balance? - In Halo 2, the BR and Sniper were clear powerhouses, but they were 2 of the most skill intensive weapons in the game, and the incredible strength of the BR neatly balanced out the incredible strength of the sniper. In Halo 3, the BR and Sniper were still clear powerhouses, but when it came to a ratio of skill put in to success achieved, the AR and melee were the clear winners, which is bad because using an AR and meleeing people were two of the easiest things in the game. Also, vehicles, especially the ghost, are just impossible to kill in Halo 3, especially with the ability to survive singleton sticks.

Spawns? - Like every Halo, Halo 2 had its share of bad spawns, but the spawns in Halo 3 are just horrendous. This is the evident by the increased amount of spawn killing between Halo 3 and Halo 2 montages; the spawn system is worse at giving good spawns, and most likely as a result of this, it's a lot easier to manipulate.

General glitchiness? - Halo 3 wins this hands down with bullet spread.

GamersForChange Update #3

2011-11-16T17:14:00.001-08:00

Midterms are over, so I can finally do stuff again. Yay. Anyways...

1. Interviewed Stubby, TM22, Muggsy, and CJ all last Thursday. Stubby's interview is up, TM22 still needs to send me his gameplay along with his audio portion (due to technical issues, I couldn't capture both of our audio), Muggsy's still needs to be rendered but I have all the components necessary to do so, and CJ will probably redo his interview because he recently had his wisdom teeth removed and he was on infinite painkillers during our interview, making his answers not the best.

2. Will try to revive the Thought Talk series soon. I have gotten into contact with someone who I would like to do the next one with.

3. Also will try to continue awesome Age of Empires commentaries soon.

Underrated Montage of the Week #8 - Phurion Fluxy 2

2011-11-16T16:32:00.001-08:00

Due to copyright issues, I can't embed the video, so here's an old-school link.

Phurion Fluxy 2

Gameplay by: Phurion and Fluxy

Edited by: Phurion

Date of Original Release: 7/11/2010

Current View Count: 38,726

If you haven't been around in the Halo montage community for very long, you should know that Phurion has been making videos forever and is one of the most respected members of the Halo community. His first dualtage with Fluxy (the predecessor to the montage that this post's about) is one of the most-viewed montages on YouTube with over a million views, and in my opinion, he has contributed more to the Halo community than any person ever.

Gameplay: I really don't think that the gameplay in this montage receives nearly the amount of credit that it deserves. Of course, nobody said that the gameplay was bad and the reception was obviously positive, but I remember watching this montage and thinking, "Holy shit, how did he do that?", for at least a good dozen of the clips, something that didn't happen very often back then and happens even less so now. In fact, I watched this montage yesterday after deciding to feature it in this blog post series, and it turns out that it still has quite a lot of the "wow" factor it had initially in the gameplay department. Anyways, unlike Phurion's previous Halo 3 montages, this montage has a pretty big MLG slant, but, like Phurion's previous Halo 3 montages, the gameplay's still great and easily one of Phurion's strongest productions ever gameplay-wise. First of all, a ton of the clips of the clips are from under immense pressure. MLG kids are always lauding MLG footage, because "the enemies actually know how to shoot back", but ironically, most MLG clips aren't from under much pressure. OutBRing/outsniping at least 3 people of a solid skill level is pretty impossible, which is why most MLG clips are a collection of clean-up kills or a case of right-place/right-time to catch everyone off guard. Moving along from this mini-rant, the MLG footage in this montage is the real deal. There are a lot of no scopes at no shields in this montage, from both MLG and non-MLG settings, a good amount of which are for overkills and killtaculars. Also, a lot of the clips aren't "cookie-cutter" (top-mid spawn camping on Narrows, Pit Snipe 2, Guardian Snipe 3, etc), mainly due to the fact that it's clear that Phurion and Fluxy are playing aggressively in these clips. They aren't sitting pretty on all of those spots I just mentioned; they're rushing in there and wrecking everybody. While this style obviously doesn't work out so well most of the time in-game, it's tremendously entertaining in montage form and is one of the main reasons why I love Roadblock's final Halo 3 montage so much. Lastly, the gameplay's strong in the variety department too. There are a lot of sweet non-MLG clips to complement the MLG ones, and there's ample amounts of rare kills such as the halfway across map triple kill stick on Narrows and the ricochet on Last Resort to spice things up.

Editing: Phurion always comes through when it comes to editing, and like I've said several times before, it's because he doesn't fuck around with over-the-top effects that do nothing to contribute to flow like many editors do. Syncing was clearly the priority for this video, and everything Phurion did with the editing played some part establishing harmony between the soundtrack and the game footage. Simple effects such as cuts, fast-forward, and slow-mo are all used very effectively, and I absolutely loved the theater work in this montage, especially the technique where he zooms into the victim and then back out, which he also used to great effect in Neighbor's and Hysteria's dualtage. The technique set up sync points very well, was smoothly executed each and every time, and was original and innovative. Phurion may not be the flashiest editor, but this just goes to show that he can still bring new, amazing things to the table. Clip placement was good too. The nasty ricochet on Last Resort to start things off was great, and the killtacular extermination followed by the sweet triple was a solid finale clip. I also loved how Phurion paid homage to the 1st dualtage, which ended with a killionaire on Guardian, by using a killionaire choke on Guardian to lead into the last body song.

Flaws:

- Couple dudes standing still here and there.

- Soundtrack was a bit generic IMO.

- Killionaire choke would have been much better as the finale.

40,000-ish views certainly isn't nothing, but seeing how amazingly well the 1st one did and how this montage is still incredibly good, I'm surprised that this didn't get more attention or go further in H3F's second Halo 3 movie competition than it did. I think the fact that it was in SD quality may have been an issue, but it's good SD and definitely good enough that it didn't take away from the montage. Anyways, if you're in the mood for a fantastic Halo video from a montage making legend, check out that link at the top of the page.

Underrated Montage of the Week #7: http://gear61sblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/underrated-montage-of-week-7.html

Underrated Montage of the Week #7 - Dutchy's Final Halo 3 Montage

2011-11-11T17:07:00.001-08:00

Gameplay by: Dutchy

Edited by: Dutchy

Date of Original Release: 9/28/2010

Current View Count: 27,798

Well, is an introduction really necessary here? This video's by Dutchy, and it somehow doesn't have 75 bajillion views. That's really all I have to say here. Oh, and I saw renders of this before it was released, making me super awesome. /bragging

Gameplay: As usual for Dutchy, the gameplay is ridiculous, as you can also tell by the "AMAZING" I put in the title of the video. All of the "run-of-the-mill" multikills are top-notch, like the overkill mancannon snipe and any of the "duck hunting" exterminations. More importantly though, there are a bunch of clips that stand out due to their uniqueness, like the 360's and 2 for 1's for somewhat high to high multikills, and of course, the micro-whip killtacular no scope on Guardian for which Dutchy grenades himself from bottom mid in order to get an angle on the guy top mid, which is incredible because a kill like this was barely seen prior to the release of this montage, and still hasn't really been replicated to this day. This just goes to show that while Dutchy is the master of the "formulaic" social multikills, he also knows how to mix it up every once in a while and stun his fans with some ridiculous innovation. There are a lot of memorable clips in this montage to make it stand out, which includes the "falcon punch" beatdown at 1:30. As far as variety goes, this montage does a pretty good job keeping the footage from being monotonous, though it definitely is slanted towards social. And as much as I love my bloopers, I have no problem with my credits being chock-full of sick clips as well. On a final note, I found it pretty ridiculous how there's a section full of 2 for 1's for triples and overkills, which also has a 3 for 1 in the mix, and a section full of 360 snipes as well. Most people would be lucky to get just one of each of those clips in their entire lifetime, yet Dutchy has a ton of each one and is able to casually jam them all together. Damn it Dutchy, you're too good at this game.

Editing: The editing in this montage may not be nearly as good as what Exus did for Dutchy's 2nd Halo 3 montage, but it's still quite good. Montage superstars known for their gameplay almost never edit their own footage, making the good job Dutchy did with this video even more impressive. This is another case of great laid-back editing. There aren't any over-the-top, fancy effects; they're fairly simple for the most part, and the primary focus clearly is the syncing. The color correction matched the atmosphere of the soundtrack quite well, and as much as I dislike the recycling of ideas, the shaky cam reminiscent of Dutchy's H3M2 for the Snowbound killimanjaro was very well done and a nice addition to the montage. This montage had a great flow, and the laid-back style really allowed for the clips to shine. Clip placement was great too. The MLG killtrocity is an insane clip and is a great way of starting off the video, and the spinning overkill was nasty as well. However, I prioritize originality incredibly highly, so I really think that the Guardian killtacular would have served as a better finale.

Flaws:

- Like I've said several time before, I really don't like kills on stationary people, and this montage definitely had its fair share.
- Some of the cuts made the clips feel choppy in my opinion, though this effect was lessened by the fact that they were always done to set up sync points.

My theory is that this montage didn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves because Dutchy's 2nd Halo 3 montage sort of dominated everything after it came out (it IS a contender for greatest Halo 3 montage of all time after all), and more importantly, because it was released smack-dab in the middle of Halo: Reach fervor. I'm good friends with Dutchy, and like many of people in the Halo community I've gotten to know, it's been amazing watching Dutchy progress as a montage maker, especially as an editor, because people who get their own gameplay and edit it themselves is such as rarity nowadays. This montage is incredibly underviewed at the moment, and if you haven't seen, definitely give it a look-see. And if you've already seen it, watch it again; it's still worth the watch, and hey, maybe you'll notice something new about the montage that you missed before or revisit some incredible clip that you've totally forgotten about.

Underrated Montage of the Week #6 - Bliss 2

2011-11-05T18:44:00.001-07:00

Gameplay by: Rhis

Edited by: Marruk

Date of Original Release: 12/29/2010

Current View Count: 11,899

Ever since Marruk started doing stuff for TheFuntageCrew, I knew that the guy had a lot of talent and a great eye for editing. His syncing is fantastic, and when it comes to creating flow, he's the man. As soon as I saw that this montage was edited by Marruk, I knew I was in for a treat and it certainly didn't disappoint.

Gameplay: As awesome as Halo 2 was, one thing I didn't really like about it was the 1v1 montage genre. You might be thinking, "But Gear, you have a good amount of Halo 2 1v1 videos on your channel, you massive hypocrite". Yes I do, and that's because I do like some Halo 2 1v1 montages. However, what irked me about Halo 2 1v1 footage is that a lot of it looked as if it was practically staged. Obviously people weren't in Halo 2 customs all day just saying, "Hey, you go right there while I throw this sticky at some obscene angle and then shoot a barrel to propel it to you", but in a lot of Halo 2 1v1 footage, people are barely trying to kill each other, just going for nade launches and other montage kid stuff for the entire game while their opponent was doing the exact same thing. I've lost track of how many times I've seen someone get a nade launch on someone who was barely moving because he was trying a nade launch of his own. Complaining aside, I didn't feel like this was the case for any of the clips. Not only are the plays good on their own, in most of the places, Rhis seems to be under legitimate pressure, and his shields are almost completely down for a good amount of the snipes. I also really like Rhis' twitchy style of sniping because of its uniqueness, and I was really glad that there were many showcases of this in the montage. And, as far as 1v1 montages go, the gameplay was fairly diverse, showcasing your different flavors of snipes (no scopes, BXZ's, etc) and sticks (nade launch, barrel launch, straight up). The in-game audio from Rhis was also a great supplement to the game footage and was especially great to hear because the in-game audio trend pretty much died after Halo 3 came around.

Editing: Like I said before, I love Marruk's editing. The syncing and flow were unreal, and never once did I feel that the gameplay was weakened. The intro was a simple but nicely chosen angle (and again, keep in mind that this is Halo 2), and I thought the 3D text coming out of pillar was great as well. The stick from the intro leading into the stick from Rhis' opponent's POV was also really awesome. The effects are all very simple (rewind, cuts, crossfades, replays), but there was also a bit of innovation in the mix like the circles used to highlight the focal point of certain clips while syncing to the music, which is almost unheard of with simple editing. Another thing that I really liked about the editing is the touch of humor that Marruk added here and there like the "h2 is cool" text screen at the end and the "fade-ins are overrated" bit in the beginning, reminiscent of his work for TheFuntageCrew's community funtages. As for clip placement, I didn't have a problem with it. The clip leading into the intro is great, the first real clip of the body was sick, and so was the clip used for the finale. The gameplay was all on roughly the same level more or less, so I guess that this was hard to mess up to begin with. Lastly, I liked every song in the soundtrack, especially the body song. Like I said, instrumental music is awesome.

Flaws:
- Montage ends really abruptly. The last song should have faded out in my opinion, but I guess this awkwardness does represent Marruk's style.

Similar to Rush, this montage was severely hurt by the fact that it's a Halo 2 video released long after the Halo 2 era came to an end. I'm incredibly glad that this hit 10,000 views, but as a Halo 2 fan who really liked every aspect of this montage, especially the soundtrack and editing, I'm still sad that this video hasn't gone places.

Underrated Montage of the Week #5 - Serious Business

2011-10-29T12:01:00.001-07:00

Gameplay by: Red Bull Sniper

Edited by: Red Bull Sniper

Date of Original Release: 7/11/2010

Current View Count: 35,410

Funtages don't come along very often, and they desperately do. However, it's easy for funtages to flop through poor execution, and this montage is... definitely not an example of this. I don't really have any sort of backstory for this montage, so let's jump right in.

Gameplay: In my opinion, this funtage, like other great funtages such as the Dead Serious Tage and Jaroozabongler, has its fair share of borderline if not straight-up sub-par clips. However, this makes complete sense and I'm perfectly fine with it, because these videos tend to come from your average Joes rather than your big stars. And, while the montage does have its share of "meh" clips, it has its share of awesome ones as well, like the 2v2 overkill extermination at the end, and the overall caliber of the traditional gameplay is still above average. Moving aside from the traditional gameplay, the bloopers are what make this video great. I laughed at a lot of the clips, like the guy killing himself with the trip mine in the beginning and especially at the scene with the epic music when he's sneaking up on the 5 guys hiding in the Snowbound catacombs. Lastly, the clips have a ton of variety, even the multikills. There aren't many multikills from overdone "montage-kid" spots, and the rest of the gameplay has everything else besides your multikills, chokes, betrayals, WTF moments, etc.

Editing: If one were to evaluate this montage's editing by your conventional standards, it wouldn't score very high. Some of the angles are just atrocious, the text is plain, and the syncing is there, but nowhere near perfect. However, this isn't your conventional montage, so let's just throw that all away.

The crappy white text plastering the gametype name in the bottom right with "MLG" is fucking hilarious. I've always been pissed off with people who whine at literally every single video that isn't completely dominated by MLG footage, and this one line of text was a simple, funny, and very effective way of parodying of this mentality. Thank you Red Bull Sniper. While we're on the subject of parodies, I absolutely loved all of the references to famous montages such as Apex, Dualtality, and Neighbor and Hysteria's dualtage. The majority of the humor in this montage is incredibly simple and isn't much more than a couple lines of text (intro, MLG label, quote from Carl Sagan), but the incredibly simplistic style gave the montage a great self-mockery type of humor while being very funny. Overall, the editing of this montage fit the feel it was trying to go for very well, and since I don't really have a section for this, the soundtrack's fantastic as well. It's diverse and it also fit the montage's theme very well.

Flaws:
- The quality. Similar to the gameplay and editing, it does add to the self-mockery style of humor this montage goes for, but it still irked me because it looked like it was captured in HD and then rendered incorrectly.

Serious Business is an incredibly funny Halo 3 montage, which differs from the norm and has soul behind it. For me, a lot of montages seem to be the same thing over and over again, because they're not personal at all. The gameplay isn't captured by whose montage it is, the editing isn't either, and the clips, for the most part, follow your conventional montage multikill standards so they almost never leave an impression. This, on the other hand, has someone getting gameplay, editing it himself, and injecting his own humor and creativity into it in order to make the experience original and more personal. Yes, some of gameplay isn't so great and the angles are pretty iffy, but for me, this lack of a professional touch made the montage work better with the feel that it was going for. At 35,000 views, this montage certainly isn't unknown, but I still feel that it's very underviewed given how entertaining it is relative to the majority of videos out there.Also, here's the trailer for this montage if you're interested. It's not as funny as the actual montage in my opinion, but it does have good humor and is a very enjoyable watch.

Underrated Montage of the Week #4 - Rush

2011-10-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

Jumps by: Gary UK

Edited by: Gary UK

Date of Original Release: 8/10/2009

Current View Count: 24,688

Yes, the title is not a typo; there is another incredible Halo montage named "Rush". I was so caught up in finding old Halo 3/Halo: Reach montages, that I totally forgot about trick jumping and Halo 2. Anyways, I actually came into contact with Gary UK long before LBYL fame, back in the days of 2008 when he sent me this video, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that this guy was ridiculously talented and was definitely going to go places. It didn't take long for him to become the member of the trick jumping community that I admired the most, and he's remained so to this day. One of the main reasons for this is because Gary UK isn't just good at jumping; he's good at everything, and this video is one of the best examples of this, showcasing fantastic editing and a killer taste in music alongside the endless stream of simply breath-taking, awe-inducing jumps.

Gameplay: I don't need to say much here; the jumps in this video are simply unbelievable. Not a single jump disappointed me, and at least a good 50% of them left me in that mix of confusion and wonder you experience very often with good trick jumping videos. The jumps are in this video are packed to the brim with what seems to be an impossible amount of creativity, showcasing tactic after tactic that I've never even come close to considering as a possible tool for trick jumping (then again, that's probably why I'm not a trick jumper). On top of that, it's clear that the clear majority of the jumps require considerable skill in execution as well, even for trick jumping. A lot of the jumps clearly require a very high level of dexterity, featuring maneuvers that obviously had to be landed with pinpoint accuracy. Normally, this is where I would pick out the best moments from the game footage, but I really can't do that here; all of the game footage is just so damn good.

Editing: The game footage is clearly the video's strong point, but the editing is very, very good as well. First off, this is Halo 2, so pretty much any sort of cinematography whatsoever deserves some level of respect, especially cinematography as smooth and well-used as Rush's. The angles have none of the choppiness or awkwardness of amateur editors, and they all do a fantastic job either setting up close and/or sync points. On top of the great theater work, we have great syncing, which hits the necessary amount of major sync points to establish a wonderful flow, all while not distracting at all from the amazing game footage. Lastly, while all of the game footage is plain ridiculous, the last clip does indeed stand out, and I think that it was definitely the perfect choice as the video's finale.

Flaws:
- Can't come up with any. Seriously.

Rush got hit pretty hard for the fact that it was for a game that has pretty much been irrelevant ever since its creation, let alone a game that was already 2-ish years old at the time of its release, but a view count of below 25,000 is still mind-boggling. This flawless video exceeds on all fronts and is easily one of the Top 5 trick jumping videos in existence, a feat that is even more incredible when you factor in that this was all done by one person. Seriously, watch this video ASAP if you haven't already; the entirety of its 7 minute time-span are easily some of the best minutes of Halo media of all time.

Underrated Montage of the Week #3 - tranQ and Friends

2011-10-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzqPDM9a_7k

*Can't embed the video because of copyrights, which have somehow blocked embedding despite me enabling it specifically*

Date of Original Release: 11/4/2010

Gameplay by: tranQ and the Halo community

Edited by: tranQ

Current View Count: 7,094

I've been friends with tranQ for a while now, and he's another one of those people that I luckily got to see blossom into a consistent, well-established montage maker. tranQ and I are both passionate supporters of the old-school style for Halo montages, and this video is one of many examples from tranQ that demonstrates excellent implementation of this style. Unluckily for this video though, it didn't get anywhere near the amount of attention it deserves due to sub boxes fucking up and Halo: Reach's still fairly recent release. Now let's delve into the review.

Gameplay: The gameplay in this montage is just ridiculous. There are maybe 2-3 filler clips in the entire montage, and the rest of the footage is just packed full of unique, sick plays. Very few of the clips are cookie-cutter multikills (examples are bottom mid hill on Pit in multi-team, Top Mid Narrows in any setting killing people off the spawn, snipe 3/2 multikills on Guardian, etc). The back to back to back no scopes for the triple, overkill, and killtacular on Guardian from blue room in Team Crazy King is just insane in every way; it's from a very rare location for that certain map, it's in an uncommon gametype, it's from under immense amounts of pressure, and it's from the Hill, making it pretty clutch objective-wise. Other great examples of change-of-pace footage from this montage are the triple through the side of Narrows and the overkill stick on the camo guy on Guardian from Blue Room. Other things I really like about the gameplay are that a lot of the clips are from under pressure, and there's a lot of variety in the footage in almost every aspect (maps, gametypes, type of play), which is especially good because this is a community montage and it should represent the community and the many types of Halo players within it.

Editing: Again, this is another great example of old-school editing. All effects have a purpose; the emphasis was clearly on syncing, and minus a couple excessive couples, none of the editing takes away from the gameplay. The angles are smoothly done, and all of the major sync points are hit to establish a rock-solid flow. One thing that I didn't like about the editing though was the clip placement. The clips at the beginning and end are both great and above average, even within the scope of the montage, but there are so many better clips that could have been used. I feel that the overkill stick extermination on the camo guy should have been the first clip, and the back to back to back no scope killtacular definitely should have been the finale.

Flaws:
- Slow-mo to set up killtacular no scope on Guardian king from Blue Room took too long
- First song ended rather abruptly
- The sequence cutting through the mancannon trip at around 3:00 is way too choppy
- Clip placement

At barely over 7,000 views, tranQ and Friends might possibly be the most underviewed video on my channel. The gameplay alone easily puts it head and shoulders above the majority of Halo videos in existence, and the editing does a great job allowing the gameplay to shine while doing the necessary work to establish harmony between the soundtrack and game footage. Similar to Rush, tranQ and Friends is another amazing old-school Halo montage and another example of a montage that illustrates this quote, which I'm probably going to mis-remember by a couple works:

"Stop looking at the screen for names or medals; you're missing out on the plays themselves."

Now let's hope tranQ and Friends 4 comes out soon.

Underrated Montage of the Week #2 - Rush

2011-10-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

Gameplay by: Kblocker

Edited by: Kblocker

Date of original release: 6/24/2010

Current view count: 34,351

Kblocker. The word is pretty much synonymous with old school. Kblocker has been making montages for a long, long time now, and ever since he's started, the entertainment level of his every single one of his productions has been fantastic. It's kind of hard to explain, but for some reason, everything about Kblocker's style just feels... right. His gameplay is always good, his choice of soundtrack is always good, his editing always gets the job done, hell, even his quality's always good. So as usual, let's get down to the review.

Gameplay: The first word that comes to mind when I think of Kblocker gameplay is clean, and this montage's gameplay certainly was no exception. Yes, this montage does have the big multikills that almost every single Halo montage in existence revolves around, but what stands out to me about this montage's gameplay is simply this: Minus a very few shots here and there, Kblocker doesn't miss, and when he lands the shot (which is pretty much 99% of the time), it's a headshot about 90% of the time. Another thing that I want to mention is that it's clear how good Kblocker is at keeping his calm and taking his time with his shots from the footage. When I watch most montages, especially those that are social-oriented, it seems to me that the person is almost frantic to pick up that next kill before that dreaded 4 second clock runs out. This isn't the case with "Rush" and almost all of Kblocker's gameplay, evident by his always high hit-percentage. As for the quality of the clips themselves, they're all good, and similar to Aether and pretty much every other great montage in existence, there are a couple ridiculous clips that are different from the norm and help cement the montage as a memorable video. The clip with the back to back to back no scopes for the killimanjaro on Guardian is still ridiculous to this day and is rivaled by very few other clips of that variety (Roadblock's back to back to back no scopes for the overkill on The Pit and Sandman's back to back to back to back to back no scopes for the killtacular on The Pit). And of course, the "WTF, how did he land that?" camo snipe on Last Resort right before the credits is still amazing as well. Lastly, I want to point out that Rush's footage is very balanced in terms of MLG and non-MLG and map variety, an ingredient that we sadly don't see much nowadays.

Editing: There really isn't much to say about the editing that I haven't already said before. Rush's editing is another one of many examples of laid-back editing done right, plain and simple. The syncing is on point, hitting all of the most prominent beats to establish a great flow, the very few effects are all well applied and simple as to not distract from the great footage, and the clips are placed perfectly. The best clip (no scope jaro) is placed at the climax, powerfully emphasized with the syncing of the last three no scopes, especially with the last one and the gunshot and the song, and the second best clip (camo snipe) is placed as the memorable finale, a job it does well given its "WTF?" factor. Now, I've always said to put the best clip last, but the killimanjaro wouldn't have been synced as well if it were in the place of the camo snipe and vice versa, so there's really nothing wrong with the order of these clips.

Flaws:
- Couple people standing still here and there
- The letters spelling out "RUSH" aren't completely in sync with the beats in the beginning (3 beats to 4 letters)

At around 35,000 views, Rush has definitely gotten its fair share of attention, but in my opinion, it's still very underviewed. Kblocker has been using the same formula for years now, yet he's always managed to stand out as a unique, highly respected montage maker who consistently delivers quality. This makes perfect sense, because while many montages out there stumble over themselves as they go through this fancy, complicated, over-the-top approach of trying to impress, Kblocker doesn't bother with the crap and realizes that there's no problem with his simple style because of one important fact: It works.

GamersForChange Update #2

2011-10-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

1. Just interviewed tranQ yesterday for the Montage Maker Interview series. He didn't have the gameplay, so I sent him the audio for the interview to attach to the gameplays he's going to capture and use. Hopefully, he will get it back to me soon.

2. Just interviewed KayEmX 10 minutes ago. Similar to tranQ, he didn't have the gameplay, but he's going to get it captured and send it to me.

3. Will be making an announcement video (hopefully) soon of Age of Empires 1 (old school, w00t), introducing a new game to the channel and bringing lots of updates.

4. My mic broke a couple days ago, but I bought a new one 2 days ago. Not really relevant, but whatever.

Perfect Information

2011-09-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the TV show Fringe, there is an episode in which there is a man with supernatural intellect who is capable of essentially predicting the future due to his incredible analytical skills. Using his heightened abilities of deduction and observation, he is able to take in every obvious and subtle detail about his environment to come up with perfect information. This is a concept I came up with around the time I wrote this post debunking the Creationist use of probability. Here are 2 sentences from this post which inspired this idea and will act as preface for the rest of this post.

"There is no such thing as true probability. Probability is merely a concept that humans created to assign numerical likelihoods to situations with multiple "possible" outcomes. With the right information, one can calculate the exact outcome of any scenario."

And here's the example I used to back this tall order of a thesis.

"For example, let's take the flip of a coin. The probability of heads or tails are equal with each being 50%. However, if one were to gauge the initial vertical velocity of the coin, use that to calculate the exact amount of time that it stays in the air, and figure out the amount of flips it makes per second, the exact outcome can be calculated. For everything we call "pure chance", there is a designated outcome. In a coin flip, someone is doomed to lose from the beginning, meaning that the person had a 0% chance of winning from the get go."

Now let's define "perfect information": Perfect Information (n.) - Knowledge of everything.

Pretty simple right? This may seem like a lame definition at first (it is), but let's look at what this entails. Looking back at my coin example, I pointed out how, given the necessary information, it was possible to mathematically deduce the outcome of any coin flip. But now let's look go back to the guy in Fringe look at something much, much bigger: the entirety of reality. You see, the guy in Fringe was not only able to take in and extrapolate every single detail of his environment, his analytical abilities were so powerful that he was able to take this dynamic set of perfect information in his mind and deduce the future. While this may seem to just be 100% science fiction, let's go back to the coin flip example, which proved this: Given the proper information, you can exactly predict the outcome.

You might be asking yourself, "How the hell does using simple physics to predict the outcome of a coin flip turn into predicting the future?" Well, in the end, the coin flip and predicting the future are the same thing; it's merely a matter of scale. The deduction of the coin flip is still a prediction of the future; it's just for a small facet of reality that has relatively few factors to consider. As whatever we're trying to predict increases in scale, all we need is more information and stronger analytical abilities, similar to what's needed when you're doing a physics problem set and the problems just keep getting harder and harder and harder.

Let's take a look at another example, one of which illustrates my point but will venture more into the abstract. Let's say that we want to predict whether or not a certain person will get into a certain college. Seems impossible right? But let's see what happens as we get information. First, we factor in the obvious; what the standards of the college are (which we can extrapolate by looking at past acceptances), what major the person is applying to, how good the college is for that major, etc. Then we go on to the information that we don't have access to; the statistics of every single other applicant, who's going to go over this person's application, the mood of that person, how much affirmative action comes into play, etc. As we pile on more and more information, our prediction can only become more and more accurate; with every single factor that can possibly come into play along with a proper analysis of these factors, I really can't see how an outcome can't be chosen.

Now let's look at the even bigger picture. We have established that with knowledge of everything, we can deduce everything. This leads to the proving of a powerful chain reaction: If the immediate future can be perfectly deduced, then that information can be used to deduce that future's immediate future, and that information that can be used to deduce that future's immediate future, etc, etc. We can picture this by going back to my college example. Let's say we can predict whether or not this person gets into this certain college. Now we have one piece in a potential sea of pieces of information that will determine what kind of job this person will end up having. And whatever job this person gets is one piece in a potential sea of pieces of information that will determine what kind of family he can support, what kind of house he will buy, etc. Simply put, given literally all of the information in the entire universe and infinite analytical capability, the use of information to deduce more information can create a map of our exact futures, second per second. This means that our futures have already been determined. Going in reverse, this means that our pasts were determined and that given what was needed to extrapolate a perfect version of the future, we can extrapolate a perfect second-by-second account of the past. More importantly, this means that everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe was determined already from Day 1.

So in the end, is my hypothesis fucking crazy? Yes. But is it plausible? I certainly think so. The universe has been embedded with natural laws, which we have scientifically extrapolated, from the very beginning, laws that have governed everything in the plane of existence for as long as they've been around. Like with the coin flip scenario, these laws are what guaranteed a certain outcome given certain factors. Does this mean that they've guaranteed a certain outcome for our universe and everything in it since the beginning? This leads me to my next topic to be discussed in my next blog post on issues like these, which is destiny.

Underrated Montage of the Week - Aether

2011-09-28T23:12:00.000-07:00

Gameplay by: Klima

Editing by: Revenge

Date of original release: 9/4/2010

Current view count: 8,021

Note: I actually wrote this review on Sunday, but it glitched up saving it, so I lost all of it. /whining

I actually knew Revenge long before he became a known editor. Back then, he was just some random person on YouTube I barely knew who would send me his projects and renders to critique. A couple critiques later and here he is today as one of the best editors on the Halo Scene. This montage is definitely an instance of Revenge post-becoming awesome, so let's just jump right into it shall we?

The format for this series will be an review of the gameplay, a review of the editing, a review of the soundtrack, and finally a list of cons (because no review would be complete without pointing out the cons IMO, even though this is a series for underrated montages).

Gameplay: Every single clip was at least par, and the few ridiculous clips were just insane and fairly unique to boot. The spinning no scope on the Pit from Snipe 2 is just great, and both the cross bubble shield stick triple and the back to back sticks for the double on Valhalla are still 2 of the best clips I have ever seen, accentuated by the fact that they're stick multikills, a breed of clip that isn't seen very often due to sniper multikills overshadowing everything. Even today, there really isn't a clip that has topped either of these two; they're just that unique and ridiculous. Klima did a great job making sure that the baseline for his gameplay was good and that he would have a couple really memorable clips to make his montage more than just a blur of kills.

Editing: First, I want to say that Revenge did a great job structuring the montage clip-placement-wise. The best clip (what I thought was the best clip anyways. Some of you probably think that the overkill was better which is perfectly understandable) was put at the end, emphasized by perfect syncing and a tinge of brightness. The second best clip was also placed in a smart location, the transition point between the two songs of the montage. Aside from Revenge's great structuring, the color correction is perfect, matching the atmosphere of the soundtrack without being over the top, the angles are simply wonderful, and the syncing is very well done. Flow was very well established, and never did I feel that the editing substantially took away from the gameplay, definitely adding a LOT to it overall.

Soundtrack: I love these ambient, relaxing, lyric-less soundtracks. I feel that lyrics often times get lost within the sounds of the awesome gameplay playing out, and soundtracks like these aren't a direction that's taken very often (ok, maybe not now, but definitely back then). There's really nothing that I disliked about this soundtrack; I personally thought it was good, and it was original.

Cons (Going to keep this short obviously because being a downer in this series would be stupid):
- Couple people standing still in clips
- Cutting off the first song awkwardly. I feel that just continuing with the first song would have been better for coherency.
- The text telling us what was happening/going to happen. It was clean and well-done, but I've always disliked these because I find them pointless and tacky.
- Needed an angle for the last clip. The first stick isn't really seen.

In the end, Aether is a fantastic Halo montage that is criminally underviewed at barely over 8,000 views. The montage definitely has its flaws, but all of them are minor and are easily made up for a million times over by great gameplay with its fair share of insane, memorable unique footage, great editing that flows incredibly smoothly with the music, and a great, relaxed, original soundtrack.

New Series

2011-09-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

I have decided to start a new series on this blog entitled the "Underrated Montage Series". In this (hopefully) weekly series of blog posts, I will be highlighting montages which I think are underrated. The standard I will use is that the video has to be at least 6 months old with at most 50,000 views. With each post, I will have a YouTube embed of the video (duh) along with a short to mid sized review of the video. I have been wanting to restart writing montage reviews for a while now, and I thought that this series would be a great dual-purpose way to get back into it, allowing me to bring attention to under-exposed videos while giving my thoughts on montages again. Keep in mind that no post will have a review as monster-sized and detailed as the reviews I used to post; I found that I often repeated myself as I was writing those and I don't have the time to watch montages over and over again like I used to. That should do it for this update, and I should be back in a couple days with the first installment of this new series. Peace.

GamersForChange Update #1

2011-09-15T23:10:00.000-07:00

1) Finished rendering the Salaya interview for the MMIS (Montage Maker Interview Series) today. I can upload it right now, but I want to save it to space out uploads. Expect it up within a week, two at most.

2) I now have Fraps, which means I can record PC gameplay. I don't have a capture card, I don't like Black Ops, I don't play Halo (and I suck at it), so console gameplay was pretty much a no-no for me. This means that I can now use my own gameplay for commentaries again. I also have access to emulator gameplay (I've messed with the GBA emulator quite a bit this summer).

3) Well, this is in the same vein as 2. Being able to record PC gameplay now allows me to introduce non-Halo and non-CoD gameplay to the GFC channel, which I've wanted to do for a LONG time. I will definitely be doing this (hopefully) soon, and a "Let's Play" series is a definite possibility.

4) For the MMIS, my next interview candidates are tranQ and Stubby who are happy to do interviews with me. However, tranQ's mic is herpa-derping, and Stubby can't play matchmaking with his Reach disc (and he wants to use a Halo gameplay for his interview), so these are going to be postponed for a while, a while which hopefully isn't too long. People I want to interview soon with whom I have some sort of connection with: Muggsy, pTw, Kampy, and Dutchy. I can message Muggsy on AIM, and I can reach pTw through his friend ManWithoutModem, but Kampy's a hard man to reach and Dutchy always has some sort of tech issue, one of which is having a functioning mic.

5) I need to start plugging charities and humanitarian organizations again. I've been meaning to plug JumbaFund for the longest time, especially seeing as how that channel's active again, but it magically keeps slipping my mind. I also want to get the GFC community involved in this by getting suggestions for these plugs.

6) FAQ needs to happen sometime eventually. Pretty much every channel in existence has done one at some point, they're easy to do, and they're a great way to get the community involved.

7) I want to expand GFC to include more people. By expand I mean getting more commentators on board and giving them access to the GFC account. This will lead to more content on the channel, something it desperately needs, and it will give an opportunity for some underrated people to get their name out there. A public application process seems pretty hard to run, and one of the most important lessons I've learned through the Internet is that trusting people that you've just met is almost never a good idea. People I want to recruit right now are my friends Axilo, tranQ, and Stubby. I think that this is definitely unfair to the general populace, but again, trust on the Internet = dangerous.

8) Thought Talk! Almost forgot about this. Ok, I want to stray away from Halo issues, but this is very difficult for me to do, and I've been having trouble coming up with anything at all really lately. Whenever I come up with a topic, it always plays out stupidly in my head. Another priority is to have people on the show who completely disagree with me, but when I message people who are like this, they never seem to respond (maybe they think it's some sort of trap?). In addition, it seems like people don't want to disagree with me on the show, which I can understand because it could lead to a potentially awkward conversation dynamic. Also, I want to frame the video title as just topics instead of questions, since making it a question is somewhat difficult to do and it narrows the possible range of discussion. Possible topics are:

1) Impact of MLG on the gaming community
2) Yoinking (This one I really want to do. Plus, I think I have a stance on the issue that goes against that of many others)
3) Killstealing
4) Extensions on things the series and GFC have already covered

I'm also considering moving Thought Talk past the bounds of just topics within gaming, such as casual everyday topics (Best movie this year?) and politics. The latter is fairly risky though, and might just result an unwanted clusterfucks.

9) I don't think there is a number 9. Looks like this update is now over. I'm going to watch NCIS now.

Back?

2011-09-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't posted on this blog in over 4 months, so I would say that I'm definitely a bit late for an update. I go back to school in less than 2 days, so I'm going to keep this short-ish (still have packing and other last minute summer things to do), because when I really get into writing an article, I make it super tl;dr and I spend forever proofreading it.

A while ago, I promised that I would post on this blog at least every Friday. I stayed true to that promise for a while, and after that, random short bursts of time, but now, I'm just going to say the truth:

I am terribly inconsistent with this stuff, and there's almost no chance that I will ever be able to follow a consistent regimen.

For the past... year and a half or so, anything that I've had to do with YouTube, including this blog, has become impossible to commit to for a lengthy period of time. I'm sure that any one of you who's subscribed to any of my YouTube channels has noticed this; I'll come back, upload a burst of videos, leave for a couple days, maybe even weeks, and then come back again. It's mostly been the same with this blog. As for why this is, I'm not exactly sure, but I definitely have my theories.

First, I don't have much of an interest in playing Halo anymore. I thought the Halo series tanked with Halo 3, and Halo: Reach still isn't my fancy. I have Halo 2 Vista, but it requires godly specs, so it lags pretty badly on my computer, even on the lowest resolution/graphics settings/whatever. Also, my two best Halo buddies (one of whom is the one who got me into Halo), who are also my best friends in real life, don't play the game much anymore, so that's also a factor. I would like to say that if Halo: Reach was as awesome as Halo 2 that I would be playing it 24/7, but sadly, I don't think this is the case.

Second, I think I'm growing out of this. Running multiple YouTube channels along with a blog dedicated to a video game series now seems childish and picturing myself as a man in his mid-20's who is still doing this just seems incredibly strange to me.

Lastly, there really isn't much of an incentive for me to do this anymore. Before, I loved playing the game, loved the community, and loved the role I had in getting the community together and trying to steer it in a positive direction. Simply put, there was a passion driving me. Now, I can barely get myself to play any Halo (Halo 2 XBC is dead and I don't have the disc anymore, H2V lags, none of my friends play, Halo 3 is bad, Halo: Reach is also bad), the community's a polarized mess after the release of Halo: Reach and is STILL getting into the same old fights despite a bunch of people, myself included, explaining to them why these fights are just foolish (MLG vs. Social, CoD vs. Halo, etc), the size of the community seems to have decreased significantly, and 90% of Halo videos nowadays look the same to me. A ton of the figures in the Halo community I looked up to 2-4 years ago seem to gone (old school montage makers and a lot of MLG pros), and when it comes to Halo matters (montages, MLG tournaments), I'm always asking myself, "Wait... who is this again?"

Yeah, this post isn't going to be short-ish.

Anyways, so what does this mean? Well, I don't know. Despite everything I mentioned earlier, I've invested a lot in the Halo community, which makes it hard for me to just pull away and leave this all behind me. More importantly, I still care for the Halo community. I'm pretty excited for the Halo: CE remake, I'm happy when I help unknown, talented people become known, and I do have fun going onto XBL every once in a while and playing dumb customs with friends and fans.

In conclusion, I'm torn over what to do exactly, and I have been for the past year and a half. I don't know much, but I can say that I will try to stay in all of this and rebuild a passion for all of this. I say "try" because it would be foolish and deceitful of me to offer any guarantees, so take that word heavily into account. This is what I foresee myself doing over the next couple of months.

1) Uploading on both FBWalshyFTW and FBWalshyFTWReturns. My connection is ridiculous in college, so I have essentially no excuse to not to do this because it barely requires any time. While a lot of the reason of me not uploading is because I'm just lazy/unmotivated, a large portion of it is actually because of the massive internal debates over which channel I should put a video on. A lot of the videos I see nowadays seem borderline to me, and whenever I think I have YouTube's tastes pinned down, a video is hit with a random hate/love wave and I have to completely re-evaluate my bearings again. My solution to this is to simply not give a fuck. I'm not going to watch a video more than twice to determine where it goes, and I'm not going to budge a video unless it's getting a reception that's massively opposite what I expected it was going to get. I'm going to stop reading comments to gauge reception, and try to rely just on thumbs up vs. thumbs down.

2) Blogging. Hopefully at least once a month. I absolutely love writing, but I'm a perfectionist, so the problem is that I sometimes become too invested in my articles, spending tons of time correcting tiny kinks that really should have been spent, I don't know, studying and getting better grades. My solution to this is to make more posts more flow-of-consciousness-ey, stop spending so much time proofreading, and just stop caring so much overall. I have a virtual mountain of unfinished posts, almost all of which are unfinished because I care too much.

3) Doing GFC stuff. I love GFC because it's very interactive, helps bring the community closer together, and does well, everything else that's in the channel's description. It's also where I stop being the guy in the background who uploads awesome videos that aren't even his to become the guy in the background who isn't just the guy in the background who uploads awesome videos that aren't even his, which is pretty cool.

To conclude this post, I am going to end it with one last update. I will now use this blog to broadcast all GamersForChange updates. I considered making a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, but Facebook updates would be lost in a sea of other updates and I think Twitter is stupid, which I'm almost certainly going to get a lot of heat for but whatever.

Update over.

Pokemon Stories - Episode 2 - Fuck TentaCRUEL

2011-05-10T17:56:00.000-07:00

So, right now, I need to surf to Cianwood to get the potion for the sick lighthouse Pokemon the gym leader Jasmine is taking care of. I don't really like the water much in Pokemon because it's infested with Tentacool and Tentacruel, but they're good training fodder for my new Magnemite, which is immune to their annoying poison attacks and can usually KO them with Thundershock before they pull off a successful Supersonic. However, this happened today.

*Lvl 24 Tentacruel appears!*

Go Lopez!

*I tell Lopez to use Thundershock obviously, however, the Tentacruel goes first.*

Tentacruel uses Supersonic! Lopez is now confused.

Lopez is confused! Lopez hurts itself in its confusion!

Fuck this, I'm switching. Go Amorebieta! (my Sudowoodo)

Tentacruel uses Poison Sting! It's not very effective... Amorebieta is now poisoned!

Amorebieta uses Rock Throw! Amorebiete is hurt by poison and loses a ton of HP!

*I use an Antidote to cure Amorebieta*

Tentacruel uses Poison Sting! It's not very effective... Amorebieta is now poisoned!

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU

Fuck this, I'm switching again. Go Muniain!

Tentacruel uses Supersonic! Muniain is now confused!

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

After Muniain hurting himself 3 times in a row, I take down the Tentacruel with a couple good old-fashioned cuts. Ugh, I hate Tentacruel.

Pokemon Stories - Episode 1 - The Self-Destruction of Failure

2011-05-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

So, I recently re-picked up Pokemon out of boredom by downloading a Gameboy Color emulator for my Android, and I've been having a TON of fun. It's been about 4-5 days, and I've logged around 8 hours on my Pokemon Gold. I just finished the part where you have to shut down the Radio Tower in Mahogany that Team Rocket commandeered to make all of the Magikarp at the Lake of Rage evolve. At the end of this mission, you have to knock out the Electrode powering the machinery, and when I was doing this, I had this awesome battle.

Wild Electrode appears!

Go Toquero! (my Quagsire)

Use dig! (Because ground is good against eletric)

*Toquero burrows into the ground.*

Electrode uses self-destruct!

Miss!

*Toquero comes back up and starts rofling uncontrollably.*

Just another day at the office.

Tips for Making a Good Montage - Structure

2011-04-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

I have a ton of crap to do this weekend (studying for 2 midterms, a CS lab, multiple Physics problem sets, and much, much more fun stuff), so I'm going to keep this one short. I started a semi "How to Make a Montage" series a while ago on this blog, but I got lazy as usual and just kind of left it incomplete. So now, I am going to start it up again and hopefully complete it.

For this post, I will be discussing, as the title suggests, structure, a fairly simple concept that I'm sad to see many montage makers mess up with. Understanding structure is a very powerful asset because good structure can make a montage substantially better without much work. There actually isn't much to it, which is why I have decided to write about it at this point in time. So, without further ado, here's a very small list of rules to follow to give your montage a good structure.

1) Start off strong - Similar to pretty much any piece of decent media, a montage needs a solid pull. Therefore, you are going to want to start off your montage with a strong clip to keep the viewer interested enough to keep on watching. However, do not start off your montage with your best clip, or even worse, clips. This will raise the viewer's expectations to a point which the rest of your montage will most likely be unable to reach. This is even worse if you pack all of your best clips into the beginning because this will literally cause your montage to fall flat on its face as soon as you run out of gas. I've seen countless montages in which I was incredibly impressed right out of the gate only to become drastically disappointed as the montage progressed. So, to recap all of this, start off with one of your better clips, a clip that is good enough to keep the viewer immersed and bad enough to not give your audience unrealistic expectations.

2) Hit high points - This is one of the harder aspects of structure, but it's still fairly simple. Hitting high points means that you should match high points within whatever soundtrack you're using with your better clips. The soundtrack of your montage is what defines the flow of your montage, and not only do you have to match the high points in location, but in intensity as well. If a song takes a long time building up to a certain climax like Fin, use one of your best clips to match that climax. Simple. Also, keep in mind that the sword cuts both ways in every way when it comes to the synergy between your footage and the soundtrack. Every matched high point within the soundtrack is an asset to your montage, and conversely, every missed high point is a detriment to it. The more intense the high point, the more your montage gains when it matches it and the more your montage loses when it doesn't.

3) Build up is your friend - This is a very powerful tool because build up is one of the best ways to make a montage memorable. Build up is awesome because it sets up your montage to consistently impress the viewer throughout the montage because of how it constantly sets up a bar every couple clips only to have it broken a couple clips later. Let's say that your montage starts off with plain overkills (it's a long time ago so these were still impressive). It then moves on to killtaculars, killtrocities, and soon, it's featuring nothing but killimanjaros. Your viewer will start watching, start expecting overkills, become more and more impressed as killtaculars start consistently appearing, become even more impressed as killtrocities swoop in to replace the killtaculars before he gets used to them, etc. However, keep in mind that you should balance build up with creating flow between the gameplay and the music. Let's say the music is structured like this:

30 seconds of stuff - high point - 1 minute of stuff - high point - 30 seconds of stuff - high point - 1 minute of stuff - final high point. (Song is 3 minutes total for those of you who suck as math)

Don't just go: "Ok, I'll have a minute of my C-level footage, then a minute of my B footage, and then a minute of my A footage". Hit the high points. So 30 seconds through your first block, stick in a B-level clip or maybe even a low A-level clip, and maybe have the high points get better and better as the montage progresses. Don't just blindly set up your montage to get better and better, ignoring the soundtrack entirely.

4) End with your best clip - This is something I've pushed over and over in the montage reviews I used to do, and it really is the easiest and most important thing when it comes to structure. This really is just basic common sense: For complete kickassery, you need to have a kickass finale. The better your montage is overall, the more it needs this. The better your montage is overall, the more it awkwardly crashes on its face with a disappointing finale. If you're aspiring to make a memorable montage, find the best damn clip you have and stick it at the end. Period. Now I know that the evaluation of a clip is completely subjective, but I've seen countless montages ruined by the finale clip being an average triple or something when the body is like 90% sick overkill exterminations with the sniper.

So, that's it. 4 simple things to keep in mind to make your montage a lot better with fairly little work. To conclude this post, I'm going to end it with one of my favorite Halo montages of all time and a partial analysis of why it's so awesome. Here it is:

Roadblock's final Halo 3 montage is one of the most respected videos on my channel, and for good reason. Despite its simplicity, it still easily beats the crap out of at least 75% of the Halo montages in existence. Why? Well, we all know that it has some pretty damn good gameplay. This is undeniable. However, what I think a lot of people don't realize is that the montage actually had a fair amount of good but not epic-shit-your-pants amazing clips. Why do a lot of people not notice this? Because of its structure.

The job this montage does following the 4 rules is pretty much perfect. Sick clip at the beginning? Check. Biggest high points hit within the song? Check. Build up? The gameplay is just insane everywhere so it's hard to judge, but I would say so. Best clip at the end? Well, personally I would have gone with the whip triple or the back to back to back no scopes for the double, triple, and overkill, but yes, the finale clip is still amazing and it goes with the build up because of the fact that it's a killtacular and not just an overkill/triple (I know that there was another killtacular in the montage, but I think this one was used instead because it was cleaner overall and the last shot was a headshot). Simply put, this montage does everything right. All of the best clips in the montage are matched with the strongest high points within the soundtrack, accentuated by how prominent the beats are within it, flow is very well established, and the good, but not 100% jaw-droppingly amazing clips are given more of a filler/build-up role. In other words, it played its strengths beautifully while subtlely downplaying its weakness (relative to the rest of the footage of course. The "weak" clips in this montage were still great). Anyways, that is all that I have for today. Peace.

Random YouTube Comments I Found Funny/Dumb - Episode 6

2011-04-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

So here's another comment from Broly Bro's Halo 3 Montage.

"i loved halo 1, 2, and 3. each one improved the halo series and the only reason i could see people not liking 3 is because they cant use button glitches and they have to lead their shots. halo 2 was harder than halo 1 and halo 3 was harder than halo 2. halo reach caters to noobs tho and i dont understand why they went in that direction."

Holy shit, this person legitimately believes that Halo 3 is the most skill intensive out of all the Halos... Again, I refer to, "There's no way this person considers himself an MLG fan, because a true MLG fan should easily see Halo 3's awfulness for competitive play relative to Halo 2 and Halo 1". Also, the person flipped the entire spectrum. It goes Halo 1 > Halo 2 > Halo 3 for competitive play.

For the record: Here's why Halo 2's button glitches kicked ass and how it made the game infinitely times more 3-dimensional than Halo 3

As for the leading your shots part, this is true. Leading your shots takes more skill than regular aiming because it throws in the factor of predicting where the person will go. However, the reason you had to lead your shots in Halo 3 was because of the idiotic projectile-based bullet system they implemented instead of hit-scan, which was terribly inconsistent, especially online. As a result, the quality of a person's BR often times depended on dumb luck (will Halo 3 be mean and arbitrarily eat my bullets or will it let them connect like a good little video game?), making Halo 3's bullet-registration system worse than Halo 2's for competitive gaming by a pretty damn large margin.

And of course, we have to bash Reach at the end after sucking Halo 3's dick into oblivion.

Alright guys, let's hop off Halo 3's penis

2011-04-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

So, Broly Bro's Halo 3 Montage now has the below comment as one of its highest rated comments. It has 15 thumbs up (15 more than it should), and this number is still increasing, as expected:

"Goal- Repopulate Halo 3
When- Whenever
Why- Halo Reach dissapointed many Halo fans
What's the crazy thing- People who don't like Reach still play the outlandish game
What's the other crazy thing- MLG removed Halo 3 from the pro circuit
What MLG should realize- Adding Reach and dropping Halo 3 was a mistake
Thumbs up so people could see.
Just never forget the good old days from 2007 until now. Halo 3 isn't just a game, its what created friends and a community within it."

I've vented about this massive "OH MAH GAWDZ, I MISS HALO 3, FUCK REACH" movement that has been going on for literally the entire time between now and Reach's release, but I don't think I've ever dedicated an entire post to it before, so I'm going to do it here now.

Like I've said many times before, personally, I think Halo 3 sucked (relative to its predecessors of course). However, I do realize that the quality of each game is a SUBJECTIVE matter, so when people say that Halo 3 is the best Halo of all time, I'm perfectly fine with it because I can understand how one could reach that point of view. Halo 3 was a casual gaming paradise when compared with its predecessors with stuff like Forge, theater mode, campaign scoring, and, of course, the smaller skill gap, which ISN'T an inherent flaw like many people believe; it's only a flaw if you're evaluating the game from a competitive standpoint, which is only one of many standpoints, all of which should be considered equal. However, when it comes to evaluating games from a competitive standpoint, it is nowhere near a subjective matter. Of course, there's still some subjectivity and uncertainty behind it, but unlike evaluating a game for how good it is where the definition of good is determined entirely by perspective, the evaluation of a game off of its competitive merit has to be completely subjective. Why? Because unlike "good", which is no clear cut definition, "competitive" has a definition that is set in stone, meaning that the competitive merit of a video game is determined by how it means an objective, which, in this case, would be this definition. For a good example of this definition, check out this post: The Definition of a Good Competitive Game. If you know what it takes to be a good competitive game, you should easily be able to deduce that Halo 3 is absolute crap as a competitive game when compared to its predecessors. This is one of the main problems that I have with this post. The second main problem that I have with this post is that, like many other people sharing this overly simplistic, annoying mentality, it doesn't remotely try to see issues from another perspective (mainly that of someone who has a favorite Halo that ISN'T Halo 3), and as a result, tries to make it seem like Halo 3 is God's personal gift to gaming using reasons that could be used to make this case for any Halo game. As usual, let's break down this all down piece by piece:

"Goal- Repopulate Halo 3"

Ok, this is fine. You like Halo 3, and you want Halo 3 to have more people playing it. This is a perfectly understandable and fair thing to say. I love Halo 2, and I would LOVE to have more people playing it on Xbox Connect and Halo 2 Vista.

"When- Whenever"

Ok, so far so good. I found that one-day movement to revive Halo 3 on 1/23 of this year to be pretty stupid (though I understand why it was 1/23), because something that massive couldn't possibly be accomplished in one fucking day. You're not being greedy/unrealistic, that's good.

"Why- Halo Reach dissapointed many Halo fans"

Now this is where the comment begins rapidly plummeting to the center of the Earth. First of all, EVERY Halo game, minus Halo 1 obviously, has disappointed many Halo fans. That's just how it works. Bungie isn't the type of company that just takes a game, gives it a nice spit-shine, slaps on a couple nice, new features, releases it as the sequel, and calls it a day; they take chances. Between every single Halo game, there has been at least one drastic change to the game's core. Halo 2 had the ridiculous amount of auto-aim and magnetism, the huge lunge distance for melees, and button glitches. Halo 3 severely downgraded the auto-aim and magnetism, removed glitches, overpowered the melee into oblivion, and threw in the projectile based bullet system. Halo: Reach added in the bloom, brought back hit-scan, and introduced no-bleedthrough. There are always those people who just don't like change, which is why there always be these people who abhor the sequel and want to go back to the previous installment. Some people started in Halo 1 and hated Halo 2, some started in Halo 2 and hated Halo 3 (like me, though I feel that my hatred for the game is more objective than most people's), and like we're seeing right now, some people started in Halo 3 and hate Halo: Reach. And if there is ever another Halo after Reach, there are going to be people who started in Reach and hate this new Halo. That's just how Halo works. This "why" isn't a compelling reason at all; it's just the statement of a phenomenon that has ALWAYS been true. This person might as well have said that the sky is blue as his reason instead; it wouldn't have been much weaker. Also, if someone was disappointed by Reach enough, they would naturally move away on their own; there's no need to point this out for them.

"What's the crazy thing- People who don't like Reach still play the outlandish game"

Again, if someone hates the game enough, they will naturally move away from it on their own. Second, this isn't crazy. It's just how Halo and pretty much any other popular video game series works. When the newest installment comes out, the majority of the fanbase will move on, because most people don't take video games that seriously; as long as the newest installment doesn't suck ass, might as go for that breath of fresh air. All of the Halos are stellar games in comparison to everything that is out there in the video game world, so this makes complete sense. And because the majority of the population has moved on, even the most hardcore of fans will move on as well, even if they don't like this new game as much as the old one. This is why I moved on to Halo 3. Why would I continue playing Halo 2 when everyone, including the majority of my XBL friends, were playing Halo 3? Why would I continue playing Halo 2 when half of the playlists were dead and MLG had moved on to the next game? I went back to Halo 2 every once in a while, but for the most part, I realized that I had to move on, so I did. This wasn't crazy; it was merely an adaptation to the changing of the status quo.

"What's the other crazy thing- MLG removed Halo 3 from the pro circuit"

This is even worse than the previous statement in my opinion; it's just obviously wrong. First of all, MLG is a COMPANY, meaning that their goal, like the goal of every other company in existence, is to GROW. Halo, like every other popular video game series in existence, has been growing with each new installment. So, if MLG isn't comprised of a bunch of blithering idiots, which it isn't, the clearly correct choice when a new Halo game comes out is to pick it up for the circuit. Every new Halo fan is a potential new MLG fan, so unless they pick up the newest game, they will be unable to tap into the expanded market it always brings along with it.

However, this all only explains why MLG needs to pick up each new Halo game, not why it has to drop the older one when it comes out. Well, this exactly indirectly explains why MLG needs to drop the older game when the newest one comes out. It would be unwise to have more than 1 Halo game at the circuit at any given time. This would obviously strain MLG's resources, and it would be awkward to have all of the pros split up. Then, one of 2 things will happen, the first being more likely:

1) Everyone will stick with the newest game anyways, making the keeping of the older games inefficient and near pointless, like the preservation of the Halo 2 servers along with those of the rest of the original Xbox games - Halo pros play a TON of Halo. It's inevitable that they will get tired of whatever Halo they're currently playing eventually and go for a breath of fresh air when they can, no matter how good this current Halo is. 3 years is a long time, even if you're playing Halo 2 or Halo 1 throughout these 3 years. Also, since the location of the biggest market always shifts to the newest Halo game when it comes out, it is in the best self-interest, which is mainly financial, of the pros to shift to the newest Halo game. Playing the newest Halo game gives them the biggest possible audience, and with this comes lots of other goodies like more potential sponsorships. Also, it's also in the best interest of pros to move on in order to establish their dominance in each Halo game. After all, what's greater than being a legend in just one game of a series? Being a legend at EVERY game of a series. This is why Ogre 2 is almost unanimously regarded as the greatest Halo player of all time; the man is just ridiculous at each and every one of them. Anyways, so if this scenario were to happen, support for the older games would eventually be cut, and we would be where we were originally with only the newest Halo game being on the circuit.

2) Everyone will stick with the Halo with the most competitive merit, which will almost surely be Halo 1 or Halo 2 (most likely Halo 1) the games with the smallest followings within the series, making competitions for the newest game almost pointless, eliminating almost any chance for the company the grow - This would be dangerously unhealthy for the company because there would a massive split between games. So because all of everyone's favorite pros will be playing one of the first 2 Halos, a good amount of MLG's current fanbase will stick watching the events for these older Halos. On the other hand, all of the newcomers will be watching the events for the newest Halo, which are going to be pretty terrible because a lot of the world's best players won't even be playing in them. Also, lot of MLG's revenue comes from advertising, and the value of advertising time is based off of how many people an advertisement placed within this time on this certain form of media would reach. Advertising on MLG would seem a lot less lucrative to advertisers if the attention for their biggest asset, Halo, was split so harshly. To put things into perspective, let's look at this using YouTube. What would you rather have: 500,000 videos with 1 view each or 1 video with 500,000 views? I thought so. Simply put, if this scenario were to occur, the company's growth would be stunted if not reversed because its fanbase wouldn't be as united and it would be somewhat focused on markets with essentially no room for growth while also being not completely focused on the market with the most room for growth.

In conclusion, MLG dropping Halo 3 wasn't crazy; it was completely normal.

"What MLG should realize- Adding Reach and dropping Halo 3 was a mistake"

Everyone seems to be implying that MLG should stick with the Halo with the most competitive merit, which is why people are constantly going on about how MLG should stick with Halo 3 instead of moving on to Halo: Reach; a lot of the members on the "Viva Halo 3, Fuck Reach" bandwagon are on this bandwagon because they think Halo: Reach is some noobed-up piece of garbage while Halo 3 is the pinnacle of competitive Halo. While this "MLG should use whatever Halo is the most competitive" is stupid because of you know, reality, as I described in my previous paragraphs, even if MLG were to somehow use this method, why the FUCK would they stick with Halo 3??? This mentality has always confused me, because if you went anywhere in the MLG forums where there was a debate on the competitive merit of the Halo games prior to Halo: Reach, Halo 3 always undeniably had the shit kicked out of it. Always. Among the pros, forum, staff, pretty much anyone who had any sort of connection with MLG, everyone believed that Halo 3 was the worst Halo for competitive play by far. Even with Reach out, Halo 3 is still generally regarded as the worst. So I really just don't see how people keep saying "MLG should stick with Halo 3." Do they not realize that Halo 3 is the 3rd game of the Halo series, meaning that there were 2 Halos before it? Do they think they are capable of saying that Halo 3 is the best Halo for competitive play when they haven't played the other Halos extensively? Have they simply never visited the MLG forums or interacted with any hardcore members of the MLG community? These are the only ways I can see someone saying this and genuinely believing in it, and if any person fulfills any of these requirements, I can safely say that he isn't a hardcore enough MLG member to dictate what the company should do, especially with a recommended course of action as drastic as, "Let's just avoid change."

Simply put, adding Reach and dropping Halo 3 was not a mistake but rather the most rational course of action. Also, if MLG were to drop Reach because it sucked as a competitive game to move back to an older Halo, it sure as hell wouldn't move to Halo 3 when Halo 1 and Halo 2 are on the table. Also, Halo 1 and Halo 2 would be a lot fresher than Halo 3, because prior to 7 months ago, everyone had played Halo 3 for 3 years.

"Thumbs up so people could see."

And of course, you have the always-present "Give me thumbs up pl0x" slapped on to the end of the message, usually not because the person wants to spread some sort of profound message, but because the person merely wants some form of attention.

"Just never forget the good old days from 2007 until now. Halo 3 isn't just a game, its what created friends and a community within it."

Finally, we have the some sort of sentimental message slapped on to the end, so the massive gaps of logic within the message are somewhat covered up. First of all, you don't need to tell someone not to forget the good old days. If the days were good, people will make the effort on their own to preserve them in memory. Second, for every single Halo, it has been something more than just game for a ton of people. Again, this is completely natural, and it doesn't make Halo 3 special in any way. Lastly, Halo 3 isn't "what created a friends and a community within it". It definitely created friends and a community within in, but this guy is making it seem like it's the only game to have done it. Again, every Halo game has done this.

For a comment that's trying to make it seem like Halo 3 is the best damn thing ever, it sure points out a LOT of things that Halo 3 has in common with all of the other Halo games, and whenever it didn't do this and properly tried to differentiate Halo 3 from the others, it did it from the wrong angle (competitive merit). The comment might as well have said, "People die when they are killed, and death is bad, so let's not kill people." It has all of the plain obviousness, but it bears a truer message.

In conclusion, people need to hop off Halo 3's penis. Seriously. It's gotten a lot of action over the 3 years between its release and Halo: Reach's, and that should be enough. There's no need to drag it out over 7 entire months after Halo: Reach has been released. Its time has ended, and people need to accept that. And if you're going to post some nostalgic comment about Halo 3, please don't drag Reach into it or tout it as the best damn Halo ever; you're completely ignoring the fact that it's perfectly reasonable for people to prefer one or more of the other Halos over Halo 3, even Halo: Reach. I can completely relate to this mentality, because I feel the same way about Halo 2, but I'm not going to go on about how Halo 2 is the best, how MLG is retarded for dropping it and picking up Halo 3, or how its sequel, Halo 3, was absolute shit, which I actually believe is true. And if I were to describe Halo 2 as special, I would explain why it's unique, not why it's the best, because "best" is a completely relative term, and of course, I would make sure that I wouldn't be replacing actual arguments with raw nostalgia. Each of the Halos is indeed special, and trying to bring some tears to people's eyes by describing it as more than just a game isn't the way to go about doing this, because again, this is true for each and every Halo for a lot people. Lastly, limit public nostalgia trips; it gets annoying. People move on, and a lot of these people quickly get tired of people getting teary-eyed because they're stuck in the past. I talk about Halo 2 a lot, but you don't see me going all nostalgic on every single Halo 2 and Halo 3 video ever about how I miss the good old days similar to how every single Reach and Halo 3 on my channel and essentially the rest of YouTube has at least one comment trashing Reach and praising Halo 3 with a ton of thumbs up. Life goes on people. All of our pasts have some beautiful, fun, life-defining moments within them, but we cannot linger in them forever as time is constantly moving forward. Peace.

The Definition of a Good Competitive Game

2011-04-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here's what I consider a good definition of a good competitive game:

"A stellar competitive game is one in which skill directly translates into success within the game in a proportional manner."

In other words, for a good competitive game, the more skilled you are, the more ass you kick. So how do we determine how well a game fits this definition? We look at its skill gap. A skill gap is the gap between how bad you can be at a game and how good you can be at a game. Since every game has the same level of maximum badness (not being able to do anything), a game's skill gap is evaluated by how good one can possibly get at the game. So what do skill gap and my definition have in a common? Well, the bigger the skill gap is for a game, the better it is for competitive play. To illustrate this relationship, let's analyze things from a mathematical perspective, simplified for the purposes of illustrating my point.

The games in this example are oversimplified shooters, in which the better you are, the more people you can kill per minute.

Game A has a skill gap of 0 - 10, for which a level 0 player is a player who can only kill 0 people per minute, and a level 10 player is a player who can kill 10 people per minute.

Game B has a skill gap of 0 - 50, for which a level 0 player is a player who can only kill 0 people per minute, and a level 50 player is a player who can kill 50 people per minute.

Both games have a skill unit (the amount of skill a player has) to level conversion ratio of 1 to 1.

Player A has 10 units of skill. He is a level 10 player in Game A.

Player B has 50 units of skill. Because the maximum level in Game A is level 10, his 50 units of skill are truncated at 10, and like Player A, he is a level 10 player in Game A.

Game A is a poor competitive game because even though Player B is WAY better than Player A, they see roughly the same amount of success in Game A. We can also see it fail by using the definition I provided at the very beginning of this post. Player B's 50 units of skill didn't proportionally transfer into success within the game. While Player A achieved level 10 with 10 units of skill, a 1 to 1 ratio, Player B did it with 50, a 5 to 1 ratio. But now let's look at Game B.

Player A is a level 10 player in Game B.

Player B is a level 50 player in Game B, meaning that he'll see a LOT more success in Game B than Player A does.

Game B is a MUCH better competitive game than Game A. Player B is way more skilled than Player A, and unlike in Game A in which they were roughly equal, it shows in Game B with Player B consistently kicking the crap out of Player A. Player B has 5 times as much skill as Player A, and this was reflected within the game, because the game is a good competitive game and was able to proportionally convert these players' skill levels into the proper, corresponding levels of success.

Let's shift this phenomenon over to something we are all familiar with: Halo. In Halo 2, close range combat was incredibly 3-dimensional because of the button glitches and weaker melee, which required an extensive mastery of many aspects within this ONE aspect of the game due to the several ways you could kill someone close range and the almost always necessary need to follow through. For an incredibly detailed explanation of Halo 2's close range combat along with a deep analysis of all of its button glitches, read this article: Why Halo 2's Button Glitches Kicked Ass

Anyways, because Halo 2's close-range combat was so incredibly 3-dimensional and had such a large skill gap, there was a massive spectrum of close-range combat proficiency within the game, even among the top pros. Even though all pros are essentially pretty damn amazing at every aspect of the game (this is why they're pro after all), there were some pros who were CLEARLY better than the other top pros at close-range combat in Halo 2. Walshy, Pistola, and Shockwav3 were all absolutely stellar at demolishing people up close, and even though they were all always at the highest levels of play in Halo 2, this was very obvious. It didn't matter who they were going up against close-range, they consistently came out of it as the last man standing, even when they were at slightly lower shields than the other guy.

But now let's look at Halo 3. Halo 3's close-range combat system was an absolute travesty for competitive play because it was simplified from its predecessor in almost every conceivable aspect. First of all, the melee does a stupidly huge amount of damage, taking down a player's ENTIRE SHIELD. If player was considerably weakened, he was almost always killed with a single melee, eliminating much of the need for skillful, consistent follow-throughs. It was just 1-button, BAM!, you're dead. Second, glitches were removed, so instead of having a close-range combat system which was almost like a complex chess game in which they were many possible options with some being better against others and in certain situations, the close-range combat became this for the most part: If there's a dude next to you, smack him by pressing B once and hope that you come out alive. Third, they almost completely removed the aspect of reflex time of the equation by introducing the stupid, if-you-have-a-lot-more-shields-you-win equation. And, if you and your opponent were weak and at roughly equal amounts of shields and you beat down at roughly the same time, you both died. Reflex time became a factor maybe 10% of the time when it came to close-range combat, and this was even lower in competitive play, because in the highest levels of competitive play, all of the players have a roughly equal reflex time anyways, meaning that almost all of their fights ended in either "Lawl, I have more shields so I win" or "Lawl, we both die even though one of us hit the other first". You could see the clear deterioration of close-range combat between these games by just watching the Live Streams of the events from these games. About how many times did you hear something along the lines of, "Oh my god, _____ is such a close-range monster" or "Man, what a sick (some close range combat maneuver)", in Halo 2? Now what about Halo 3? These numbers shouldn't be remotely close to even. In Halo 2, a stellar player at little to no shields could consistently mow down 2-3 other top players through a couple incredibly skillful close-range maneuvers, coming out of it alive a good amount of the time (watch any Pistola Halo 2 FFA gameplay). In Halo 3, this was near impossible because your opponent would almost always at least force a 1 for 1 trade through Halo 3's idiotic system, otherwise leaving you to almost certainly die against the next guy because you would be at no shields.

To sum this all up, Halo 2's close-range combat was better than Halo 3's was for competitive play because it had a larger skill gap, meaning that there was a higher bound for how capable people could get taking down people close range than there was for Halo 3.

So, how exactly does one evaluate the size of skill gap? Well, this is where it gets complicated, because any competitive game worth its salt will have a TON of factors to analyze. Here's a few that I find important:

3-dimensionality - This is pretty simple. The more stuff there is to master, the more work a player has to do to reach that upper bound. An example is Halo 2's button glitches making its close-range combat infinitely times better than Halo 3's.

Consistency - The amount of consistency a game has depends on how little random shit it has. This is essentially the same thing as how much of a game a player can control with his skill. For example, online bullshit eating your bullets, which would have otherwise hit, is an example of inconsistency, because the player can't control whether or not his bullets will go where they're supposed to. Bloom is an example of inconsistency for the same reason; it determines whether or not bullets will hit a target not based on a player's aiming ability, but off of pure luck.

Speed - This one is a bit tricky. This doesn't mean that the faster the game is, the more skill intensive it is (this would make CoD a lot more skill intensive than it should be); it means that the faster a game gets with skill put into it, the better it is for competitive player. In CoD, it doesn't take much skill to mow down 10-15 players in 25-30 seconds; headshots aren't really necessary and there aren't shields to take down. In Halo, on the other hand, mowing down that many players in such a short time frame is pretty damn hard, even if the players are absolutely terrible and are just running around. Example? Social footage. Stringing together 10 noobs for the killionaire may seem easy initially, but when you only see a select few very skilled players like Kampy and Dutchy get it (it took a LONG time for other montage kids to master social well enough to pull these off), it's clear that it's actually a fairly difficult task for the average player and definitely a skill set that takes a while to master.

Well, there's a ton more, but I'm sure that you're starting to get the picture now. Anyways, that is my analysis on what makes a good competitive game, and I hope that you've learned something from it or at least enjoyed reading it. Peace.

Handy Little YouTube Rule That Might Help You - An OFFICIAL BLOG POST

2011-04-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

YouTube Rule #1337: The phrase "Official Parody" don't mean anything, so just slap it on to the title of whatever the fuck you want as long as it's any sort of a parody. Seriously. Just look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Friday+Official+Parody&aq=f

It's pretty interesting how there's about 7 trillion "official" parodies, all of which are quite different and are from different channels.

Also, I wasn't able to write a blog post on Friday, because I stayed up until 5 AM on Thursday doing a Computer Science lab, and then stayed up until 8 AM on Friday doing the same lab, which I sadly didn't complete during this all-nighter (I actually finished it at around 8 PM yesterday) So yeah, I've been sleep deprived as hell recently and unable to do anything blog-related, but don't worry, there will be actual posts coming soon, I promise.

Why Halo 3 is the best Halo ever

2011-04-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

Up until now, I have always believed that Halo CE or Halo 2 is the best Halo. Halo 3 and Halo: Reach have always been light years apart from these 2 games for me, but recently, as I was reading all of the incredibly intelligent comments on YouTube vying for Halo 3's superiority, I finally realized what I have been missing for all of these years. To further test this epiphany, I proceeded to play 24 straight hours of Halo 3, and again, I realized that I have been wrong for this entire time. All of the gripes that I had before; these were all merely misunderstandings of Halo 3's genius. Here's a small list covering a mere iota of Halo 3's genius:

1) The projectile based bullet system which led to shitty bullet registration: Halo 2 worked like this. If your reticule is on the dude, and you fire, your bullets instantly connect. This is called hit-scan, and it's absolute bullshit. Why? Because this isn't realistic. Bullets don't travel at instead speed, and using this system, they don't really even exist; they're merely represented graphically within the game. The only interaction taking place is that between your reticule and the dude; the guy isn't being hit with bullets when he's being damaged like in real life, he's merely having a reticule placed on him. This makes no sense. By implementing bullets as actual physical objects that are affected by the physics of the game (which we all know are absolutely perfect), Halo 3 is more realistic than its predecessors and is therefore better. Everybody knows that there's no such things as latency and general online bullshit to fuck this system up and that sacrificing basic playability for realism is always the correct thing to do.

2) The overpowered assault rifle: There's really no explanation to this; the BR was simply overpowered. The AR gave the average player a chance and stopped those evil good players from dominating with their... skill, which we all know is an unfair advantage. It's common knowledge that a starting weapon should be able to rival weapons specifically created for close range combat and give precision weapons a run for their money in mid-range combat. This is called balance folks.

3) The overpowered melee: I've frequently complained that the melee is stupidly overpowered because the pressing of one button which produces an attack that you don't even have to really aim is equivalent to 3-4 well placed shots with the BR, a precision weapon, which is one of the most skill intensive weapons in the game. But again, I realized, realism! Think about it. A bullet weighs maybe one pound and travels at maybe 500 miles an hour. This gives every bullet a momentum of roughly 2.5 million foot pounds (conveniently capping the amount of feet in a mile at 5000). This means that 12 bullets, 4 BR shots, have a combined momentum of about 30 million foot pounds. But let's look at the beatdown. Sure, the Master Chief lunges at a speed of maybe 10 miles an hour (50000 feet/hour). But the Master Chief weighs about a bajillion pounds. That gives every beatdown a momentum of 50000 bajillion foot pounds, which is MUCH greater than 30 million. By making the beatdown take down an entire person's shields, Bungie was fixing its underpowered-status, and to make this decision even sweeter, they realized that making the beatdown any stronger would ruin the balance of the game, even though it should be according to realism.

4) The reload glitch: Again people, realism. No soldier alive can reload their gun properly 100% of the game, and no gun is well-built enough to allow this to happen. By arbitrarily shafting people through this disastrous disappearance of ammo, Halo 3 was showing us how it cares about realism and places it above all else, like it should be. Also, since this glitch was super random, Halo 3 always stayed fresh because you never knew what was coming. Would you reload your sniper and get that overkill extermination no scope on Pistola or would Halo 3 just straight up give you the middle finger and deny you the opportunity at one of the greatest plays ever? YOU NEVER KNEW.

Nah, just kidding. April Fool's guys. I'm sorry, Halo 3 still sucks. I wish I could have made this longer, but I wanted to release this before April Fool's was over.

A Bunch of Complaints Regarding Montages + A Call for Originality (Part 2)

2011-04-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read Part 1 yet: http://gear61sblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/bunch-of-complaints-regarding-montages.html

Holy shit, I'm actually finishing an article. Anyways, where did I leave off... Right, I was talking about how MLG footage in Reach sucks because Sanctuary is the only good map for competitive play in Reach. So yeah, there's a pretty big fucking crisis when it comes to montage footage and originality nowadays. MLG footage is naturally limited to begin with, and with only one good map for competitive play, it's taken one hell of a fucking beating with Reach rolling around. With montage kids already being insane at what they do, less viable maps, and an increased emphasis on the sniper, social footage in Reach is rapidly deteriorating too and is pretty damn near dead if you ask me. So where does this leave us?

The Halo montage clip that relies heavily on how big the medals are in it is a classic, much-loved staple in Halo montages. However, with the circumstances the way they are, we're going to have let go of a lot of this attachment. This means that montage kids need to stop just going for the largest multikill possible from these incredibly overused "montage kid spots", slapping them together, and calling it a day. Again, these multikills require a good amount of skill and are near impossible for the average player, but anything gets boring after you watch it 1000 times, no matter how awesome it was originally. We get that jetpacking to the top of the big tower on Pinnacle is awesome. We get that killing everyone in hill in Pit KotH and then looking towards the Tower Spawns is awesome too. Montages are too similar nowadays, and this has to change.

You may have noticed that I said that we have to let go of "a lot" of this attachment, not all of it. This is because multikills aren't inherently bad; they can still be entertaining. The problem is that they're too run-of-the-mill nowadays, which means that montage kids are going to have to challenge themselves again, and in a different way this time. Like I said in the first part, montage kids can't just try to get higher multikills anymore because the limit's essentially been reached; there is no higher left. Montage kids need to either find different spots (unlikely because the good ones have essentially all been discovered by now), or just stop playing the game like robots. Don't just jetpack to some high place and whore sniper for the entire game. Don't go for the same spawn traps like looking mancannon from Top Mid on Narrows or looking Tower Spawns on The Pit. Simply put, stop following routines. Maybe give your gameplay a more natural feel by actually moving around the map instead of sticking to one place. Maybe purposefully place yourself in terrible places as a challenge (One of the things I really liked about Best Man's first and final Halo 3 montage is that a lot of the clips were in obscure positions. The bottom mid quick scope triple on Guardian is one of my favorite clips). Maybe just play as aggressively as hell, rushing wherever enemies are and never backing down (one of my favorite clips ever is Roadblock's back to back to back no scope overkill on The Pit for this very reason). I don't care; just do something different for multikills.

This call for originality isn't just for multikills; it's for, well, everything. A lot of the suffering that Halo montage footage has gone through is because of the games themselves and other stuff we can't control, but a good amount of it is also because of this fear/unwillingness of going outside the box on behalf of montage makers. Halo 3 took away the more powerful sniper rifle and glitch kills. Halo: Reach took away map variety in both MLG footage and social footage. However, both games also gave us new things to work with. Halo 3 gave us 2 for 1's, ricochets, and exterminations. Reach returned grenade launches, gave us the sweet assassination animations, and has some pretty interesting things you can do with the walls that you can shoot through (which I'm definitely sure are at least on both Boardwalk and The Cage). Sure, these games can be worse and better than each other for montage footage overall, but none of them is strictly worse than any other one. New doors have consistently been presented to us; all we need to do is open them. For Halo: Reach, people need to start experimenting with grenade launches more, setting up sweet assassinations which are beautifully accentuated by the new assassination animations, going for multikills while in midair with the jetpack, and other crazy, new things. For the people who are still making Halo 3 montages, you can purposefully go for ricochets like in Just Mad's final, grenade yourself for the killtacular like in Dutchy's final, or go for barrel snipe multikills like in Andrew is XXL's and Chrisdx1's "Let It Be". To conclude this post, I'm going to embed my favorite Halo: Reach montage to date, which easily beats out every Halo: Reach montage so far with its sheer amount of originality, a desperately needed element in a time in which originality is almost dead.

Halo 3 vs. Halo: Reach

2011-03-26T00:13:00.000-07:00

Well, this is obviously quite late, but I figured better late than never. Anyways in this post which I wrote a while back, I said that Halo: Reach is better than Halo 3. My opinion has actually somewhat changed since then, I'm going to give the breakdown anyways.

So... do I stick by what I said in that post from forever ago? Eh, I'm not sure. In the beginning, my impression of Reach is that it's nowhere near Halo 2, the status that I gave Halo 3, but I was fairly able to say that Reach is better. After playing Reach a bit more in the last couple of months, the waters have muddied considerably, and I'm not exactly sure anymore. Both games have massive flaws, and for me, comparing the two is like trying to compare Rebecca Black's Friday and Jersey Shore; they both just suck.

So here's how I felt about Halo 3. In its raw state, Halo 3 was just awful. A grossly overpowered AR and a grossly overpowered melee pretty much ruined the game. Combine these with BR spread to further lower the skill gap along with a beat down system that judges results off of the arbitrary factor of shield amounts rather than reflex time, and you've got yourself a pretty terrible game. In MLG, the game was bearable, but still wasn't very fun when compared to Halo 2. Similar to Halo 3 in regular matchmaking, Halo 3 in MLG suffered because of its slower pace and the increased easiness of forcing 1 for 1 trades. Good players and regular players who were just on fire simply couldn't shine as much as they used to. However, social in Halo 3 was mad fun, and this was one of the redeeming factors of the game.

Halo: Reach suffers from many of the same problems. It's even slower than its predecessor, which is saying something because its predecessor was already slow. The bloom actually limits how efficiently a player can slay his enemies. However, Reach fixed one of the main problems in Halo 3, the overpowered starting weapon. While the game got slower due to the bloom and the decreased mobility, the game restored a lot of the skill gap by nerfing the AR.

I have stuck with this impression of Reach when it comes to comparing it to Halo 3 since the beginning: It frustrates me less, but its best moments are not nearly as great as Halo 3's are. Since the castration of competitive Halo post-Halo 3, social is pretty much all I play. In Halo 3, social could often be very frustrating with the overpowered AR and melee and the tendency for the game to turn into a massive clusterfuck, but when I got going, it was incredibly fun. In Reach, it's not nearly as fun because the bloom limits how quickly I can kill enemies, and consequently, lengthens the time I have to wait between each enemy I deal with. Since the sniper isn't really affected by bloom and Reach uses hit-scan, the only real way to get any action going in Reach is with the sniper. Granted, it was pretty much the same thing in Halo 3 as well, but it's even more so in Reach, which is quite annoying. About 80% of Halo 3 social was a 1-dimensional shooting gallery with snipe, and in Halo: Reach, it's more like 95%. Anyways, in Reach, when it comes to 1v1 battles between me and a player that is obviously less skilled than I am, I have found that I win a lot more often than I did in Halo 3, mainly due to the AR being nerfed. Most of my frustration with Halo 3 was bad players almost effortlessly mowing me down with the AR, and with almost all of that disappearing, Reach frustrates me a lot less.

As for Reach MLG, I don't really know where I stand on it when comparing it to Halo 3 MLG. Personally, I can't easily choose one or the other, but apparently, the majority of MLG pros say that Reach is by far better than Halo 3 so I'll take their word for it. However, I think a lot of this sentiment is resultant from the "Yay, I'm done with Halo 3" euphoria due to the Halo 3 being such a massive step down for competitive Halo. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. As for what I think about Reach MLG, it's hindered a lot by the bloom and the Sanctuary literally being the ONE good map in it, but bullet spread leaving is a huge relief, and I really like the use of armor abilities as pseudo-power ups. The thing about overshield and camo is that they don't take much skill to use because you don't use them; you just get them and you receive some sort of buff that makes you inherently better than any unaltered Spartan. With stuff like Evade though, you don't get the advantages that come with the power up by just picking it up; you reap the advantages through skillful utility. This adds a lot of 3-dimensionality to the game, and it widens the skill gap by giving players something new to master. However, armor abilities isn't really a fair thing to deem as a reason why Reach MLG is better than Halo 3 MLG because there's nothing to compare it to in Halo 3 and is most likely resultant of the natural games-having-more-stuff-in-them-as-time-goes-on phenomenon. This would be like saying that Halo 3 is a better game than Halo 2 because it has a theater mode.

The problem with comparing these two games is that their faults lie in different categories, and it's very hard to objectively weigh the importance of each category. For example, is having a balanced starting weapon more important than having good maps? Both are very universal when it comes to their impact on the game, so it's hard to decide. When it came to comparing Halo 2 to Halo 3, the decision was fairly easy because Halo 2 was better than Halo 3 in pretty much every department. Anyways, let's just go over each category one by one, and see which one comes out on top. Below, I will list every aspect that is applicable to every Halo game.

Crap, I really wanted to finish this today, but I really have to get to sleep; I'm flying back to LA tomorrow. And this has been yet another Part 1 for Gear61's Blog of Everything. I really need to start completing all of these series I'm starting. Maybe I'll do one tomorrow when I get back.

Random YouTube Comments I Found Funny/Dumb - Episode 5 + Off-Topic Rant About Kids Thinking They Know Something When They Actually Don't

2011-03-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a comment I found on Salaya's Halo: Reach montage, Live Your Life, which is actually my favorite montage to date.

"Your montage was the BEST that I have seen so far for Reach,most of the other ones are just objective farming.
Here is my review about your skill:
-You are the BEST ninja that I have EVER seen!!!
-you are good with the snipe
-You are okay with the magnum
-yet you suck... with the DMR"

The comment start off OK, but the guy then arbitrarily adds in a "skill review". Clearly, this is one of those people who believes that montages aren't meant to show skill and takes a game that's meant to be played for fun very seriously. However, this guy here sets himself apart from the others but adding in an entirely new level of pretentiousness. First of all, by inserting a "skill review", he's indirectly saying that he thinks that he's a good authority on Halo skill, which is pretty stupid given that he's just some random kid on YouTube. Second, he pulls the SUPER annoying, "Because I said some good things, I can now say something that's blatantly negative", move. I can just imagine him patting himself on the back after all that praise and then thinking to himself, "If I make the review entirely positive though, it sounds like he's better than me! Better fix that by being a blunt douche!" And of course, his statements have little to no support. "Live Your Life" is about 80% ninjas and sniping; there's 4 clips or so in which Salaya uses the DMR/Pistol, a hardly adequate sample. It's pretty stupid to judge any sort of skill off of a montage, let alone a couple clips. Also, who the hell rates PISTOL skill? Seriously? The weapon's a piece of shit; it really is only effective when you spam your heart out and luckily demolish them short to mid range. And to top it all off, I think it's pretty safe to say that Salaya most likely doesn't give a shit about how good he is at the game or how good other people think he is, especially the latter.

Since I'm in a ranting mood, I'm going to transition this blog post into something I think a lot of you will probably enjoy: Another gripe I have about Reach. It's no secret that I absolutely hate the bloom in Halo: Reach. Again, I understand what Bungie was trying to do, but they implemented it incorrectly and it wasn't even necessary in the first place. However, there's actually a reason for my passionate hatred of the bloom besides that it horrifically fucks up the gameplay. This reason is that it further confuses those endlessly annoying people who think they know what Halo skill is but don't.

From many people's point of view, a person's shot is determined in a very simple way: If the player has a good shots hit to shots fired ratio, he has a good shot. The higher that ratio is, the better that player is. This may seem like a logically sound method and this is a significant portion of what determines the caliber of a player's shot; but here's the problem; it's only a PORTION. Halo is a very 3 dimensional game, which is why it pisses me off when players think this, similar to how a lot of players mainly judge a player's skill off of his k/d and don't realize that there's a lot more to the game than just kills. When it comes to rating a player's shot, one has to also factor in a myriad of other factors such as overall quality of the opponents, quality of the opponent's evasive maneuvering (strafing), pressure of the given situation, the time frame for viable shots in each situation, and the trajectory of the opponent (hitting an opponent going mancannon is obviously harder than hitting an opponent just running across top-mid). I've seen many comments on pro gameplays calling their BRs bad because of this pure shots hit/shots fired-to-rate-aiming-ability mentality. These comments are, of course, stupid because they failed to factor in that a lot of the missed shots were cover fire (shots intended to merely suppress the opponent, not hit them), from under pressure, or were against opponents with a good strafe. Also, when it comes to sniping, a lot of people fail to factor in that when it comes to competitive play, it doesn't matter how you get the job done; winning's winning. I remember posting a Naded Pit TS gameplay a while back in which he went 15-0 with a ton of great snipes. However, a lot of people were calling his sniper pretty lackluster because he missed a ton of shots. What they didn't realize is that Naded is very liberal when it comes to sniper ammo usage like a lot of pros, a behavior that makes complete sense. In the very fast paced world of high-level play, players don't live that long. So if you get snipe, might as well take every possible opportunity to land some crazy, nearly-impossible shot; you're probably not going to be able to use all of the ammo before you die anyways. This is what Naded was doing in the gameplay. Because of this and the fact that he was in a position to consistently grab every new sniper, he took every shot that he could because a kill's a kill, no matter how sloppy it is.

Now how does this all relate to bloom in Reach? Because bloom FORCES even the best of players to miss shots. Like I've said many, many times before: Halo: Reach's bloom is bad mechanic because it makes it so that relying on blind luck is sometimes the best option. Again, your goal in a video game isn't to dress up your kills and land every shot; it's to eliminate threats as quickly as possible, because every second a threat is alive and in your sights places you at risk. But again, many players don't realize this because they foolishly rely on the shots hit/shots fired method to judge a player's shot. With the bloom in Reach, it's now even easier for these players to escape into their ivory-tower and label what they perceive as bad DMRs. Every time I see comments of "Bad DMR" on a high level gameplay because there's a lot of spamming within it, I want to cry because:

1) The philosophy off of which they base this opinion is flawed and chock full of holes for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier.
2) The IRONY

The cool thing about dumb things within this world is that they're often coupled with irony. While this can often be quite funny, it's also just plain sad a lot of the time as well. These comments are definitely an example of dumb things coupled with irony, but unfortunately for me, it falls under the "just plain sad" category instead of the funny one. So why is this all ironic? Because whenever someone posts this type of comment in this indirect but obvious way of attempting to assert some sort of superiority when it comes to Halo skill, they're showing the world how they're the complete opposite of superior when it comes to Halo skill. These are the players who take the one-track method of pacing out everything, failing to re-evaluate the benefits of spamming as the range of their target changes. While these people most likely have clean shots that look great in montages, they're actually BAD players for doing this. Again, a good player realizes that a kill's a kill and a win's a win. "Dressing up" your kills like this isn't the "skillful" way of doing something, it's the inefficient, foolish way. So for all of the people who do this, think they're good players for doing this, and negatively judge others because of this, I have a couple things to say to you:

1) You're doing it wrong. If you're going to judge something as insignificant as a person's skill at a video game primarily intended for recreational purposes, at least learn what the hell you're talking about before doing so.
2) It's a video game, chill.
3) The people who make Halo montages and put them on YouTube most likely don't give a shit about how good they are at it, so there's no point in doing so anyways.

Peace.

Rebecca Black's "Friday" - A Stunning Masterpiece and Defining Work of Our Generation

2011-03-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

So the other day, I was browsing YouTube, looking for thought-provoking videos presenting revolutionary complex ideas, and I had the luck to stumble upon this... incredible gem of a video. Here it is:

Isn't it just... beautiful? Words cannot begin to describe the endless depth and intellectual complexity behind this masterpiece. Trying to fathom this brilliant song all at once would simply overwhelm and brutally shatter our minds, so we must over it piece by piece. Here are the lyrics:

(Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark)
Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Right out the gate, we see a fantastic demonstration of Rebecca Black's incredible vocals and never-ending genius. Her voice is so smoothly controlled that it's almost as if it were being manipulated by some sort of advanced audio editing software, a dazzling breath-taking feat that the average human can only dream of accomplishing. Stand aside Mariah Carey; there's a new sheriff in town. But what about the lyrics? As hard as it may be to believe, the lyrics are at least a match, if not greater, in terms of caliber to the amazing vocals. While the lyrics of most songs just dive right into the actual lyrics of the song, aggressively taking the listener by surprise and putting them at risk of a dangerous heart attack, Rebecca Black cleverly builds up to the remainder of her lyrical genius by merely giving us a tantalizing taste of her superior writing ability. Her use of the simple yet brilliant stretching of the word, "yeah", a revolutionary, never-before-seen technique which is sure to catch on in the future, leaves us on the edge of our seats for more. I tip my hat to Rebecca Black for her adept usage of dramatic tension to build up to what truly matters, the song's core. While most music nowadays seems to have forgotten what an introduction is, Rebecca Black provides us with the enticing appetizer we need to get into the mood for the amazing entree.

7am, waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein’ everything, the time is goin’
Tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushin’
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

7 lines in and I'm already overwhelmed. This song is already bursting at the seams with original, non-conformist brilliance. While most songs tell of over-the-top unrealistic stories, this song concentrates on what's real, and consequently, what's relevant: A teenage girl waking up, eating food, and seeing her friends. You may say, "Wait, this is pretty much the unedited, everyday thoughts of the average American teenage girl unnecessarily put into song form using shitty auto-tune and a generic beat!", but this is what people don't get. Yes, the lyrics are the everyday thoughts of the average American teenage girl, but this is why these lyrics are absolutely brilliant. While songs nowadays are focusing on these abstract, naively unrealistic scenarios such as finding true love and making the world a better place, this song focuses on something that desperately needs attention nowadays: Real America. Sometimes we need to just stop and appreciate the beauty of the ordinary, and this song is clearly exactly what people need in order to do just that. The world has gotten to a point in which we've almost completely let go of reality and immersed ourselves in the dangerous world of hope, theory, and other abstract objects. This stunning masterpiece is the much-needed wake-up call we needed, a tether which binds us to what truly matters, in the form of a lonely voice representing a tragically underrepresented demographic: Female American teenagers.

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

Even though this song is on the cutting edge of lyrical brilliance, see how it isn't afraid to use modern slang such as "kickin", modern linguistic devices such as 'g' dropping in the form of "Sittin'", and portmanteaus in the form of "Gotta" (Got to). These lyrics further cement this song's role as a voice of real America by continuing to describe what seems to be a bland occurrence, an American teenager getting into a car with her friends. But notice that she doesn't just get into the car, sing about it, and leave it at that. Before this verse ends, she asks the profound question, "Which seat can I take?" Keep in mind that her friends are "kickin' in the front seat" AND "sittin' in the back seat", so the car seems to be full. Here, we are presented with a logical paradox that is undoubtedly a deeper metaphor for all of the deep, seemingly unsolvable scenarios for which there seem to be no good answer. Is the torture of an individual justified if it's done to protect the lives of many? Is it justified when a major political leader lies in order to prevent the onset of mass hysteria and chaos? The infinitely deep, impossible nature of all of these deep questions is magically captured by this single lyric. Astounding.

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin’ down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend

Finally, we understand why this song is entitled, "Friday", as we find out that the experiences detailed by this song take place on a Friday. Again, this song simply shocks us with its paradoxical use of utter simplicity to add to its never-ending complexity. I was simply amazed by the start of the song, so naturally, I was wondering if the title, "Friday", had some sort of deeper meaning like the rest of the song so far had. Was it an anagram for "ridayf?" Was it supposed to be spelled, "Fry Day?", as if it were making some sort of Futurama reference? Prior to these lyrics, I was viciously racking my brain for answers, trying to fathom this deep conundrum, but in the end, it turns out that it's entitled, "Friday", because it's about the day Friday. Brilliant. Just brilliant. Never saw it coming.

But let's look at the rest of it. Again, this video reminds us of its purpose as it further completes its vividly accurate portrayal of American youth, using more 'g' dropping and the hip, happening phrase, "getting down". The song is so accurate that one almost forgets that he's listening to a fictional scenario instead of some recording of a bunch of everyday teenagers getting together and doing everyday things, boringly narrating everything in a hilariously unnecessary songified manner as they do these things. Now look at these lyrics which are 2 lines apart:

"Gotta get down on Friday" AND "Gettin’ down on Friday"

Notice a difference? No? Well, look again. Find it? Correct, in the first one, Rebecca Black says "Gotta get" and in the second she says "Gettin'", flawlessly transitioning from a future imperative to a present progressive verb tense. Rebecca Black clearly understands that phrases lose their impact when they're repeated, so she subtlety changed the form in which it was presented, preserving her original message while keeping it fresh. As for what her original message is, how can one not love it? Rebecca Black delivers yet another refreshing, brilliant blow of originality wrapped in a deceiving case of simplicity as she talks about how she wants to "get down" on Friday, pointing out a phenomenon that desperately needs more attention in the media (music, movies, you name it): Teenagers like to have fun on the weekend.

BAM! That is the sound of the gears in your mind which randomly sound like hammers finally clicking. Amazing right? How could us simpletons not realize such a simple concept? Up until now, having fun on the weekend was a phenomenon thought to be exclusive to old people and babies, but with this stunning revelation, it all makes sense now. Why are teenagers so eager to leave class on Friday? What do teenagers even have to do on the weekend? These questions have been unanswered since the beginning of time, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of brilliant philosophers stumped. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle: None of these brilliant men could solve these dilemmas. But now, with this incredibly intelligent look into the life of Rebecca Black and her friends, even us average human beings can begin unraveling the impossible enigma that is the American teenager.

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin’ forward to the weekend

Once again, we are treated to the never-stale treat of g-dropping, this time with a return of a brilliant technique used in the very beginning of the song, the use of the word "yeah" as part of the lyrics. Notice that Black doesn't simply copy the technique from the first part of the song; she inserts it almost as a side-note to the current lyrics. It's always great to see a return of something beloved, but it's also terrible to see something beloved return so many times that it becomes overdone and stale. Black brilliantly sidesteps this problem by merely making a reference to her past genius, serving it with an inconspicuous side of subtlety. Once again, Black demonstrates a powerful mastery of balance and lyrical complexity.

Then we have, "Fun, fun, fun, fun", another lyric of unfathomable depth. Here, Black realizes that subtlety would be ineffective, correctly deducing repetition as the proper device of choice. By repeating a phenomenon as universal as "fun" 4 times, she is reminding us of the essence of life, which is to have fun. Notice how she doesn't try to sound pretentious by using a word such as "enjoyment" or "euphoria". She goes straight to the point, uttering the 3 letter combination that we all know and are all certainly fond of: "fun". But look carefully at what follows this line:

"Lookin’ forward to the weekend"

Not only do we get a crystal clear look into the murky mysteries surrounding American teenage life, we get another metaphor that represents something that is deeper than all of us. On the surface, it looks like Black is saying that she's merely looking forward to the weekend, but knowing this song, she obviously means something on a more profound level. She obviously isn't just saying that she can't wait for the weekend to begin; she's further developing her capture of the meaning of life from the previous line. Looking forward to the weekend is a metaphor for all of the great things that we wait for, the things which ultimately define the human experience. The couple seconds of waiting a loyal boyfriend has to go through for his girlfriend's "yes" after he presents her with the beautiful engagement ring he sank six months of his salary into, the hours a loyal husband has to wait gripping his wife's hand as he waits for her to stop being in labor and bring his first child into the world: All of these beautiful things are represented by this single, deceptively powerful line.

7:45, we’re drivin’ on the highway
Cruisin’ so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right
I got this, you got this
Now you know it

Here, the song takes a turn from being down-to-earth and simple to being abstract, surreal, and paradoxical, injecting the song with a daring unexpected swerve, further characterizing its brilliance like the twist at the end of "Sixth Sense" starring Bruce Willis. While these lyrics seem to continue what seems to a perfectly ordinary narrative, upon further analysis, we see that these lyrics are not as simple as they seem and actually take a dive into the surreal realm of the completely nonsensical. Let's take a look at this lyric:

"Cruisin’ so fast, I want time to fly"

After hours of painful, tireless deciphering, I translated this line into plain English: "I'm in car that is traveling so quickly that I want time to go by faster." What? Why would she want time to go by faster because she's in a car going at a high velocity? What connection could these two things possibly have in common? Also, from the video, it looks like she's enjoying the car ride, so why would she possibly want the experience to just fly by instead of savoring every possibly moment? Also, doesn't she say this somewhere down the line?:

"I don’t want this weekend to end"

So why would she want time to fly when it seems like she has every reason not to? Because she doesn't. This line is in the song because it doesn't make sense. Because this line makes absolutely no sense, it makes us think and question what people deem as logically coherent, the very fabric of reality itself. My 12th grade English teacher often said that "great literature is the question minus the answer". Similarly, Rebecca Black's "Friday" is a question minus the answer. So what is the question that this song is posing? I don't know. Why? Because that question is actually yet another question minus the answer. That's how insanely deep this song is. Now let's move on to the rest of this portion of the song, specifically when she starts talking about a mysterious "it".

You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right
I got this, you got this
Now you know it

What exactly are all of these pronouns referring to? What is "it"? What is "this"? Let's look at the first line again:

"You know what it is"

Black tells us that we know what "it" is, yet she gives no clue as to what "it" is. But again, let's think of terms of great literature: "Great literature is the question minus the answer". There's really no "it". Black is holding up a mirror which reflects the innermost part of our being; what "it" is depends on who we are. The "it" is whatever we find to be "fun", the joyful activities that define our lives and provide us with the bliss that we, as humans, all need from time to time. For some of us, it's reading a great book. For others, it's playing basketball. For others, it may be listening to beautiful, thought-provoking music like this masterpiece.

She then continues the conundrum, telling us that she's got "this" and that we've got it too, egging us on to solve the puzzle. And then from out of nowhere, she says:

"My friend is by my right"

This may seem like a completely random statement of an obvious fact, but again, there's more to it than meets the eye, or ear rather. Similar to those hilarious, spontaneous Old Spice commercials which are chocked full of random statements that come out of absolutely nowhere, this video takes us by the hand on a wonderful journey into the world of the surreal, forcing us to question the fundamentals of our existence and the world we perceive to be around us. Like Socrates once said, "Question everything." She then abruptly brings us back into the world of the song, repeating that she and you have "got this" and that you now "know it", obviously referring to the spontaneous journey of self-discovery that you just embarked on and returned from with a newly found epiphany, the epiphany of what "it" is for you.

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

And yet another positing of the the brilliant question, "Which seat can I take?" I don't know Rebecca; I simply don't know. Maybe when I get much older and much wiser will I be able to solve this impossible conundrum.

[Chorus]

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday

Gettin’ down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin’ forward to the weekend

Here, Black shows that she isn't completely above conventional music standards, repeating entire verses to strengthen her points and ideas. Given the immense depth and complexity of the video, this retracing of previous material is direly needed and adroitly placed.

[Bridge]

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after...wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

When I heard these lyrics, I was completely blown away once again. Again, these lines may seem like a completely pointless statement of blatantly obviously fact, but once again, Black is blurring the lines separating the abstract and reality, challenging us to question everything. Telling us the order of the days of the week may seem as useful as telling a Harvard Mathematics major that 2 + 2 = 4, but these words actually serve as a tether to harshly pull us back into the cold clutches of reality, preventing us from becoming lost in the abstract realm she plunged us into earlier talking about "it". Similar to how the totems in Christopher Nolan's "Inception" prevent the characters from becoming lost within the world of the dream, these random statements of the most basic of facts keep our minds from becoming lost in the world of the theoretical and imaginary. She then cleverly plays off of this delicate balance by making us think that the song is stuck on a one second loop, repeating the word "we" twice instead of making the line flow through the use of something more logically and musically coherent. By doing something that usually doesn't happen in music, we have to ask ourselves whether or not we're actually in reality. Similar to the perpetual spinning of the top in "Inception", her repetition of the word "we" represents how we can never be sure of anything in this world, even what we deem as our very existence. In the end, all of us may be living in some sort of Matrix. We can never know.

And for the last line of this portion, Black takes us back to reality by reminding us of a sad phenomenon all of us have certainly become accustomed to: How good things must always end. Nothing lasts forever, and with this powerful line, Black takes a daring, commendable risk, reminding us of the finite nature of our very existence and everything in it.

[Rap Verse]

R-B, Rebecca Black
So chillin’ in the front seat (In the front seat)
In the back seat (In the back seat)
I’m drivin’, cruisin’ (Yeah, yeah)
Fast lanes, switchin’ lanes
Wit’ a car up on my side (Woo!)
(C’mon) Passin’ by is a school bus in front of me
Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream
Check my time, it’s Friday, it’s a weekend
We gonna have fun, c’mon, c’mon, y’all

For the most part, this set of lyrics seems to revert back to the presentation of a much needed window into American teenage life. Notice how the first thing the rapper does is point out what Rebecca Black's initials are, providing some interesting sociopolitical commentary on a powerful trend within the next generation: The need to shorten everything. Below are a few of the many examples of our youth trying to expedite everything:

"I don't want to wait 2 minutes for my song to download, I only want to wait 1!"

"Why say "what's" and "up" and you can just say "sup"?"

Here, Black is obviously trying to tell the youth and anybody else who believes in this philosophy to simply slow it down and enjoy life. One day, we will look back at all these minor grievances we had with these slow processes and realize the silliness of it all, recognizing that these slow ways of doing things are one of the many things that represent the simpler time that we all secretly want to get back to in the midst of all this modern day technology and pop culture. Remember, Black previously said this:

"I don’t want this weekend to end"

Similar to how the theme of Black not wanting the weekend to end and is clearly going to cherish every last second of it, the rapper's follow up in the form of the automatic pointing out of Black's initials bears the simple yet powerful message of, "Just enjoy life.", reminding us that, in the end, all of these small annoyances in our lives contribute to the wonderful mosaic that is the human experience, similar to Fridays for Rebecca Black.

We then delve once again into the surreal as we hear:

"Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream."

The only thing that can "make tick tock" is a watch or some other time-keeping device, most likely some archaic one, but the song bears no mention of such an object prior to this line. However, the interesting thing here is that the song isn't referring to an actual concrete clock; it's referring to the metaphorical, innate clock that dwells within each of us, the clock that we swear we can hear ticking in our ears when we're waiting for something that we have been looking forward to for a very, very long time. In this case, the singer is referring to the upcoming Friday or some party he needs to get to, but again, these things are merely a representation of something much broader, an embodiment of all of the things we look forward to. The wait is so unbearable for this poor rapper that he simply wants to scream from the agony. A word as powerful as "scream" may initially seem to not fit well into this incredibly relaxed song, but keep in mind that this isn't your ordinary pop song. Unlike the mainstream garbage we label as "music" nowadays like Justin Bieber's "Baby", this song doesn't pull any punches, using the only word that can possibly describe the immense magnitude of the suffering humanity goes through waiting for those things that bring us joy.

[Chorus]

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin’ down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin’ forward to the weekend

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin’ down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin’ forward to the weekend

And just as you think the song is going to ruin itself with all of the repetition, it cuts off at the perfect time, right before your mind transitions from, "Dang, this is deep.", to "Holy fuck, this song is fucking annoying and terrible." Black starts off the song strong and here, she gracefully brings it in for a touchdown, not adding any more new material to leave us pondering about everything she brought up earlier.

Simply put, Rebecca Black's "Friday" is a beacon of hope in today's depressingly pathetic music industry, an industry that is absolutely plagued with insipid lyrics, cliches, and hopelessly over-the-top auto tune. Unlike the clear majority of today's "music", "Friday" is loaded with profound insights, which range from being philosophical to socioeconomic in nature, and talks about material that truly matters, masterfully presenting all of its complex themes and ideas in an easily accessible form so that even the common man and woman can absorb its full impact. Rebecca Black is definitely an up-and-coming musical prodigy, and she is the voice our underrepresented generation desperately needs. Here's to hoping that one day we will see another instance of Rebecca Black's genius, an instance that is as good, if not better, than the masterpiece that is "Friday". Peace.

A Bunch of Complaints Regarding Montages + A Call for Originality (Part 1)

2011-03-11T22:23:00.000-08:00

Right now we're facing two pretty bad trends. Halo: Reach footage, especially social footage, is pretty much dead, and Halo 3 social footage is almost dead as well. First, let's talk about Halo: Reach.

There's an epidemic right now folks. Halo: Reach multikills are now heavily dominated by essentially only 3 types of clips and their variations:

1) Massive social multikills (almost always with sniper) from atop the small tower in Pinnacle
2) Massive social multikills (almost always with sniper) from atop the box leading up to sniper spawn on Cage
3) Some sort of multkill from enemy Carbine on Sanctuary in MLG (almost always with sniper)

While I hate people who are always throwing Halo 3 > Halo: Reach in my face, I have to admit that Halo: Reach does have some pretty massive flaws, ESPECIALLY when it comes to maps. Simply put, most of the maps suck, and as a result, there are pretty much only 3-4 maps in montages nowadays. To further add to the problem, the slowing down of the DMR via the bloom makes the sniper rifle even more of a must to pull of any real action.

However, this trend is not only the fault of the game, it's the fault of montage kids as well. First of all, montage kids are now REALLY good at what they do, especially for social. Back in the day, Halo 2's much faster pace and stronger BR/Sniper made it much better for competitive play and consequently, competitive montage footage, so MLG customs dominated the scene during Halo 2's time. Social footage wasn't nearly as big in Halo 2 as it was in Halo 3, so when Halo 3 rolled around and people converted to social, it was almost ompletely new territory for them. Because of this, we saw an interesting evolution of social footage in the Halo 3 era. In the beginning, plain BR overkills in multi-team were good and clean sniper overkills in multi-team were sick. Pretty much anything above a killtrocity was gold. But as time went on and montage kids got better at their craft, these standards began to rise and formulas began to be formed. Spawn camping top mid on Narrows was discovered. Spawn camping on Last Resort atop the tower overlooking beach spawns were discovered. Looking tower side on The Pit from Sword Room for spawn kills was discovered. Social clips became less of a test of staying calm and playing well in the face of the endless spontaneity that is social, and more of a test to see who could follow formulas better, these almost lists of directions that almost always led to a decent clip. I've played with montage kids quite a lot, and on Last Resort, this happened almost every single time we spawned in the base instead of at the beach:

Step 1) Montage kid spawns.
Step 2) Montage kid goes to Camp Froman, sometimes with a mongoose, and grabs sniper.
Step 3) Go the tower overlooking beach spawns somehow. Sometimes grab the grav lift underneath Camp Froman and use it to lift up into the cove with the bubble shield spawn to expedite process.
Step 4) Look where the initial spawns are on Beach and kill anyone there.
Step 5) Turn around and look where the palm tree is, picking off anyone there as well.
Step 6) Periodically drop down to take their sniper ammo.
Step 7) Repeat steps 4-6
Step 8) ????
Step 9) PROFIT!!!

While there is obviously some skill in this and a killionaire following this formula is pretty sweet and definitely something I could never do in a million years, seeing the exact same sequences played out over and over again ALWAYS gets boring, no matter how incredibly impressive it may have been at one point in time or how incredibly hard it would be for the average player to pull off. However, in the beginning of Halo 3, this problem wasn't actually that bad because there was a solution to this that didn't involve abandoning these formulas:

Just get bigger multikills following them.

And it worked. For most people, including me, we didn't care that the exact same sequence of moves was being carried out each time, we just went, "HOLY SHIT, A KILLIMANJARO!", or whatever. When Kampy got that no scope jaro exterm x3 doing the Last Resort thing I just mentioned, I almost had a seizure; it was that unbelievable. That spot on Last Resort was nowhere near a secret even in that day and age, but again, it was amazing because while people were still struggling to pull off killtaculars and killtrocities from that spot, Kampy did it for the fucking jaro on a guy off the spawn with a sick far range no scope for the triple extermination. But as time went on, montage kids got better at what they did and this "topping the multikill standards of the time" quickly went out the window. Why? Because the limit was reached. Killionaire is the highest multikill medal in Halo 3, and now they're average at best. They're still treats, but unlike in the beginning of Halo 3 when a sword killionaire was godly, they're nothing to get that excited about anymore unless they contain nothing but under pressure no scopes at no shields. True, you can go over a streak of 10, but you don't even get the medal or announcer voice after the first killionaire and that pretty much kills it. Halo 2 at least had the jaro medal and announcer pop up again with each continuation of the multikill, but even in Halo 2, multiple jaros in FFA snipes or whatever got boring and annoying pretty damn quickly.

Now enter Reach. Even though it's a completely new game, the method behind getting clips in social remained the same for the most part, which is:

1) Get sniper and DMR/BR

2) Kick ass

And with the BR equivalent being nerfed via the bloom, this formula is now even more boring. To make matters worse, bloom kind of kills DMR montage footage (at least for me anyways), because it makes them seem sloppy. You often times don't have any chance continuing a multikill if you try to pace it out, so bloom has shown up in almost every DMR clip so far, and it's just weird for me knowing that some of the clip was determined by blind luck. Anyways, because the method essentially remained the same, pretty much all of the social experience that montage kids acquired in Halo 3 carried over to Halo: Reach. So unlike the slow evolution we saw in Halo 3 concerning multikills that took place over many years, we had a series of freakishly rapid and massive jumps, leading to jaros becoming commonplace a merely couple months into the game. It also doesn't help that bullets actually register now with the hit-scan, making huge "shooting gallery" sniper multikills even easier.

Back to maps. Without a doubt, I can say that Halo: Reach has the shittiest collection of maps out of all the Halo games. Again, as much as I hate to agree with the die-hard Halo 3 > Halo: Reach people, they're definitely right about this. And not only are the maps bad, they're almost insulting because it seems like Bungie put little to no effort into them. Half of them were done in Forge World, a lot of them are heavily influenced by the campaign, and pretty much all of the good maps are just maps they ported from the previous Halo games. I'm perfectly fine with good maps being ported from game to game, but if you're going to do that, at least go all the way and port everything, not only port some of them in a desperate attempt to make it seem like you're trying. Sanctuary and Pinnacle are awesome, but Lockout, Midship, and Wizard/Warlock would be kickass too. As to why this is killing montages, it's simple. People hate playing bad maps. Not only does the general population avoid them because they're bad, lowering the chances of clips happening on them because they're played on less, it's hard to do cool things on shitty maps, because they're, well, shit. A montage kid would almost certainly get more clips playing 1 game on Asylum/Sanctuary than he would playing 10 games of Spire or something.

MLG has it especially bad. There really is only 1 good map in MLG and that's Sanctuary. I wish I was joking about this, but I really am not. I was relatively disappointed with the maps in Halo 3 concerning competitive play, but Halo 3 had those maps that were decent but not great which seemed good enough relatively due to the lack of good stuff and ended up making their way into competitive play and working. Halo: Reach, not so much. Ivory Tower is OK I guess, and it did make it into MLG back in the Halo 2 days, but it was eventually cut for a reason and I hate how the new textures mess with your game. Countdown is just bad. Closed maps that are mainly hallways are bad because it prevents team shooting and general teamwork, and Countdown is like 75% hallways. Closed maps in general suck because they made it harder to maneuver, and this leads to grenades being overpowered (and grenades are already overpowered in Reach so this is just... ugh). Zealot sucks due to the same problem except it's not hallways (emphasis on the fact that it's plural), it's just a massive donut of ONE hallway. Sanctuary is the only good map in MLG for Reach, and this is evident by the kind -of-comical-but-mostly-sad auto choosing of the map every time it comes up as an option. Whenever Sanctuary comes up for me in MLG, it gets 5-6 votes within the first 2 seconds almost every single time. Take a look at this montage:

Notice something? You guessed it; there is a shit TON of Sanctuary footage in it, and I don't blame the ACL community for this. The sniper is by far the easiest way to pull off any real action in Reach, and given Sanctuary's incredible openness relative to the other maps in MLG, it's by far the easiest place to pull off any real action. MLG is naturally limited as a source for montage footage as well, so the fact that Sanctuary is the only good map in it greatly saddens me. It's nice to take a break from social montages every once in a while, mainly because they're often fairly formulaic, but it doesn't make me much happier to escape from formulaic and go to: Halo: Reach Sanctuary - Montage X.

Response to Zach - Part 1

2011-03-05T18:13:00.001-08:00

Well, a long time ago, I posted this article, and surprisingly, I got an incredibly well-written, intelligent, eloquent response to it from a guy named Zach. For those of you who didn't read it, the article was about the conflict between science and religion and religion's pointlessness. This article is actually one of my least favorites because it isn't hashed out enough in many areas and it's too aggressive in some, so I'm actually not that surprised that it elicited a response from somebody. I started writing a response to this comment almost immediately, but I ended up putting it off for forever because I can't follow things through very well. Anyways, here's the response:

"For the most part, this article is well-reasoned and generally draws conclusions I agree with. However, there are a number of statements that simply cannot be supported, and that's where your argument trods through a bit of a gray area in order to prove itself.

The first one that jumps out at me is, "The universe never has any intentions." Quite simply, this statement cannot be verified. Firstly, one could make an argument about the definition of 'universe'. Can one define 'universe' without a complete understanding of it? Any incomplete answer is a generalization, which means your statement is unverifiable. That paragraph more or less becomes unreasoning at this point. "The fundamental laws of science" therefore rest upon something else. I think that you would say, and I would agree, that they rest upon other fundamental natural laws. Avoiding a discussion about whether complete universal (sic) laws can ever be completely understood, the point is that the unknown still exists, and it can be explained by God. Why humans? As you say, an "event", but why not God?

Second is your statement that, "Objective morality fails." I see and agree with arguments or archaic-ness. However, does a human intrinsically know not to kill another human? (Disclaimer: I haven't read your evolutionary morality article yet.) I think the answer is pretty clearly know. Killing another male for "his" female makes sense on an individual biological level, which is precisely as far as we naturally look. Rules that you proclaim as "blindingly obvious" represent a societal progression of no little import. Today, society gives us these rules in a way that they do appear blindingly obvious. Does this make religion obsolete? No, as moral questions still need answering, and to do so objectively is both convenient and practical. By convenient, I mean that it has the ability to permeate the public consciousness and come into contact with many minds. By practical, I mean it allows simplicity in what is otherwise an infinitely complex subjective answer. Every moral problem is answered objectively to some degree, even if we don't acknowledge the objective basis we use to make our choice. Therefore, new issues are well-benefited by the development of some kind of publicly acknowledged objective answer. Not to say that there cannot be variety. Think about the question: Should gays be allowed to marry? Yes and No's all across the board are argued for a variety of reasons. Religion is to varying degrees a faucet to answer this objective question. As humans, we like the thoughts of another to provide us some guidance. We are social animals,and other's opinions affect us in a profound way. Structuring one's life within the context of a religious community also allows a forum for one to refine ideas.

Where I DO see an argument for religion's changing nature is in the rise of mass communication and a greater degree of homogeneous thought that enables a rise of alternate forums of a different nature and a larger scope than the aforementioned religious community. I think that you have embraced new forums, and for that reason it is easy to proclaim the older ones obsolete. After all, you don't rely on religion at all for your objective moral base. My essential point is that there is still very much a place for religion in the world/society. As far as the "chosen people" thing goes, I think having a purpose is necessary, and that you (and I) determine that purpose in a different way. At the same time, I think there are more destructive things to draw purpose from than religion, and who are we to condemn "them"?

I think this fits in well with the final paragraph and your statement that, "Religion is a crutch." I actually agree with this statement, but I don't see it as derogatory. Faith is helpful to the human mind. Literally, actually. A complete lack of a sense of purpose can actually be a severe mental disorder. That said, there is a clear distinction between "sense of purpose" and faith. To some degree, religion equates these two things. This effect is profound, and in terms of "living life to the fullest", one can make a significant argument for religion aiding this objective.

As you say, faith can be achieved without religion. However, religion helps, simply. There is no precise replacement for religion, although whether a replacement is even desirable is debatable. My argument is that religion is unique in a good way, and it provides something that science can never provide, even with a mindset shift or a reordering of priorities. The content of one's "self-determined" objectives is important, so while the importance of something like everlasting life is self-determined, the mental effect of giving importance to this thing is irreplaceable. What I'm trying to allude at is something indescribable, and I hope you can have a good discussion with a thoughtful person of faith; I've found that there is an otherwise incommunicable component of faith that is worth preserving, even with all of the evils that comes with religion.

Curious for your response. Please point out any logical fallacies, I'm sure there are several. My thoughts are pretty cluttered and I need to get some sleep :)"

And now, let's break it down.

"For the most part, this article is well-reasoned and generally draws conclusions I agree with."

Yay.

"However, there are a number of statements that simply cannot be supported, and that's where your argument trods through a bit of a gray area in order to prove itself."

Damnit.

"The first one that jumps out at me is, "The universe never has any intentions." Quite simply, this statement cannot be verified.

Technically, no statement can ever be verified, and there's no such thing as absolute fact. I would draw from Plato's "The Cave", but for the sake of people being able to understand this article, I'll use an example that's probably more well known among, well, everybody, and it is "The Matrix". Similar to the The Matrix, it's impossible to know whether or not your reality transcends all others or is the only one. Simply put, you can't know for sure whether or not you're living real life or in a Matrix. Different realities can have different rules, so based off of my previous statement, it's impossible to know whether or not something is the absolute truth. If we were to argue using the fact that we really just can't prove anything, then any sort of debate would be utterly pointless because it would just end up with, "Well, we can't know stuff for sure, so who the hell wins?" So, for the sake of any sort of argument, one must set parameters for the evaluation of any sort of statement. In this case, it is the universe as humanity perceives it. However, even with these parameters, nothing can really be proved. Science is constantly changing, and things we once thought were logical are constantly transforming into things we now generally see as illogical. In the end, the merit of a statement (I guess statement isn't the correct term. Let's say hypothesis), is determined by how well it is supported using the most modern of logical and scientific norms, and of course, general observation. Right now, we have something called "the burden of proof." When a concept that is superficially illogical is created, it is the creator's job to make a case for the validity of this concept. Every concept has two sides (not true and true), and the opposite of these concepts is defaulted to initially because it is the more logical side. An example is the existence of Santa. Could Santa exist? Of course. Is it highly improbable? Yes. This is why people do not believe in Santa. Right now, the universe isn't considered as a biological organism because it doesn't meet the standards set by the scientific community for biological organisms. Inanimate things are incapable of thinking, and thinking is necessary to form intentions. Therefore, the universe cannot have any intentions. But can the universe somehow be a biological organism? Hell, maybe inanimate objects are capable of thinking. But again, these are incredibly outlandish statements, so it is the job of people who disagree with my statement to give some sort case for these hypotheses and consequently, their position. Otherwise, my statement must be defaulted to similar to how people default to the conclusion that Santa doesn't exist. My use of the statement "The universe never has any intentions" as a logical building block is the equivalent of me using "Santa doesn't exist" as a logical building block or "Gravity exists" as a logical building block.

"Firstly, one could make an argument about the definition of 'universe'."

I've never really understood how people claim that definitions can be argued. Definitions, are, well, by definition, set in stone. We create definitions by assigning names to certain things, not the other way around. When we see something that doesn't have a name, we give it one. It's not like definitions are just words floating around with certain meanings attached to them which we discover without these attached meanings, putting us on some quest to find a meaning whenever we find a word. One day, someone saw a black and white animal with udders, realized that it didn't have a name, and they defined it as a "cow". What didn't happen is that somebody found the word "cow" so he embarked on a quest to find out what a "cow" was. One day, somebody realized that the entirety of existence didn't have a name so he defined it as the "universe". The reason why people argue over the definitions of words is because we learn what words mean from a variety of sources, and sources are bound to differ similar to how folktales slowly change over time as they're passed down from generation to generation. Dictionaries generally have the same definitions, but they're not the same word for word and the difference of just one word changes meanings for people. Everyone gets the same general idea from dictionaries, but what's gleaned from these different definitions will still differ slightly. Also, people learn the meaning of words through non-objective (non-dictionary) sources, primarily other people. This accounts for the different connotations or "flavor" we get from words. For example, skinny and slender mean essentially the same thing. However, we get a much more positive vibe from slender because that's generally how it's used: Positively and as a descriptor of one's stellar physique. Skinny, on the other hand, is a much more neutral term even though it describes the same attribute. Definitions are objective; it's just that they've been blurred over time due to human error and human subjectivity, which is why we argue about them. Anyways, most of this is completely irrelevant anyways because most people have a same general idea of what "universe" means, which is the entirety of existence, and this is really all that's necessary. The waters are indeed muddy, but they're clear enough for the sake of debating. Also, settling on a set definition of "universe" for the sake of this debate would be cool.

"Can one define 'universe' without a complete understanding of it? Any incomplete answer is a generalization, which means your statement is unverifiable. That paragraph more or less becomes unreasoning at this point."

The first part of this argument is sort of unclear, and I'm not really sure how it works. My answer is "yes", and I don't really see why not. People still don't understand everything about the brain, yet we still call it the brain. Understanding merely improves definitions and makes them more detailed; it isn't necessary for the creation of one. For example, a basic definition of the brain would be, "The organ responsible for the controlling of the mental and physical processes of the body." This isn't an invalid definition; it is merely a basic one. A better definition of the brain would go over its individual parts like the cerebellum, the chemical processes that happen within it like the transferring of electromagnetic pulses through neurons and across synapses, and all of other good stuff I learned in 9^th grade biology. This would definitely be a more complex definition and generally would be considered a better one (I add this in because "better" is a completely subjective term), but this doesn’t mean that its more basic counterpart is false or invalid.

"The fundamental laws of science" therefore rest upon something else. I think that you would say, and I would agree, that they rest upon other fundamental natural laws."

Actually, I do not believe this because this leads us down an infinite regression. Those other fundamental natural laws would have to rest upon something as well, and whatever they rest on will have to rest on something else too, etc, etc… In the end, every explanation in life has to end with an infinite regression (ok, you can’t really end with something that just keeps going but you know what I mean) or an illogical truncation, otherwise known as “Just because” or “That’s just the way it works.” Here’s an example.

“Why does this ball fall to the ground after I throw I up in the air?”

“Because every object which bears some sort of mass possesses an innate force of attraction known as gravity. Therefore, the earth you are currently on bears a massive force of attraction, which brings everything that is airborne, down. This is known as a gravitational pull.”

“Well, why does a gravitational pull come with anything bearing mass?”

“In order for something to have mass, it must be composed of miniscule building blocks known as atoms. Atoms are subject to the 4 fundamental forces of our universe: The strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and of course, gravity.

“Well, then how do these fundamental forces work? Why can’t mass result in an innate force of repelling?”

“Umm… That’s just the way it is.”

I believe that every explanation has to come to an end eventually, and when it comes to the understanding of our universe, I believe that this end lies in these fundamental rules which we’re getting to understand better and better with science. An infinite chain of explanations is certainly a possibility, but infinity is a concept that no person can even envision, let alone logically grasp. Neither possibility makes sense, but the truncation of the regression pattern at these fundamental laws of science is the best option because it's rooted in what we know.

"Avoiding a discussion about whether complete universal (sic) laws can ever be completely understood, the point is that the unknown still exists, and it can be explained by God."

The unknown does indeed still exist, but God isn’t really an explanation; it’s merely surrender disguised as an explanation. I believe that all explanations come to an end, but I also believe that no matter what, we should always continue trying to come up with explanations for our explanations. This is what science does, and this is what separates it from religion. Science says, “Okay, this happened because of this, and this works due to this and this,” and so on and so forth, analyzing the situation to develop a deeper understanding when appropriate. Using God as an explanation, on the other hand, is like saying, “Ok, this event happened, and it’s tough to break down, so some phenomena we can’t really describe or understand are responsible.” God is the illogical truncation, the equivalent of “Just because”, however, it’s worse than my “just because” regarding the fundamental laws of the universe because it isn’t based on evidence and countless hours of critical thinking and analysis, but rather on the lack of will to find and do these things. God is an explanation in the same way magic is an explanation for well, anything. Consider the following example:

Me: "Hey Luis, what happened to the watch that was on my table before I left? It's gone now."

Luis: (Thinks for a minute) "The magical ninjas under your bed took it."

Me: "And how do you know this?"

Luis: "Eh... I just do."

Me: "Well, there's no sign of forced entry, so how the hell did they get in?"

Luis: "They're magical remember?"

Me: "Ugh."

Similar to how magical bed ninjas don't really explain anything, the concept of God doesn't explain anything as well. Neither are rooted in logic, and there's no evidence for either's existence, let alone the actions they supposedly committed (Magical bed ninjas taking the watch and God creating the universe). So is God an explanation for what is currently the unknown? Sure, in the same way that magical bed ninjas are an explanation for my missing watch. It makes absolutely no sense defaulting to the supernatural when it comes to complex issues because the supernatural is inherently illogical. No matter what, stick with what you know, and if you don't want to, then there's no point in engaging in debate because the point of debating is to determine the logically superior side. Even by not knowing something, you know something: You know that you don't know. When it comes to how it all began, the proper starting position is agnosticism. When it comes to God, the proper starting position is a disbelief as strong as the average person's disbelief in Santa Claus, and from what I've seen, there's really no reason to sway from that starting position.

Random YouTube Comments I Found Funny/Dumb - Episode 4

2011-03-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

This is one of the highest rated comments on ManchesterUtd's Halo 2 montage, The Red Devil, and it is one of the funniest and awesome comments I have read in a long time.

"HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS MONTAGE IS AWESOME - Abraham Lincoln"

I never knew Abraham Lincoln had such good taste when it came to montages. What a boss.

Dear Big YouTube Channels

2011-02-25T22:29:00.001-08:00

Stop abusing your primary fanbases by making a trillion side-channels to hog the top subscribed lists on YouTube. Iphone channels? Seriously?

- Sincerely, Gear61

I'm sorry, but Halo: Reach isn't ANYTHING like Call of Duty

2011-02-25T22:26:00.000-08:00

A criticism of Halo: Reach that I have been REALLY fed up with for quite some time now is the "Halo: Reach is just like Call of Duty so it's automatically terrible" comment. Not only does this criticism not make any sense, it reflects one of the trains of thought within Halo community that I hate the most, which is the "Call of Duty is fucking terrible so let's just bash it whenever we can, even (by "even", I mean "especially) when it isn't relevant in the slightest to the discussion at hand" effect, something I refer to as the "CoD Effect". Similar to how Godwin's Law stipulates that within large online discussions, there will almost always be an idiot who can't argue worth a damn bringing up Hitler or the Nazis in a desperate, asinine attempt to bring people down, within large online Halo discussions, there will almost always be an idiot who can't argue worth a damn bringing up Call of Duty in a desperate, asinine attempt to bring people down. Because ranting makes me feel slightly better, I am now going to absolutely shatter this mentality and show you why it makes no sense.

I have a lot of work to do, so I'm going to keep this short. This is actually pretty convenient though because it really doesn't take much to debunk this insipid criticism. First, let's look at the arguments this side presents. The main and essentially only thing people use to relate these two games is Armor Perks in Halo: Reach and classes in Call of Duty. The only other thing I've seen people come up with is bloom.

Classes is definitely a defining aspect of Call of Duty, so yes, Halo: Reach is obviously similar in this respect. However, the concept of class customization has been around for a while; Call of Duty did not pioneer this idea. One of the main things that separates Halo from Call of Duty is power weapon control. Because you can't pick up special weapons in Call of Duty due to this class system, there is no way to assert dominance through skillful weapon control (I say this because in CoD, players who play more than others have access to more guns). This is one of the defining aspects of Halo because it adds to its incredible 3-dimensionality by increasing the depth of map control within the game. Just because Halo: Reach now has classes, it doesn't mean that it's a Call of Duty game, it simply means that it's a shooter with classes.

Similar to classes, bloom is another similarity between the two games which doesn't mean anything. The concept of weapon bloom has also been around for a while, and Halo 1 actually had it as well (though the bloom between Reach and Halo 1 are nothing alike). Also, unlike classes, I don't think bloom is anywhere near a defining aspect for CoD because it's a concept that's been around for forever and is literally everywhere when it comes to shooters.

So why isn't Halo: Reach like CoD? Because despite Reach's similarities from its predecessors, it is still a Halo game. For me, the core of Halo's multiplayer has been the shield system. Like I said in my Halo vs. CoD post, the shield system is what sets Halo apart from other shooters due to the complexity it adds to fights within the game. It forces you to work a lot more for your kills than most shooters do, and because you can come back essentially good as new (I say "essentially" because of health, which has actually been around for every Halo game) after a fight, it places a high emphasis on following through with your kills. This is also great because it allows great players to shine, widening the skill gap. It doesn't matter how many noobs a good player has to go through; he will consistently outplay each one because each fight will start on an even playing field due to the shield regeneration system. Similar to how the shield system is the core of Halo, CoD's realism is its core. If kills didn't just take 4-5 bullets from your average gun, CoD would not be CoD because in real life, nobody can survive 4-5 high caliber rounds to the stomach. If anything, Reach is the least like CoD of all the Halo games because kills take so much longer than they did in the rest of the Halo series, pitting it farther away from CoD's "I see you first and kill you after 1 second of shooting" gameplay.

Halo: Reach and Call of Duty definitely have similarities, but the differences between these two games still clearly outweigh the similarities. In the end, every attempt to bash Reach by declaring it the equivalent of a CoD game is essentially equivalent of saying that one game is exactly like another because they both have a start menu. As long as Halo doesn't turn into SWAT, it will ALWAYS not be a CoD game.

Random YouTube Comments I Found Funny/Dumb - Episode 3

2011-02-21T15:42:00.000-08:00

You know how people are sometimes so stupid, they misidentify the side a person is on? And you know how this sometimes ends up with someone bashing someone who is on the same side as he is? Well, on my latest video, this just happened.

So some guy posts:
"halo reach is trying to be like cod. its like i have to copies of cod =("

This is a pretty easy-to-understand comment right? This is one of the many variations of the, "Fuck Halo: Reach because it's like CoD" comment, a comment indicating a dislike of Call of Duty and Halo: Reach which is sadly seen on almost every Halo: Reach video on my channel. However, one guy somehow interpreted this as "CoD is awesome and Halo sucks", as seen here by his response to the first guy:

"fuck off back to cod u fucking fanboy"

*Facepalm* Oh YouTube...

The Last of my Halo: Reach Review - The Non-Multiplayer Stuff

2011-02-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

Reach's non-multiplayer material is one of the main forces keeping it from being a hopeless piece of shit. Let's start off with the campaign.

The campaign was... OK, I guess. I thought the gameplay improved in term of variety (Space battles, fuck yeah!), but I didn't really enjoy it because I absolutely HATE bloom and the general slowing down of the game's core (decreased mobility). I had a lot of problems with Halo 3's core engine (mainly the beatdown system and the overpowered AR), but these changes didn't affect the campaign that much (ARs are only annoying when you're facing them down, the overpowered beatdown really was just an advantage for you because the enemy AI has a terrible reaction time, and the flawed system to determine melee battle victors wasn't really applicable for the aforementioned reason), so I still had a lot of fun with the Halo 3 campaign. Reach's flaws, on the other hand, are a lot more universal, so the gameplay really suffered for me. In Halo 2, I could play Outskirts over and over and over again because Halo 2 sniping was fun as hell and there was infinite ammo on that map, but there really isn't any equivalent of this in Reach because the game is just so damn slow. Space battles were cool though.

As for the story, I was fairly unimpressed. Like I said before in my CoD vs. Halo post, I've never really been able to fully immerse myself in the Halo story arc, but I felt that Reach's campaign story-wise was even more lackluster than in the previous installments. First of all, not playing as Masterchief feels weird as hell. Second, I don't know if this is just me, but I found the voice acting to be absolutely terrible. The voice acting in the previous Halos wasn't exactly a masterpiece, but I found it to be passable. In Reach, there's a LOT of missing emotion in lines that DESPERATELY need it. One of the main things that pissed me off is that the voices that tell you that something bad is going down do it with no air of urgency, and as a result, it's just super awkward. I also didn't find many of the characters to be that compelling due to their poor development and poor voice acting, so I didn't really feel any sorrow for any of the character deaths minus the death of yourself in the final level, which was executed surprisingly well with the gloomy atmosphere and the cracking of the helmet. For example, when Jorge died and I kind of sensed that the game was trying to make me feel sad, I thought to myself, "Wait, did someone die?", moving on eventually to, "Wait, who's Jorge?", and finally to, "Oh yeah, that really buff dude I never really cared about, meh." It was kind of cool seeing the story behind Cortana at the end though, despite my hatred for Cortana post-Halo 3.

Overall, I found the campaign to be pretty disappointing. More variety in the form of armor abilities and different types of gameplay is certainly a plus, but Reach's slow as fuck engine and weak plot/characters really killed it for me. I finished running through the Reach campaign almost 4 months ago, and I highly doubt that I will revisit it any time soon, if ever.

Moving on from the campaign, the rest of Reach's non-multiplayer material is pretty amazing to say the least. Let's move on to one of my favorite parts about Reach: Firefight.

Reach's Firefight is one of Bungie's greatest successes in quite a while, and even though this isn't saying much with Reach, Halo 3, and Halo 3: ODST coming off the line in the past 4 years, it's still something. Firefight in ODST was ground-breaking because it was the first time Bungie attempted incorporating bot-matches in Halo (not really bot-matches since this implies You vs. AI Spartans, but you get the gist), and of course, I give them props for finally attempting something like this. However, Firefight in ODST was INCREDIBLY lackluster because it had little to no replay value, and this was because you essentially couldn't customize the experience at all, leaving you to play the same old thing again and again and again. Firefight was definitely an absolute blast for my friends and I when we started playing it, but the experience became stale within 3 weeks, maybe 4, and we only played once a week during this time span, making ODST Firefight's lifespan of freshness 3-4 days. We actually went back to it once a couple months down the line because we were really bored, but it ended up boring us even more, because, again, it has so little replay value and it becomes stale incredibly quickly. For a 60 dollar "game" with only a short lackluster campaign and a pass to the Beta of the next mediocre Halo game to accompany its Firefight mode, I expected Firefight to be a LOT better with at least the option to choose your starting weapon. For a lot of people, including me, Firefight is where people who aren't good enough to get clips in social go, so giving the option to start off with a sniper rifle and infinite ammo would have been more than enough for me at the time.

Enter Reach. Simply put, I love Reach's Firefight to death. I knew that Firefight was definitely going to be revamped, but I didn't expect nearly as much as what I got. The amount of customization you can do with the Firefight experience is simply incredible. You can customize waves, make skulls, join the Covenant, make your own gametypes which don't have to be slayer, you name it. The bottomless clip option is one of the best things to happen to Halo in a very, very long time, making medal seekers like me incredibly happy because massive sniper multikills are now easy as hell to get. I still haven't tired of Reach's Firefight, and unlike ODST, the replay value of Reach's Firefight mode is just phenomenal. Again, Reach's Firefight is ridiculously amazing, and I tip my imaginary hat to Bungie for creating such a wonderful game mode.

Lastly, we have Forge and Theater mode. Similar to Firefight between Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST, Forge made a MASSIVE jump between Halo 3 and Halo: Reach. Forge was one of Halo 3's greatest aspects, because, similar to Firefight in ODST, it was the first time Bungie had tried something like it. Forge provided an entirely new way to play Halo, and it was a fantastic creative outlet. I was consistently amazed by the screenshots and maps the Halo community created for the Bungie Favorities. For fun random stuff like recreating the Back to the Future time traveling scene, Grifball, and Go-Kart maps, Forge was fantastic. However, Forge was pretty bad at creating maps for conventional Halo play. The majority of the Foundry and Sandbox variants Bungie put into matchmaking were painfully terrible, and the only good competitive map that cam from Forge was Onslaught. Also, Forge suffered because maps with a fuck ton of objects played out like laggy pieces of shit (Amplified).

Now Forge is more capable AND more efficient. I'm no expert Forger, but I've messed around in Forge a good amount of times by now, and I still discover new things I can do with it each time. Also, simple things like making objects float in the air can be accomplished during the creation of objects, instead of like in Halo 3 where you had to go through the stupid, roundabout process of making something, putting something on top of it, and then deleting the first thing to make the second thing float.

As for theater, it seems to have been shafted pretty hard in comparison to Forge and Firefight. Sure, you have these minor improvements like sorting out the films by the map they were on (Also Bungie, Forge World is WAY too broad a category) and being find yourself in other people's media, but there really were no major improvements to theater mode from my experience. It really is just the same thing with a couple minor improvements that you don't really need. Ironically, theater mode actually LOST one of the capabilities from Halo 3, the ability for multiple people to view a film together, but this capability was glitchy as fuck in Halo 3 (it crashed roughly 70% of the time for me), so I guess we didn't lose too much in this department. However, it's still a strict downgrade, which is just... sad.

And there you have it, the last of my Reach review. To summarize everything, Reach's Non-Multiplayer stuff is pretty awesome, featuring two awesome things (Firefight and Forge), 1 OK thing (Theater), and 1 "Meh" thing (Campaign). Now I'm going to be responsible and do math homework instead of publishing my opinions for random people on the Internet. Peace.

Why You Shouldn't Bring Me With You For Illegal Activities + Why Water Sucks

2011-02-13T22:55:00.000-08:00

A couple months ago, Luis and I went on a supermarket adventure, because we were in desperate need of water. So on Veteran's Day, we embarked on an epic journey to Ralph's, a supermarket roughly a mile or two from our dorm. When we got there, we purchased a 24 pack of water (It was either Kirkland or Arrowhead, I don't remember. Ignore this because it isn't relevant and I added it in for no apparent reason), 2 6-packs of Heineken (Luis needed it for a 21+ party he was going to later that night), and some random groceries such as ham, bread, and cheese. After we paid for everything, we started lugging it all back to our dorm. I was carrying the water, and Luis was stuck with everything else. Everything was pretty heavy, so Luis came up with the brilliant (by "brilliant", I mean "idiotic") idea of jacking one of the shopping carts from Ralph's and using it to transport our stuff. I was against the idea due to moral reasons, and because I didn't want to drag a shopping a couple dozen feet only to have it lock up on us due to the anti-theft mechanism it was almost sure to have. However, this didn't stop Luis from trying, and after a couple dozen feet, the cart locked up on us as expected, leaving us looking like the dumbest thieves ever.

We were now stuck roughly a mile and a half away from our dorm with tons of groceries to carry on our own. Because we were real men (a.k.a. college students too poor to afford a taxi), we decided to carry the groceries in our arms all the way back to the dorm. It only took a minute or so for our arms to start burning, and the experience quickly turned into an incredibly painful form of torture. A couple minutes into it, we run into two of Luis' friends, a Spanish woman by the name of Eva and a girl from Peru whose name I can't recall. Luis starts talking to them as we're walking, but soon, we reach an intersection and Luis puts his bags down on the ground, continuing his conversation without the arm pain and halting our progress. Luis' stuff was in bags, so putting his stuff down was quite convenient for him. However, I was stuck carrying a 24 pack of water, and picking it up weakens the plastic covering each time, putting it at risk of ripping and making the act of putting my stuff down a lot less convenient. I didn't want to risk the packaging just falling apart, so I continued holding the water, semi-listening to Luis' conversation but mainly trying to ignore my arms which were screaming in pain by now. I was fine with the situation for a couple minutes, but I quickly became annoyed with Luis' complete ignoring of our current objective for a nice little chat with his buddies. Eventually, my arm pain took over my mind, and I exploded as illustrated in this fairly accurate dramatization.

Luis: Some stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say.

Eva: More stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say.

Luis: Even more stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say.

My arms: (Silently to my brain) Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain.

Eva: And even more stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say.

Girl from Peru: Waddup, I'm from Peru and stuff (in Spanish of course).

My arms: (Silently to my brain) Moar paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain. Let's gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Luis: Stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say (again).

Eva: More stuff in Spanish that a Spanish-speaking person would say (again).

My arms: (Silently to my brain) FUCK IT, LET'S FUCKING GO, FUCK!

Me: LUIS. DUDE. FUCK. BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Luis: (Turns to me) RIGHT, YOU EXIST!

Me: FINALLY.

So after Luis finally realized that I was dying, we said goodbye to Eva and the Peruvian girl and continued on our epic journey. After a couple minutes, we found ourselves facing a crosswalk that currently had the "No go" orange hand symbol telling us that crossing was a bad idea. Because I am a law-abiding citizen, I stopped and obeyed the traffic signal like I normally would. However, following the law isn't Luis' strong suit. He was pretty damn tired like I was at this point, and there wasn't many cars in sight, so he decided to cross, motioning for me to join him. The concept of "no man left behind" (or ahead rather) overrode my obligation to follow the law so I joined him. We were halfway through our illegal crossing when we forced a car to screech to a stop to avoid killing us two moronic jaywalkers. Even though we had just broken the law and almost died, we didn't make much of it because we were both tired as hell and nearly delirious from how much our arms hurt.

After we reach the sidewalk, we quickly notice that a police car was off to the side, moving slowly and semi-pulled over. It was clear that this officer wanted to pull over, but there were cars between the sidewalk and her, which is why she was like this. Because the only thought running through our heads was "Get back to the fucking dorm", both of us had forgotten that we had just broken the law, and therefore, we didn't think that the police car was going for us, but rather for the people in front of us who were joggers or something. After there aren't any cars between it and the sidewalk, the police car quickly pulls over, and an officer steps out, stopping us and engaging us in the following conversation.

Officer: Do you two know why I pulled you over?

*I eyeball Luis out of the corner of my eye to avoid turning away from the police officer, and it's clear to me that he's either clueless or too much of a pussy to respond. I think for a minute, and my mind settles on the Heinekens Luis is holding. I point to the beers, figuring that the following scenario would go down.*

- *I point to the alcohol.*

Officer: Correct. The possession of alcohol by underage people is a serious offense, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to punish you two heavily for such a misdemeanor.

Me: WHADDUP NOOB, LUIS IS ACTUALLY 23 SO HE CAN HAVE ALCOHOL AND SHIT. I WIN, MUAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!

Officer: Damnit, I've been foiled! You sir, are clearly superior and a perfect law-abiding citizen. Have a nice day.

Me: Damn straight. -

*However, this is how it actually went down.*

*I point to the alcohol. The officer looks at the beers and puts a slightly perplexed look on her face.*

Officer: No... You two illegally stopped a car that had every right to continue going.

Me: (Thinking to myself) Oh shit, herrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

So in the end, Luis and I got off with only a warning. To make matters worse, I had lost my wallet a couple days prior to this event, so I had no form of ID for the officer to check. Luis also used his Spanish charm to play the "lulz, im foreign so i dun know anything, be nice to me pl0x" card, which might have contributed to the officer's merciful decision. After this fiasco, Luis and I made it back to the dorm after several more incredibly painful minutes, Luis laughing every couple seconds to my distaste like a blithering idiot. I don't know about you, but getting in trouble with a cop isn't very high on my list of funny things. Anyways, all was well after we arrived at our dorm, and we were rewarded with the awesome gift of our arms not feeling like they were going to fall off at any second.

Fuck water.

Killstealing is Bullshit

2011-02-13T21:52:00.000-08:00

Time and time again you hear phrases such as "You stole my kill!" or "This video has nothing but kill steals." These comments have pissed me off ever since I started seeing them because the concept of kill stealing is bullshit. Why? This is pretty simple actually. In team play, since you're a part of a TEAM, a teammate "stealing" your kill is something called TEAMWORK. Nothing is being stolen, kills both you and your teammates get go towards the SAME score total. If you feel like your kills are being "stolen" in team-oriented play, then you're playing the game with a individualistic mindset, which makes you an idiot.

In FFA, on the other hand, "kill stealing" is merely smart playing. Why take time killing enemies at full shields when you can maneuver yourself to have other people do the work for you and then swoop in to pick up the kill at the last second? If your kill was "stolen", you either didn't kill your enemy efficiently enough or you were simply outmaneuvered by whoever stole your kill. Deal with it. You don't see people yelling "LOL, KILL STEALER" at FFA masters such as Pistola and Legit in the Halo 2 days, because what people call "kill stealing" is an inherent part of FFA play, and such an insipid criticism looks even dumber when aimed at people who are literally making thousands of dollars off of their "kill stealing" abilities, otherwise known as incredible Halo skill.

I've always wondered how people can take a video game series so seriously that they criticize people's behaviors within the game as if they're analyzing them from a strict moral perspective. The very label of "kill stealing" makes the act seem like robbery, which, by itself, makes this philosophy incredibly foolish. What I find sort of ironic is that people who take this game so seriously should be able to deduce the points I outlined above because I deduced them from my experience as a competitive player. People really just need to chill out nowadays because in the end, Halo is just a video game.

YouTube: The Unwinnable

2011-02-08T22:07:00.000-08:00

Hater effect (n.) - No matter what the fuck you do, there will be haters.

The "hater effect" applies to all facets of life, and as a veteran Halo YouTuber, uh... person, I have decided to share how the "hater effect" plays out with Halo montages on YouTube.

If your montage is mainly non-MLG - lol, this dun show skill o nething. it just garbage. play some mlg and try your dick off so i can be impressed

If your montage has a shit ton of clean-up kills (this applies to a lot of MLG montages) - lol, this dun show skill o nething. it just garbage. play against kids who aren't weak all the time plz

If your montage has low multikills (this applies to a lot of MLG montages) - u need higher medals nubs. it's just triples and doubles and stuff. (This isn't coupled with the "this shows no skill" cop-out very often, but it does happen)

If your montage has a lot of BR/Sniper/DMR kills - boring, use moar next weapons time. (This is sometimes coupled with the "this shows no skill" cop-out)

If your montage has Reach in it - REACH, LAWL!!! HALO 3 FOREVA

If your montage has Halo 3 in it - REACH MONTAGEZ NAO PL0X

If your montage has a lot of people who aren't shooting back at you - lol, this dun show skill o nething. it just garbage. play against kids who shoot back plz

If your montage tries to be original in any way, shape, or form (This applies around 90% of the time)- WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, AAAAAAAAAH, MAH BRAAAAAAAAAAIN. NEW, WHAT, NEW, WHAT, NEW, WHAT, bleh

If your montage has clips of you killing people in objective (this is worsened if you're losing in the clip) - PLAY THE GAME IT WAS MEANT TO BE PLAYED, WAAAAAAAAAAAH. u gaiz ruin halo

After studying all of these responses, I have deduced the perfect Halo montage clip.

*Everyone you kill in this example is at full-shields prior to death.

So you're playing Flag on Asylum in the MLG playlist. The clip starts off with you carrying the flag (to prove that you aren't a stat whore), and your team is up 2-1 (to further prove that you aren't a stat whore). You melee Ogre 2 their courtyard (to prove that you aren't playing scrubs) with the flag, killing him, but he leaves you with only a bit of your shields due to a melee. You then out-DMR Roy at their rocks for the double (because Roy is a pro, you out-DMRing him was a display of skill on your part, not an example of bad playing from Roy. Pros are infallible, shut up). You are now at no shields, and you will remain at no shields for the rest of the clip. Roy drops a sniper, which you then pick up and use to quick scope headshot Pistola, from under pressure as well, their hut for the triple. Even though you're still at no shields, you under pressure no scope Lunchbox, who's at their flag, for the overkill extermination. You then pull a Spiker out of your ass, switching it for your DMR, and use that to out-DMR Ogre 2 off the spawn for the killtacular extermination x2. You then deconstruct your Spiker and put together a Focus Rifle, Needler, Plasma Pistol, Grenade Launcher, and Plasma Rifle. Going through each of these weapons in that order, you kill these pro players 5 times for the killionaire. 5 seconds later, you then mod the game so that you're all now playing Halo 3 and you repeat the process with the appropriate weapon switches (BR for DMR, Beam Rifle for Focus Rifle, etc).

Now get 25-30 of these clips and you've got yourself a montage!

How To Become a YouTube Celebrity

2011-02-05T02:20:00.000-08:00

Since I've been on YouTube a while and a lot of people have asked me how to make it big on YouTube, I have decided to make a little guide to all of you up and coming YouTubers out there. So here are a couple tips that should help YOU become a YouTube celebrity.

1. Be a semi-attractive (attractive works too) young woman - Apparently YouTube is dominated by testosterone, so by doing this, you're already on your way to becoming huge. Have no talent? No problem, YouTube doesn't care. Aren't even that good looking? No problem, YouTube has no standards. Have an obnoxious personality? No problem because again, YouTube doesn't care, and your obnoxious personality will merely end up polarizing people, creating conflict and generating you views! If you have a penis, you are definitely heavily disadvantaged, but don't worry, there's a lot more great tips you can use to help you become a YouTube star!

2. Make sure that your videos have pointless jump cuts every 2 and a half seconds - Fuck coherency. Seriously. All it does is confuse people with its... coherentness. A video that seems a retarded crack addict Mexican jumping bean on speed is the way you want to go. It's well known that most YouTube users have incredibly short attention spans, so long, coherent videos are actually brain-damaging to the majority of the YouTube population. This is why you're going to want to mix it up with these jump cuts, making it seem like you edited your videos by importing them into Vegas and having a retarded chimpanzee tap-dance on your keyboard. Feel free to use jump cuts for their actual purpose, which is to cut out unnecessary segments and improve the flow of the video, but you're going to want to balance out each of these with at least 20 completely unnecessary ones. If you can't watch your video after editing without attempting to pull out your hair, then you know that you've done a good job. So what are you waiting for? Ship that mediocre footage of yourself into your choice of video editing software and start sxephil-ing it up today!

3. Incorporate breasts into your video somehow - Even though being able to see breasts on the internet is pretty much the easiest thing ever with Google images and, well, porn, YouTube absolutely loves seeing talentless females shamelessly parading them in their videos even though YouTube is the one of the few places on the internet where you will never see them in their entirety. So if you've filled the first requirement and you have breasts, throw away any form of self-respect you have, exaggerate the hell out of them and start recording with that camera at chest level!

4. Make your video thumbnails incorporate number 1 or number 3 - Again, YouTube's a sucker for chicks in way, shape, or form. BUT WAIT! What if I don't fulfill number 1? No problem! Make sure that your videos are all somehow related to women and shamelessly cram in screenshots of beautiful women and their breasts into your video so you can choose them as thumbnails! But what if I don't want to make videos related to women? Fuck it, do it anyways!

5. Have deceptively flashy, over the top titles - Because YouTube users are slightly behind in common sense technology, they still haven't figured out that deceptively flashy, over the top titles generally equals a shitty video. Have a video in which you discuss Jessica Alba at some point? Then entitle that video "JESSICA ALBA'S TITTIES!", make the thumbnail have breasts in it somehow, and get that shit into the YouTube world! It's that easy! Make sure to use lots of exclamation points and capitalized letters! Hell, just put a rock on your caps lock so that you never forget it!

6. Just plain suck - This is VERY important. Since YouTube is on the cutting edge of modern-day social trends, bad is the new good for the YouTube community, and, you guessed it, good is the new bad. This actually makes a LOT of sense, and let's create a list of bad's and good's advantages and disadvantages to examine why:

Bad
Advantages:
1. You make YouTube users feel a lot better about themselves, and let's face it, based on how incredibly pathetic many YouTube users obviously are based on their comments, there's probably a good amount of suicidal ones out there. What better way to get a loser out of the dumps than to show him someone who is an even bigger loser than he is? Bad YouTube videos SAVE LIVES. Also, keep in mind that making bad YouTube videos keeps these suicidal people using all of their time and energy commenting on how much you suck and thumbs downing your material into oblivion instead of for cutting their wrists and downing entire bottles of aspirin.

2. You get shitloads of attention through the massive amounts of user feedback you receive (thumbs, favorites, etc). Also, people love pointing and laughing so terrible videos have a much better chance of being shared by the people who watch them.

Disadvantages:
After many grueling hours of scientific research and logical extrapolation, I have concluded that there are absolutely none.

Good
Advantages:
After many more grueling hours of scientific research and logical extrapolation, I have concluded that there are absolutely none.

Disadvantages:
1. I don't feel like typing much more, so I'm pretty much going to just say "Reverse of the first advantage for Bad". What do you think these suicidal YouTube users are going to do when they come home, go to YouTube, and see someone who's more talented/good lucking/charismatic/famous than they are? That's right. They are going to kill themselves. Similar to bad videos, not making good videos SAVES LIVES.

2. You go to jail for killing people.

3. Jealous people will invade your privacy and eventually kill you, which usually involves impaling and unicorns. Believe me, this isn't a very nice way to die.

I think you and I know which one wins here.

7. Already be an incredibly overrated celebrity IRL - This is one of the easier ways to become a YouTube celebrity, because you simply let your overrated-ness do the work for you. You don't have to actually do anything in your videos, because, literally, the only thing you have to do is exist. Like I said before, YouTube users are slightly (and by "slightly", I mean "incredibly") behind in common sense technology, so they still haven't figured out that developing and demonstrating blind, irrational, incredibly passionate hatred for overrated celebrities merely adds to the fire and increases their fame, roping in more idiots to add to the fire. Hey Miley, get back to making those shitty 240p videos of you and your not very attractive hoes talking about completely useless and irrelevant subject matter (for starters, I recommend talking about venetian blinds and potatoes). Bieber, is that you? Make a video of yourself drinking from a water bottle or something. YOUTUBE FAME AWAITS YOU.

8. Actually be talented - So 1-7 just didn't work out for you huh? Not only do you have morals, you have a penis AND some form of talent. Or maybe you don't have a penis, but you still have morals and talent. What do you do? Well, this should ONLY be done as a last resort because it goes against EVERYTHING YouTube stands for, but it HAS worked in a few cases on YouTube such as KevJumba, NigaHiga, and FreddieW. What am I talking about? I am talking about making good, well thought out videos that actually showcase your talent. Again, this is a very risky path to take, but if you're some sort of maverick and you're simply out of options, give this a shot.

Well, there you have it folks. Here are 8 stellar tips to help YOU become the next YouTube sensation. I hope they help you out a ton, and remember, if you ever do make it big and you used any of these tips, you owe me 99.5% of any revenue you may pull in.

Soccer

2011-01-30T23:36:00.000-08:00

Luis wanted me to write an article about soccer, so Luis, here is your precious article about your precious soccer.

It sucks. That is all.

Just kidding, here's a link to the actual article: Luis, you are from Spain.

Athletic Club de Bilbao is Awesome + How I Became a Soccer Fan (Sort Of) + Why Carbon was Awesome

2011-01-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

So Luis is a huge soccer fan like, well, the rest of Europe. I actually played quite a lot of soccer as a kid, but I've never been able to immerse myself in competitive soccer like Luis and other soccer fans could. I have simply never found watching soccer on television to be very interesting. To me, it isn't much more than a ton of running that results in absolutely nothing 80% of the time. Anyways, since I hang out with Luis a lot, I've naturally tried to become more involved in some of his interests, and this involves soccer. However, despite my efforts, I was still unable to get into competitive soccer like before.

I didn't completely stay away from soccer though. In the end, I ended up developing a sort of semi-support for the sport and for Luis' favorite team, Real Madrid (guess where he's from in Spain. That's right. Luis is from Barcelona.), in the form of providing moral support to Luis, saying stuff like "Real Madrid ftw" and "Fuck Barcelona". Luis and I even bought Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (We're college students so we're poor and therefore can't afford up-to-date video games), a poser version of FIFA, and I started playing as Real Madrid to expand on this pseudo-support for the team. However, because I'm a video game junkie, I started really getting into playing as Real Madrid on my Xbox. Even though the game is completely fictional and the players are just bits of data, I was really happy with the players that performed well for me within the game and I started feeling connected to them. Soon, I was looking them up on Wikipedia, and consequently, I visited Real Madrid's Wikipedia page eventually as well to discover what I found to be an annoying oddity.

Me: What the fuck? Real Madrid is a Spanish team right?

Luis: Yes.

Me: So why does a Spanish team have so many non-Spanish players?

Luis: That's globalization. Every team has to do this now in order to keep up.

Me: Well, yeah, but roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the team is foreign. You can barely even tell that this team is from Spain.

Luis: Eh... (Even though Luis isn't Canadian, he says this a lot.)

Luis actually has a 2nd favorite team called Athletic Club de Bilbao (Luis once told me that if he were to split his love for Real Madrid and Athletic Club de Bilbao percentage wise, it would be 51/49 - Real Madrid/Athletic Club de Bilbao), which is also referred to as Athletic de Bilbao, Athletic Club, or just plain old Athletic. His father is from Bilbao, the capital of one of the three provinces of the Basque Country, an autonomous community in northern Spain. Because of his roots, Luis' father is a huge fan of Athletic, so Luis grew up with lots of Athletic in his life. His father told him many stories of the good ol' days of Athletic and brought Luis with him to a lot of the matches. So why did I just write an entire paragraph that seems like a random, out of place tangent? Well, because this paragraph is actually a set-up for the continuation of my story. How? Well, after I checked out Real Madrid's Wikipedia page, I went to Athletic de Bilbao's and discovered something incredibly awesome, which I will now illustrate in this not very accurate conversation.

Me: Holy balls! Luis, what the hell is this Spanish team doing with nothing but Spanish players?

Luis: Yeah, that's Athletic de Bilbao's philosophy. Not only do they only employ Spanish players, they only employ Basque players.

Me: That. is. awesome.

Luis, stop reading over my shoulder; it's annoying.

*Important Note: The politics and definition of the Basque country have been incredibly simplified for the purposes of this post. The Basque country actually also involves a tiny part of France (so Athletic de Bilbao can have French players without technically breaking tradition and actually has done this once), but this is a pretty gray issue. Again, for the purposes of this post, Basque country is just a part of Spain. I'm a noob who doesn't entirely know what he's talking about, so please don't take any of this personally if you're of Basque descent. Moving on...

I fell in love with the team almost immediately, and as I found out more and more about them, I discovered that they stood for many of the same principles that I stood for. Instead of just buying the best players from other teams and other countries, Athletic de Bilbao strongly supports bringing up players through its youth divisions. Athletic de Bilbao also refused to have any sponsors up until around 2006-2007 (they had to end this policy because they were on the verge of bankruptcy), because they thought sponsors would corrupt their identity. And here's what's incredible: Despite the tremendous disadvantage they force upon themselves by only recruiting players from not just Spain, but a specific part of Spain, they are still a consistent Top 8 team (For this season, they're currently ranked 6th). According to La Liga (the highest level soccer league in Spain) statistics, they are the 4th greatest Spanish soccer team of all time, and they are one of only 3 Spanish teams to have never dropped out of La Liga, otherwise known as the 1st division, since they started playing, which happened in 1928.

As much as I love the concept of free-market capitalism, I absolutely hate it when things are turned into pure business, and this counts sports. This is one of the reasons why I now hate MLG. Back in the day, it wasn't just about the money like it is now, and teams weren't just random collections of good players thrown together. Teams acted as a single harmonious entity, and they actually took the time to get to know each other and create chemistry, improving as a team, competing as a team, winning as a team, and losing as a team. I think the best example of this is mid-2006 to mid-2008 Carbon, which was: Shockwav3, Ghostayame, Gandhi, and Karma. Even though Final Boss was clearly the best team during this era, this version of Carbon was the perfect example of what I think a team should be: a team. It was widely known that these 4 players were close friends (Gandhi even helped Karma turn his life around by helping him lose weight), and this powerful chemistry was apparent in their gameplay as well. It was almost like they were brothers; everything they did just seemed to naturally flow together. Even though Carbon didn't have the most raw talent in the league (this was definitely Final Boss. Ogres + Strongside = Ridiculous), they were still an incredible team because of their chemistry and teamwork, which showed in their stellar objective play. Even when the entire Carbon squad was going negative, they could still wreck other teams in CTF with incredible 5-0 and 5-1 performances. One of things that I admired the most about this Carbon squad is that they had fun no matter what, even if they were playing on the main stage for that 1st place check. While most teams played as if MLG would murder their firstborn child if they lost, Carbon played all of their matches like they would a friendly scrimmage. They obviously still took their matches very seriously, but they were one of the few squads to realize that if they weren't having any fun with it, they would suck no matter how hard they tried. They played the best when they were having the most fun, because the more natural your play is, the better it is. When you aren't completely focused on results, the less affected you are by the pressure and by your mistakes.

The thing I admire the most about this Carbon is that they stayed together through thick and thin. Even when their glory days ended with Final Boss picking up Strongside, they stuck together, winning Dallas in 2007. Even when their success was further diminished with the rebirth of Str8 Rippin and they became a Top 4 team instead of a Top 2 team, they stuck together, coming back to place 2nd at the 2007 National Championships against immense odds, finally losing to what was an unstoppable Final Boss. Even when they became a Top 8 team instead of a Top 4 team with the coming of Halo 3, they stuck together. To me, this team was the perfect mix of the casual and competitive realms of Halo. This team wasn't a collection of 4 players looking to achieve as much as possible within their respective careers like every team nowadays; it was a group of 4 friends who played Halo, had fun doing it, and happened to be incredibly good at it. Unlike players nowadays, their loyalties didn't lie with wherever the money was, it lay with the team and the powerful bonds they had with the players on it. Each of these 4 players was a part of something greater than he was, and by supporting them, we became a part of that something as well. Nowadays, when we support a team, we're merely supporting a name, because the players are just there to earn as much money as possible and are often effervescent. Developing powerful friendships with the other members of the team doesn't seem very important to any player anymore, because it's all about the money now. The clearest example of this commonly held philosophy is how teams can drop players so easily now. Teams will now literally drop players after only doing poorly for one event, even those that have been together for quite a while. What makes matters worse is that players' perception of poorly is ridiculously skewed now; for the majority of players, if you aren't placing 1st each event, you're doing poorly. However, Carbon didn't support any of these behaviors or philosophies, because they stood for something besides money. Unlike for all of the current MLG teams, by supporting Carbon during this era, we were supporting more than just a name. We supported an actual team, an actual team that captured many of the values we should all hold dear such as friendship, selflessness, and loyalty.

To me, Athletic de Bilbao is the Carbon of the soccer world. Unlike the other soccer teams, it's more than just a corporation. Nowadays, we live in a world in which money can do essentially anything. We live in a world in which you can just buy your way to the top instead of doing any actual work or conquering any actual obstacles. Why try to improve your team through difficult means such as increasing chemistry and training harder when you can just purchase Cristiano Ronaldo for 94 million euros? Why challenge yourself when your money can do the work for you? Unlike for other soccer teams, for Athletic, there's more to soccer than results and revenue. There's no way to know for certain, but I'm pretty damn sure that Athletic would rather be knocked out of La Liga than sell out their core philosophies and just buy the best players they can find, no matter where they're from or who they are. Similar to Carbon, Athletic stands for something.

To sum up everything I just said, I love Athletic be Bilbao because unlike what appeared to be every other team in the Spanish league, Athletic de Bilbao actually represents the community it's supposed to represent. It's the solitary beacon of hope in an environment ravaged by capitalism, and as a now avid supporter of the team, I hope its success continues and increases. AUPA ATHLETIC!

Racism? Probably. Stupidity? Definitely.

2011-01-28T14:45:00.000-08:00

I don't visit the Yahoo front page much anymore (mainly because I don't need to kill time during Digital Imaging 1 like I did in High School), but I go there every once in a while because the front page stories are often quite funny, random, interesting, or some combination of the 3. Today, I stumbled upon this article.

To quickly summarize the article, there's a black teenager by the name of Shai Warfield-Cross who sings the national anthem for her school's, Bloomington High School North's, sporting events every once in a while. This was all fine and dandy until she performed for a game in Martinsville, a predominantly white community about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis. Here's a video of her performance:

Hear anything wrong with it? Well, she didn't pause in a couple places that I expected a pause for, and she dragged out a couple syllables a bit longer than I expected. But aside from that, it was perfectly fine for me. The gripes I mentioned also stem primarily from my personal preference, so they can't really count as "flaws", and for the most part, I thought that she sang very well. I believe that she treated the song perfectly fine, and it's clear that she has talent. However, this is clearly not the case for a couple people out there. Here's a snippet from the article:

"Principal Jeff Henderson told The Herald-Times in a statement that people had complained that while the words to the anthem were the same, the tune was unrecognizable. He declined to comment to The Associated Press."

What the... What? Seriously, what? What kind of ears do these people have?

Here's another snippet from the article:

"Some who complained after the game in Martinsville - a predominantly white community about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis - also said they felt the rendition was disrespectful to current and former members of the military, Henderson said."

And here's the video description of the YouTube video I embedded above:

"Shai Cross Singing the National Anthem at BHS North, 1/22/11. This will be the last time Shai sings the National Anthem for North. She has been given an ultimatum: that she is not to sing her rendition of the anthem anymore if she wants to sing for the North home games, instead she must sing the anthem in a traditional way because her way is Disrespectful (Writer's Note: See how it's all capitalized and shit to add emphasis? What a genius.) to the soldiers who have died for our country! What do you think? (Writer's Note: Refer below.) We think NORTH is in the WRONG!" (North was definitely in the wrong. That movie sucked.)

Herpa derpa herpa derpa herpa derpa herpa derp. Like I said before, the rendition was perfectly fine. Second, members of our military fight for the core values of our country, one of which is freedom of expression. Obviously you can't put some extreme twist on it and sing it like T-Pain or something, but each person will sing it slightly differently to suit their style. I've listened to a good amount of people sing the national anthem during my lifetime for school sporting events, and even though I can't say that they're all incredibly different, I can safely say that all of them definitely had some sort of unique, personal flavor injected into them by the singers. This is completely fine, and like Shai's mother says in the article here:

"Aurora Marin, the teen's stepmother, told The Herald-Times that the directive denies Warfield-Cross her "rights of expression and individuality.""

...this freedom is constitutionally protected. Shai's ability to do what she did is one of the many things our soldiers put their lives on the line for. If I was an American soldier and I heard the disrespect crap, ironically, I would take this statement as a sign of disrespect for our country because this person clearly doesn't understand what America stands for and why it's great.

And of course, because the singer is black, the issue quickly turned into a matter of race. The debate that propelled this story onto the Yahoo! front page goes a little something like this (with some embellishment of course):

"The fuck? This ain't traditional and shit. THE TUNE IS UNRECOGNIZABLE, AAAAAAAAAAAAH! This is fucking TREASON right here!"

"stfu racists"

The second side does have a point... sort of. I doubt that the first side is consciously exhibiting racist sentiments, but I have a feeling that if Shai were white, they probably wouldn't be making nearly as big a deal about this as they are now if at all. However, this side of the debate illustrates a phenomenon that I find really annoying in modern day life, which is the tendency for people to try to link their opponents to racism, even when it's not really relevant. Instead of delving into the meat of the matter, these people just look for any possible way to say, "lol, ur racist", and declare themselves the victor. Ironically, these people exhibit the same form of elitism that racists are despised for, which is something I find incredibly funny and sad. The following YouTube comment that made the highest rated list on the video is how you're supposed to argue this "issue":

"so....can anyone tell me what exactly is wrong with this? Wtf?"

Simple as that.

Time is the only problem

2011-01-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

People often get mad at me for ignoring them, so I have decided to create this neat little pre-written response to send to them when this occurs in the future.

"Yo dawg, I'm not ignoring you. I've just been busy because you know, YouTube isn't my life. And I get 3045325 billion requests a day so I often times forget/postpone things. Wait plz. thx"

I Just Did It With the Japanese Girl

2011-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

One day, Luis and I are at this international party hosted by our friend Julia. The party consists of people from a lot of nationalities, so everyone had to bring a dish representing his or her nationality. I went to the party with my suitemate (Our suite has 2 rooms with 2 people in each. This makes Luis my roommate and the other 2 people in the suite my suitemates) who is also named Alex (cool right?). Because we're American, and there isn't much to American "cuisine" besides junk food and unhealthy renditions of food from other countries, we bring a bunch of French Fries from In-N-Out. They looked hilariously pathetic next to all of the nice, exotic dishes everyone else had brought, and to make matters worse, they were cold and disgusting by the time we had arrived at the party. This isn't really relevant to the main topic of this post, but I felt that I would talk about it because I found it kind of funny. Anyways...

Luis and I are a part of two different conversations, but we're almost right next to each other, meaning that I was semi-comprehending what was going on in his. From what I was processing, Luis and the other members of the conversation were talking about a cool party they were all at yesterday, and the topic shifted to adding people on Facebook. I think they were talking about all of the people they met and added on Facebook from the party, because all of the sudden, Luis says this:

"I just did it with the Japanese girl."

I was semi-paying attention to the conversation, so I could sort of piece together what it actually meant and how it fit in within the conversation, which is a little something like this:

"Of all of the new people I met at the party yesterday, I only added the female Japanese one on Facebook."

However, I thought it would be absolutely hilarious to purposely misinterpret it sexually, so I did this.

Luis: I just did it with the Japanese girl.

Me: (I turn around from my conversation to face Luis) Holy shit dude, NICE! High five bro! (I hope up my hand for a high five)

*Luis thinks about it for a second, and then realizes the double meaning of his expression. He starts laughing and proceeds to give me the high five I so rightfully deserve. Meanwhile, the rest of the foreign people he was talking with are just kind of standing there, looking perplexed.*

Misinterpretation ftw.

Christina Hendricks is a Goddess

2011-01-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

Now that I have grabbed your attention with a picture of the beautiful Christina Hendricks (everyone in the world is either a lesbian or a heterosexual man. Shut up), I can now tell another random story involving my roommate. If you're a woman, I recommend leaving this page immediately because this story can easily be construed as incredibly sexist.

A couple months ago, Luis decided to start following a TV show, specifically, a drama. He ended up choosing Mad Men due to its critical acclaim and beautiful women (also because Luis sadly didn't meet the minimum cool requirement to start following Lost. It's a shame, I know). So he went on Amazon and bought the first two season of the TV show. We started watching an episode every couple days on my Xbox, usually during a meal.

I'm not exactly sure which episode this was, but it was definitely one of the earlier ones. So while Luis and I were watching this episode, I noticed that one of the characters, Joanne, played by Christina Hendricks, had a rack capable of generating its own gravitational pull. I was going to say something along the lines of, "Holy shit, this woman has massive breasts", but I figured that such a statement would be a lot funnier for Luis if it were in Spanish so I started piecing the words together in my mind. However, as I was piecing the words together in my mind, I began second-guessing my decision to say such a thing due to it being so low-brow. By the time I had mentally completed the sentence, "Esta mujer tiene pechos masivos (This woman has massive breasts)", I had decided that it was indeed too low-brow and that I wouldn't say it. A couple seconds after this, Luis motioned for me to pause the video. I figured that it was to add some valuable commentary, so I decided to say the sentence anyways on the off-chance that it might have been what he was going to say.

*Luis motions to pause the video.*

Luis: Alex, stop the video!

*I look around for the controller, find it, and pause the video.*

Me: Esta mujer tiene pechos MASIVOS.

Luis: Oh my god, YES.

Me: Holy shit, really? Is this really so important to point out that it requires the pausing of the video?

Luis: Yes, of course.

Me: Good point.

Great minds think alike.

The Orcs are coming! GTFO!

2011-01-22T03:50:00.000-08:00

So pretty much since I've met Luis, he has been teaching me Spanish slang. A lot of them are expressions used to refer to beautiful women (because these are the most important obviously), but one day, I switched it up and asked Luis how you refer to ugly women in Spain.

Luis: Well... one pretty popular term is "orco".

Me: "Orco"? What the hell is that?

Luis: Eh... You know the Lord of the Rings movies?

Me: Yeah.

Luis: I think they're the bad guys.

*I think about it for a while, and then I realize that he's referring to hideous, vile creatures known as the Orcs from the Lord of the Rings which look like this:

The raw hilarity of the term along with the fact that it came from the Lord of the Rings movies (which I absolutely love) overwhelm my brain, and I just start laughing. Eventually, I calm down and am able to start forming coherent sentences and saying them again.*

Me: Oh my gawd, that's fucking hilarious. *Laughs* That's pretty much the most brilliant thing of all time.

Luis: Yeah, sometimes, my friends and I say, "Que vienen los orcos! RETIRADA!" (This literally means, "The Orcs are coming! GTFO!")

Me: What does "RETIRADA!" mean?

Luis: It's an expression that started in the military. It's what you say when you want your soldiers to go back.

Me: So to retreat?

Luis: Yes.

*I ponder the epicness of the expression for a while, trying to get a feel for it. Afterward, I say...*

Me: So "Que vienen los orcos! RETIRADA!" means, "The orcs are coming. Run the fuck away"?

Luis: Yes.

*Once again, I ponder the epicness of the expression, and then I say the expression slowly, trying to process it word by word.*

Me: Que vienen los orcos... Retirada...

*Luis responds by doing a really enthusiastic rendition of the phrase. We're in a crowded restaurant on campus during this time, but nobody can really understand us, so it's all good.*

Luis: (Does the half megaphone thing in which you cup one hand around half of your mouth) QUE VIENEN LOS ORCOS! (Starts gesturing to his pretend army with the other arm as if he's a general ordering his troops to retreat) RETIRADA!!!

Me: Bahahahaha.

Spain is win.

Norwegians are from Norwegia

2011-01-22T02:58:00.000-08:00

Even though I enjoy writing massive blocks of text about my opinions, I think that this blog needs more of a personal feel to it because that's what blogs are for. So in this blog post, I present to you a random story involving my roommate.

For people who didn't read my first article about my roommate (You can find it here), here is all you need to know about him. His name is Luis and he is a foreign exchange student from Spain.

The first story takes place in Westwood, an LA neighborhood that is right next to UCLA. So one Sunday morning, Luis and I were sitting outside some cafe, reading. Luis was reading a newspaper, and I was reading Esquire magazine. Then, from out of nowhere, some old guy comes up to us in the strangest of outfits. He was dressed up in a really nice-looking beige suit, complete with a cool hat. He was like the Monopoly guy except his outfit wasn't black, his mustache wasn't nearly as unrealistically hilarious, and his hat wasn't very top-hat-ey. Anyways, so this random dude comes up to us and he asks us, "Can either of you spare 3 dollars for a Norwegian veteran?" Normally, I don't give money to hobos because from my experience, if you give one hobo some money, a trillion others start asking you for money as well. However, I was so stunned by this question that I was unable to default to my almost instinctive, "Sorry, I don't have any money on me", response. After an awkward second or two, I was finally able to give that response to which the weird old man responded to with a polite "Ok, thanks anyways" and his departure. Luis, meanwhile, hadn't looked up from his newspaper the entire time and after a couple seconds, he asked, "What happened?"

The conversation went a little something like this.

Luis: What happened?

Me: Some guy asked us for money.

Luis: What did he say?

Me: He asked if either of us could spare 3 dollars for a Norwegian veteran.

*Luis pauses for a bit, trying to understand this incredibly random statement.*

Luis: Norwegian veteran?

Me: Yeah. A veteran is someone who used to be a soldier. A Norwegian is a person from Norway.

*Luis pauses again, pondering what I just said.*

Luis: Norway?

Me: Yes.

Luis: The country?

Me: Yes.

Luis: What the fuck?

Me: Yes.

Luis pauses for a while again, and afterward, he starts laughing uncontrollably, right out of the blue. It was if this was the funniest thing in the entire universe. I started laughing a bit too, but I was still stunned at the sheer randomness of the occurrence. Luis keeps laughing for several minutes, and on the way back to our dorm, he chuckles every now and then as his mind kept going back to the event.

This may not seem that funny just reading about it, but trust me, Luis' reactions are infinitely funnier than they seem here because everything he said was with a pretty heavy accent and you could progressively see the "What the fuck just happened?" realization dawn on him.

CoD vs. Halo - A Very Biased Perspective

2011-01-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

On almost every single video on my YouTube page (I wish that this was an exaggeration, but it sadly isn't), there is some sort of "CoD sucks/Halo > CoD", comment. While I heavily prefer Halo over Call of Duty, I find this mentality incredibly annoying like I find all Us vs. Them mentalities. I doubt that most of these people have played more than 2 hours of Call of Duty, and even with a meager amount of experience, you can still develop a more well-formed opinion. I don't have much Call of Duty experience myself (Actually, this only applies to the multiplayer but the crowd I draw in with my YouTube channels pretty much only cares about the multiplayer from the looks of it so this statement might as well be completely true), but I still find many merits within the Call of Duty series. Anyways, after a long, long time brewing on this topic, I have decided to throw in my 2 cents. This probably won't change many people's minds on the issue, but it's worth a shot, and I just like voicing my thoughts and opinions sometimes.

Even though the "Fuck CoD, it's a nooby, piece of shit game" mentality is clearly the most prominent among my channels concerning this issue, there is a quite substantial "CoD and Halo are completely different games, so they can't really be compared directly. It would be hard to say that one is better than the other without relying almost entirely on subjectivity, so let's just enjoy both series for what they are: Great video games" mentality. For the most part, I agree with this philosophy. CoD and Halo are both very different, they both have their own strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly, they're both great video game series. Saying that one is better than the other is essentially a pointless statement because that sort of statement would primarily stem from personal opinion, but I do believe that you can objectively compare them in some respects, such as their viability as competitive titles. Before I delve further into the issue, I am going to talk about how much CoD experience I have because this information is important and will obviously shed light on why my perspective is the way it is.

I started playing Call of Duty with the first Modern Warfare. My friend Prashant bought the game but didn't want it anymore, so he offered to sell it to me for 20 dollars. This was a great deal, so I enthusiastically accepted his offer and started playing through the campaign. I liked it quite a lot, but the disc was scratched so the campaign just stopped halfway through. Because of this, I ventured into the multiplayer experience a little even though I knew that I wouldn't like it because as a Halo player, I do not like the fast killing that accompanies most, if not every, realistic shooter. As expected, I hated it, however, this was probably because I was terrible at it. I had a k/d ratio of maybe 0.2 each game, and in one game, I become so frustrated that I just gave up trying to kill people and ended up knifing a soda can or something until the game ended. Anyways, after this escapade, I gave up on CoD 4 until I got a fully functioning version of the game from Rajan, which I used to finish the campaign. I found the campaign to be a very enjoyable experience, and as a result, I was on the lookout for the next Modern Warfare. When the next Modern Warfare came out, I didn't get it as soon as possible like the rest of the world because spending 60 dollars just for a campaign seemed stupid to me. Rajan was a part of the "rest of the world" though, so I ended up going to his house to play the game every once in a while. There's no split screen co-op for Modern Warfare 2 (which is incredibly stupid), so we ran lots of Spec Ops, and they were fun as hell. After a couple weeks of relying on Rajan for my fix of Modern Warfare 2, I decided to buy the game myself. I played through the entire campaign myself and enjoyed it even more than I did the first one. Surprisingly, the campaign had quite a lot of replay value, and I found myself playing several levels over and over again. I also ran a lot of Spec Ops on my own, and even though it's a million times better with a partner, they were fun nonetheless. However, I eventually got tired of Spec Ops and the campaign, so once again, I ventured into the multiplayer due to a combination of boredom, Rajan's peer pressure, and the desire to try something new. Well, you may be asking, "Why didn't you play Halo 3 instead?" Answer? I hate Halo 3. I'm a diehard Halo fan, but I really can't play Halo 3 for more than an hour without 1 months or a ton a friends I love playing with (and a lot of these friends moved on to other games such as CoD and important stuff such as life). So how did Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer go for me? Well, it wasn't that great, but it wasn't nearly as painful as my Modern Warfare 1 experience. Why? Because, surprisingly, I went positive or even almost every single game I played in. I had maybe 5 hours of Call of Duty multiplayer experience total, and I was doing well. I'm not really sure whether or not the other players were good, because I don't really know how to evaluate CoD skill, but most of them were of a higher level than me, meaning that they had more experience at the game than I did.

So what do I think about CoD? Well, I actually think CoD has a better single player experience than Halo does, and I've barely even played Black Ops. Even though the Halo campaigns are pretty sweet, and I love the Masterchief, I enjoyed the CoD campaigns a lot more than I did the Halo ones because I could immerse myself more into it. Even though I hate realistic shooters for multiplayer, I love them for campaigns because I find that the realism allows me to become better involved with the storyline and the characters. I didn't really feel much sadness for the death of any character in the Halo series minus the Masterchief (which wasn't a death technically), while I did for the CoD ones such as Gaz, Ghost, and Roach. To me, the Halo campaigns are just the Masterchief or the Reach Noble dude bad-assing his way through everything, so I never really felt any strong emotions for any event in the them, even if it was a great loss or triumph. Call of Duty, on the other hand, has the same badass feel of the Halo campaign but less of the predictability. Even though their campaigns are also formulaic plot-wise like Halo's, I felt happy during the triumphs (like when Soap pulls out the knife from his chest and knifes Shepherd in the eye) and sad during the losses (Zakhaev putting a bullet into Gaz's brain as he desperately tries to lift his head). I feel that the major plot-points of Call of Duty are executed a lot more effectively than Halo's are, and even though the Call of Duty campaigns really are just your standard action movies, they're willing to kill off major characters, giving the storylines some sort of unpredictability along with the ability to effectively build dramatic tension. Again, Halo, just ends up with the main character BAMFing his way through everything, and makes the mistake of making some characters who you're supposed to like SUPER annoying (Cortana much?).

Aside from the campaign, I feel that the rest of CoD's single player experience is always one step ahead of Halo's (however, this is unfair because 3 Call of Duties have come out for the last 2 Halo games). Halo 3's real equivalent is Call of Duty 4, and I found CoD 4's campaign better because like I said, I like realistic campaigns better and the single player of both was just the campaign. Modern Warfare 2 also came out during the Halo 3 era, and the single player of this was just light years ahead of Halo 3's in my opinion. Once again, I found the campaign to be more enjoyable, and Modern Warfare 2 Spec Ops are ridiculously fun. Here, Call of Duty triumphs in both quality and quantity. Now, we have Black Ops and Halo: Reach, and the same thing happens here: CoD wins in terms of quality and quantity. Halo: Reach now has Firefight, and even though I LOVE what Bungie did with Firefight (It was crap in ODST), I don't think it comes close to Black Ops' Zombie Mode, Training Mode, and Arcade Mode. I've only played Black Ops for a couple hours at Rajan's place, so I haven't had much time to hone my opinion, but I already know that I heavily prefer Black Ops' single player to Reach's (the campaign looks really sick as well. I haven't played it, but I saw Rajan play it for a bit, and I love its atmosphere). I was very unimpressed with Reach's campaign, so in terms of the single player, Reach only has Firefight for me. Meanwhile, you have Zombie Mode, Training Mode, Arcade Mode, and what I'm sure is another great campaign for Black Ops.

And now we have the multiplayer, and this is where I think Halo shines. One thing I think that I should bring up though before going further into this is that one of the reasons why it's foolish to directly compare two entire video game series is because there's a lot of variation within them. Within Halo, you have the consistent decreasing skill-intensiveness across the series (Halo 3 to Reach is debateable though IMO), and within Call of Duty, I know that a lot of people think the series has been deteriorating over time in terms of competitiveness as well, especially between Modern Warfare 1 and Modern Warfare 2. Even though I despised Halo 3's multiplayer for its immense shrinking of the skill gap, and I'm not a big fan of Reach's as well, I still firmly support the belief that Halo's multiplayer is more skill intensive than CoD's. I would much rather play Halo 3 or Reach competitively than even the most competitive CoD. Even though the Halo series has varied a lot in terms of its merit as a competitive game, the defining Halo formula is still intact across the entire series: You have to work for your kills. This is what separates the Halo series as a competitive game, and why I think it will always be more competitive than CoD is.

The previously italicized statement is a bit misleading because it implies that you don't have to do any work at all to get kills in CoD, and this is of course, completely untrue. What I meant to say with this statement is that in Halo, the actual killing of the person takes work, whether it be with melees, grenades, shooting bullets, or some combination of the aforementioned tactics. In CoD, on the other hand, it seems to me that in every single CoD game, you only have to put 5-10 bullets into the guy in order to kill him (and headshots don't bear the same necessity they do in Halo), if not less, making almost every single battle a matter of who fired first. This is main reason why I dislike CoD as a multiplayer game, it's VERY 2 dimensional when compared with Halo and its multiplayer. Even though I've always been a casual gamer at heart, and I haven't enthusiastically played in competitive gametypes for a long time, I like games that have big skill gaps, games in which a noob killing an experienced player doesn't happen very often. I may not be some hardcore MLG kid, but I still absolutely hate it when a kid who's played the game for a month kills me with little to no problem due to the shittiness of the game (for Halo 3, this was AR + Beatdown). I've taken a long time getting good at the game; I don't just want it all to go away with the next installment. I would imagine this to be a lot more frustrating in CoD, because all it takes is for some noob to spawn behind you or catch you unaware to kill you. If you think some kid spawning behind you and killing you with AR/Beatdown in 1-2 seconds is bad, try dying in half a second to some noob luckily spawning behind you with an ACR. This is why I love Halo: Due to the shield system, the fights are very 3 dimensional. First shot is definitely an advantage, but it won't automatically win you the fight. Since it takes time to deplete a person's shields with a weapon (minus the Rocket launcher I guess), you have to follow through with more accurately placed shots after your first one. This leads to a lot more outgunning, primarily outBRing (fuck outDMRing because of the bloom). On top of that, you have factors such as the use of cover along with strafing. And for Halo 1 and Halo 2, you had a complex close range combat system because melees aren't an instant kill like they are in CoD (panic knifing ftl), and they took LOTS of skill to pull off. Halo 1 had the BLB, and the melee was just harder to land due to the shorter lunge distance (actually, I don't think there was any lunge at all). Halo 2 had a massive lunge distance, but it was still very 3 dimensional due to the button glitches. CoD has a semblance of a couple of these dimensions, but when compared to Halo, it might as well be nothing. Another very important thing that stems from Halo's shield system is team shooting. Since first shot almost always wins in CoD, team shooting isn't nearly as important as it is in Halo. Lastly, we have power weapon control. Since CoD doesn't have weapons placed on the map, power weapon control is completely eliminated as a dimension of the game, and this, as a result, simplifies map control as a skill because these two dimensions are so closely intertwined. All in all, Halo's multiplayer trumps Call of Duty's in terms of competitive value because it's simply more 3 dimensional, both when it comes to individual skill and teamwork. What I love about Halo is that it has a LOT of opportunities for skilled players to shine, even when they're down. In Halo 1, even if a noob got 6 shots on you with the pistol, you could just outgun them and 3 shot them if you were good enough. In Halo 2, a noob could load half a BR clip into your back, and you could Strongside away and around a corner, punishing him with a perfectly executed jumping BXR when he chased you. In Halo 3, you could just outgun them with the harder to use BR or go for a clutch snipe. In Reach, you can punish spammers far range with well-paced, well-placed shots. In CoD, there are far less of these opportunities. A player with little to no experience can catch the best player in the world off guard and kill him with little to no difficulty. In Halo, you have Carbon actually putting up a fight with only 3 players (Ghostayame was booted for betraying Gandhi or the other way around) against a team that made it into the Championship bracket (so they're not the best players in the world, but they're still VERY good). I love the Call of Duty games, but when it comes to multiplayer depth and skill gap size, I think Halo clearly wins with miles in between.

While we're on the topic of Halo being more 3-dimensional, I want to add another benefit of this attribute, one that doesn't have anything to do with competitive merit. Because Halo is more 3-dimensional, it's a lot more flexible when it comes to how you can be a good player. While becoming the best player in the world is obviously going to require a very proficient mastery of every skill set, merely being a good player can be achieved in several ways. For example, you may not have the best BR, but your great decision making, brilliant tactics, and general smarts allow you to best the majority of other players (Walshy). Or maybe your awareness and decision making aren't so great, but you have a ridiculous BR and snipe so you can just outgun anybody in your path. With CoD, there are obviously different ways to be good at the game, but since there's less dimensions to it, it's obviously more limited, forcing a higher minimum master of each of the skill sets.

However, Call of Duty, isn't anywhere near the noobed up piece of crap people make it out to be. Call of Duty DOES have a skill gap, and it may not be as big as Halo's is, but it's there. I know from my experiences with Modern Warfare 1. Ok, my Modern Warfare 2 experiences say otherwise, but in CoD's defense, it had more bad players than CoD 4 did because it's more noob friendly, meaning that the players I played in MW2 were probably worse than the ones I played in MW1. Also, MW2 is often regarded as the least skill intensive of all of the CoD games by hardcore CoD people. Anyways, even though the depth of CoD's multiplayer is severely weakened by how fast the kills are, there's still many factors that come into play in getting kills, meaning that there are aspects of the game one has to master and that there IS a skill gap. The actual killing of the player doesn't take much work, but I've said this before many, many times when I back up my belief that it's impossible to show much skill via montages, and I'll say it again: There's a LOT more to skill than just kills. Of course, it's VERY important to have a good BR, a good strafe, and good close range capabilities (let's just pretend Halo 3 and Reach don't exist). However, there's many other skills you have to master in order to become good at the game such as awareness, positioning, decision-making, reflex time, and map control, essentially the skills you need to arrive at your kills. Because the actual killing is essentially eliminated as a dimension of the game, Call of Duty places a greater emphasis on the remaining dimensions it has. You need to be incredibly vigilant because the slightest slip in awareness can lead to your death. Unlike in Halo, pulling off a comeback mid-fight isn't much of an option. You need to have stellar reflexes because even a couple milliseconds can spell out life or death. For example, if two people see each other at the same time, reflexes are incredibly important because the person who gets the first shot has a massive advantage. Map control is also very important. You still need to be able to identify which spots are good and how they are good: Which spots can see most of the map? Which spots have adequate amounts of cover? Ok, so now the other team is more likely to take a more defensive approach since they are ahead; which spots are they most likely going to try to control?

Also, I want to point out that CoD actually has some dimensions that Halo doesn't have, which is its customization capabilities. This is actually a tricky topic because there's a couple ways you can use this aspect of the game to prove that this makes Call of Duty more skill intensive, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't agree with (actually, "some" is inaccurate because it just means 1, but whatever). Anyways, in Call of Duty, you have classes, similar to the Armor Perks in Halo: Reach. This makes the game more skill intensive in a way similar to that of Shadowrun. It adds another aspect to teamwork because certain times will call for certain roles. For example, you are going to need some sort of anti-vehicular role in order to take care of Chopper Gunners and AC-130's. Some people claim that this adds skill to the game because it forces players to master more things. This isn't really true. The customization in Call of Duty is, well, customization. Its main purpose is to help players find which combination fits them the best. Customization doesn't really present players with more dimensions to master; it helps them find a way to capitalize on their natural talents, their natural play style. For example, a person who's incredibly intelligent and cunning will probably find the knifer class to be a good fit. On the other hand, someone who is patient and has great reflexes and accuracy will love some sort of sniper class.

Fuck the conclusion, it's 2 AM in the morning, and I need to sleep. I'll do it later.

What I Think About Reach Overall

2011-01-17T22:21:00.000-08:00

I actually have more stuff to say about the specifics of Reach, but I wanted to get this out ASAP, because I know a lot of people have been dying to know what I think of Reach overall as a game.

Well, it is time to go against the crowd and say that I found Reach to be similar to Halo 3 in the aspect that both of these games had a lot of sweet improvements made to it, but were ultimately quite disappointing because too many of the core elements were fucked with. A lot of people are probably expecting me to defend this statement when it comes to Halo 3, but I've gone into that enough already, so I'm just going to go over how Reach fits this bill.

First of all, the multiplayer. I wasn't too disappointed with it because Halo 3 smashed my expectations of Bungie pretty nicely, but I did have a little hope, and frankly, it was killed. The bloom is probably the WORST thing to have ever happened to Halo in my opinion, and it made me realize that I took reticule behavior for granted. I don't really agree with the common belief that Halo: Reach "isn't Halo", but I can't deny that Reach doesn't feel entirely like a Halo game, and for me, the bloom is the main proponent behind this. I can understand where Bungie was coming from with the bloom because trying out new things isn't always bad (and bloom DOES work for many, many games), but I really think that they fucked up with its implementation. They wanted to add a new dimension to the game and they did succeed to some extent by making far range shooting more skill intensives, but the damage they did to mid to short range shooting outweighs this in my opinion. Anyways, I don't want to dwell on the bloom for too long because I've already gone over it, so I'm going to move on.

To sum up the entirety of my opinion of the multiplayer, there are a LOT of small to mid-sized improvements (balanced AR, armory, veto system, assassination animation, hit-scan coming back) but they are outweighed by the fuck-ups Bungie made to it, which are, on average, of a greater magnitude than the improvements (decreased mobility leading to overpowered grenades, no bleedthrough, BLOOM, Armor Lock, etc).

The rest of Halo: Reach, the non-multiplayer side of it, is pretty much a strict improvement. I haven't made a blog post about this yet, so I won't go too much in depth right now.

If I were to give a grade to Halo: Reach as a Halo game, I would give it a C-. The game has some pretty massive problems, and when compared to Halo 1 and Halo 2, it doesn't come very close. However, when compared to Halo 3, it isn't that bad. A lot of improvements have been made to it, and in many ways, the game is cleaner and less frustrating than Halo 3 is and even Halo 2 as well (the standard starting weapon isn't complete garbage). Hit-scan returning is a big plus, Firefight is incredible, and the Armory is great. Many of the problems of its predecessors have been fixed or semi-fixed (overpowered AR, bullet spread), and a lot of moving forward in the form of addition has been made (more 3 dimensional Forge, more 3 dimensional campaign, a new playing mode in the form of Firefight, a more 3 dimensional player customization experience, etc). However, Bungie seems to have forgotten, once again, the most important thing when it comes to continuing a successful video games series: Preserving the core that makes the series great. Bloom was NOT necessary. No bleedthrough was NOT necessary. Decreased mobility was NOT necessary. Bungie undeniably moved forward in many ways in Halo: Reach, but it also moved, well, in the wrong direction in many ways as well (I don't want to say backwards because that implies bringing back an error that was eventually fixed from a previous Halo game). People say that Reach had and still has potential, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Halo 2 sucked ass pre-patch, so there is definitely hope for this game. If bloom was removed/fixed, no bleedthrough was eliminated, and mobility was restored back to what it was before, I believe that this game would nearly be as good as Halo 2 was.

If I were to give a grade to Halo: Reach as just a video game, I would give it an A-, something that is pretty similar to what I would give to all of the other Halos in this respect. Even though I don't like Reach much as a Halo fan, I can't deny that it is a GREAT game when compared to the rest of the entire video game field like all of the other Halo games. The world-renowned, defining Halo formula is relatively intact, and the game has quite a lot of replay value along with lots of different aspects to explore (theater, customs, Firefight, campaign and its skulls, multiplayer). Halo: Reach is still a very 3-dimensional gaming experience, and it really isn't the hopeless piece of crap many people say it is.

More Reach Review - Nothing But Good Things to Say About Reach (Almost)

2011-01-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

Again, no structure. And yeah, most of this article is positive stuff to say about Reach. Amazing, I know.

Ranking system - The ranking system is essentially a strict downgrade over Halo 3's and even Halo 2's. Why? Because there's no levels. Halo 2's ranking system only reflected your skill with a number representing your level. Halo 3 took it a step further by introducing ranks, which are based on experience and reflect how much you play the game, along with games played and games lost. Using the person's level, you could deduce the person's skill level, but levels can be misleading due to people buying 50's and whatnot, so you could use win/loss ratio to supplement your deductions. Halo: Reach took all of this backward by eliminating levels, but they include other information such as Legacy and percentage of a person's games in each matchmaking category along with the necessary numbers to calculate k/d ratio. As for whether or not the ranking system matches you up with opponents of similar skill, Reach's ranking system is again, a downgrade. In "competitive"/social, the teams are almost always horribly unbalanced, and even though there is a true skill system in Reach to make even teams in actual competitive playlists such as Arena, I still find that these teams are more unbalanced than they were in ranked Halo 3 matchmaking.

As for improvements to the ranking system, we have ratings, a poor but admirable attempt attempt to represent a player's performance within a game with a numerical rating. Bungie's attempt to do this was doomed from the start because something as complex as gauging a player's Halo skill is pretty much impossible to mathematically calculate. From my experiences with the rating system, it is largely based on k/d ratio for Slayer and the amount of objective done for objective games. The formula horrifically downplays subtle aspects such as the skill levels of the opponents, assists and general support playing, and the types of weapons used. I find the concept of numerical ratings to be very cool, but all the rating system really does is provide us with another meaningless number. However, it is an improvement because it adds something to the game without hurting it in any way.

Speaking of things that add to the game without hurting it in any way, we have the armory, which is one of Reach's greatest assets. I honestly don't give a fuck about how my Spartan looks and what he does when he dies, but a lot of people do, and it is nice to know that there's a little something extra to mess around with within the game if I ever get really, really bored. Even though the armory bears little to no importance for me, I've looked through it many times, and I have to say that I'm really impressed with the amount of effort Bungie put into it. Simply put, there is a TON of stuff you can mess around with in there, and the amount of customization you can do with your character is phenomenal. I am especially fond of the death effects, and if that day ever comes in which I will start taking Halo seriously again, I will probably start saving up for one of them.

While we're on the topic of strict improvements to the game, we have assassination animations. Again, these bear little to no importance for me because I never do them intentionally (leaving yourself wide open to attack for 2 entire seconds isn't my cup of tea), but they look really fucking cool, and again, they, by definition, add to the game. When I first found out about the Reach assassination animation, I thought to myself, "OK, these look cool and all, but is Bungie going to majorly fuck up and make them mandatory, pissing off competitive players everywhere?" And guess what? They didn't. The assassination animation is a beautiful thing because it represents exactly what I believe game developers should do with a successful series: Keep adding to it without fucking with any of the important core elements. So with the assassination animation, you have this incredibly cool way of killing someone for all of the casual players out there while preserving the "bare-bones" way of assassinating someone for competitive players. I tip my non-existent hat to Bungie for this brilliant idea.

This probably doesn't deserve its own paragraph, but call signs can now hold up to (this is bolded because this means that a 4 character call tag isn't mandatory) 4 characters. This means that you can now do more things with it, and again, this is a strict improvement.

Lastly, we have the veto system. Again, this is strict improvement for the game. In Reach veto system terms, the Halo 3 veto system was like this: First round of voting = Option 1 and Option "None of the Above". If "None of the Above" is chosen, the second round of voting is just Option 1. In Reach, we have 3 gametype/map combinations to choose from each round along with the "None of the Above" option which is the equivalent of the Halo 3 veto. And if "None of the Above" is chosen, we get to see another 3 gametype/map combinations in Round 2 of voting. In Reach, we see 6 gametype/map combinations compared to Halo 3's measly 2. This is a 200% increase. I am very happy with what Bungie did with the veto system, and this is another stellar example of what you should do with a successful video game series.

More Reach Review - Bloom, Weapons, and Armor Abilities

2011-01-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

I'm too lazy to inject some sort of structure into this, so I'm just going to type out my thoughts on subjects one by one.

Bloom - I hate the bloom, but I can't deny its merit. People say that the bloom adds another dimension to the game by making shooting harder; therefore, it is good, mainly for competitive play. This is half true. Bloom makes far range shooting a lot tougher, and with the implementation of hit-scan, I would say that long range shooting in Reach is an improvement over Halo 3 in which you were at the mercy of the infamous BR spread. However, the bloom is a double-edged sword, because it ruins short to mid range shooting. Even though you can pace your shots when you're up close, your goal isn't to have the cleaner shot, but the more efficient one. It doesn't matter if the guy spamming his heart out beat your beautifully paced shot; he still killed you. Spamming is more effective option in too many situations, and when two players are having a "spam-off", the battle isn't a matter of skill, but a matter of luck, which is bad for the game, especially competitive play. I don't want to play a slot machine every time I'm DMR-ing a guy up close.

Weapons - For the most part, I'm happy with the weapons. I like how the Plasma Pistol has surprisingly effective lock on option for vehicles now. The plasma pistol was brutally neutered between Halo 2 and Halo 3, and even though I mostly agree with this decision because it was clearly on the overpowered side (it was called "noob combo" for a reason), Bungie went way overboard powering it now. I believe that the balance was achieved pretty nicely in Reach, because the plasma pistol isn't the monster it once was in Halo 2, and it wasn't the almost completely useless piece of garbage it was in Halo 3.

The Needle Rifle is cool even though it's ugly as sin. I love the sound it makes; the concept is awesome (watching them explode is always fun), and the bloom doesn't affect it that much.

The DMR is also cool. Yes, it's sad to see the BR go, but I think the gun looks cool, and I like the sound of it. I actually prefer the sound over the Halo 3 BR's and maybe even Halo 2's. A 4 shot killing capability would be cool, but it isn't horrendously underpowered or anything. The clip size and the amount of ammo it can hold are also fine.

Rockets can lock on again, awesome. Even though this was completely pointless because the Spartan Laser (Spartan Laser = one of Halo 3's greatest successes) is such a perfect anti-vehicular weapon, there's really no harm in doing this in my opinion. However, I think that the rockets in Reach are too strong like they were in Halo 2. The strength of the Halo 3 rockets were perfect in my opinion.

The Needler isn't as strong as it was in Halo 3, but it's still overpowered like it was in Halo 3. The gun requires little to no skill; it shouldn't be nearly as effective as it is. Yes, the Halo 2 Needler was useless garbage and criminally underpowered, but Bungie went overboard in souping it up later on.

Concussion rifle is cool and balanced.

Focus Rifle is the same as the Concussion Rifle (except even cooler IMO), though I do miss the Beam Rifle. How it is a substitute for the Beam Rifle/the Covenant equivalent of the sniper rifle makes absolutely no sense to me.

Plasma Rifle's OK I guess. I've never been such a big fan of the weapon.

Plasma Repeater is new but essentially the same as the Plasma Rifle (minus the cool discharge option), so my opinion of this gun is the same as for the Plasma Rifle.

The Plasma Grenade Launcher is a kickass concept, and I also think it's very well balanced. I thought it was way overpowered in the Beta, but from my experience with the actual game, it's underpowered if anything (the gun takes forever to charge and the grenades aren't hard to dodge) and is still quite fun to use.

Fuel Rod Gun - Yay, this gun is in matchmaking! It's annoying yet quite fun seeing your shots bounce around, and the gun is actually pretty effective (and maybe even a tad overpowered IMO).

Grenade Launcher - It's balanced, an interesting weapon to use, makes for fun kills, and isn't overpowered. What's not to love?

The guns I forgot that aren't the sniper rifle - They're cool I guess.

And last but not least, the sniper rifle. People say this gun is ridiculously easy to use now compared to Halo 3, but I'm really not feeling this difference. When I'm sniping people that aren't strafing or moving quickly, it seems easier because the hitboxes feel bigger, but when you're sniping someone that is moving quickly/strafing or when you're going for quickscopes, it feels a LOT harder. On the flip side, no scoping seems a lot easier.

Armor Abilties - Let's just go through them one by one.

Sprint - It's awesome. It requires skill to use and can't really be abused. It makes running away like a champion a lot easier, which is quite annoying sometimes, but for the most part, it isn't too bad. Referring back to running away thing, it teaches kids not to chase.

Bubble Shield - Infinite bubble shields that can be deployed at any time? Baw.

Jet Pack - This is similar to sprint in that it requires skill to use, can't really be abused, and isn't that annoying. It can be annoying when you're looking at your radar and you forget to factor in altitude, but this isn't a fault of the game; it's the player's job to be vigilant of his surroundings, which includes the space above him. The Jet Pack allows for sweet power weapon rushes, but it doesn't go too fast, it makes a loud noise, and it expands its user as a target. This is a very well-designed and balanced perk.

Evade - Pretty much the same thing as sprint. It can be annoying, but it's still skill intensive.

Hologram - This perk allows for some really fun kills/moments, and it isn't that hard to detect the holograms, making it not too annoying/overpowered.

Armor Lock - This perk isn't overpowered, because it's not like it guarantees you an auto-win if you use it, but it's REALLY annoying. You will most likely die after using it because you confine yourself to one place and you don't replenish much of your shields while within the lock, but you give your opponents a massive middle finger by doing so. Also, if used correctly (something that I personally haven't seen very often) by having your team come in while they're distracted with you, it can be pretty damn good.

Camo - You can tell when they're within the vicinity because your radar goes all screwy, but it can be abused with close range weapons, and it's really annoying when abused properly.

The perks are innovative, but a lot of them are way too annoying and unbalanced. I'm fine with Sprint, Evade, Jet Pack, and Hologram, and the rest need to go, especially Armor Lock.

GamersForChange FAQ

2011-01-03T23:50:00.000-08:00

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