The Patti LaBelle Sweet Potato Pie stayed on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Yes, there were some who purchased the pie now and then, but for the most part, the pie was unknown to the masses. Until this review was posted on YouTube on November 12. Since then, Wal-Mart can’t pay to keep the pies in stock as people who viewed the video rushed to Wal-Mart to get their own piece of Patti!
Video
I’ve been waiting for this game for quite a long time and two days into playing, I am in love.
Payday 2 is a team based game where you are a squad of criminals who embark on various missions. Doing so, you receive cash which can be used to buy new weapons, new masks, and can be also used to customize all your gear.
What I love:
-The first Payday was also team based but just wasn’t very good at it. The HUD was too limited, the missions could be done without a team, the classes showed no major difference, and you really never needed help. In Payday2 the HUD now shows your entire team, their health, armor, ammo, and equipment. Each mission requires you to work with them and use their special skills to accomplish each heist.
-Every time you level up, you gain a skill point that can be used to level up certain classes. Now thankfully each class is significantly different from one another and each has a special ability
-The first Payday had..uh maybe 5 or so missions? Now we have upwards of 12 missions (probably more) and certain missions has various parts to them.
-I love being the bad guy in a game, it’s something you rarely are in video games. There’s a certain essence of “badass” about it.
-The guns! Oh how I love the choices of them all! The first Payday was limited to just a hand few, Payday 2 has over 9 standard weapons and just as many secondary weapons.
-The graphics! Oh this game looks beautiful compared to the last game. Then again a video in 360p would look better than the first Payday.
-The options to do each Heist are endless. You can stealth it or go in guns blazing. A door can be opened in four different ways, cameras can be taken down in numerous ways, locks can be broken or picked; Oh the choices are wonderful!
What I dislike:
-Nothing honestly.
Bonus section! What I hate:
-The leveling system is just stupid. Each skill costs 1 skill point and a large amount of cash. To “Ace” a skill requires three points and an even larger amount of cash. Tier 3 level skills cost three points and a six figure cash amount….
-The guns are so expensive that I want to cry. A G36 rifle costs $200k and each upgrade can vary from $10k to even more. Thankfully we don’t have to pay for ammo, otherwise I’d quit.
-Grinding every level. I’ve put five hours into the game and hit have hit level 24. Once I hit 24 I spent the next hour playing a serious heist, earned a ton of cash, but gained next to nothing in experience. The grind begins.
-Crime.net. I don’t even know where to start with this. In the first Payday, you simply went to the multiplayer menu, selected a map and difficulty, and you were shown the available games. For Payday 2 they introduced Crime.net. A large, constantly updating map which shows all the available heists, their difficulty, pay, experience, lobby leader, and the open slots available. As nice as it sounds, having all that info shown to you, the map is glitchy move around, it updates too slow, and new missions aren’t able to be set up by yourself so you must play what the game says you must.
-You’re being shot! In a normal first person shooter, when you’re being shot at a red arrow or something of similar nature pops up in the direction you’re being shot from. It’s a tried a truth method that nearly ever shooting game uses. In Payday2 a half red circle shows up from what part of your is being shot it, in example an enemy can be in front of you but shooting at your left arm, thus it’ll show your left side is being shot. This has completely confused me and led me to be spinning in circles to find a guy who’s probably just right behind me.
Don’t get me wrong, I will max out my level in Payday 2 and continue to play this game till I find something more exciting to play with my friends. It’s a fun fun game and can be replayed till time ends. I love being a criminal, love the new improvements they’ve made, and love the gameplay. It’s not a perfect game, but I’m quite alright with that.
Every time my birthday rolls around it seems like it was just yesterday I was a year younger; time really does seem to fly. Though going from 18 to 19, it seemed like a lifetime.
It’s amazing that a year ago I was enjoying my summer with my girlfriend of three years. My memory is a little foggy but I’m pretty sure I spent the afternoon with her, as was the norm with me and her. We exchanged gifts, considering our anniversary landed on the same day; I got her a key necklace with a heart as it’s main part, she also got me a necklace in the shape of a heart with our names inscribed in it. I’m not sure where that necklace went to..
I entered college that September at William Paterson University. Man oh man that was quite an experience. In a period of four months I watched my relationship crumble, learned that college isn’t easy, and that it’s a dog eat dog world. I left in late November, partly due to the fact I just wasn’t ready to be in college and because they locked my account since I apparently wasn’t a “legal” US citizen (don’t mind my SSN, bank account, drivers license, etc).
My parents were supportive of me leaving WPU, my dad was too caught up arguing with the school over their actions, but I felt alone in my world. I didn’t want to be the kid sitting around doing nothing with his life but also didn’t want to instantly jump into college again. So, I did what any sensible 18 year old would do, I became a certified bartender.
Being a bartender seemed like a cool idea, of course from a business perspective, paying an 18 year old to handle alcohol is a “no-no”. With that plan failing I just started looking around for whatever was out there. The job hunt had it’s many lows but, every now and then it provided me with a job and timeless memories.
I knew though that I couldn’t survive working as a promoter for clubs or working part time in a retail store. I took a deep deep breath and registered back up to go to college. Brace yourself Bergen County College, I’m coming for you!
One year, 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, has felt like a lifetime to me. My world has flipped upside down more than once and has undergone a change in every way. I’ve changed my friends, my style, my attitude, my view on life, and much much more. The 18 year old teen who walked cautiously into college a year ago has been replaced by a 19 year old who feels like he’s ready to take on the world.
(random image for laughs)
Andrew Weber blogs about TV at The Drug of the Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Under the Dome is an extremely literal title. The main characters, primarily the residents of the small (presumably New England, since it’s written by Stephen King, but not specified that I can recall) town Chester’s Mill, along with some people who were passing through, are completely trapped from the outside world under a giant mysterious dome. So far, we know nothing can go through the dome, including sound, and citizens haven’t yet found a way to contact anyone outside the dome. The only method of communication is through sight on either side of the dome.
So that’s our big premise, taken from a recent Stephen King novel of the same name. That’s by far the most important part of the first episode. The second task of the pilot is to get a passing look at who we can guess will be our major characters. Here they are in short. First, you’ve got chief of police veteran Duke (Jeff Fahey, pilot Lapidus on Lost), and his younger chief deputy Linda, engaged to a firefighter outside of the dome. Due to poor timing, many of the town’s police were out of town participating in a parade. There’s “Big Jim” Rennie, car salesman and town council member (played by Dean Norris, Hank from Breaking Bad). Big Jim and Duke have a tet a tet most of the way through the episode and appear to be keeping some sort of secret from most of the town involving bringing in lots of propane.
There’s a pair of erstwhile summer lovers, teenagers Junior and Angie. What was a fun little fling goes bad when Angie doesn’t reciprocate Junior’s love, and Junior turns out to be some sort of psycho and kidnaps Angie and locks her away in a fallout shelter. Joe, a high schooler, is Angie’s younger brother. They’re both parentless for the duration of the dome.
There’s a Barbie, an ex-military out of towner who was looking shady at the beginning and could be either good or bad. He appears to have been on some sort of mission that involved needing a gun and looks a little like Jeremy Renner. He’s staying with local journalist Julia for the time being whose husband is missing and/or dead and/or having an affair.
Phil is a local radio DJ, and Dodee is his engineer at the station. Alice and Carolyn are parents just passing through en route to drop off their troubled, rebellious daughter Mackenzie at camp, before they get trapped (if only they hadn’t stopped at that one gas station).
Those are from what I could suss out the major characters, though there may be more introduced later, and some of the characters I described may turn out to be more minor than I could have figured from the premiere.
There are two major fronts then to work with in Under the Dome. There’s the question behind what the dome actually it is, how the characters find that out, if they can communicate outside the dome, get anything in, etc.
Then, what will probably occupy more time, is how everybody deals with the situation that arises when the characters realize they’re cut off from the rest of the world. Separating all the characters from the rest of society under the dome should give us a set up for the classic science fiction situation of an external futuristic (or supernatural) power forcing humans into difficult and unusual situations. They’ll have to decide whether to work together or compete and act outside of the ways they do every day, revealing their true natures. Do people look out for each other and help to store food for the good of the whole town? Do they form gangs and compete and engage in violence? It’s a classic Lord of the Flies scenario, and the dome is their island.
As I’ve said time and again, I’m a sucker for high concept serial science fiction shows. I know by now better than to get too excited from a mere one or two episodes of a series. Big sci-fi series like these so often disappoint, and they’re a thousand times easier to begin than to end (or to, well, middle, for that matter). It’s not particularly difficult to think of a wacky situation and create a cast of characters; it’s much harder to flesh out those characters with realistic and believable motivations and create a plot that obeys the rules set out by the show, and is compelling, well-paced, and not anti-climactic.
This has the building blocks. The reason it’s intriguing is solely the future possibilities but it’s hard to ask for too much more out of a first episode. There’s nothing about the writing or the characters or the film work that stands out, but I’m affirmatively intrigued due largely to the plot, and with pilots, if the plot is compelling enough that can be enough, especially for sci-fi or fantasy.
Will I watch the next episode? Yes. It’s on CBS. I can’t remember the last show I’ve watched a second episode of on CBS. I’ve repeatedly faced let downs with these types of shows; I watched multiple episodes of Revolution which I regretted quickly, as well as Terra Nova. I’m probably never going to learn completely. All I can do is know my own biases and prepare myself for the likely disappointment. In its favor, this at least this has some source material by a credible writer to work with, and is created by Brian K. Vaughan, a comic writer whose work I’ve enjoyed.
Andrew Weber blogs about TV at The Drug of the Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
We also see that Ray is a bit of a rebel. He doesn’t play by the rules, and that sometimes gets him in trouble with his team, and his boss, who is played by the always wonderfully sniveling Peter Jacobson. Supposed to spy on a woman for a scummy rich dude, he instead warns the woman, who he happens to know from an earlier encounter, of a stalker. He then proceeds to make out with her. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty either, threatening the stalker, covering the stalker in green die, and then beating him with a baseball bat when his earlier threats don’t succeed.
Ray is a very serious character who comes from a very fucked up Boston Irish-Catholic family (if you can’t recognize the Boston accent from real life, you should recognize it from Ben Affleck movies over the years). His dysfunctional family includes his two brothers, one of whom was molested by a priest as a child and is now an alcoholic, and the other who developed Parkinson’s from one too many shots to the head during a boxing career. His sister jumped off a building years ago while drugged up. And his dad, whom he hates most of all, just got out of prison after 20 years and is coming to find him and his wife and kids, whom are the last people Ray wants his dad spending time with.
So those seem to be the two main threads of the series, his job and his family, all shaken up now by the reappearance of his hated dad after many years. Ray’s got to balance his job, doing terrible things for rich people, with his inner sense of right and wrong, and he has to be the rock in his otherwise fucked up family, keeping together his troubled brothers while fending off his father. I half expected the narrator to announce during a credit sequence, “This is the story of a family from Boston living in LA, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.”
Ray’s got to do it all, and you can probably understand why he doesn’t crack a smile during the episode, or, really, say more than maybe 50 words. His silence and straight face imbue him with some combination of mystery, intimidation, and sex appeal, to the different characters in the show.
Ray Donovan was not a bad show, but it was a surprisingly generic show. Rather than seem inherently different and new, it seemed like it was trying to take some of the same themes that show up all the time on broadcast and the “light cable” (TNT and USA) networks and give them some serious edginess so that you know it’s premium cable. Ray gets drunk. Ray considers screwing a post-adolescent pop star who adores him. Ray beats up a man with a baseball bat. Unlike in an USA show as well, Ray’s job involves not infrequently doing what all involved admit are terrible things. These facets made the show darker and give it a wider swath of possibilities for future development; shows on Showtime are allowed to have more complicated, serial plots, that USA shows can’t or won’t. However, nothing in this first episode takes advantage of those possibilities. It seems more like a matter of degree than a fundamental difference from that classic USA or TNT format.
Ray’s got demons, and he’s going to have to face these demons. He’s great at a really cool but risky job. I can see the avenues worth exploring, The tensions between his old family and his new. The moral difficulties of committing terrible acts as part of a living because that’s his job. There’s clearly a mystery to his past, and to what he did to ensure his father stayed in prison and why.
I liked the family plot better than the work plot from the first episode, but still it hewed a little too close to cliché. These clichés can be broken with the detail and depth that hours and hours of a television series can offer, which is one major advantages over film. Still, I wish the pilot had delved deeper into one area of Ray Donovan’s life to try to really heighten the appeal and show off a little early complexity rather than throw the kitchen sink of potential plots (his family, his brothers, his work, his mentor) but attack them all on a surface level just as a preview of all the characters you’ll be seeing this season. There was no semblance of focus.
The genericism of the story lines isn’t necessarily something that can’t be transcended through further episodes. In the first few episodes, Justified looked like a simple procedural with a cop who didn’t play by the rules before it grew into something excellent. I enjoyed the first season of Hannibal, which hardly breaks new ground, greatly. Still, it’s hard to make this type of show work without a charismatic lead. What everyone in the show saw as mysterious or silently uber-competent, I saw as stiff and uninterested.
There was enough that I was on the fence. All I wanted was a five minute sequence in the episode that convinced me, damn, this is a show that is required viewing, a moving moment, a stirring speech, and a stunningly filmed confrontation, and then I could figure out exactly what’s good about it later. I didn’t get that.
Will I watch it again? Honestly, from this episode, probably not. If it picks up buzz and I start hearing that it gets good, I’m perfectly willing to give it a second chance, and I do think there’s a non-negligible chance that I’ll have given it a couple more episodes before the end of the season. My expectations are always ramped up a little bit for premium cable shows and I was kind of let down, less by the show being bad, and more by the protagonist not seeming particularly compelling, and the show not offering me at least a little something new or different or exciting me in any particular way.
Well the weather hasn’t been great here in New Jersey so I stayed away from the shore this Memorial Day Weekend and spent Monday night at the movies with my friends. They talked me into seeing Fast and Furious 6; here is my short review.
What I liked:
What I disliked:
My final impressions? Well if you have that much free time, a little kid who wants to see it, or friends who will buy you your ticket then by all means go see Fast and Furious 6. Otherwise save yourself the $13 for a ticket and go buy lunch or dinner.
The Great Gatsby by R. Scott Fitzgerald was a required book to have read in my high school sophomore year; I enjoyed the book so much I read it three times start to finish that year. Think of my excitement when I heard they were making The Great Gatsby movie. Luckily, I was able to go see the movie last night with a group of friends. I walked in expecting to be amazed and love it. I didn’t.
With Leonardo Dicaprio as Jay Gatsby I expected an amazing performance
As the title states, this is a short review, thus I shall touch on my main “likes” and “dislikes”.
What I Liked:
What I Disliked:
Overall, I left the theater very disappointed. I’ve always heard that books were always better than the movies based on them and never did I believe the people who told me that. This one time though, the book has the movie beat by light years.
