For every one that reads this, please join me in writing my congressman asking for the elimination of daylight savings time.

Well, I knew of a web service you could use to make your own gamer card. So, I thought that I could use it pull in achievement information, and then weight the games by their aggregate scores on metacritic (I was also going to have games older than four years automatically drop off).

The first hurdle was trying to find an api for metacritic. Let me save you some time, there isn’t one. What I ended up doing was writing a quick screen scraper that I could use to extract the information, and then cache in my database. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked.

The next phase was pulling in the achievement information. This is where the wheels fell off the truck. I had not tried to pull achievement information form this before and, I was horrified to discover that it only pulls “Recent” game achievements. Or, roughly the last twenty or so game you played. So, for me, it was missing over 13,000 of my total gamer score. That’s no good.

Upon doing more research into the matter, there is no public way to retrieve this information. Basically, what you would have to do is log into people’s accounts on xbox.com, and then download all the html files with achievement information, and parse them. Fuck that.

I declare this project officially dead for the time being.

Originally I had no intention of playing through this game. My brother’s had told me a little about the story, which I determined was incredibly stupid. And, I have always preferred an arcade style FPS like Halo, rather than pseudo-realistic like the CoD games. But, vanlandw threw down the gauntlet so I was once again sucked into the wretched world of “Modern Warfare.” In a journey that defies all logic and reason, vanlandw quested through the first Modern Warfare game on veteran on his first play through. I defeated the first game when it came out years ago, so I thought it would jade my experience a little, even through I did not remember much about it. This is why I decided to play through Modern Warfare 2 on veteran, so I could simulate, if not duplicate the experience.

Much of the game play was as I expected it, it was challenging, but not really over the top. And, the story is so mind shattering stupid that they had to put in unskippable cut scenes (I hate this recent trend in games). If you attempt this game on veteran, you are going to die, frequently, but it does not matter too much because the check points are pretty generous. I managed to get through the first few levels without any big problems. My first tough checkpoint was experienced in the “Takedown” stage.

If you watch the video below, the point I got stuck in is the checkpoint at 4:00 in. If you get stuck here, you pretty much have to do exactly what the guy does to get past it, I tried every path, and the one he does on was the only one that worked for me. Ultimately, this point was not so much of a problem of stage design as that I had run out of ammo with my rifle, and it is really difficult to do it with the shotgun. And, if you want to see a version where the guy just badasses his way through it check this out.

The area that I thought was the most difficult in the entire game was in a stage called “The Only Easy Day was…Yesterday.” The problem on this stage is towards the very end. At this checkpoint you have to take out wave after wave of enemies that are concealed in smoke that make it rain grenades (reminded me of COD4) while flanking you. In the video below you can check out the checkpoint at 2:08. I did not do what this guy did. Whenever I stopped for a second to aim I got naded so I just ended up sprinting while zigzagging through cover into the next room. It worked, but it took a few tries and a little luck to do it.

The last really annoying part of the game was in the last stage. The whole trying to navigate on a “high speed” dingy chase is as absurd as it was annoying. You can check out the stage in the video below, basically you just end up swearing around while praying you don’t get shot. Beware as the video does contain the end sequence of the game, so if you don’t want to spoil the story make sure not to watch it.

Speaking of story, the story in Modern Warfare 2 is really stupid. It is utterly implausible, and they added in controversial aspects (playing as a terrorist in an airport) just to get PR as far as I can tell, but they did not make the game better, and just added annoying game play elements (forced to walk slowly on the terrorist stage). In the original MW game, that story elements seemed at least somewhat grounded in reality. The second game just goes bat shit crazy, with things like Russia invading the United States, and rogue Army Rangers. It just makes your brain hurt. Infinityward even removed Co-op for the game, because they did not want to tarnish their horrible narrative. A pathetic call if I have ever scene one. This game could have been much more enjoyable co-oping with a friend while protecting Burger Town. Sadly, I think that COD 5 is the best game in the series, and IW didn’t even make it, Treyarch did.

Having said all that I should point out that IW did fix many of the bugs from the first MW game. I discuss those more in my COD4 post, but there are some glaring problems with the first game that were not nearly as bad. The two big ones for me are dogs and grenades. In MW it literally rains grenades throughout most of the game. Seriously, WTF, where do these people get all the grenades? With dogs, you actually have a chance in MW2, where as in MW you had to anticipate when it would pop up the prompt because they did not give you enough time to react. The other major issue is pure level design, there are no poorly designed areas that are virtually impossible to get past like the War Room in MW. You’ll probably notice other things, such as enemies not spawning as quickly, in MW there were parts where guys would come as fast as you could shoot them, but that isn’t as noticeable in MW2. Inf MW2 if you are fast you can usually killed all the guys in an area.

Taking into consideration that I played this on veteran my perspective on the difficulty may jade my rating, so I am going to issue a few ratings for the game. One for playing on veteran, and one for the game in general, and one for multiplayer (which I did not even discuss in this post because it sucks so much).

For the game itself, I am going to give it a 1, since it has reasonable game mechanics, and the visuals are pretty decent. For playing on veteran I am going to give it a -2, because while IW did fix many of the bugs in MW, it is still clear they did not do enough play testing on the highest difficulty for it to be a smooth experience. For the multiplayer, I am going to give it a -5 on my undecim scale, because it sucks, and I cannot figure out what people see in it.

There are so many problems with the book, I don’t even know where to begin. And, I am not talking about the whole sacrilegious angle. I suppose my biggest gripe would be the style of the writing. It is inconsistent, and agitating. Reading it is like talking to someone that keeps slipping in and out of an irritating accident. This however is just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the things I found most disturbing about the book is the promotion of a strong sense of classism. There is a sharp delineation between the “elite” magic users, and everyone else, whom are referred to as “moggles” with some level of contempt. And, to make the normal people seem even more awful, the author reinforces her stereotype by having the foster family of Harry Potter  behave brutally towards him.

In fact, the whole situation with his family is another annoying facet of the story. The book basically begins with him, as a very young child being dropped off at his Aunt’s house. This was necessary as his parent were slaughtered by a wizard who is apparently not a nice guy. The problem is that his aunts family essentially hate him. In this section of the book, Harry is apparently a well behaved child, but is constantly punished. On, the flip side, once he is taken to the magic fairytale land to learn to be a wizard everything is different.

Harry Potter seems to be a character of opposites. In the regular world, he is good but falls downwards. In the fantasy land, he constantly does foolish things, and is quite reckless. However, the worse he screws up, the more upward he fails. It makes little to no sense. While I agree that no good dead goes unpunished, it is pretty rare that failure is directly rewarded either. And, really is this a lesson we want to teach our children?

I could rant about this forever, but I am going to tie it up here. Upon reading the book twice, and giving it due consideration. I am whole heartily issuing it my lowest possible rating, -5. Please people, avoid this book at all costs.

A few minutes after returning from Family Video with a video game, the power goes out. This is extremely uncommon, as we are on Grand Haven’s independent grid that nearly never goes down. So, I sat in the dark for a few minutes assuming the power would come back on at any moment (99% of the time is back in in five minutes).

After few minutes of waiting I finally decide to start scrounging around for a flashlight. Jesse found one, and we used it to find another. To be clear, we had enough time to wait a little while, find a flashlight, find another flashlight with dead batteries, find batteries, figure out how to open the flashlight, and put the batteries in the flashlight. And, the power still wasn’t back. This was unheard of.

So, of course the first thing I want to do is write a post about the experience. But, ultimately I decided not to, because I obviously could not post it since I had not internet access. But, more importantly, my laptop gets quite warm so I only use it when I can have a fan blowing on me to prevent my brain from boiling. No electrify = no fan.

At this point, I am figuring that I can survive without internet access for a little, because certainly the power should be coming on at any moment. I figured that it would be a good time to get a little catch up reading done. So, I grab my kindle only to say “battery is empty.” Ugh. I swear, whenever I want to use that thing the battery is dead. I really need to remember to turn off wireless when I’m not using it.

Next, I figured I would grab my iPod Touch, and see if everyone’s power was down by scanning for wireless networks. After that I was going to listen to some tunes. That thing was so dead that it wouldn’t even show the “charge immediately” screen. I swear, when the internet goes down, or in this case the power, all my electronics instantly die.

My last resort was to pull out an analog book, and attempt to read with one of those little book lights. I haven’t tried to read with one of those in ages. The light I use works pretty good with the kindle, but doesn’t work to well with a regular book, unfortunately. I managed to get through a chapter but it caused to much eye strain I was feeling sick to my stomach. At this point an hour had pasted.

So at this point I’m searching the house for a length of rope, and trying to figure out which branch would hold my weight the best.

After 90 minutes of unbearable horror, Jesse and I went to Wal-Mart. We wondered around for a half hour or so, and picked up some flashlights and portable fans. We got back to the house at a little after 12:30. Thankfully, during the time we were out the power came back on.

According to the blinking light on the stove, the power had come back on 11 minutes before we walked through the door. In order words, over two hours from the time it went out. Unfortunately for us, those two hours felt like an eternity.

After getting all the versions of ie installed, I took the new ie8 final out for a test drive. And, low and behold it still sucks, not surprise there though. I love how they don’t care about standards, and just keep introducing more fucking bugs for web developers to deal with. I can’t wait until the next site that I have to add yet another ie version specific stylesheet to. I mean seriously, I have one file for every other browser on the planet, but I expect to have to have three stylessheets just for ie.

I am seriously considering instituting a $1,000 surcharge to make sites ie6 compliant, but it seems absurd to me to devote such a huge portion of project development to debugging issues for a single, very obsolete, browser. Am I wrong? In the not too distant future I plan on modifying this site so that ie6 users are sent to a static page with download links to modern browsers, they will not longer be able to get to the actual blog and send me annoying messages about rendering quirks.

If you are viewing this post in internet explorer: what the fuck? Get with the program, and drop that piece of shit.

I could site here and rant about how awful internet explorer is, and how it takes years off my life, but it is getting late and I really should be sleeping, not venting. But, I won’t let that stop you from venting.

Anyone reading this is more than welcome to post a comment expressing their hatred for internet explorer. Any version is fair game, as they all suck.