The Fretless Bass informs you of his new position.

I would tell you how long I have been writing on this blog reflectively, but I didn't check before I went to the writing page, and I don't want to have to save this as a draft.
Any way, I've been blogging for a few months now, and I'm finally crawling out of the gutter of the writing world, from internet blog with very few followers, to reviewer for a high school newspaper!
If there are any of you reading this that may fear the end of this blog, FEAR NOT! My position on The Voice staff may bring in more viewers, I will keep posting on this blog. Here's how it's going to work, I split my posting between here and The Voice, and on The Fretless Bass, you will get the more edgy/inappropriate version of the same review I might post on my school newspaper's website. You might enjoy reading this blog more, but the review with The Voice will probably be more accurate.
This has been not a review, but an informational message to anyone who reads The Fretless Bass, you will now find many of my reviews at http://cchsvoice.org/

the Fretless Bass reviews: The Walking Dead on AMC, season one.

There hasn't been a good drama on TV, since we lost 24 and Lost. (I'm still crying myself to sleep.) At least there wasn't until last Halloween! That was the night The Walking Dead, Based on a popular graphic novel, premiered on AMC. I watched the show from the beginning, and I can tell you, no TV in my life has been so capturing, entertaining, and horrifying.
The story follows Rick Grimes, an idealistic sheriff's deputy in Georgia, who, after being sent into a comma by a gunshot wound, wakes up to a deserted hospital, with the undead clawing at him from behind a locked door. Rick escapes from the hospital and embarks on a quest to find his family. Throughout the season, Rick must do battle with insanity, loneliness, racism, and above all, the dead.
The thing that absolutely hooks me on The Walking Dead is how many episodes could go the entire length without seeing a zombie once, because the show isn't really about zombies, it's about people. The conflicts in the show are largely not about zombies. You think your husband is dead, do you hook up with his best friend? And when he comes back? What do you do then? You need to go back into the zombie infested city to save a member of your group, but he's a vile racist. You fight a street gang for a bag full of guns, but the street gang is protecting a nursing home. The conflicts in the show are all about morals, and How they break down or get stronger after the dead rise.
There is one thing that really caught my attention on the show. Throughout the season, you see some characters slowly fall to insanity, and you love it, every episode, you are wondering if someone is finally going to crack, or if they go so far over they edge, they make everyone else zombie fodder. It's conflicts like these that set The Walking Dead apart from other zombie movies and shows.
The next thing I want to talk about it the three kinds of horror. There's type one, where things jump out at you really fast, type two, which I call gore-horror, where some idiot assumed that more guts=scarier, and type three, which is psychological horror, it's also the only good kind. Three guesses which type of horror the walking dead is? Well for all you gore-horror enthusiasts out there who can't connect my last two sentences with this one, I have two things to say to you, get therapy, and it's type three. There is only one instance of type two horror in the entire season, and even that is used very creatively to make a type three. The survivors need to chop up a dead zombie and smear it's guts on them so they can't be smelled, the scene is disturbing to watch, not because of the gore, but because of the fact that they are chopping up another human. Type three horror is good for this show because you know that the zombies are coming, you just don't know when, and you pray it isn't when the kids are getting home-schooled, or Rick is having a tender moment with his wife, and it eats away at you, by the end of every episode you feel as crazy as some of the characters are.
My only complaint with the show is that at the end of the season finale, Rick gets a secret whispered in his ear, and we need to wait for next fall the find out what it is. I'm guessing it's something terrible, like the bite doesn't cause the disease, only speeds it up, because it's actually air-born!
To end, I want to say that if you haven't yet seen The Walking Dead, see it right now. Because if you don't, you're missing out on some fabulous TV. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to eat, I'm starving, I wonder if we have any leftover brains in the fridge......

the Fretless Bass reviews: CCHS's Noises Off.

This Friday, I went to my high school's fall play. This play was fantastic, I had many friends in it, and that only added to the experience for me, as a thespian myself. I would have auditioned, but this play is only for sophomores and up.
Anyway, Noises Off is one one of those plays with a play within a play. That is, it's about a bunch of actors putting on a show, and of course they fail. The show is in three acts, the first act is a dress rehearsal. In the second act, they all hate each other; the set is turned around and they go through the show again, only they are all trying to kill each other for various love reasons. In the third act, the set is forward again, and nothing goes right.
Every character was hilarious, especially the characters played by Evan Sibley, and Maddie Mahoney, who's characters, and the characters "played" (within the play) by those characters, never stopped delivering laughs. However, what really stole the show was the set. It was fantastic! It turned around in the second set, and showed us the backstage. Also, the number of doors in the set required tons of quick entrances and exits. Props to the actors and actresses for all the quick thinking, especially with all the fake attempted murder going on in-between entrances. The absolute height of the play was when Evan's character fell down the stairs.
The only grievance I have with the show is sort of a compliment in a way. It was that sometimes, there was too much going on, and you missed something, because you were already trying to watch three other events.
In summary, Noises Off is brilliant, and even though it closes tomorrow, you should make every attempt to see it, either with CCHS, or another company. Now if you'll excuse me I have to clear out forty thousand hours of the Simpsons from my Tivo.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Modern Warfare 2

Do you remember my review of the first Modern Warfare game a few weeks ago? I do. I remember how I said the game's major flaw was that the plot was thicker than a linebacker and the fantastic gameplay made up for it. Well, Mod Fare 2 has the same issue, except that the plot is slightly easier to understand, so by a simple conversion, Modern Warfare two is better, much better, than its precursor.
The game once again splits between following two units, one American (Rangers) and always in an intense battle, and the other seemingly British (Task Force 141) and more stealth-based. However, in Mod Fare 2, I wasn't sure what country Task Force 141 was from. Every member had a British or Scottish accent, but they took orders from the same guy who commanded the
American Rangers. One thing I noticed in particular was how the game was more about Soap again. You play mostly as a character named "Roach" (again with the weird code names) who is under the command of the protagonist from the first Mod Fare game. I'm sure this was just put in to get the fanboys excited when they first saw Soap's name, and it gets even worse, because Captain Price makes an appearance, too! This is a good tactic, I, as a fan of the series, did get very excited when I saw those two names on my heads up display.
So let's get down to the juicy, meaty, center of this review.
What Mod Fare 2 did right: Modern Warfare will always go down in my mind as the game with fantastic gameplay and graphics. Now, I have said about movies that graphics shouldn't matter that much, and the same goes for video games, but the graphics in this game are amazing. The gameplay, all you need to know about that is that it lets you do everything you wanted it to do, with very simple controls. I will hail Mod Fare 2 forever as well for its unique gameplay mechanics. The height of the game for me was when an EMP went off over the warzone, first, you see through the eyes of an unfortunate astronaut who witnesses the explosion, then gets killed by a flying satellite. Then, you have to play out the rest of the stage on the ground without your read-dot sight, which makes combat a real challenge. No other game can integrate story and gameplay as well as Modern Warfare 2.
What Mod Fare 2 did wrong: again, plot. In the beginning of the game, I couldn't tell what the heck was going on, mostly because I skipped the level where you massacre Russian civilians, because I didn't buy a game to see/do that. Also, stop making every war character either a badass or a wimp that freaks out at everything. What about a guy that has a personal vendetta against Russia, or a female character for once? There has been little to no variation in personality of characters in this franchise.
At the end of the day, Modern Warfare 2 is the best FPS I have ever played and I think you should get it right now if you haven't yet. I know this review is behind, but every critic has to put his two cents in on the big games, and now you have mine, don't spend it all in one place.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

I love Harry Potter. Now that that's out of the way, I need to criticize this movie through teary eyes, because I was let down. First and foremost, it's just a ploy to get us to spend more money. The movie took a very small amount of material, and turned it into a full length movie; you could have walked out of the theater at any time, walked back in ten minuets later, and figured out exactly what you missed. That's bad. Movies need to be deep and involving, and you need to have to focus to follow them, like Inception. HP7 was not one of those movies. Second, there was a whole lot of pointless crap in it. At one point, Hermione was feeling sad, so the music on the radio became background music, and she and Harry started to dance around to it. I'm sure that was just a trick so the writers wouldn't have to think of an actual plot event to have happen. Thirdly, there was the part where Hermione read about the story of the Deathly Hallows, and it went into an animation of the story that looked like something out of an artsy film festival. It sucked! It was another time waster! Lastly on the hate list, the director obviously went out of his way to make the whole thing an analogy to 1930's Germany. The "snatchers" were nazi's (they even had red armbands), the "Mudbloods" were Jews (who were put on trial for their heredity), and Voldemort was Hitler. It all seemed really unnecessary, like the movie makers thought we needed to connect Voldemort to Hitler to understand how evil he is; we don't, everyone in America has read the books, we know Voldemort is evil, we don't need to be reminded of the Holocaust to connect the dots.

Lucky for all of us, there were some things I did like about this movie. The movie focused on two characters more than it ever had, Hermione, and Voldemort. I can't tell you about Hermione without a spoiler, so I'll only tell you that Voldemort has more lines in this one than he did in all six other movies combined. The last thing I liked about it was how you really got the feeling that the main characters were alone, and there was no one in the world they could trust. That's a really hard feeling to get from a movie, and HP7 did it.

Now, after all the negatives I've given in this review, I want to make one thing clear, the movie was good and entertaining. Come on, it was Harry Potter! But this time it failed to enchant me quite like the others did.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Final Fantasy X

(WARNING! IF YOU ARE A FINAL FANTASY FAN, DO NOT READ THIS POST, IT MAY CAUSE YOUR INFERIOR SENSE OF JUDGEMENT OF GAME MERIT TO COLLAPSE OPPON ITSELF IN A BURST OF LOGIC!)

In order to start this review, I'm going to have to tell you a story.

It was the first month of high school, and I decided I needed a new activity. I said to myself "I'm a game and movie critic" so I went to sci-fy club! I ended up leaving and never coming back because I was the only person there not dressed in all black and wearing cat-ear dilly-boppers with purple died hair, but that's beside the point. The meat of this story is that while I was there, I mentioned that I hated final fantasy X, I was told to leave by the president of the club, so I did, jokes on him.

So I was chastised by a super nerd for not liking final fantasy X, well lucky for all of us, my brain works like an english report, so I will now state reasons and evidence for why I hated that game, and apply the problems to all gaming, because to me, FFX is the "what not to do guide" for all gaming.

I got FFX, and I was excited, I had recently finished playing Kingdom Hearts, witch is the ultimate example of game storytelling, and the main character in FFX, appeared in KH as a whinny, asshole, 10 year old.

I plugged the game in, and after watching an obnoxiously long opening sequence, I stood still for five minuets because it was never obvious that the cut-scene had ended. I was then taken through a sequence of moving my character five yards, then watching a ten minuet cut scene. Then, I was introduced to a plot so thick, you needed scuba diving gear to breach the surface. Characters were introduced with no backstory, people just started talking and interacting with them like they were introduced six hours ago, when in reality it was thirty seconds! During one of the ten minute cut scenes, your character is about to fall off a broken bridge, and some random guy catches him, and the main character exclaims this mystery guy's name and thanks him, they obviously new each other, I DIDN'T! And this is all during the time when only five percent of the time is gameplay and the rest is cut scenes, this isn't a game, It's a figgin' movie! (just so you all know, the reason I labeled this review as a movie, is because in my opinion, FF games are movies.)

Now for the real evil, Turn based combat. It's not fun. There, that's all the evidence I have, and it's good. Games are supposed to be fun, when you take one of the most important things in gaming and make it not-fun, you make the game not fun. Some people would say "Mickey! It's about strategy" Well it isn't, all you ever do in turn based combat is select attack when you aren't about to die, and eat a magic puppy intestine when you are.

So to sum it all up, FFX is a horrible game because, its more of a movie then a game, you can't tell if you need to kill the antagonist because he slept with your wife or if he stepped on your blue suede shoes, and you are about as involved in the combat as George Lucas is with making those three other Star Wars movies he promised us!

So if you are a die hard FF fan, and you read past the disclaimer at the top, I can guess that right about now, you're deciding which day of the week you want to set my house on fire, and I can't blame you. I just ripped apart a game that thousands of people would fight to protect. So hate me for it. But no matter how bad it gets, I can still say I was right about Obama, he said the troops would be out in six months, and two years later, we're still in the middle east, just like I said we would be.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but when I bought this game, I didn't accurately read the label, and thought it was Modern Warfare 2. I am, however, not sorry I made that mistake, because Modern Warfare was the best FPS I have ever played.
I have one more thing to get off my chest, I'm sick of the usual way of reviewing things, so I'm going to devote the next two parts of the review to what Modern Warfare did right, and what it did wrong.
The following facts are everything that made me love Modern Warfare. The story mode wasn't pathetic. In most war games I have played, the developers focused most of their time on the multiplayer mode, and since I can't play online due to my pathetic internet service, I have been stuck with a story mode that measures up to banging your head against a wall every time somebody yelled "give me some covering fire!" or, "Tango down!" So the story mode is fun, it's long enough to satisfy, and short enough so it doesn't get aggravating. Second, you feel like you form a bond with some of the characters, that way, when one of them dies, you actually get mad, charge the enemy, and get yourself killed. Third and finally, the controls are simple, and you don't ever superglue yourself to a wall when you only want to take cover. In many shooters, you press a button to take cover, and your character promptly welds himself to the nearest wall. In Modern Warfare, you just crouch behind a box, or a chest high wall, or just stand behind a door, AND IT WORKS! It still doesn't hold a candle to the cover system in Call of Juarez, but it's better than the cover system in Uncharted, and Fracture. These two games represent both extremes in shooter cover. In Uncharted, when you take cover, you weld, duct tape, superglue, and tie yourself to a wall. In Fracture, there is no cover.

Now for what Modern Warfare did wrong. First, the main character, "Soap" MacTavish, is a silent protagonist. That alone would only be a minor offense, but then the game tries to get you to care about Soap, and you don't, I cared more about the support characters, because they had personalities. Second, I couldn't understand the plot. I said the story mode was fun in the previous paragraph, but I didn't say I knew what was going on. The ultimate goal was simple, you point the gun at terrorists, press R1, and the terrorists die, but the first few levels were a haze of bullets, Russians, and people talking about nuclear missiles that where on a boat? Or were they in mexico? No, I got it, they were being transported into new york by being smuggled with the circus.

So at the end of this review, If you haven't bought Modern Warfare, you should, and as soon as I can, I'm going to buy the sequel. This game is a gem among a field of bad FPS's, and No one can convince me otherwise. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go smack around an informant that was going to tell me about the release of Blues Brothers 3.

the Fretless Bass reviews: The Town

I'm glad I saw The Town before I finished The Prince of Thieves, because now I can enjoy them both. Never read a book because it's movie is coming out, and if you do, see the movie before you finish the book, because most book-movies would be good as stand alone films, but don't hold a candle to the paper version, so they get crucified. If you see the movie first, you enjoy it, and then you read the book and like that too, everyone wins.
The Town did a lot of things right, Ben Affleck had a good Boston accent, it was filmed on-location, and they didn't overdo the violence. The thing I really liked about The Town is how they made a real effort to make the city a part of the film, which would result in locals liking it more. Being from the Boston area, I can tell you that they shot all the public-set scenes in Boston, because nowhere else in America are the streets so narrow.
Now to the meat of the review. The Town is about a career bank robber who falls in love with a woman he took hostage in one of his hold ups, and decides he wants to get out, which of course is not as easy to do as it sounds.
The thing that made me really like the film, along with the interlacing with the city itself, was how they made most of the characters in a moral gray zone. There's your main character Doug. He's a bank robber, but he has a heart of gold. Then you have your FBI agent that's hot on his tail, he's doing the right thing, but he is willing to do anything and everything to catch Doug. It shows us that crime and crime fighting aren't black and white.
Normally by this time I would be prepping to verbally assassinate the movie, but The Town only has one fatal flaw, it portrays Boston and Charlestown in a bad light. The movie refers to Boston as "the bank robbery capital of the world" which it is not. It also portrays Charlestown as a place where all the crime in New England is centered, I happen to know this is also not true. I have a family member who used to live in Charlestown, and whether you were in crimeville depended on if you were in the projects or not.
To sum up a review, I'm going to buy The Town on DVD, that's how much I liked it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go snuff some Cheerios.

The Event will never be as good as 24 or Lost.

I have heard people saying that The Event will be the fusion of Lost and 24. Well it won't be, because that show was already made, it was called Flash Forward, and it had all the action of 24, and the plot of Lost, brilliantly mixed together.

The Event is good, it may even become a hit, but in my heart, it will never replace the show I know and loved, and then lost.

The one thing I really don't like about The Event is how the protagonist is always yelling "where is my girlfriend!?" That just sounds bad. Especially to people my age when the terms "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are used very casually. What I'm trying to say is that when people see the ad, they don't care as much as they would if he was yelling "I want my family back!" in a glorious Harrison Ford style. You care more when you actually watch the show and you find out he was going to propose to her.

My final grievance: the show is obviously trying too hard to be 24 and Lost, they have an honest, black president, rouge electro-magnetic busts, and lots of stubble.

Sorry, The Event, but you don't come close to any of the shows you wanted to mime. Who knows? I might be eating my words in a few months, and if I do, I'll be sure to pretend I had predicted it the whole time, now if you'll excuse me, I have to go mourn for my dead shame.

the Fretless Bass reviews: The elder scrolls 4: Oblivion

I was excited to get Oblivion, because my friend had it and he wouldn't stop raving about it. However, upon starting the game, I was introduced to the biggest snooze-fest of all time. The opening consisted of running down narrow-linear hallways and getting stopped every five minuets to answer personal questions. I thought the whole point of RPG's was to get away from all of this. So the main quest goes that the king of your country dies and needs you to deliver the symbol of rulership in the kingdom to his lost son or everyone is going to die in an obscure way they never really get around to discussing. They keep going on about how it's time-sensitive, but I had enough time to go loot an entirely different dimension before I even read the quest info. I want to talk now about the biggest problem with the opening and main quest. You start out in jail. And the king is running away from assasins through a secret escape route that is in your cell. This raises many questions. Who was dumb enough to build a potential escape route for a cereal rapist? And why are you in jail? I think it was probably for something really trivial, like swearing in public, because throughout the rest of the game, the guards will arrest you if you look at them funny. And furthermore, when the king dies, he gives YOU, an escaped convict, the symbol of rulership previously mentioned. If i were really in this situation, I would sell the thing to the nearest store and skip town.

Character customization is almost too detailed, you start by selecting your race, I decided to be cliché, and became a Wood Elf, which was a mistake because I got no good bonuses and became so short I often mistook myself for an eight year old child wearing combat armor. Designing your face is the aggravating part, it's so detailed that you could model your character after yourself, and your favorite baseball player, and your mom, and no one would be able to tell because YOU NEVER SEE YOUR FACE ANYWAY!

Combat is less than intuitive, it is little more than attack as much as you can with R1 and shield and eat herbs or something when your health is low. Bow and arrow combat is standard, but you pay dearly if you forget to equip arrows. Magic is the way to go, if you train your destruction magic high enough, you can obliterate any enemy with ease, but it's not easy to train your magic that high, so I just went with swords and bows.

Armor is good, the game doesn't do the old "you must be this tall to wear the orkish armor" (which is good because if that were the case, by elf would only be able to wear the cotton candy armor. I was skilled in light armor, and I was genuinely surprised when I realized the game didn't trade speed for protection. Not all Light armor sucked, I got a full Myth armor and it actually protected me!

You can also choose your class and birth-sign I became an assassin born under the sign of the Lord, which meant I could sneak around and heal myself. The selection was immense though, each class and birth-sign had advantages and disadvantages, it took me over five minuets to decide, which may be a little too long.

Quests are fun and imaginative, where bad RPG quests are little more that "go there and kill everything" Oblivion makes the goals and plots of the quests unique, although as I was writing that sentence it occurred to me that no matter how the quests are explained to you, killing everything is usually what it comes down to. So I retract that statement, the quests are heavily cliched with a unique lacing around the edges where there's no dungeon, wait...... Half the quests are in dungeons, so I subtract both statements and replace them with the quests being s&*^.

The most aggravating, difficult, and stupid part of Oblivion is trying not to be Cliché, I've brought this up in previous paragraphs, and it really is difficult to be what you want to be and unique. A Wood Elf assassin archer that wears a robe (my character) come on! I could have done better. The salt in an open wound part came when I made a second character that ended up being an imperial (human) knight that specialized in hand to hand combat. It's not really cliché, it's boring.

In short, I liked Oblivion, it just seems like it's trying to hard to be a fantasy RPG. Here's a hint, if you are making a Fantasy RPG, don't have elves, lizard things, and dwarfs, try to avoid the mainstream and be different. If this makes your game really good then I am a genius and deserve to work in hollywood, and if it bombs then it was all your Idea and I'm in the Green Party!

The Fretless Bass reviews: High School: the game

I had nothing to review this time, so the brilliant Idea came to me, why not review high school like it was a video game? so this is what I got.

I was excited and a little scared to get High School, because there were a lot of mixed reviews, some said it would be the best game ever, some said it kept you up until one in the morning with side quests, but they turned out to be both wrong.

High School is the worst game I have ever played, it's just not fun, you learn a lot, but you find yourself falling asleep during the science levels. The only fun part of the day is extracurricular quests, and they get in the way of all your side quests, which shouldn't be called that because they're all required.

The game is also so strict too, if I miss one quest, I have to keep playing for tree hours after I've completed the day's main quest, and the teachers mark me late if I enter the door one second after the bell rings.

The map is large and confusing, you can't seem to get around, and the other cpus seem to have incredible contempt for your desire to BE ON TIME.

People say the biggest improvement from the game's prequel, Middle School, is all the freedom, which I guess is true because in middle school if you even uttered the phrase, "I wonder what's on the other side of those walls." you were suspended from gameplay immediately. In high school you can go outside, but you get damn near expelled if you cross an invisible boundary that only the administrators can see. Not to mention that you only have three minuets between each block to go outside.

Now for the side quests, they are a lot harder, but everyone complaining about how they stayed up until one A.M. every night playing sufferers from a syndrome I call "inability to manage your time in the slightest." All the instruction manuals say you have four house of homework a night, but thats bulls@#$, you have two, on a heavy day, it's just really hard. So because of that, you can only get out on the weekends.

The biggest problem from the game is the fact that it takes four years to complete it, and then because you have spent so much time preparing for it, you feel compelled to buy collage!

Now, I can sum up the entire game in three sentences. Whoever invented high school should be punched in the face. I have better things to do than play High School, like pound a nail into my eye by slamming my head against a wall. I could only write this review because my math homework got delayed.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Walt Disney World.

I just got back from a ten day trip to Florida, most of which I spent in Disney World, the mother of all amusement parks. For those of you who don't know it, I have a working theory that Disney secretly owns everything in the world, including YOU, and what I saw in the Florida park only advanced my far- fetched hypothesis. My mother was able to set up the entire trip easily on the computer, we got a great hotel in the Animal Kingdom that let you look out at animals in the hotel's backyard, we got a meal deal, which meant three meals a day and one snack a day with no hassle, and we could "park hop."
So apart from the conspiracy theory part of this review, I will be reviewing each park in the resort in the order I visited them, and, in the end, Disney's overall appeal to me.
1. Epcot: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was the worst park in the entire resort. It seemed to be based around education, which is not why I came to Florida, and the only way to make the park more interesting was to pronounce the area called "The Land" in a really low voice. It had a few gems thrown in, it had Soarin' which was agreed upon by my family to be one of the best rides in the resort, and the Mission Space simulator, which was a mock-mission to Mars complete with three-G's, and Test Track, which was half roller- coaster and half something else. So because of the previous rides mentioned, Epcot is worth visiting, but don't get excited.
2. Hollywood Studios: The almost polar opposite of Epcot, Hollywood Studios is all about movies. Many of the attractions in the park were actually shows about filming movies, in which there was no fourth wall. These shows were all very good, but the real reasons to visit Hollywood studios are the Tower of Terror, and the Rockin' Roller Coaster. The Tower of Terror is different from other drop rides because it has a plot, I won't ruin it for you. The Rockin' Roller Coaster is one of only two true roller coasters in all of Disney. It also blasted classic rock behind you while you rode, so it was a good ride for me. In all, Hollywood Studios is probably the overall best park in Disney.
3. Animal Kingdom: This was the park that was tied for second with Magic Kingdome. This park had such rides as Dinosaur! and Expedition Everest. Dinosaur! was not a roller coaster, but not a sit there and watch the story go by ride. In Dinosaur!, you ride a time machine on the bumpiest ride since my airplane pilot died just before landing, trying to bring a dinosaur back to 2010, from literally moments before a giant comet hits the Earth and kills over half of all life on Earth. Expedition Everest is the only other true roller coaster in Disney, and It was a great ride; Animal Kingdom is a park you don't want to miss.
4. Magic Kingdom: The Magic Kingdom was not all it was cracked up to be, the best rides in the park were Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and Buzz Lightyear. Splash Mountain was just a wet ride that takes you through the Br'er Rabbit story, before dropping you into a not that big splash. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was a lame roller coaster that had no sharp turns, and was really just circling the whole time you rode it. Buzz Lightyear is an interactive ride that lets you shoot lasers at the minions of Zerg. Magic Kingdom was just OK in comparison to the rest of Disney, because it had the highest concentration of mediocrity, unlike Epcot, with the highest concentration of suck, Hollywood Studios, with the highest concentration of good, and Animal Kingdom, which is somewhere in-between. At least in Epcot, you have Misson Space, Test Track, and Soarin' as gems thrown in among garbage. Magic Kingdom's lack of good to balance the OK may even make it the worst Amusement park in Disney.
To conclude this article, I would like to explain my lack of enthusiasm for the land where all your dreams come true. The truth is, the slogan says it all, but the dreams that come alive at Disney are those of young children who stay up all night listening for Santa Claus, playing spaceman in the backyard, and having tea parties with stuffed hippos. While Disney has branched out a little to older vacationers like myself, it is still geared for younger audiences, it saddens me so say this, but for anyone above the age of 12, the magic is almost over, Disney should be experienced by children the ages of 6-10, when Never Never Land isn't so far away.

Avatar screwed with the movie industry!

Recently, I was thinking fondly of the days when 3D was something a cartoon-movie added on for yucks because they knew the movie was terrible, or just to drag in a few more dollars from the people who actually let the presence of 3D influence their moviegoing experience. 3D was a gimmick, it was something that was always just thrown on a movie to make a sack of dung look like Buckingham Palace, until you step inside and ruin your new shoes.
Then Avatar came out, and now producers think they need 3D to compete, well I need to tell you something. Avatar wasn't even that good, the plot had been done a thousand times before, Avatar might as well have been named "Dances with Blue Aliens." I'm going to admit it, 3D was the only thing that made it good. I saw Avatar with my family without 3D because some family members get a little sick with 3D, and none of us liked it very much, but everyone who saw it with 3D wouldn't shut up about for two months.
Now, because people have associated making more money than The Titanic with 3D, Captain America: First Avenger, and Thor are both going to be in 3D. These are two movies I am very excited for, and Avatar is going to ruin them. If Marvel studios is smart, they will ditch 3D for both movies, and make Captain America more of a war movie to drag in the Modern Warfare nerds, and Thor a norse epic.
In short, Avatar wasn't even that good, and thanks to it, all my favorite movies are going to bomb and end the superhero movie business for a decade. Thanks a lot, James Cameron, Terminator was good, but you should have quit while you had some dignity.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Bad Company: Live In America

The other day in Boston, I saw a Bad Company concert as part of their American tour. This was my first actual ROCK concert, (I've been to Jackson Browne and some piano recitals) and I loved it. Bad Company proved that there is no school like the old school.

They had three of the original band members, and some additional players, and played all the hits. Some of my favorites were when they did, Can't get enough of your love, seagull, simple man, ready for love and, of course, Bad Company.

Bad Co. is really fun in concert, because they are a real performance band, several times in the show, Paul Rogers swung around the mic stand. He also took his shirt off, so from where I was sitting, he looked like Wolverine in Jimmy Page pants.

As with the Stones, Bad Company focuses their music on hard, simple guitar riffs, which make them easy to jam too, you could tell that the band was having fun.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend seeing Bad Company in concert, because on this tour, they record the concert and give you an album of it, before you leave the theater. As I write this I am listening to myself singing "Shooting Star" with the rest of the crowd.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood

Western Games are hard to get right, this is the fist one I've bought, but from reviews I've read, I know that only a few good ones have been made. Fortunately, Call of Juarez is in the minority.
Like many good western stories, the tale starts during the civil war. The plot follows three brothers, two playable, gunslinging, badass, fighters, and a priest that is constantly whining. The two brothers you can play as are Ray and Thomas McCall, and the youngest and dumbest is William. In order to rebuild their lives after the war, the three go on a quest to find the legendary gold of Juarez.
My favorite part about Call of Juarez was the weapons, they got it right, not infinite ammo pistoles, but six-shots that took three hours to reload, and this may seem like a bad thing, but you can avoid it very easily by buying better guns. These better guns have acceptable reload speeds and still capture the wild west combat style. Another cool aspect of the combat was the cover system, instead of having to press a button to super glue yourself to a wall, you just ran up beside it, and peaked over/around. It felt very natural, and did not slow you down at all.
One interesting thing that I have taken a neutral standpoint on is the fact that before each level, you can choose to play as Ray or Thomas. Ray can kick down doors, wield two pistoles at once, and throw dynamite. Thomas can use a lasso, clime any object higher than the curb (unlike ray) and can wield knives and a bow. I don't know which one sounds better to you, but I only played as Ray three times in the whole game, twice because the game didn't give me a choice, and once because I couldn't pass one level as Thomas, but every other level was just as easy with Thomas.
One thing I disliked was William, he is the wimpiest brother, and spends the entire game narrating and praying. (sometimes at the same time) William does move the plot along until the end of the game, but before then, he is dead weight on the gameplay, and the plot. He is also a christ analogy, which is the stupidest thing to put in a video game, besides silent protagonists. The one thing I hated about Call of Juarez was how there was no Co-op mode. In every level except for two and a half, you are fighting alongside your brother as a CPU. The game was built for Co-op.
Unfortunately, Call of Juarez is rated M for language, and suggestive themes, so it can't be marketed to anyone below fourteen. Also, the two cool characters have no values beyond family, so they are mean to women, and kill enough people to fill Arlington cemetery twice. I give it 7/10

The Fretless Bass reviews: Inception

The other day, I decided that if I didn't see Inception and find out what the heck the spinning hallway was I would have to be demoted to asking my friends what it was about, and neither one of them gets out very much.
So I saw it, and it blew my mind! (no pun intended)
The movie follows Dominick Cobb, a man with a really strange talent, preforming corporate espionage by putting a subject to sleep, entering his dream, and stealing his secrets while inside. Usually, he and his team steal people's ideas, but in exchange for a chance to go back to America (where he is wanted) to see his kids again, Cobb agrees to preform inception, which is to give someone an idea without them knowing you gave it to them, a process that has been called impossible.
The thing about dreams is, during them, you can do anything, but you find out in this movie that if you mess with dream physics too much, the subject's subconscious projections will kill you. When I found out about that, I said, "What the heck? What's the point of going into a dream if you can't create images of your jerk classmates and have them stand in their underwear in front of congress?" or in this case, create a gun big enough to blow up all of your problems. That was my only problem with the premise, but besides that, I really liked the idea of dream sharing.
Cobb's internal conflict (Internal conflict always drives the plot) is the guilt over his dead wife, and the really cool thing is that in the dream wold, the character's internal conflicts become projections in the dream world, so Cobb's internal conflict becomes a physical entity, in the form of his dead wife screwing up all his missions in the dream world.
My favorite part of the movie was when due to inner ear function in the dream world, a hallway started spinning around while two guys were fighting in it, and it made some fight-scene history! This fight scene is better than the one in Spider-man 2 when they were on the train!
My final review of Inception, this is the best movie of the summer so far, and you should see it twice if you want to fully grasp it in all it's glory. 8/10.

The problem with comedies

After watching/essentially hitting my face with a hammer over and over/writing a review of grown ups, I came to a conclusion about comedies.

Think back to every comedy movie you've ever seen. How many were good movies? I'm not saying funny, it's hard to screw that up, but how many would you actually watch again? Not many. That's because of one word, Messages.

In today's movie industry, for some reason, everyone writing a comedy movie thinks they need to somehow put a message in the film that will make everyone who watches it a better person. Well I have two points for you. One: Making movies is not a good way to make the world a better place, go join the peace corps so I never have to watch your movies again. Two: People don't go to comedy's to learn about how they should call up their estranged daughter, they go to laugh at fart and sex jokes!

My point is, with most comedies, they message seems to be something thy just injected into the plot with a syringe. Like grown ups, many of these painfully injected morals are inconsistent, one minuet, they are telling you to be honest with your spouse, next, they tell you to screw your romantic night out with her and hang with your buddies.

I'm going to name and explain three movies that got it right. The Hangover, because it had no message, this is what all comedies should be like, don't try and teach us anything, hurl the jokes at light speed. Next, Caddy Shack, It's message was consistent, Danny trying to figure out what to do with his life, it was funny, and the message didn't change in every scene as in Grown Ups. Finally, Cool Runnings, The message was about never giving up and trying to accomplish your dreams, and although the genre of the movie changes from a comedy to a sports drama halfway through, you don't mind, because you care so much about the characters and their struggle.

So I hope someone with a lot of power in the movie industry reads this, because I just told him/her how to fix comedy.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Grown ups

Grown Ups was nothing special. As with most comedies, it was funny, it delivered cheap laughs for cheap, well, not cheap because the tickets were ten &!@#^&* dollars!

Lets start with the parts of it I DID like, There were too many Saturday Night Live alumni to count, and they didn't kill anyone.

Notice how that was a very short list. The only kind of humor in the movie was a bunch of guys cracking insults, and getting shot with arrows. They made fun of old and ugly people too much, and every child in the movie was a total ass. If all that wasn't enough, someone said, "hey, let's try and put a message in this thing to get some character development!" Well, there was one part at the beginning where I thought the message was to try your hardest, then, three quarters of the way in, they fully stop the plot, and have a talk about how love involves some anger as well. It didn't even make sense!

Now you may have noticed that I didn't put an overview of the plot up, well because of the lack of a message and no character development, all I can tell you is that a bunch of friends get together after their former coach dies.

I only said Grown Ups was "nothing special" because it was funny, I would have said it was bad if it wasn't funny. So, at the end, Grown Ups lacks anything beyond wise-cracking humor and I would call it a rental, don't waste your money in a movie theater for this one.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

When I first picked up Blood Oath, I was skeptical because I thought the name was completely unimaginative. I guessed that the name Blood Oath had been used in books, movies, and video games scores of times. Well I looked it up, there are about twenty.

Blood Oath follows young Zach Barrows, a White House employee who gets stuck in a job protecting America from "the other side" (anything Stephen King has written about) with a vampire that is bound to do the President's will. The vampire is named Cade. The book was good, It's strong point was the plot, which was the kind that made you want to scream for a sequel and kept you turning the pages (even though I wouldn't call it a page turner). It delivered story telling at its best.

However, Christopher Farnsworth used some very clichéd devices. Zach is a newcomer to working with the President's vampire, so he has to get it all explained to him (and the reader). This is a writer's escape route; if a writer resorts to making the main character a newcomer to the process that is central to the plot, it means, they aren't imaginative enough to explain it in some other way. Also, there's a character named Griff, and he is the veteran, who has been working with Cade since the seventies, and as soon as the I found out that Zach was replacing him so he could retire, I knew he was going to die in some painful way, and he did. Now, you may be saying, "Mickey! Quit ruining the story for us," but honestly, that is the most predictable event in any book I have ever read...... ever. So it's not really a spoiler, it's an idiot test, if you didn't guess it, you're the biggest moron I've ever met, and I know some dumb people.

At the end of the day, Blood Oath is a very good read, but it would be better suited as a screenplay, which makes sense because Christopher Farnsworth is a screenplay writer. I look forward to the Blood Oath movie.

the Fretless Bass reviews: Batman: Arkham Asylum.

I want to start off by saying, I love Batman. He is easily my favorite DC superhero, and defiantly in my top ten list. When I first heard of Arkham Asylum, I was excited, because it was getting good reviews, so here's mine.

First, I like stealth games, I'm just hardwired that way. But Batman isn't really a stealth game. Instead of hiding from your enemies, you sit on top of gargoyles and watch them move about the room like they know what they are doing with your special forensic vision googles that let you see: through walls, your enemies teal skeletons, and their heart rates. It even isolates which enemies are armed. So the question is, why would you ever not take this mode off? I'll tell you, the artwork and landscape are really good, if you leave the forensic vision on, it's like giving an entire development department the finger. So you can see through walls and no-one can find you on the gargoyles, so your not performing stealth missions, the game calls it predator, and rightly named, as one thing you notice when you play the game is that you are picking the order in which you want to take out the guards. Because of this, I would have called it not predator, but God. You can also through as many baterangs as you want. This is great, because baterangs make great distractions for the AI that is about as helpless as kitten in a dingo enclosure. Seriously, the AI in this game is among the dumbest you will ever come across in gaming. The ads made a big deal about how the AI notices the bodies of the other guards, but they only do it because the Joker tells them there's a man down on the speakers. After that, they always say the same thing "What happened?-What do we do?-shut up and find the bat!-Batman? can you hear me? show yourself!" Speaking of finding bodies, one of my favorite things to do in the game was to drop down on a thug from a gargoyle and hang him upside down by a string, then it's like a Predator came through the room, minus the skinned bodies. The combat is flowing and beautiful, they linked all the attacks to one button, which is nice, because mashing one button is what I usually do anyway. But for only one button, you have a startling amount of control of Batman while he is fighting. Another really cool thing you can do in combat is glide kicking guards, this is where you glide down to a guard and kick him in the head, reducing his brains into a gelatin. (not really, Batman has a moral compass, so he only knocks guards out, you never kill anyone in this game.) Next, detective mode, You can trace people around the Asylum by following the alcohol in his breath or traces of their tobacco, etc. The last thing I really liked was the gadgets you could use. You have an unlimited amount of uses of each of these gadgets and you are free to use any one of them at any time. Most of these gadgets are used for crossing road blocks around the asylum like fragile walls and electric barriers, but unlike most other gadget games, you don't only use each gadget once a level for the same reason over and over again. In Arkham Asylum, most of the gadgets have practical uses in the predator levels. Take, for instance, my favorite gadget, the explosive gel, normally, it is used to break down walls by spraying it on a surface, then detonating it, but if a guard is nearby when the wall explodes, he is knocked out, this is a technique I found myself using whenever possible because you could get yourself miles away from the scene, with a good vantage point for your next target. I also liked to spray the gel on top of ladders. (you fill in the blank.) The only difficulty with the gadgets was that you had to select one at a time, so when I have a giant mutant running at me full speed, instead of throwing a baterang at his head, I found myself trying to defeat him by smacking him with a cryptographic sequencer.

The list of things I don't like is short, but valid. First, the game is supposed to be part horror, but is't not scary at all, the most scary part is when you are walking around the sewers on wooden planks and Killer Croc jumps up at random times, and then you dismiss him with a single baterang. Second, as I already mentioned, the AI is stupid, third, sometimes, you need to fight genetically altered thugs that have the mass of an elephant and a desire to kill that is stronger than the Hulk. So when you fight them, you beat them by, (not kidding) side-stepping their charge so they slam into a wall. That's only been used in games about forty billion times! Fourth, whenever I wanted to get somewhere really fast, I pushed the analog stick forward as hard as I could and I found Batman strolling along like this was his morning constitutional. I'm reasonably sure this was to let the player know that Batman wasn't afraid at all, but having to hold the X button to run is a hassle, Look, if you want to walk, push the analog stick halfway forward, then the X button can be used for it's real purpose in life, jumping.
Batman Arkham Asylum is one of the best games ever made and I would recommend it to anyone over the age of eleven. I give it a 9/10.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Toy Story 3

I'm going to be honest, when I first heard of Toy Story 3, I thought that it would be a tack-on plot with no expansion, just a screen feeding you the exact same movie again. However, when I did see it, I found that it was actually quite good.

The plot starts with the toys desperate attempt to get Andy to play with them again, and it fails. The Toys are dismayed because Andy is going off to college, and they will be thrown out, donated, or stuck in the attic. Andy decides to take Woody to college and leave the rest of his toys in the attic. But, in a move of brilliant stupidity, Andy puts the attic-bound toys IN A GARBAGE BAG and LEAVES THEM AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. The toys almost get put into a garbage truck, but escape, and hide in the donation box because they don't believe Woody when he tells them that Andy wanted them to go to the attic. So the toys all end up in a day care, where the movie quickly becomes a dystopian film.

I did like the film, and I have liked all the Toy Story films, and this movie did much better than I expected, and wraps up the plot of all three movies nicely. One thing I liked a lot is how they had Buzz reset to his original factory settings. This problem has come up now in all three movies. (If you don't remember, Buzz was first introduced like that in the first movie, and in the second movie, another Buzz Lightyear toy replaced Buzz and thought he was on a mission and all the other toys that were completely unarmed and frozen with smiles of their faces were somehow out to get him). But this movie did it well, I would have expected them to just have him fall over and hit his head, but they integrated the event into the plot very smoothly.

I have a few bad things to say about it, too. First, You could replace the character of Woody with MacGyver, and no one would stop drooling on their official fan t-shirt to notice. Also, about fifteen percent of the movie was Woody climbing, but seriously, that toy could out climb Ryan Seacrest if there was a photo shoot at the top of the cliff. My final grievance is with the plot, in every single Toy Story movie, the toys somehow get lost and need to find their way back to Andy. If not for the Andy-going-to-college part, You could have swapped Toy Story 3 with Toy Story 2 and no one would notice except stuck up reviewers like yours truly.

All in all, Toy Story 3 is a very good movie and I would recommend it. I give it an 8/10.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Jak and Daxter: the lost frontier

I have had a playstation for a long time, and I must say one of the most consistently excellent titles in the entire gaming world would be Jak and Daxter. The first game was set in a fantacy world where the lifeblood of existence is a form of energy called eco, Jak, the main character despite the title, has the ability to harness eco and use it to fight enemies. So Jak and his best friend, Daxter, go to the forbidden Island and Daxter falles into a pit of dark eco, and comes out as a half-weasel, half-otter, and ottsel. Jak must journey to the far end of the world to find a cure and instead, after an incredible adventure, finds a mysterious machine powered by eco.

In the second game Jak uses the machine and it takes him, Daxter, Samos the green eco sage, and his daughter, Kiera, to the future, they land in Haven City, Jak is captured by the evil barron Praxis, and is tortured with dark eco injections for two years. Daxter finally saves him and they soon discover that Jak turns into a horrible dark eco powered creature whenever he gets to mad. He and Daxter then save the city, and all is well.

In the third and fourth games, Jak and Daxter again save the world or the city. All of these games have been excellent. The Lost Frontier, however, is a knock off piece of crap. The first thing you notice is how the plot is like someone wrote "and then this happened!" in sharpie at the end of the story line. Jak 3 ended nicely, and wrapped up the entire action series nicely with no lose plot lines, and Jak X (the fourth installment) had a tack-on, but still believable plot. In The Lost Frontier, all of a sudden the world is running out of eco and Jak, Daxster, and Kiera need to find more. The one thing that really pissed me off though, was that Jak's personality had changed. In the earlier games, he was an angry guy, now he's twice as talkative and has a new voice actor. The gameplay is mostly the same, except they ditched the lovable mod-gun in favor of some piece of crap called the "Gun staff" Why mess with something if it isn't broken? Along with that in the gameplay area is the movement, in the precursors to this game, the movement felt very free and open, in The Lost Frontier, everything seems choreographed. In short, this game was so bad, that I stopped playing it half an hour in to write an angry review. And now as I write this very sentence, I realize that was dumb. I'm going to publish this anyway, and keep playing the game, if it gets any better, I'll be sure to tell you. Mickey's rating(for now) 4/10.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Robert B. Parker characters

I love Robert B. Parker, I love all of his books that I've read. I've especially liked the Appaloosa series. I have, though, noticed some similarities between some of his characters, mainly in the Spenser and Appaloosa series. First, Hawk and Virgil Cole seem to have the same personality. They are both the really experienced guy that barley ever speaks his mind and never does anything unnecessary. Spenser and Everett Hitch aren't all too similar, but they do seem to be the only people in their respective worlds with a @#$%^&* conscience. Also, I read the same phrase twice in the two series. In Paper doll (a Spenser book) and Brimstone (an Appaloosa book) the phrase "He'd f@#$ a snake if you'd hold it for him" comes up. I like Robert B. Parker's books, and I like his writing, but you'd think that re-using a phrase as memorable as that would be something writers wouldn't do. Also, all the "whores" in both series always have the same personalities, they all don't mind being a "whore", but they'd rather be something else, and they seem to know everything about everything illegal happening within five hundred miles. Also, the plots of Brimstone and Appaloosa are almost the same. Virgil and Everett ride into a town, become the law, keep a whole bunch of saloon owners and drunks that are so dumb they couldn't tell you the right way to sit on a horse from killing each other, save some woman from some kidnappers in the desert, ride back to the town, and solve the problem with one very loud word, "BANG" and move on to the next town with or without the girl that Virgil can't seem to make his mind up about. Now, don't get me wrong, I liked both those series a lot, but I would have fixed the above errors instead of hopping that my entire fanbase only knew me for one particular series and never read the other.

A dark week for TV

The week of May 23rd 2010, was a dark week for TV. I'm writing this to complain about it. First, Lost ended on Sunday, then 24 on Monday, then Flash Forward on Thursday. Lost had announced that season six would be its final, so I had time to cry and take some coping classes, but I didn't find out 24 and Flash Forward were going to end until both shows were most of the way through each of their seasons. The people at Fox made a big deal out of the end of 24. Flash Forward however, didn't, when I heard about it, I called all my friends to see if they found out before i did and neither of them had.

Lost was a show about the survivors of a plane crash on a F@#$ed up Island (I can't tell you any more than that because the plot is so complicated it would make skynet short out). 24 was a show that ran for eight seasons about a federal agent named Jack Bauer saving the world. In the first season, he saved his family (spoiler alert!) mostly, in the second season, he saved the world, then he retired, came out of retirement, retired, came out of retirement, went rouge, came back and retired, then un-retired and went rouge again. Flash Forward was a perfect hybrid of the two, it was about an FBI agent named Mark Benford who is assigned to trace the cause of whatever caused every human on the planet to faint and see the future for two minuets and seventeen seconds. It had the military action of 24, and the having no Idea what the f#$% is going on from Lost. So anyway, all three shows had their series finale in one week, and I was devastated. Lost could have kept going for three hundred years with all the LSD induced plot twists, and Flash Forward had recently made a brilliant move to keep the plot moving until 2016. 24 was the only show I thought had a good reason to end; Jack Bauer had run out of disasters to save the world from. All three shows closed with excellent writing, and I'm willing to bet Lost and 24 will be made into movies when I'm 45.

The Fretless Bass Reviews: Jackson Browne and David Lindley.

Last summer, I saw Jackson Browne in Boston on his Time the Conquerer tour. I liked it a lot, actually, I loved it, I'm a huge Jackson Browne fan, and Time the Conquerer, while not his best album in my opinion, delivered more Jackson as I like him. Now, Jackson and his former guitarist, now solo, David Lindley, have put out an album of live songs recorded from a tour they did in Spain. Now, they're going to tour the U.S.A with acoustic instruments, and I have tickets! I expect this concert to be just as good as the other one I saw, if not better. David Lindley opens for the show, followed by Jackson Browne, then David comes back and they close the show together. I'm really excited, and I'll be sure to review it for you.

The Fretless Bass Reviews: Tom Rush at the Union Coffee House.

I just saw Tom Rush play in Carlisle, and it was really cool. For all of you who don't know, Tom Rush is a folk singer who's heyday was in the 60's and 70's. Some of you may know his song Circle Game. The cool thing is that Rush is a comedian, in between songs he tells hilarious stories. He's also an amazing guitar player, and singer, but he's the only singer I know that could also be called a comedian. If you are into the folk scene, I highly recommend seeing Tom Rush.

The Fretless Bass reviews: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Uncharted 2 is the best game I have ever played. The story starts with a good old flash back sequence where in the first ten seconds of the game, the protagonist, Nathan Drake, finds himself hanging off the safety rail of a train car that is coincidentally hanging off a cliff. In the flash backs that follow, you find out that Drake was talked into stealing a priceless artifact that belonged to Marco Polo by an old associate, Harry Flynn. Now, Drake is a fortune hunter, but presumably was a thief before the events of Uncharted: Drake's fortune (the first game). So Drake goes with Flynn, and Something goes horribly wrong (any more would be a spoiler). The most basic plot of the game is that Drake is competing with an army of mercenaries to obtain a priceless treasure. Now for the review. My favorite part of the game (this was a hard thing to decide because I liked all of the game) was the way that combat, climbing/jumping, and puzzle solving, were all evenly dispersed throughout the game and were all still fun. Combat is amazing, the diversity of weapons is nice, everyone can have a favorite gun and/or combination of guns. My favorite weapons to carry are a wes .44 and an M4. The hand to hand combat system is good, they linked all combat to two buttons and made it so you felt like you knew what you were doing, and the combos varied enough to keep you entertained. One big thing I like is how punching is not more powerful than bullets (as in many 3rd person shooters). Climbing/jumping was powerful. Nathan Drake is superhumanly athletic, so he can pull himself over walls, leap from one ledge up to another, and jump across a twenty foot gap. One thing I didn't like though, was how even though Drake is supposed to be superhumanly athletic, he grunts like Venus Williams when he jumps off so much as the curb. Puzzle solving is the weakest out of the three, still fun, but weak. Every puzzle in the game can be solved by opening Drake's journal and it literally shows him the answer. There was one puzzle where the hardest part was remembering each symbol's corresponding color as you turned a page in the book. And now for my favorite part of the gameplay, stealth. I love stealth games, and uncharted 2, while not Batman Arkham Asylum (I'll review that one soon), satisfies. The parts where stealth is possible are really obvious, so you don't die twenty times only to realize you could have taken out six guys before ever even drawing your gun. The cover is nice too. The issues are again the grunting, I once jumped behind a guy and made a grunt that would have woken a dead man, and the guard didn't even blink. I don't know whether to blame this on the sound people or the fact that the AI couldn't tie it's shoelaces with instructions that have size thirty font. Also, the stealth move is almost always the same, a neck break. I'm about to wrap up, so know: the bad things I said about this game are purely stuff you don't even notice until you stop to write a review about it, and this game is flawless in every sense of the word. Mickey's rating 10/10.

Introduction to The Fretless Bass

Hi, everyone, I'm Mickey, and as you can guess, this is my blog, The Fretless Bass. I'm going to do my best to be funny and give good reviews of comics, movies, video games, and music. I think I should start by explaining the title. The Fretless Bass means many things. I play bass guitar, so that is one reason for choosing this name. Also, a fretless bass as an instrument is unguided, you need to play it by ear, like my writing style. I'm also a bass singer, and relatively laid-back when writing, so I am also a fretless bass. I do sincerely hope you enjoy reading my blog, and I also hope I'll enjoy writing it.