I downloaded this demo without basically seeing any propaganda on the title and immediately enjoyed the freshness of how the game feels and controls. After playing the demo I was immediately hooked, picking it up the Friday of its release and completely clearing the career mode within a few days. It’s easy to make comparisons to the Tony Hawk series, but that argument is tired and old. They are very different games with very different styles. So all I will say on that subject is that Tony Hawk is to Burnout what skate. is to Gran Turismo or Forza. If you ever used to skateboard for real you will immediately notice how natural the “flick it” controls feel and they become very intuitive as you begin to let go of the standard X for jump, square for trick mentality.

I have to give it up to EA on this one, they hit the nail on the head. Probably drawing ideas from their Fight Night title, which uses the “total punch control”; most of the game in played using the left and right stick. The left stick steers and rotates your skater when in the air and the right stick controls your feet allowing you to preform ollies, flip tricks, and manuals. To ollie, press down on the right stick and then slide it up, just like you would slam down on the tail of your board then slide your front foot forward to preform an ollie in real life. To manual, slightly press back or forward on the right stick to shift your weight. And to grind or board slide a rail just ollie onto it. To grab the board with you right hand, press the right trigger. Same goes for the left. It just makes sense! The one annoying thing was the camera angle. It is kind of like the Gears of War angle but slightly lower to the ground to make it look like skateboarding videos. This can often make it difficult to judge distances. However, you get used to it pretty fast and adds a tad of extra realism to the game. It does seem a bit lazy on EA’s part not to give you the option to change it. The music is diverse with everything from hip hop, funk, and jazz to metal and indie rock.

The way the game starts is pretty humorous with a long intro of you getting rushed to the hospital after being nailed by a bus. The intro is full of a slew of pro skaters including Danny Way, Jason Dill, Paul Rodriguez, and Chris Cole (certainly showing off the monetary power of EA). You then get to create your custom skater. The customization is limited, the facial differences and body stature all look very similar and everyone online seems to look nearly the same except for clothes and hair. The hair is lacking in styles though, without even one decent long hair style, unless you like jerry curls. It makes you appreciate a character creation system like Oblivion’s. You are then dumped at the community center in San Vanelona, a city that seems to be made just for skateboarding (yes, I know that is exactly what it is) divided into four sections: the suburbs, the res, downtown, and old town.

The object of the career mode is to get coverage in the top skateboarding magazines in order to get sponsored and eventually win the ESPN X-Games. You achieve this by winning competitions, beating local and pro skaters in games of SKATE a.k.a. HORSE, and filming approximately 30 second video clips for skateboarding videos that require you to do certain goals within the time limit.

The online play is probably the weakest part of the game. The horrible lag kills any flow you can get going while skating causing you to trip up or lose your manual at random times. The controls often seem unresponsive in online play, causing you to do an ollie instead of an advanced flip trick when in skate jams. The best part of online is the ability to invite your friends to a game of freeskate and just enjoy the massive city finding new ledges and gaps to clear. The ability to upload your videos to skate.REEL is also a plus.

Overall a great game and a really good one to just pick up and play to waste some time on a rainy day or enjoy a relaxing game after work. Don’t buy this game if you are looking for serious competitive game play or if you want to grind on roof tops and drop 60 feet on flat ground and keep riding, cause this game isn’t for you. It’s a simulator with a fair amount of customization and a fantastic atmosphere. Grab your controller and go terrorize the streets of San Vanelona.

As many big shows begin their returning seasons this Fall, we do get the chance to support some new series that attempt to stay afloat amidst these established titans. Sometimes, but rarely, great concepts get lucky and see the light of day. This is exactly the case for Pushing Daisies.

Here’s a spoiler free synopsis of the show: Pushing Daisies is about Ned (Lee Pace), a man who unexplainably has the power to bring dead things back to life with just one touch. If he touches them again, they die for good. Ned discovers the bounds of his ability early in his life, but not without some psychological damage along the way. In his adult years, he creates a pie restaurant (humorously dubbed “The Pie Hole”) where he tries to keep to himself. Unfortunately, pies don’t pay the bills. So with the help of police investigator Emerson Cod (Chi McBride), he gets into the business of solving murders. Go to the morgue, touch the dead, ask them questions, retouch and collect the reward money. Sounds simple, right? Well only if Ned wasn’t so sympathetically neurotic sometimes…

This is a show about life, death and the stuff in between. The cast go together great and tons of colorful characters are introduced. The first episode starts with a back story, but one that is wholesome and entertaining throughout. It has a very surreal feel to it, which makes perfect sense with the pseudo morbid premise. Let’s not say Tim Burton-y, but that’s definitely the first thing that comes to mind. The storytelling is done in such a way that everything unfolds like a colorful fantasy storybook; in visuals and in writing. One of it’s primary creators was the guy behind Men in Black, and it shows with weird directorial style. Again though, all of this is done in an enchanting sort of way.

Cast of Pushing Daisies at “The Pie Hole”

Pushing Daisies premieres this Wednesday at 8/7c on ABC. Be sure to check out the website for some preview clips, as well as a comic book. Give it enough attention and maybe it’ll last longer than one season. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

Friday night I went to the Norva in Norfolk with another writer on here, Bryan, to see Unearth with special guests Darkest Hour, Autumn Burns Red, and Suicide Silence. It was EPIC. This is my first time seeing all of these bands in concert and my first time hearing Autumn Burns Red.

The night started with a local metal band that I can’t remember the name of (sorry dudes), then moved on to Suicide Silence. I recently picked up these guys first album and have listened to it a couple times. I gotta say, they are better live. They really set the pace for the rest of the night and the energy didn’t drop. Autumn Burns Red came on next. To my surprise (they looked kinda emo), they were really metal! I’ll definitely be picking up their album.

Finally, two of my favorite metal bands were up. Darkest Hour came on and wailed. Their lead guitarist is something else, and their drummer really tore it up. You could literally feel the metal in your chest. This is when the mosh pit started to really get riled up this point and a few fights broke out, with a bouncer at one point punching a dude in the face repeatedly in my direction, though a just sort of redirected the fight towards the back on the venue like one would redirect a roaring train on rails. They played mostly songs off of their new album “Deliver Us”, which is one of the best metal albums I’ve listened to and that is a load.

Unearth came on last and really rocked the house. Their riffs were so hard and the breakdowns were hard. This is when the crowd just went nuts. They played a bunch of songs off their new album “III” one from their first album “The Stings of Conscience” and even their single from the recent Aquateen Hunger Force soundtrack. The concert ended and I could feel it in my chest and heard muffled speach through the ringing of my ears saying “That was badass!” and “That was fucking epic!” I can’t wait to see these guys in concert again.

So the Halo 3 launch has come and gone, and as you can see from the earlier post, we’ve been having a blast playing this game. Here’s a small review of Halo 3’s campaign mode.

Halo 3’s campaign is tons of fun. There’s nothing like charging a group of Brutes with a buddy, or running over Grunts with the new chopper. The weapon balancing feels just right. Welcome back: Needler! Once you’ve accidentally deployed your hundredth Bubble Shield at the wrong time, you get the hang in reloading using the bumpers. Dual wielding has never felt this precise. Unloading on an enemy with the Brute Spiker while reloading your SMG is the perfect example of how Bungie can take an old game play mechanic and make it more interesting without reinventing the wheel.

Now, I managed to get hooked up with this at 7PM thanks to a friend who owns a 7-11. This meant using the alleged wait time to actually play the campaign nonstop. From 8:00PM to 1:30AM, we blasted our way through seven of the nine “chapters” in co-op on Normal. The next day we finished in an hour and a half. That’s right; the campaign is seven hours long. This was expected, but a letdown overall.

The story, without spoiling, should satisfy fans of the series, but if you’re a newcomer, expect to have no idea what’s going on. It’s ok, just shoot the bad guys. That’s really what the Halo series has always been about, right? Prepare for a lot of cheesy/great one liners, and some really macho stuff along the way. Also, take note that some of the cast of Firefly do voices of the marines, Alan Tudyk has some hilarious quips.

You have to admire this game’s enemy AI, it’s damn clever. Maybe that’s only in comparison to your ally AI, which is dumb as bricks. Who knows, but playing this game solo (even on normal) can be a test of patience.

The bottom line: don’t play Halo 3’s campaign alone, unless you HAVE to. If you do play solo, prepare to be challenged. If you play with a buddy, don’t play on anything less than Heroic. That is of course unless you plan to melee every enemy you encounter. Should you buy this game for campaign alone? Hell no. The bread and butter is in the multiplayer. More on that later.

Master Chief and the Arbitor: BFF

So, I was one of the few people who sat through Grindhouse in theaters and enjoyed every minute of it. I am also a big fan of Quentin Tarintino’s work. Of course there was no question that I would have to grab this DVD when it came out. My only confusion is why they didn’t package the movies together as a box set or at least release them the same day with the option to buy them together or not! But I digress, the film is still fantastic, and if you didn’t see it in theaters (likely) the premise is that Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russel) is a vehicular serial killer looking to get his kicks on a few unsuspecting females. The film is styled like the 1970’s exploitation films shown at the Grindhouse drive-in theaters, using techniques such as heavy film grain, random segmets of black and white (think Kill Bill), and sometimes lacking film reels, leaving parts of the story up to you to figure out what happened between the two scenes.

The DVD has a runtime of 1 hour 53 minutes, 23 minutes longer than the Grindhouse double feature release. These extra scenes add more character development in usual Tarintino fashion using what seems like babbling dialog, but if you really pay attention its foreshadowing events. One particular bonus scene seems to add a whole extra creepiness level to Stuntman Mike that is lacking in the theater version. However, these bonus scenes do seem to make the movie drag on a bit and are understandable why they were cut for time. The giant “FILM REEL MISSING” that would come up just after a giant buildup did add a dash of humor to the movie that is now missing from the film. The car chase scene looks just as good at home as on the big screen and still maintains it’s level of intensity. Also, Zoe Bell is an amazing stunt-woman and her performance really shines in the DVD, catching things that you might not have noticed in the theater. The bonus features are good, with some nice featurettes on actors/actresses of the movie. However, the faux-trailers are noticeably lacking and I believe them playing adding them to the beginning sets an atmosphere for the rest of the film.

A great movie in classic Tarintino Fashion. If you liked the first scene in Reservoir Dogs and enjoy classics like Vanishing Point (made often references to in this film) and Bullitt, then this movie is for you.

Allow me to make something very clear, I love METAL! I also love senseless, comedic violence. So Metalocalypse is like a god send in cartoon form. If Dethklok were real I would stalk them, kill them, and make pillow cases out of their flayed flesh so that my thoughts could be closest to them while I sleep.

Now that that is out of the way, Metalocalypse is one of the funniest shows currently on [adult swim] and the season premier did not disappoint. The plot of the season premier begins where the season finale left off. General Crozier is suffering from partial amnesia after Mr. Selatcia kills Cardinal Ravenwood and puts Crozier to sleep. Dethklok however has shut themselves in and refuse to make any public appearances or start on their new album; instead, living a lavish lifestyle and abusing each other in brutal ways. This time by macing each other in the groin with crotch firing mace codpieces. The new episode is full of decapitations, disembowelments, and various other gratuitous deaths! Its worthwhile to note that the animation has improved significantly since season 1, most likely due to a much larger budget. Its all capped off by the new soundtrack of surprisingly well composed metal, especially since it is written for a 10 minute short cartoon. This, of course, brings me to my next subject.

The DETHALBUM. The entirely remastered soundtrack is wonderfully done. With guest drummer Gene Hoglan, of Strapping Young Lad and Testament, playing on every track. It includes previously unreleased tracks including “Bloodrocuted”, which was mentioned in season 1 by Nathan Explosion as excellent song title. If you get the version with the bonus disc it includes my favorite track “Murder Train a’Comin”, which seamlessly switches between the blues and hardcore deathmetal and has hilarious commentary sprinkled throughout.

Do yourself a favor and pick up the new Dethalbum in stores now, watch the new season on Cartoon Network’s [adult swim], and pick up the season 1 DVD when it hits stores Oct. 2nd.

P.S. I would like to thank the dudes at Dethklok.org for showing off my Dethklok fan art and being cool enough to link here and to my deviantArt page.

It has been a few weeks since I have started developing the Spoylr and I have finally worked out all the kinks (no thanks to IE) and I’m am pretty pleased with how it turned out, as I hope our reader will be too. The site came as a vision of myself and a few friends. We wanted a place where we could review or just talk about the latest in all things geek culture, from video games to cool toys. The idea for the site is to have a place to express our thoughts on what matters to us as young consumers in a digital world and even get some feedback from our peers. The Spoylr writers are a bunch of twenty something guys (so far) from Virginia Beach. We have a web and graphic designer (that’s me), a film student, a web design student and full-time manager of a second hand video game and movie store, and a substitute teacher and aspiring writer. We hope to expand to podcasting in the near future.

On a trip to Washington D.C. I finally came up with the idea for a 1950’s theme with Fallout 3 coming out soon (1 and 2 being two of my favorite games of all time) and the recent success of Bioshock it made sense to me. So the mascot is basically my splice of Buddy Holly, pretty much the coolest geek ever, and the Pipboy, the mascot of the Fallout series who was based on the same style as the Monopoly man.

We hope everyone can enjoy the new site and thanks for visiting, and if you dig our site, remember to “Digg” our site!

Halo 3 AND Heroes came out? It’s official. It’s Nerd X-Mas week.