Last night, there was a hockey tournament in Ontario called the Memorial Cup. If you live around Toronto, no doubt you've heard of it as that was where it was being held.

Anyway, our team, the Sea Dogs, for the first time in the franchise's history, qualified for the memorial cup tournament. (It's a relatively new team). Well, last night, the team won the game against Mississauga and won the Memorial Cup! As you can guess, everybody's pretty excited about it. The team will be arriving at the airport this afternoon and there will be a rally and parade tomorrow to celebrate the team's success. It's the first time a team from Atlantic Canada has actually got a chance to bring the cup home.

All in all, it was an exciting night last night, as long as you were cheering for the right team.

Yep, I got Portal 2 on 360 yesterday. It's too early to give away any major impressions, but the game is good and wheatley is an awesome character. I you liked the original, you will enjoy the sequel. That's all I'm going to say for now.

I am now on Steam by the way. I started my profile yesterday, and while my activity will be limited for a while, I'm very happy. I've been thinking about getting into PC gaming for a while, and I think this is just the start. I wanted to see how a FPS plays with a mouse and keyboard.

So, it just so happens I found a demo on Steam for Half-Life 2. It took me a while to figure out how to get it, but I did and have played a good amount of time with it. The visuals are pretty darned good considering the age of my PC. I'm still going through the demo's graphic options to see how to get the best performance. I am also getting used to the controls. I loved the game on the 360 as part of the orange box so using the mouse and keyboard is odd at first, However, I do believe I am getting the controls down.

My PC is pretty old so I won't be playing Crysis anytime soon. :lol: However, I will be searching for older PC titles. The original Call of Duty and Far Cry have come to mind.

I'm pretty excited about the PC platform and the possibilites of Mods. I will update you all again soon.

I've been playing a lot of Gears of War 2 lately instead of Black Ops. I am enjoying the game very much. Most of the time has been spent in the multiplayer, but I did finally finish the campaign and had a great time playing.Being 22 experience week, I thought it would be a great time to jump into the multiplayer side of things. Annex is a personal favourite but Guardian is a solid mode too. I've also been spending too much time in Horde. Nothing like chainsawing those damn locusts!

Gears of War 2 isn't all I've been playing lately. I've just jumped back into Bioshock 2. Great atmosphere and setting, superb visual design and characters in addition to solid gameplay. I've also played a bit of multiplayer and it seems pretty fleshed out. I like the trials (challenges in COD) the plasmids are neat, and I am having a rather good time overall.

My 360 isn't the only platform getting some playtime lately. I just recently picked up Resistance Retribution for $15 on PSP. After several hours of playtime, I'm really starting to enjoy the game. The controls are difficult initially, and it's repetitive, but the game really opens up after a few hours. I give Retribution a thumbs up.

Also picked up Singularity for $10 (back up to $45 now) along with Resistance Retribution. I'm feeling less than loving towards it right now, but I'll give it a few hours.

Also, my latest review for Test Drive Unlimited 2 is up. I would copy and paste the link, but the damn browser won't let me.:(

I love saving money. :)

Went down to gamestop yesterday planning to pick up Resistance Retribution (that's right, a game for a SONY system!). Had my eye on this game for a while now. Anyway, went down to pickup the game and I wandered into the 360 section of course as that's my "go to" section. Looked around for some decent deals. I found Singularity on the shelf with a $65 price tag marked down. The marked down price? A bargain of $10! I grabbed it as I also had interest in this game. I can't resist a great bargain, no matter how little money I might have.

Have already got more purchases in mind, all in download form:

Super Meat Boy

Limbo

Dead Rising Case Zero

Zombie Apocalpyse

Perfect Dark

Bayonetta ($20 bucks games on demand, $42 in stores)

Now we are all bracing for the storm of the winter where I live. Possible over a foot! Bring it on!

2010 has certainly been a great year. I'll keep this blog short and sweet. Here were my favorite games in 2010:

Best Shooter- Halo Reach

Best Action Adventure- Red Dead Redemption

Best Story- Red Dead Redemption

Most Under-appreciated game- Mafia 2

Biggest Comeback- Need for Speed Hot Pursuit

Best Graphics- Red Dead Redemption

Best Sound- Battlefield Bad Company 2

Best Single Player- Red Dead Redemption

Best Multiplayer- Halo Reach

Most Value- Call of Duty Black Ops

Funniest game moment- Pentagon Zombies (Black Ops)

Most Surprising game- Mass Effect 2

Best Racing Game- Need for Speed Hot Pursuit

Game of the Year for 2010 is Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar

Rockstar has raised the bar once again for open world games. Fantastic story and characters, great story and multiplayer, stunning world and visuals, fantastic gameplay and pacing and multiplayer make Red Dead Redemption stand out as the finest video game of 2010.

Runners Up- Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Halo Reach, Mass Effect 2

Hope everyone had a good Christmas! I know I did. Here are some of the things I got this year.

Clothes

Lots of chocolate

Family Guy box set

Clothes

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit: Awesome game so far!

Many gift cards

Clothes

More clothes

Mass Effect 2: Still in packaging

Mafia 2: Still in packaging

I forgot to mention clothing! lol

It was a very busy day for sure. Family Gathering and opening of the presents and the turkey dinner. Good times had by all. I'll be getting in some precious game time today with Mafia 2 and Mass Effect 2.

Malls open for Boxing day sales on Monday, but with a major snow storm coming, that might have to wait until Tuesday.

Happy Holidays!

Just finished my Christmas wishlist for 2010. No doubt a massive improvement over last year.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit: Take the old classic Need for Speed exotic cars and cops, put them into an amazing looking open world envrionment with weather and day/night cycles, add online modes with cops, and put it in the hands of a very talented developer, Criterion.

Mass Effect 2- Take the amazing elements of the first Mass Effect, storytelling, dialogue trees, combat, and take out my issues aka exploration and smooth out the technical issues, and I could be playingthe first true RPG that I can actually enjoy.

Mafia 2- I love a good story and don't mind if the open world is stripped of many side activities. I'm looking forward to the story and great shootouts and an authentic representation or mob life in the 1940's and 50's.

Plus money, clothing, family guy, and microsoft points.

It's the end of the year and it's almost time for Game of the Year. I can't say anything yet as I have yet to play these games I've just listed, but I can say that there is a Western, an Alien invasion, and Massive warfare and explosions. Stay Tuned.

First, my sympathy goes out to PC gamers who have to suffer through massive bugs, crashes, and glitches to get their version working, if it will even work at all.

Note: I have played only the xbox 360 version and not played any other version.

It's more Call of Duty. These games have become a bit of aquired taste. If you hated COD after 4, stay away. However, if you hated Modern Warfare 2 for its story and crap cheap tactics in MP, but would've enjoyed MW2 otherwise without those cheap tactics. Black Ops is solid. I don't think the game is as bad as the haters would like you to believe.

My experience has been mostly good. The problems are in the multiplayer, but aren't crippling on the 360 version. Matchmaking puts you in some games that in which your team is kicking ass (which is fun). Other times. I got put into a headquarters match where my team is losing 225-0 several times in a row. Still, you can adapt, and the streak of bad games will end. Also matchmaking didn't work last night for anything including zombies. Basically, it was like no one was playing online. This is Call of Duty, so cleary there is a problem with the matchmaking. Finally, the spawning needs some work (looking at you Nuketown!). But you can take advantage of the bad spawns on nuketown and score some easy kills if that's up your alley. The graphics on a couple of the multiplayer maps looks less than stellar.

Once you get past these negative points, the game's very good for what it is. It's not gonna deliver a deep story. It's simply a fun video game experience that won't take hours to figure out. The campaign is probably the best since Call of Duty 4 which isn't saying much, but it's still very fun. I'm currently going through the game on hardened and scooping up achievements among the way.

I must say I love the combat training. Great addition that lets you actually test out the later killstreaks. Very full featured too, which is nice. The Zombie mode is just awesome. The chatter from JFK, Castrol, and Nixon is actually pretty funny. And the game looks mostly stunning and sounds fantastic. Combat Training and Zombies are incredibly addictive and aren't the main parts of the game:o

Those are my impressions of Call of Duty Black Ops. Activision's business model is rather annoying and the gameplay should see some kind of change, but the quality of the content on the disc is top notch.

Demo for Rock Band 3 is up on xbox live marketplace so I decided to give it a go. I do have a guitar, drums, and mic from GH5, so I decided to give the Rock Band series. Since no Rock Band games have demos, this is my only chance to give a Rock Band game a shot.

Plays exactly like Guitar Hero. Shocking I know. I've gotten used to the new notes and highway and while odd at first, I am starting to dig, especially the background visuals, which can actually distract from gameplay. lol.

I'm not the best Guitar Hero player on the planet, I'm only working on medium difficulty, but I'm catching on, gotten some of the basics down but still need practice in some areas. Hitting blue and red notes both at the same time is close to impossible even though I can do green and yellow at the same time (if you've played RB or GH, you know where the buttons/notes are).

I'm totally digging it though. The 4 songs in the demo are pretty great and I might be picking up Rock Band 2 as it is about $18, depending on how my Call of Duty Black Ops transaction goes. Thinking about tradin in some games, trade in 3 games, get one free (thats how I got Halo Reach). If all goes according to plans, I could be picking up Rock Band 2 sometime soon, maybe even Mass Effect 2. It's only $20!

Recently, I played the demo for Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. After several playthroughs, I have made a verdict. It's perfect, everything I wanted from the game. Arcade gameplay, damage modeling, great visuals, cop chases, exotic cars. Criterion has done it again. Smply brilliant.

I also love the new xbox update. No ESPN, as I live in Canada. But we do get msn video streaming. CBC news stories among many categories are ready to watch, with NO waiting for it to start. Very smooth. New menus and sounds are very slick, and the entire dashboard seems to move a bit faster than before. I give both the update and the Hot Pursuit demo a big thumbs up!