For once I have something positive to talk about! At first I was being negative about the dog story before I saw the video. "So Fable 2 has regressed into a fancy version of Black & White" I thought as I looked down upon Whoville with a sneer, but then I took off the Grinch costume and watched the video. It actually looks like a npc companion that WON'T be a burden for once! Sure he can be injured but it looks like a simple heal spell will take care of any problems like that. And you don't even to use him anyways, he's optional! I won't be stuck with some inbred mutt that I have to stop every ten seconds to let them catch up as I explore! Forget about ultra-realistic graphics and physics, we need AI that can intelligently take care of itself without constant attention. And it looks like we may have something like that this time. But of course I could be horribly mistaken and Fable 2 could be just as disappointing as it's predecessor, ah there's the good old negative me.

When driving past a pedestrian jogging on the side of the road another car will ALWAYS be coming in the opposite direction at a distance that will ALWAYS make you pass simultaneously while you're swerving to avoid the stupid pedestrian. You never hit but you hold your breath as your sideview mirrors come within a hair's width.
I hate pedestrians, both virtual and real. Virtual pedestrians are suicidal, hell-bent on getting run over so you get heat/stars etc. from the police. They either run into the street or they're programed to dive out of the way but they dive INTO THE WAY OF YOUR CAR. Real pedestrians act like they own the world and jaywalk like they don't care that they're entering of the turf of big shiny metal things that go fast. Oh go ahead Madame Cellphone, cross the street at an odd angle, ensuring you're in the street for the longest possible time when the light is green, we don't have anywhere to go. RUN THE *BEEP* OVER! RUN HER OVER NOW! Ahem. I mean... aww forget it.

And it's all thanks to YouTube, their merger to Google, and places like photobucket and imageshack.
You browse the internet and see a link to a funny video and say to yourself "Jolly good, my funnybone could do with a good rub!" in a Vaudevillian actors voice. So you click the link and it's a YouTube video so you click play and lo and behold the video has been removed! "Blast and damnation!" you exclaim as you run off and find a maiden to tie to traintracks before her Mountie boyfriend can interveine. Image bandwith exceeded? Image linking not allowed? It's enough to make you want to vomit in rage! Now every blog post and every forum thread has a shelf life because they all use these fickle hosting services. I swear these are signs of the collapse of the internet because soon everybody is going to be using YouTube for everything and one day all the videos will be removed "due to terms of use violation". Broadcast Yourself? Yeah, well Broadcast THIS YouTube!

In one of the inset pictures of the review it says "Why are you hanging off the back of that helicopter? Just 'cause" copying nearly perfectly the title of my blog post "Why does he have infinite parachutes? Just 'cause." But they say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so I forgive whoever wrote it, besides it's a pretty obvious joke so somebody probably thought it up the moment the title of the game was announced.

So this is the expansion pack for critically acclaimed game of last year. More of the same I say, which some people will love but not me. Sure, the gunbattles are great when you and your enemies are trading shots from behind cover, but then the game tries to add the old tired 'fear' element to the game. If F.E.A.R. stuck to the action it would be one of the greatest action shooters of all time but they keep on interrupting the fun with foolish jump-scare sequences that simply annoy me. Ooooh, the room is slathered in blood, ooooh, look out for 'The Ring' rip-off girl! So they introduce 'scary' enemies so there's stuff to fight in the 'scare' areas and they're based on the old "you fear what you can't see" addage so they're little ghosty monsters that run up and smack you and all you can see clearly is their red eyes. That stuff doesn't scare me, the Skarj from Unreal scared me and were fun at the same time, these little jerks were just obnoxious. I wish they'd abandon the scare crap and focus more on the action, until they do so this expansion won't be taking precious space on my hard drive unless the reviews say it's too good to pass up.

Is Jessica Simpson really hitting her target audience on Xbox Live Marketplace as artist of the month? The only thing I see any 18-36 male downloading her videos for is the eye candy. I mean the Late Night with Conan O'Brien clips and Beerfest trailers are right at home in here but where does Jessica Simpson fit in? I pray to god that MTV isn't infiltrating Xbox Live this way. But kudos to Xbox Live for the cool stuff like the Conan clips and the entire episodes of Viva Pinata, it may be a kids show but I like it okay. Now only if they got special House M.D. content for Marketplace.