#GTA Photo Booth

[beantownbrownie]

10 Highlights from (or soon to be on) Cars & Bids, shot by yours truly:

Source: Me, shot at the Modern Auto Photo Booth for Northeast Auto Imports and Cars & Bids.

[photoboothgtaca-blog]

Looking for Photo Booth Rental Toronto? Hire high-quality and stylish GTA Photo Booth. Contact us for more info at 416-332-0770

[thecollectivesims]

The Collective X Pyx for Coachella

Looking for something edgy to wear? Then this outfit by @pyxalicious is for you!

 Created for The Sims 4: by @pyxalicious

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You may recolor our public cc but don´t include the mesh and tag us for original piece You may convert our public cc to other sims games (No SL, GTA etc..) Do NOT reupload/redistribute our pieces nor claim as your own Do NOT re-sell our meshes (original or modified)

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poses by: @helgatisha 

Photo booth by: @thecollectivesims

@emilyccfinds @sssvitlanz 

[awesome-john-willi-blog]

Our interactive photo booths are available in Toronto, Woodbridge, Maple, Vaughan, Thornhill and the rest of the GTA.

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[stinky-and-the-pain]

& then there was one

my parents finished renovating our house my freshman year of high school. i was 14 and finally had my own room...a place i didn’t have to share with my 11 year old brother or my 3 year old sister. i painted it green & a couple of months later painted a tree on one wall and filled the branches with lord of the rings quotes. it was my sanctuary. 

my grandma gifted me my first laptop around the same time. she won it in a company sweepstakes and gave it to me because she had one already. it was the coolest thing. we had a family computer in the office (nee playroom) that i had played both sims 2 and 3 on. but now i could take the sims to my room! 

amongst other things. 

i played skyrim religiously after my brother got bored of the xbox, as he was also gifted a playstation 4 along with GTA V. i also adored several creators on youtube, at that time a bastion of comedic skits and random tangential clips lasting no more than 6 minutes or so. i felt deeply invested in the community -- not so much with fellow audience members but with the youtubers themselves; as if these videos were a two-way conversation. shane dawson led to desandnate led to smosh led to kalel cullen led tobuscus led to pewdiepie led to cryaotic, etc., etc. they were great! 

forget the boy bands of the 90s and early 2000s....which youtuber did you want to date? SMASH + fuck, marry, kill in the back of the chilly and damp bus driving home from a scholastic bowl meet. my heart ached for these people. they appealed so deeply to me and i fell madly in love with them all. and i wasn’t alone; we all fell in love. 

i’m not sure how i found out about omegle. at a slumber party or birthday, someone pulled out their laptop & we could see and chat with strangers. live. no supervision. we were...14? 15? had to be 14 because i succinctly remember laughing a while later when i told a grown man i wasn’t 18 but actually 14 after he had finished for me. all while sitting in my new green bedroom. 

for the longest damn time i thought i had an extremely average adolescence. i was lauded as independent and mature, and took pride in that. maturity meant i was better but also inherently prepared for what life was throwing at me. plus independence meant that i could effectively do whatever i pleased. and to that extent, i never attended a party (though i did sneak over to a boy’s house when i said i was going to a friends’ but that was later figured out and actually excused) but i pursued other exploits. 

another piece of the puzzle is that youtube around 2010 appealed to people exactly my age. and was simultaneously extremely sexual. the mass cancellation of shane dawson is ultimately rooted in his behavior around this time. and this behavior was broadcast to us, 12-14 years old, which signaled to us what could be deemed appropriate. queue me believing that men around the ages of 19-25 could find me, a barely there 14 year old, attractive. and boy did i run with that. 

i spent immeasurable time on omegle. it was thrilling, especially when men’s faces would light up as my video appeared. “finally, a real person and not just a dick!” i remember one, zach herzog (sp?). he was so kind, introducing me to imgur which rounded out my early internet diet. he had a girlfriend but at one point admitted to me that she was not as pretty as i was. we would message on kik for hours. he graduated college a year after we met (my junior year of high school). jake was around that time too. but honestly jake was special in that we met through omegle chat (no video). and we actually chatted for about 3 years, at one time making sure to watch the weekly game of thrones episode (freshly downloaded off pirate bay) together and discussing what went down afterwards. after we skyped with video on, we slowly stopped communicating. 

another, stephen i believe. he was from the UK and i only remember that because of his accent and that i had him say my (fake) name multiple times. i never once used my real name nor talked aloud to these men. always text. but does that matter? over skype, he would send videos of himself jacking off...which would have been pleasant save for the fact he liked smacking his penis near the end and i couldn’t take that seriously. 

the first man i reciprocated for -- that is, i obliged requests to show parts of my body -- was sam. i don’t remember anything too striking about him save he did his business to me while we were still on omegle (only strange because the fashion then was to move to somewhere more ‘private’ and stable like kik or skype) and then promptly ghosted me. somewhere in my hs junior year planner, there are notes to sam asking him if he would ever come back. 

then senior year. so stressed with college applications (i applied to one school) i spent most of my time in my bedroom alone, indulging in a healthy diet of top gear and youtube, by this point dominated by cryaotic and pewdiepie. but i always had time for my dear favorite, capndesdes (of desandnate fame who later made his own solo channel where he published several q&a’s and apartment vlogs). october 2013 and i was wearing his blue ‘crescent moon face’ shirt (referencing the photo booth video). i met Anthony, Mike, and David on omegle. i immediately picked out Anthony and sure enough he was interested. him being in a group, i knew we wouldn’t be doing anything that night but the video chat was fun. the connection even died at one point but we got back in contact as i had shared my twitter (and my real name, though for months he believed my fake name was my middle name because i felt bad telling the truth). i guess i should’ve known this time was different when he insisted on skying the next morning before i went to work. i felt embarrassed for how i looked but he said i looked beautiful. and was so earnest i had to believe him. 

we skyped everyday. every day. essentially right as i got home from school because that’s conveniently when he got off work. oh and i eventually had to admit that my microphone was not in fact broken. we played minecraft and gta on the xbox. he said he planned to visit me one day. but that’s absurd, right? i would laugh and say ‘you’re too much.’

he visited november 9 2013. drove all the way up. i was at my friend’s birthday party. we had just woken up and he revealed he was in our town. i gave him directions to the park so we could meet. i remember running to him from my car, friends sitting in the back seat. we walked about two miles around the park, chatting. he was even more beautiful in person. the sight of the freckles on his nose are still so vivid. even after all these years remembering, my naiveté still strikes me. a day later, he asked me to be my girlfriend as we walked to his car after dinner. i said yes, that i would do him the honor of making him the happiest man on earth. a day later, he took (but i also gave) away my virginity. he met my friends and then we said goodbye on a rainy and cold afternoon. i still sometimes smell the sweet mustiness of that room. 

a handful of memories that are still striking after 7 years:

washing the strawberry lube off myself in my parent’s bathroom, praying they did not ask why i had spent the last 5 afternoons and evenings staying so late at a friend’s house; forcing myself to connect to Lorde’s music after he said he enjoyed her first album; saying that thin mints were my favorite after he admitted to buying too many; taking my adventure time backpack to the hotel room and filling out my cheatsheet for my physics test the next day while he watched and eventually rolled me over to kiss me; feeling too insecure to lead him around town so instead opted to stay silent as he chose what to have for dinner; eating at my favorite local mexican restaurant after losing my virginity; showing my friends the pictures we had taken in the hotel room and them losing their minds. 

after he left, i was devastated. and essentially remained devastated for the next 7 months. i cried the morning after he left, while driving to work and listening to ribs. 

there’ll be more, when i have strength. 

[daleisgreat]

15 Years of Xbox 360: Flashback Special!

I am usually timely with these, but the holidays has resulted in this 15th Anniversary of the North American launch of the Xbox 360 Flashback Special to be about a month late. The 360 was one of the first major consoles to have a near simultaneous global launch in the three major market territories. With the United States and Canada launching first on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe on December 2nd and finally Japan on December 10th with most other smaller markets over the following year. The 360 had an extraordinarily long life cycle, with it being eight years until Microsoft launched its successor, the Xbox One. I had major highs and lows with the 360 so get ready to take in my journey with the system. Like with past system specials here, I recorded podcasts based on RPG games and comic book games that released on the 360, PS3 and Wii and have embedded them at the bottom of this entry for supplementary material if you crave even more 360 games to learn about. Be forewarned, this is my lengthiest Flashback Special yet, so I have implemented bookmarks for ease of navigation you can click or press on below! With that out of the way, the last special I did here was on the PS2, and I want to begin the 360 Flashback Special the same way by expanding upon its unavoidable….. CHAPTERS Part 1 – The Hype Part 2 – The Launch Part 3 - Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements Part 4 - Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles Part 5 - An Awesome Debut Year of Games Part 6 - Upgrade to HD Part 7 - Three Red Lights Part 8 - Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Part 9 - Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Part 10 - For the Love of Online Co-op Part 11 - Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs Part 12 - Becoming a Pinball Wizard Part 13 - Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre Part 14 - The Fad that was Plastic Instruments Part 15 - Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Part 16 - Wanna Wrassle? Part 17 - Sports-ball Forever! Part 18 - No Russian, No Cauldron Part 19 – Dubious Honors Part 20 - Lightning Round Quick Hits Part 21 - ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) Part 22 – You’re Still Here!? Well then…. (STINGER!!!) The Hype Microsoft garnered a lot of attention by pulling the plug on its original Xbox early because of the PS2 being an unstoppable global force, and was determined to launch its system a year before the PS3. The Dreamcast had huge success in North America for its first year by launching ahead of the PS2 a year early, so I could see where they were coming from. I covered E3 2005 for the long defunct gaming site, VGpub. I recall getting a closed door tour with a few other gaming press members for the Xbox 360 and was shuffled around to a few isolated booths that showed off the 360’s “blade” dashboard interface and went over some of the functions of the system. I recall being shown Kameo running side-by-side an unreleased build on the original Xbox to demonstrate the 360’s horsepower. 360 had a couple games playable on the show floor that year with Top Spin 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. From my brief time with those two games what I took away the most was the much-improved controller being lighter, slightly more ergonomic, and the much appreciated inclusion of the shoulderbumper buttons to replace the peculiar white and black buttons from its predecessor. Of the several games I was shown and/or played from E3 2005, the one that impressed me the most was Saints Row. I walked out of that demonstration thinking it looked like the first viable open world contender to Grand Theft Auto after countless watered down GTA-clones were flooding the market. Sure enough, Saints Row did not disappoint the following year and would have three more successful sequels over the years.

Back when cable TV mattered before the dawn of streaming, this MTV reveal event delivered on building anticipation for the 360.

Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which happened in tandem with a much publicized MTV reveal event of the 360 filled with all kinds of celebrities made it impossible to avoid the 360 launch hype building up to its November launch. Then there was Microsoft’s truly extraordinary “Zero Hour” launch event in the Mojave desert to give people the opportunity to travel all the way there just to buy an Xbox. Then there was the Mountain Dew contest where they were giving away 360s every so minutes and you increased your chances to win by entering more codes on their website, and yes, I must have entered at least a 100 codes from weeks of gathering bottle caps from co-workers to no avail. All this blitz of marketing engagement made it impossible to not pay attention to the 360’s launch. I was a huge fan of the original Perfect Dark on N64, and thus was eagerly stoked for the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero which made it a day one buy for me. Amped 3 wound up as the second game I pre-ordered for launch day, and it was a solid snowboarding game, which got a significant boost from its irreverent narrative that pushed me through playing it. The Launch With my pair of launch games pre-ordered I went on to count down the days until the 360’s launch. I thought I had my launch system guaranteed on November 22nd, but last second shenanigans prevented me from buying it at the final hour, yet I was able to procure dibs on the first batch of second wave systems that hit retail three weeks later. Launch window systems came with a couple limited pack-ins in the form of a DVD remote control (yay?) and the downloadable XBLA puzzler game, Hexic HD. Hexic HD was a perfectly fine hexagonal based puzzler from Alexey Pajitnov, the same designer who invented Tetris, but I mostly played Perfect Dark Zero in those opening months of the 360. I only got about halfway through the campaign, but I played a ton of deathmatch with friends and/or solo against bots. Like the previous game, PDZ had a plethora of multiplayer options and maps and tided me by splendidly during the first months of the 360’s lifecycle.

Perfect Dark Zero and Amped 3 were my first two 360 games and both held me over nicely during those initial launch window months! Over the next few weeks I played a fair amount of launch games my friends brought over and picked up/rented a couple more. Top Spin 2 I played far more than I thought I would and wound up finishing its lengthy career mode. Call of Duty 2 was a local multiplayer hit that friends repeatedly brought over. A few years later I eventually picked up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and got immersed working my way through its “blacklist” of rival racers to vanquish. Launch title Condemned: Criminal Origins I did not start playing until recent years, and I am kicking myself for not starting it sooner as it is a trip of a suspense/thriller first person game consisting of intense hand-to-hand and melee weapon combat over traditional firearms FPS weaponry. The game is still fun to this day and I have made it a ritual to play it on Halloween for the past three or four years. Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements

Also worth highlighting here during the launch was familiarizing myself with the much-loved “blade” dashboard in the launch window. The four blades were filled with many options to separate game, videos, photos and music media. I made heavy use of custom soundtracks on the original Xbox, and loved how the 360 had support for it built into the user interface so they could be dropped into any game. Dashboard and online features on the original Xbox like friends list, voice chat, game invites and more carried over on the 360 and later evolved into so much more through system updates that introduced must-have features like Party Chat that made it so several users can voice chat together regardless of what game any of them are playing. It made catching up with family and friends on weekend game nights more manageable. The biggest hit of the UI during that launch window was Microsoft debuting achievements that were mandatory for all games. These became an instant sensation among any ardent game player when accomplishing the criteria for an achievement and hearing the endorphin-rush of a sound effect and accompanying on screen graphic that indicated you unlocked another achievement. Most of the launch window games had straightforward achievements like finishing campaign missions or getting X amount of wins in sports and racing games, but they eventually evolved and encouraged users to play games in new ways I never thought of (Crackdown was a great early example of this with its achievement design). Also the way the Blades made it easy and irresistible to compare what achievements you accomplished in a game against other people on your friends list that it only upped the friendly competition between friends to see who could unlock more achievements. It is gratifying to see Microsoft allowed each Gamertag’s linked Gamerscore to carryover from 360 to Xbox One and now Series S|X. While achievements are still around today, and I occasionally dive into going out of my way to unlock some if I am enjoying my time with a game, they do not compare to the early years of the 360 where achievement-mania was running wild. Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles

This was also the first time a major console had an online digital store implemented at launch. The original Xbox had a scaled-down store they experimented with late in its lifecycle with about a dozen smaller classic arcade hits and smaller sized web browser-esque “flash” games of its era that could be purchased, and the 360 expanded on this bigtime. Initially, the 360 digital game marketplace known as “Xbox Live Arcade” launched with games maxing out at 50meg download limits so the game could fit on a memory card, so all of the first year or so worth of XBLA games were mostly re-releases of smaller-sized arcade classics like Smash TV, Contra and Gauntlet along with similar simple browser-based flash game of its era like Bankshot Billiards 2. Over the 360’s lifecycle though they kept increasing the game size limits to the point where disc-based games were coming out digitally and were multiple gigs in size as memory card and hard drive storage options increased. During the first few months of the 360 after launch developers were not flocking to releasing XBLA games because they were unsure if they were going to take off like digital games were slowly starting to on PC at that point. The launch dozen or so XBLA games were met with success, but developers were not anticipating it so in those early months only one or two new XBLA games hit a month. The big breakout XBLA success was a straightforward adaptation of the card game, Uno that launched in May 2006. I can attest for many sessions of simple, pick up and play rounds of Uno while catching up with friends over voice chat online. Microsoft eventually patched in support for the 360’s first webcam, the “Vision” camera, which lead to some peculiar matchups with strangers online who wanted to make sure to demonstrate all their adult substances they were consuming that evening. Later throughout 2006 and 2007 XBLA grew to releasing a game every Tuesday, and Microsoft enforced every XBLA game have a demo/trial so it was an eager experience to see what game would be hitting that Tuesday, because most of the time Microsoft did not announce the game until maybe a day before at that time.

It took over 20 years, but it was worth it to relive the iconic X-Men arcade game with online co-op, and EA did a bang-up job bringing back NFL Blitz for two of my most played XBLA titles! There are so many success stories of XBLA games to go on about, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites. Seeing the re-release of many classic arcade, 8 and 16-bit titles with enhanced graphics and online support was a big win for XBLA in this department. I remember interviews with the XBLA executives from this time answering fans demands and going through the legal hoopla with Konami to bring back arcade favorite beat-em-ups like TMNT, X-Men and The Simpsons, and all with online play! This treatment went doubly so for fighting games. It started with Street Fighter II: Turbo receiving the XBLA treatment, and within years Capcom, SNK, Namco and other studios were porting over their greatest hits onto XBLA like the first two Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur titles, many King of Fighters re-releases. My personal favorite is the remake, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix that saw all new gorgeous artwork and a new officially endorsed ReMix soundtrack from the fantastic ocremix.org community.

Non-fighting game wise I was surprised by EA Sports’ revival of NFL Blitz. It is one of the few games I somehow got addicted to online, and become somewhat legitimately good at too and was able to genuinely earn the 10 straight online wins achievement against random ranked opponents! Renegade Ops is an addicting twin-stick shooter in an mini-open world unleashing destruction as pint-sized vehicles with a gruff CO barking orders from the chaotic minds from the team that also made Just Cause. Valiant Hearts I originally played on 360, and loved the passion they showed on their unique adventure/action take on a World War I game. I 1000% related to Double Fine’s take on being a wide-eyed kid caught up in the whimsical spirit of Halloween in both of its RPG-lite Costume Quest titles. Fans of past Sega consoles like the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast were well treated, and new fans emerged after a plethora of XBLA re-releases of titles like Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, both Sonic Adventure games, Daytona USA, Ikaruga, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Jet Set Radio, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Rez and others saw new life in XBLA form. The Genesis saw packs of three games re-released in bundles themed around best-sellers in the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe 16-bit entries. Although I would recommend skipping the XBLA Genesis packs in favor of the 360 disc release of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection that has 40 Genesis games and bonus unlockable Arcade and Master System titles. Sega obviously treated its back catalog well on the 360, and I put in many hours revisiting these past favorites. I bought into the hype for Shadow Complex, and it became the first “MetroidVania” I ever finished. Hydro Thunder Hurricane perfectly captured the nature of the 1999 arcade boat racer, while successfully evolving its gameplay into the HD era. Adorable puzzle-platformer Ra-Skulls brought back pleasant memories of Mr. Driller! Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper made smart use of implementing FMV-video into its charming superhero platform-action title. Despite its stomach-turning title, Deathspank is a lighthearted action-RPG I saw through to the end with a twist ending I did not see coming. That same developer, Hothead Games, released the first two turn-based RPG Penny Arcade games I ate up that perfectly encapsulated the popular web comic in videogame form.

Two of my best-of-class XBLA recommendations are Trials HD and its sequel, Trials Evolution. It is an exemplary example of the adage, “easy to learn, tough to master.” Its quirky, bouncy motorbike and instant reloading spawns made it easy to succumb to endlessly retrying its inventive stages after each wipeout. It also had innovative use of implementing Friends List leaderboards with their ghost times appearing as you play, just teasing you more and more upon each crash when coming close to usurping their times! The sequel added online multiplayer that clicked and made perfect use of Trials unique gameplay. Microsoft I recall got a lot of flak for their curating policies for XBLA at the time because they would only allow one game to release each Tuesday, and there were many indie developers lashing out for being on the short end of the stick for not getting their game slotted for release on XBLA. Eventually Microsoft upped it two XBLA games a week, with usually a more anticipated game hitting on Tuesday and a lesser known title from a smaller studio hitting on Friday. Looking back on this the obvious downside is the lack of quantity of XBLA titles with only one or two releasing a week, but the curation process lead to the hit-to-miss ratio of them being significantly in favor of the hit range. Sure there were some stinkers that creeped in their like the disappointing Turtles in Time Re-Shelled remake, but the good outweighs the bad greatly in the XBLA market, especially compared today to the ridiculous amounts of low-rent DIY shovelware hitting every week on all consoles with there being seemingly no restrictions for any developer to get their game on a current console, for better or worse.

The digital store also made game demos more easily accessible instead of the traditional demo disc, and downloading demos in the early years of the 360 was kind of a big deal, especially when they had major opening acts of action and intriguing narratives like the Prey and Just Cause demos that made a huge impression on me and triggered me to rush out and buy them. This also worked against games, with the most egregious case being EA Sport’s planned reboot of its basketball series with NBA Elite ‘11’s demo being so plagued with bugs and glitches, that EA infamously flatout cancelled the game days before its street date release and forced retailers to return their copies of the game. That last minute recall tempted overzealous retail employees to snatch up precious copies to make it one of the rarest physical releases on the 360, with copies going on eBay for many thousands of dollars. An Awesome Debut Year of Games

I have no idea if it was happenstance, or intentionally planned, but it worked out pleasantly in the 360’s favor in its first year of next-gen exclusivity they had one or two AAA exclusive games launching per month. Noticing multiple users on my friends list playing the latest AAA game, and with the dawn of podcasts in 2005 featuring their affable hosts discussing the latest games in exhausting detail on launch week is what I feel created the horribly named sensation, “Fear of Missing Out.” I ate up gaming podcasts upon discovering them in 2005 with 1up Yours, The Hotspot, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live being early favorites of mine and influencing my gaming purchases with their genuine positivity on the latest games that made it difficult to ignore their top picks. They, along with traditional print and online gaming press made it easier to keep up with the latest must-have game of the month for the 360’s first year. A month after launch Dead or Alive 4 snuck in at the end of 2005. It was the first fighting game on the system, and with it having a Spartan character from Halo’s universe as a guest fighter, and an innovative-for-the-time pre-fight lobby system lead to me spending many hours in it online and offline. I was terrible at it, but still had countless hours of fun, even while legitimately earning the dubious zero point achievement for 25 straight online losses.

Oblivion’s Adoring Fan I loved seeing respawn every couple of in-game days to tag along on my adventures before quickly getting slaughtered, and Test Drive Unlimited was an unprecedented always-online open world racing title that laid the foundation for Forza Horizon and The Crew! A couple months later, the first big RPG hit on 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a huge improvement from Morrowind, and this Western open-world RPG was publisher Bethesda’s first mainstream console hit. It took me well over a hundred hours to finish that I spread out over the course of five years (just in time for Skyrim!). I had to resort to abusing the hell out of the dupe glitch for infinite invisibility potions to get past those dastardly Oblivion Gates, but it was an immensely gratifying experience to complete and fully 1000 gamerscore Oblivion! Pro tip, make sure to avoid a near freak-out experience like I had and have a bow in your inventory on the final Thieves Guild mission where you steal an actual Elder’s Scroll!

The string of big-release games kept rolling through 2006. Test Drive Unlimited broke new ground for the racing genre with its always connected open world! Before From Software had blockbuster success with their string of Souls games, they were known at this time for their niche mech games, and had their most success yet with the release of Chromehounds in 2006. The online-focused mech game was more accessible from their previous feature-extensive Armored Core titles. A pair of popular third-person Tom Clancy games hit in 2006 with the first Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas titles. I rented both of these and was terrible at them online, but I do recall having fun as the decoy in Vegas to draw out enemy fire so my friends could pick off my assailants! My anticipation for Saints Row paid off, and it wound up being an awesome GTA-clone done right that year! The first Gears of War was the big 2006 holiday release from Epic Games, riding the success of several hit Unreal FPS games, but long before their current Fortnite fame. It lived up to the hype and delivered with its unapologetic brand of in-your-face gore, and smooth drop-in/drop-out online campaign play. It became one of my favorite franchises on the 360, and I would up playing through the campaign of every single game released to this day! The final big 2006 release I want to highlight is Dead Rising’s brand of campy, zombie mayhem from Capcom that became a huge new IP for Capcom and also the catalyst for many 360 owners to… Upgrade to HD Up through most of 2006 was when I used a traditional CRT (AKA “Tube TV”) as my main gaming television. HDTVs were first noticeable on the market during the PS2/Xbox/GCN era, and a fair number of games supported HD resolutions (especially on Xbox), but HD graphics were never a marquee bullet point of that gen. That all changed with Dead Rising. For the first several months I remained content with the CRT visuals of launch window 360 games, then when playing the Dead Rising demo, I could not help but notice the game’s text was rather tiny and kind of difficult to read. Upon listening to podcasts I learned I was not alone on this and it turned out the game’s text was optimized and quite readable for HD resolutions. Many more games would soon follow this trend in the following months. I noticed this even more when a friend brought over a smaller HDTV and we put them side-by-side running Rainbow Six: Vegas and I saw for myself the difference in the legibility of the in-game text. So yeah, the core graphics for all games where shinier and crisper in HD, but my primary reason for upgrading at the end of 2006 was just to read the damn text. History is repeating itself in recent years with text starting to look smaller and requiring more eye-squinting again to read in games like Wreckfest and MLB: The Show for me, when I later learned that is so because the visuals are optimized for 4KTVs (which I finally upgraded to several weeks ago).

Did you experience the ‘Look and Sound of Perfect’ with 360’s HD-DVD player, along with its killer app of a film in Tokyo Drift? HD movies also arrived to the 360 in 2006 with the release of the ill-fated HD-DVD add-on. Sony getting the better end of the stick in exclusivity deals with studios lead to it losing the physical HD format war against BluRay, and movies stopped releasing on HD-DVD by the end of 2008. I almost impulse-bought the add-on upon seeing it on the clearance rack for $50, but thankfully I held off. By that time however HD streaming was starting to take off with TV shows and movies available to rent and purchase from 360’s online marketplace, and the 360 nabbing a year exclusive on being the first non-PC device to offer streaming Netflix. Streaming movies and TV shows exploded in popularity and before I knew it, almost anytime I logged on nearly half of my Friends list was making use of one of many streaming apps that would become available on the 360. A couple years before the 360 got to this level of success, it had a couple major hurdles to overcome, especially the right-of-passage a vast majority of early 360 owners fatefully dubbed…. Three Red Lights There have been a fair number of platforms that have been notorious over the years for noteworthy faulty hardware ratios like the first three original PlayStations and the problematic powering on trickery required to boot NES games, but those all pale in comparison to the atrocity of the launch year 360 units. Within a few months after launch more frequent whispers started to become prominent of knowing someone who had a 360 that failed on them with the telltale indicator being three flashing red lights on the system. Users would then have to call Microsoft to set them up with a shipping container to mail to Microsoft to repair and mail back. I was the first among my local friends and peers to get the three lights of doom, and I have painful memories of it because my system was lost in UPS transit for three months before I finally got it back after visiting the local UPS center’s lost and found.

360 #2 only lasted several months before red-lighting in 2007, and the third met its expiration date in 2011. I will refrain from going into the nuts and bolts of the architecture problems, but in layman’s terms Microsoft was in such a rush to get that year head start on Sony, that a high amount of faulty chips made their way to manufacturing and resulted in the system’s high failure rate. To Microsoft’s credit, they gave all launch year 360 owners an extended three year warranty to get their system replaced free of charge, which I took advantage of twice. The third one died after the extended warranty, but by that point Microsoft had a slim version of the console on the market releasing alongside Gears of War 3 that I snatched up, and **fingers crossed** have had no issues yet with. Being the first to be hit with the three red lights amidst my immediate local circle of friends and co-workers made it interesting. Over the next year every couple of months another friend would call or text me, and/or another co-worker would catch up with me at work and relay to me their troubles of their 360 bricking and I would be their unofficial tech support on how to get ahold of Microsoft to the point where I still remember the phone number to this day (1-800-4MY-XBOX) to get set up with the replacement system. I wound up buying a hard drive transfer cable to transfer data to new hard drives when switching systems and I recall at least a handful of people borrowing it from me when they switched systems due to switching systems and/or upgrading hard drives. In a bizarre twist, I will put a curse on Hollywood Video for my first two 360s red-ringing! The first time it happened I was playing a rented copy of Chromehounds. The Hollywood Video curse struck again in 2007 when renting Shadowrun caused my 360 to crash!!! As ubiquitous as the three red rings became, Microsoft wanted to ensure a 360 makeover image with a marketing assault for the 2010 launch of… Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Nintendo’s Wii launched Holiday 2006, and the motion-based console was an initial sales juggernaut, and it took over two years before it was commonly available on store shelves. Both Sony and Microsoft initially had meek responses to it with Sony essentially patching in motion controls in time for the PS3’s launch with the Six Axis controller that was not that well received or regarded for its precision, and the 360 had the aforementioned Vision Camera, which was essentially Microsoft’s take on an Eye Toy that only saw a handful of games support it for motion controls. Holiday 2010 saw both companies with a meaningful response with PlayStation Move on PS3, and Kinect on 360.

Microsoft pulled the same marketing strategies as Nintendo did years earlier intentionally marketing the Kinect towards families and advertising it heavily on daytime television. Most of Microsoft’s Kinect games were more-or-less their takes on the hit Wii versions. This is when Microsoft implement cartoony characters that could be implemented across games called “Avatars.” They were especially prominent in Kinect games, and one cool side effect for them was the many digital clothing items for them that could be either bought off the Avatar Marketplace, or unlocked for free by playing through games. I am especially proud of my You Don’t Know Jack dummy, and goofy oversized head ornament I unlocked from finishing Comic Jumper. A fair amount of late gen 360 titles supported Avatars in-game, which made for some interesting sights like having your Avatar onstage in Guitar Hero 5 jamming out next to Kurt Cobain. Microsoft’s gamel paid off, and for two-to-three years, the Microsoft moved millions of units of that camera. It is safe to sumrise that the 1-2-3 punch of Kinect, Move and smartphones all combined to steal the “casual gamer” userbase that the Wii was known for and the Wii’s console sales in America plummeted from 2011 onwards. The Kinect boosted 360 console sales so much from the Holiday 2010 period until the Xbox One and PS4 launches in Holiday 2013 that in that three year timeframe Microsoft sold the most systems in America for all but a handful of months. By the Holiday 2013 launch of the Xbox One/PS4, the 360 overcame the Wii’s sizable lead to become the best-selling console of the Wii/360/PS3 generation in America.

Only Kinect game I ever played was the river-rafting follies seen in Kinect Adventures, but surprise hit games like the Gunstringer seen above tempted me to almost get a Kinect on multiple occasions. I never bought a Kinect, but did play Kinect Adventures at a friend’s….yes, it was that damn river raft mini-game. I paid attention to the games releasing for it and supporting the peripheral, and a few looked like genuinely entertaining games and went on to have critical acclaim. Many traditional games added optional “Better with Kinect” features like zoom-in art gallery halls, or audio play-calling in sports games. Even though the ardent game player in me despised the change in direction Microsoft took with the Kinect, I cannot deny there were still several games I wanted to try on it after seeing the positive reactions for Harmonix’s trilogy of Dance Central games, Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer and even the limited on-rail experience that is Fable: The Journey. Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Hitting around the same time as Kinect was Microsoft patching in a new division of purchasable digital games initially called Community Games, but later rebranded Indie Games. Microsoft made its XNA development tools easily available for almost any level of experienced developer. This lead to a deluge of DIY games that looked like they were made as a semester long development school project flooding the Indie Games channel. Some developers embraced the campy nature of the amateur works that dominated the 360 Indie Games scene, with Silver Dollar Games especially unleashing a plethora of their…brand…of games like Try Not to Fart and the ironically titled, Why Did I Buy This?

The 360 Indie Games scene left a lot to be desired as seen above with the quality of games from infamous companies like Silver Dollar Games There were a few gems in the rough to be discovered in the Indie Games channel, and like XBLA games, Microsoft enforced a free trial on all games so you knew what you were getting yourself in for before throwing down some hard earned Microsoft Points, which are like regular points, but fun! There are two DLC Quest games that are fun quirky $1 platformers riffing on how gratuitous in-game DLC would become. Tribute Games gained notoriety on here with their adorable Breakout homage, Wizorb. Finally, I was a huge fan of Zeboyd Games that earned their reputation for their 360 Indie Games and I played through and devoured all four of their humorous takes on throwback pixel RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulu Saves the World, Penny Arcade’s Rain Slick 3 & 4) that released as Indie Games. Zeboyd earned their development stripes on the 360 Indie Games platform, and I am happy with their continued success today! For every one of these hits that broke through however, there were at least a few dozen forgettable releases overshadowing them. Indie Games was Microsoft’s answer for their curation policy to XBLA, but as you can see it only went so far.

Zeboyd’s four 360 Indie Games are excellent retro-style RPGs well worth your time and can be found on Steam today to experience these gems! Microsoft had similar lukewarm success with their backwards compatibility efforts on the 360. There was a huge demand leading to the 360’s launch to be fully compatible with all original Xbox games. Microsoft only originally promised that the first two Halo games would be back-compat on 360, but after enough user outcry, Microsoft released several updates over the 360’s lifespan patching in support for what ended up being a little under half of the original Xbox’s library being supported on the 360, but the software-based emulation had a list of issues and bugs that accompanied each compatibility update. Aside from a fair amount of both Halo games, I played through Fable and Spider-Man 2 via 360 back-compat, and ran into intermittent bouts of slowdown with the former, and random little portions of graphic flickering with the latter. Still enjoyed my time with both, but not without these added issues. Speaking of Halo…. For the Love of Online Co-op

The 360 featured countless games that supported online co-op which made playing the latest big AAA title all that more fun. This primarily effected first and third-person shooters with the big example for this being the Halo titles on the 360 (3, 4, Reach, ODST, Halo Anniversary Remake). I played through all five of those games in online co-op and enjoyed them all tremendously. I will give props to Halo 3 and 4 having my favorite narratives, and I loved the final level of Halo 3 being an homage to the last level of the first game where you drive a warthog through a lengthy labyrinth of enemies and terrain to navigate before a time limit expires and everything explodes, MacGrueber-style! Halo 3 brought in four player online co-op, which I experiment with friends online by trying out the “Skull” modifiers which only upped the difficulty and lead to us finishing a good chunk of the game on the highest difficulty. Halo 4 I continue to this day to reference an ill-fated moment I had when playing with my friend Derek, where I was controlling the Scorpion tank whilst marching it up a lengthy incline, and he was walking alongside me and I misinterpreted the level’s geometry where I did not see a turn and nonchalantly drove the Scorpion tank off the edge of a level and plummeted it down to its awaiting death to the erupting laughter from Derek on the headset.

While I had a lot of fun with the Halo titles online, there were plenty of other worthy options, with the first Crackdown standing out among them. Getting lost in that open world with a friend and wreaking havoc with powered-up heroes whose jumping abilities had seemingly no limits was a blast, so was coming up with random challenges for each other like making a competition to see who could race up to the top of the mammoth Agent’s tower first. Saints Row 2 is another open world game that had online co-op, and made discovering some of the game’s secrets I had no idea about like its hidden mall worth going out of the way to show to friends. Dead Island’s online co-op stood out to me with its in-depth crafting system and emphasis on melee combat ala Condemned. The four Gears of War titles on the 360 all feature first-class online co-op. Gears of War 3 I have classic memories of bringing over to a friend’s the night it launched and we set up our TVs next to each other and played through the entire journey over two days. The survival-based Horde modes from the Gears titles created a new sensation for online co-op, and I played many hours of it online in the first three Gears. I even became invested into the “deep” lore of the Gears franchise to the point that I read a couple of the novels. Gears of War: Judgment switched developer to People Can Fly who tried to freshen up the controls and gameplay a bit. They also focused the narrative on Baird and Cole’s origins which did not go over well with the fanbase, and while it was the least popular of the four on the 360 I will still give Microsoft props for trying something different with it.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s final boss battle with Galactus was made to experienced and conquered with someone in co-op, and while the Army of Two games weren’t perfect, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having some fun times with all the games in online co-op If it was not for online co-op I would have not broken my curse to finally finish the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I started and never finished that campaign on five, yes five, separate occasions with different sets of friends each time and stopped because we either lost interest and/or ran into logistic issues setting up times for everyone to meet together. A former co-worker Sean reached out to me to play with him online and I reluctantly agreed and started it the sixth time, but sure enough we stuck with it and completed it, and it was worth all the starts and stops because it remains years later one of my all-time favorite comic book games. That Galactus boss fight is a final boss fight that I will never forget and a truly epic final encounter to close the game! The second Ultimate Alliance game also featured online co-op and I finished that game on a much timelier basis because a lot of my co-workers also picked it up and we met up regularly for a couple weeks to finish it twice because it focused on the popular Civil War Marvel event that had two separate storylines. It had a more polished presentation, but the first Ultimate Alliance I easily rank as the superior game!

Some rapid-fire quick online co-op memories to wrap this segment up on: The first Kane & Lynch game was an interesting experience in co-op because I played it on this insanely huge HD projector. The first two Borderlands games were both huge hits with my friends and peers that won us all over with its loot-driven FPS gameplay. Credit to Derek for having patience with my crazy work hours and sticking with me for the better part of a year to pick away at and eventually finish Borderlands 2! To a lesser extent, another fun FPS co-op focused title were the Army of Two trilogy of titles. The games all had noticeable control issues, but the teamwork focused gameplay worked for us, and the franchise had a certain charisma to it with their many unlockable masks and charming fist bump animations to equip. Real time strategy games have historically been troublesome to pull off on consoles, but Ensemble Studios found the magic formula to make it work with Halo Wars, and somehow made online co-op viable with it too, and it was another game I found myself teaming up with Sean in a very enjoyable campaign that also featured some of the best CG cutscenes that remain stunning to this day. Finally, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has likely the most ridiculous storyline of all these co-op titles where you play as 50 Cent himself to track down a prized skull across the middle east that made it a zany quest to just shake my head and go with to see where it took me next, and also for my friend Matt and I to jam out to its hip-hop flavored soundtrack to throughout. Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs In the console space, before this generation, role-playing games were dominant on the first two Nintendo and Sony platforms. That surprisingly changed this generation. Microsoft made pitches to Japanese developers in the early years of the 360 to release their games exclusively, or at least timed exclusively on the system. This lead to Square-Enix releasing exclusives like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant on the 360, and porting its MMO, Final Fantasy XI onto the 360 in 2006 and making it cross-platform-online compatible with the PS2 and PC versions which meant it was the first game to share online user bases between consoles from different manufacturers. It took a little over a decade for this to happen again, so this was kind of a big deal. I still recall Square stunning gaming fans with their E3 announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would release day and date with the PS3 version (along with XIII’s two sequels later on), so it was surprising during this time to see Square open up its publishing portfolio on other platforms.

As twisted as its plot may be, I still got a lot out of Eternal Sonata with its highly entertaining battles. Blue Dragon was another early J-RPG that drew a lot of attention that Microsoft was serious about RPGs this gen. Other Japanese developers also released RPGs in the early 360 years with Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey all appearing. I purchased nearly all these games, but only one I played through of these was the bizarre Eternal Sonata, which is a traditional J-RPG set in the mind of dying legendary composer Federic Chopin. Its plot is as out there as its premise, and I will never forget its equally bizarre post-credits stinger, but I loved its engaging battle system that kept me glued in all the way through. I was also taking a music history class in college at the time, so the brief Chopin historical fact interludes between acts also did a lot for me. While Japanese RPGs took off on the 360, so did…. …. “Western RPGs” from companies on this side of the global hemisphere. Bethesda and BioWare are the two most prominent developers responsible for this slate of RPGs this generation after lighting the fire on the original Xbox. I already discussed my love for Oblivion, and Bethesda capitalized on that success with another blockbuster in the form of Fallout 3. Take the medieval fantasy world of Elder Scrolls and apply a retro-50s post-apocalypse skin to it and you have the formula for another Bethesda best-seller I once again put in over 100 hours in completing the main campaign and all of its DLC expansions. After that I needed a break from Bethesda’s games and have yet to play New Vegas. I did start up the Oblivion sequel, Skyrim and briefly made some headway into that, but got sidetracked by other holiday tent pole releases at that time and it regrettably succumbed to becoming lost in my backlog. I eventually picked up the remaster on Xbox One, and one day I will restart and finish that game!

Giant Bomb’s videos of their complete play-throughs of the Mass Effect trilogy is some of their best work that should not be missed! A series that did not get lost in my backlog was BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. The first game I initially got into as an awesome modern-day take on Star Trek, with an engrossing cast of crew mates on the Normandy. The first Mass Effect was a little rough around the edges, so I eventually fell off halfway through, but picked it up a couple years later and plowed right through it. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, but the advantage to finishing it in 2014 was that all the bonus story DLC add-ons were released and combined for a gratifying experience all together. ME2 delivered on hyping up being careful with pivotal story decisions that would have consequences in the infamous final “suicide mission” in the game. My initial run through of it saw three of my crew members not survive it through, and it gutted me so much I restarted that final mission and had to compromise with only two crew members passing away. Immediately after finishing ME2 I jumped right into ME3 and this time saw it all the way through within a couple months, luckily by this point the extended ending and all the story DLCs also just finished releasing and I was stunned with what Bioware held out of the core game and I can feel for players who initially played it and missed out on having a central character like Javic locked away behind DLC and missing out on essential storyline DLCs that dealt heavily with the origins of the Protheans and Reapers. The way I played it felt like a complete experience with all the DLC, but without it I sympathize for the critics who stated it felt unfinished upon first release.

There is also the fantastic “Citadel” DLC I want to give props to which is its own standalone swashbuckling adventure full of lighthearted campy jokes, and concludes with throwing a the party of all parties for all your friends! For people who have not played the initial Mass Effect trilogy, at least give a couple episodes of Giant Bomb’s Mass Alex play-through videos of all three games in their entirety a shot. I am almost wrapped up with them as of this writing, and it has been wonderful experiencing that trilogy all over again this way. Like Gears, I became so absorbed into the Mass Effect lore, that I have bought and read all of the novels, and almost all of them are good, even the Andromeda-based ones! I know the first Fable has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the years for not delivering on all of its promises, but that does not take away from the final product on original Xbox still being a astounding action-RPG! I treasured my time with it, and the “Lost Chapters” expansion, and late in the 360’s life in 2014 it got the remastered treatment to bring the entire trilogy (and the spin-off Kinect game, The Journey) all on 360. Fable II from what I gathered has been the highpoint of the series from everyone I have talked to. I have only played through the prologue, and failed at getting back to it while covering other games in the gaming press at the time amidst another busy holiday release season. Fable III sounds like it did not win everyone over with its major storyline hook it marketed of overthrowing a corrupt sibling at the throne, and sadly the Kinect game, The Journey was the last major single player installment of the series as of this writing. Becoming a Pinball Wizard I have played various videogame pinball titles over the years, but for whatever reason the 360/PS3 gen is when it got ahold of me and never let go. It started with Crave’s Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. Each real life table replica had their own set of goals to accomplish in order to unlock an achievement for each table, so I kept plugging away, and little-by-little I found hooked into addicting tables like Gorgar, Medieval Madness and No Good Gophers especially being my favorite. Later on Crave released an XBLA pay-per-table platform with tables from multiple companies called The Pinball Arcade. Every several months a new batch of tables were released and I found myself immediately downloading them and studying the in-game instructions for each table to thoroughly learn all of its intricacies and the addicting nature of filtered online Friends-list leaderboards had me plugged in to top the scoreboard for each table.

Well over 100 hours I invested into Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX on the 360. Two of my favorite tables are pictured above with No Good Gophers on the left, and Mars on the right. The same exact thing happened with Zen Studio’s XBLA title, Pinball FX. Their tables were not based on real tables, and as they gradually released more tables for download, they embraced their interactive nature and featured more computer animated toys that flew off of and around the table, and more dynamic special effects on the playfield that simply are not possible on real life tables. Despite them being not lifelike, and featuring more exaggerated pinball physics, I still embraced them when I was in the mood to switch up from the real tables in Pinball Arcade. Zen released a sequel a few years later in Pinball FX2 that had more dynamic community and hub-based features and integrated online friends leaderboards into actual gameplay with in-game pop-ups when your score was approaching a friend’s high-score which only intensified every attempt and kept me coming back more frequently. Some of my favorite tables from the first two PBFX games are the spooky mystery pin Paranormal, the Monty Python-influenced Epic Quest (with RPG stats and leveling that carries over in each attempt!) and the outer space themed Mars. Pinball FX3 on Xbox One/PS4 added even more community based features that keep me playing it weekly to this day, but that is a story for another time! Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre I believe Microsoft somehow found a way to publish one marquee AAA racing game each year for almost the entire 360 lifespan. They originally rotated between Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham games, and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport series each year. I never got into either of those series that much. Forza is the more serious sim, and I have tried out a couple installments over the years, but the intense sim mechanics are just not for me. If I would have put more time into PGR I feel I would have really got into that series, and I have some fleeting memories of getting into the second game for a brief moment on the original Xbox.

While I did not get reeled into Forza Motorsport, I fell hook, line and sinker into PGR’s replacement, Forza Horizon from the developer, Playground. It lightened up the sim-based controls and offered up enough assist options to procure that comfortable blend of sim and arcade racing. I also wound up in favor of its open world hub nature to either drive around to new races and take in the country side, or hang around the game’s central music festival. The first Horizon had such a fitting licensed soundtrack of rock and electronica-based songs that I sought out the entire soundtrack and it is its own separate running playlist for me. Since I did not upgrade into the Xbox One/PS4 gen until 2016, that meant I picked up Forza Horizon 2 on the 360 instead, and thankfully it was not all that downgraded from its Xbox One version. Both games I wound up completing all the races, challenges and finding all the hidden barnyard cars. Yes, I even played through all of the Fast and Furious licensed expansion for Forza Horizon 2 where Ludacris himself as Tej provided voiceovers to set up each race. Before Forza Horizon, another game attempted the same thing a couple years earlier with Test Drive Unlimited. It featured a sorta-GPS replication of the entirety of Oahu as its open world hub and I absolutely ate it up and was white-knuckling the final race which was a one-on-one endurance race against the top ranked AI around the entire outer highway of the island. The sequel was fun too and added another island, but I think one Alex Navarro’s reaction to the opening cutscene in his Quick Look video will be my main takeaway of it. I have mentioned in previous console flashbacks how I love demo-derby racing games, and on 360 Flatout: Ultimate Carnage was king! It is a fantastic follow-up to the PS2/Xbox games, and my brother and I played it online regularly for years, I can go on about it forever, but instead I will embed below a special three-part video where my brother and I raved about why it was one of our favorites….

Many years ago my brother and I made this three-part YouTube series on our fandom for Flatout: Ultimate Carnage The summer of 2010 saw two new arcade racing games debut that both should have been successful new IPs with sequels to this day, but since the two released within a month of each other they presumably took up each other’s player base and both Activision and THQ did not pick them up for sequels. Activision invested in Bizarre for an all new racing IP in Blur, which is essentially conflating the power-ups of Mario Kart with underground street racing, and it was indeed as awesome as that pitch sounds. I played hours of it in the main career mode and online as well. On the other end THQ invested in Black Rock Studios with their innovative racer, Split/Second, a reality show-based driving game where studio directors would triggers obstacles and destructible environments to activate and provided an all-new gripping racing experience. It too was also a riot to endure and 100% finish, but it sadly never received a sequel either.

I loved the Burnout series the previous gen, and EA delivered with an upgraded port of Burnout Revenge that remains my favorite entry in the series to this day. I got into its open world follow-up, Burnout Paradise and developer Criterion were aces with their long-term support of free updates that kept me coming back to it. EA’s other flagship racing series, Need for Speed had a few entries I put serious time into. The 360 launch title, Most Wanted had an intriguing concept of working your way up the “Blacklist” of the most wanted street racers to compete against. When Criterion did an all new reboot of Most Wanted several years later, it combined that concept with the blazing fast gameplay from the Burnout series to my approval. Finally, I will give head-nods of recommendation to both of Sega’s Sonic kart-racers on the 360. They are the top Mario Kart-clones out there, and ooze with Sega fan service. The second game, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed successfully innovated with evolving stages that switched up from racing in karts, then into mini-bi-planes and then onto water-based hovercraft. I completed the careers for both games and put in a fair amount of online play with both entries too. The Fad that was the Plastic Instruments My gut told me the original PS2 Guitar Hero was going to be big within minutes of trying out the original demo in the fabled Kentia Hall at E3 2005. Adored the first game, but the second game was when it went mainstream, and was thrilled with the second game’s HD 360 release in 2007. 2005-2009 was the apex of the genre for my friends and me. There were countless nights of my friends and family passing the guitar around trying to best each other’s scores, and when 360 introduced online leaderboards for each song it upped the competition level even higher. Local city clubs and bars did Guitar Hero tournament nights and my favorite memory from these was on a Guitar Hero III tourney night when it was my turn to go up on stage to pick a random song out of a hat I was the lucky soul to draw one of the hardest songs in the game in the form of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” I suffered on stage, and barely managed to finish, yet it remains a memory I shall cherish! In fall of 2007, Harmonix splintered away from Red Octane and teamed up with MTV Games to unleash the revolutionary Rock Band that brought in drums and karaoke to the fold for four player co-op play!

I will forever love the countless Rock Band nights I had in the first two Rock Band games that hit in 2007 & 2008, especially the nights I played with my old podcast co-hosts Chris and Scott. I downloaded well over a hundred extra DLC songs over a few years for it, and we would routinely meet up one or two nights a month for Rock Band nights for two years. Almost always, our last song to finish off a session was the final song in the first Rock Band’s career mode that was filled with many wrist-suffering solos, yes I am talking about Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides”. Our Rock Band addiction culminated with the “Bladder of Steel” achievement which we procured when playing every song straight without a fail over the course of several hours! I was almost always the drummer on Rock Band nights. At first no one else wanted to do them, but eventually I got into them and kind of became somewhat decent at it on medium difficulty. One night at an Alice Cooper concert I became entranced at watching the drummer wail away all night that I convinced myself after the show to lay down a $200 pre-order for the premium ION Drum Set for Rock Band….though after a few months something about that bulky set did not gel with me and I did not prefer the way the drumsticks clanked off the pads and I never developed a rhythm for them and eventually gave them away to free up space.

The forgotten gem Rock Band title no one talks about, LEGO Rock Band! Behold one of its awesome boss stages with the Ghostbusters theme song! The plastic instrument genre quickly became oversaturated with numerous entries a year from Activision and EA. At first it was kind of interesting to dive into some of the band focused entries of the series like how Harmonix did a wonderful tribute to The Beatles with reliving their career and its groovy “Dreamscape” stages in The Beatles: Rock Band. The Metallica nut in me feasted on forcing carpal tunnel upon myself with the painfully intricate, yet entrancing solos from almost every track in Guitar Hero: Metallica. By the time Green Day: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen rolled around though and other offshoots that I completely skipped like Band Hero and Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, it was clear the writing was on the wall for the genre. I did manage to sneak in some last doses of fun with a couple other off-the-beaten-path entries though before this genre faded away from its zenith.

The head-bopping mash-ups of DJ Hero with its uniquely intuitive turntable controller and feeding my karaoke addiction with Lips were breaths of fresh air for the genre late in the 360’s life.

Microsoft’s karaoke series on 360, Lips, supplied a fair amount of fun with its unique glow-in-the-dark microphones and four volumes of songs released before Microsoft eventually morphed it into a karaoke pay-per-song app late in the 360’s lifecycle. My buddy Matt introduced me to LEGO Rock Band, which Matt got for free with any Black Friday purchase one year at Kohl’s and we were both nearly burnt out on the genre by this point, but thought we would at least give this graphically unique version a shot. The adorably twee nature of the LEGO visuals with its complementing soundtrack were irresistible, and it instantly won us over. We stuck with it all the way through, and were fans of its music video-esque “boss” levels, with the Ghostbusters theme song stage being one we replayed far too frequently. Another refreshing take on the genre was through DJ Hero and its sequel, DJ Hero II. I loved that turntable controller, and it flawlessly placed me into the DJ world with its mash-up stylings soundtrack and fitting club visuals. Both games were unsung heroes of the genre when they released because they both came out a year or two removed from the apex of the genre’s success, but the DJ & LEGO games brought in some much needed fresh air in that scene. Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Now while I almost entirely avoided the Kinect, there still remained deluge of non-Kinect casual party games that were a hit with the family on holidays and friends on game nights. The two Microsoft published Scene It games that came bundled with their user-friendly big button wireless controllers were family favorites for a few years and successful adaptations of the hit movie trivia DVD-board game. A guilty pleasure of mine is legacy licensed trivia/board games/game shows on consoles, and the 360 had plenty of them with solid editions of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Apples to Apples, Risk and Family Feud 2012. Doritos Crash Course seemed initially like a forgettable promotional game that was free on XBLA that only offered avatars racing each other on a variety of obstacle courses, but somehow its simple gameplay was addicting and far more entertaining than it had any right to be at family and friend gatherings.

You Don’t Know Jack was a fun revival of the hit PC irreverent trivia series that was dormant for nearly a decade before THQ brought it back on consoles in 2011. Friends and I played through every episode on the disc and its DLC packs, and I revisited it for several years because of one dumb habit where the adorably jerk-of-a-host, Cookie Masterson, would have a unique greeting to open the game if you played on a holiday. The success from this You Don’t Know Jack revival got the developers at then-Jellyvision to revitalize the brand and include a bunch of other party games in the popular yearly Jackbox games that are still going strong as of this writing. I also wanted to squeeze into this chapter of the flashback Microsoft’s polarizing decision to appeal the UI of the 360 to a more family/casual audience and changed the fan favorite “blades” UI into the detested “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) in 2008. Microsoft was trying to synergize with the equally detested UI of its latest PC operating system, Vista. Tablets were starting to become trendy at this point, and Microsoft was resilient on forcing a tablet-esque UI across all its devices and the results were a total system failure. I was among the many who made their outcry heard over how ugly the many rows of diagonally aligned boxes filled with ads were a visual nightmare on the eyes. I was use to some minor ad implementation in the Blades UI before promoting other 360 games available, but the NXE mixed in all sorts of commercials, movie trailers and other assorted promotions that hit the same wrong nerves as those eye-blasting web browser ads.

Microsoft eventually updated and tweaked the NXE into a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI that remains on the 360 boot-up today. With the 360 user base understandably a modicum from what it was in its prime today, it is refreshing to see Microsoft lay off as of this writing with a complete absence of ads on the UI. I will also use this space to shout out the premium theme backgrounds that I have used for many years being the pumpkin patch and winter wonder land themes that are always a delight to see when I boot up the 360. Yes, the Xbox Live 360 servers are surprisingly still online in 2020, 15 years after the 360 launch. Most 360 online multiplayer supported games support peer-to-peer multiplayer so as long as Microsoft keeps the lights on, you will still be able to play 360 games online. Microsoft only kept the original Xbox Live servers up for seven and a half years, so to see them more than double that for 360’s servers as of today is…astonishing. Worth noting is some games like Chromehounds, Final Fantasy XI and all EA-published games utilized their own private servers which the publishers have shutdown long ago, so those games are unplayable online, but a vast majority still support the option. Wanna Wrassle? For several years on the 360, one of my yearly holiday season traditions was to buy the latest WWE Smackdown vs. RAW game and complete the career/season story mode and unlock all of the hidden wrestlers and features over the course of a few months. I did this from WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 through 2011. For one of the yearly installments I was so close to unlocking all the achievements to get 1000 gamerscore, but the last one I needed required a grind to complete the main single player career mode five times. I decided at the time this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on past seasons of 24 and brought a second, smaller TV next to my living room TV and absentmindedly button mashed my way through those extra career mode playthroughs, and it took almost the entirety of the second season of 24 to accomplish that feat and earn that final achievement. No regrets!

WWE's yearly Smackdown vs. RAW games featured zombies in their storylines, while All-Stars shifted the gameplay to more arcadey fun for all! The story modes in those yearly WWE games were worth playing through because the writers in some cases got creative and did things that were not possible on TV like having the Undertaker cast mind control spells for example. They added and experimented with a plethora of new modes and options, with the WWE Universe mode being a prime example of going all out creating dream cards and custom storylines. The creation options became incredibly in-depth each year too, in the later installments the developers added a Create-a-Storyline feature that had a surprising level of customization full of custom text entries for dialogue and branching cutscenes. One infamous online community, Video Game Championship Wrestling, became famous for its machinima they created with this system that contained intricate storylines with created wrestlers in its league consisting of video game character icons, developers, comic book & anime characters, fabled movie legends and yes even sprinkling in a few wrestlers. I dabbled in creating a couple simple storylines, but it was too much for me to invest into, but thankfully users could upload and download storylines from the community which added seemingly infinite replay value.

You have not lived until you witnessed an episode of the acclaimed wrestling videogame machinima that is Video Game Championship Wrestling. Will it be Gabe Newell or Dr. Wily who will emerge here as VGCW champion? WWE released a couple spinoff games that were not as feature-dense, and contained more accessible, arcade-like controls. They were on the right path with Legends of Wrestlemania, which highlighted the 80s success of the then-WWF, but absolutely nailed it with WWE All-Stars which featured a hybrid of past legends and current stars, and all of them were intentionally designed to look like roided-out action figures capable of larger-than-life moves like hurling opponents 30 feet into the air in addition to juggling, fighting game-like air combos. This all combined for fun multiplayer sessions with friends and family members who usually are not fans of wrestling games, but genuinely got into the gameplay to my surprise. I rampaged through everything All-Stars had to offer within a couple months after the latest Smackdown vs. RAW game, and was kind of burnt out on wrestling games after this for a while and skipped all future WWE games for several years starting when they changed the branding with WWE ‘12.

TNA iMpact! was from the same people who made All-Stars and had super-fun Ultimate X match as seen above! FirePro Wrestling on the other hand features only controllable Avatars and none of the trademark legacy 2D gameplay the brand is usually known for. There were a few other non-WWE games I tried out before I took a 360 wrestling game sabbatical. Rumble Roses XX was the first 360 wrestling game and the second all-women wrestler game in America after its PS2 predecessor. Never put as much time into it as I meant to, so I cannot leave any lasting impressions on it other than it gave Dead or Alive a lot of competition with its variety of costumes. I did put a lot of time into TNA iMpact! however, which was the game the All-Stars developers worked on before. At the time it hit, I was into the TNA promotion, and the game was a pretty good representation of that product with a fun Ultimate X mode, and a story mode circled around a fictional costumed wrestler named Suicide who went on to become an actual wrestler in the promotion in 2008, and the character has remained there off-and-on to this day. Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring introduced the high-flying luchadores from Mexico with their own exclusive game and featured some familiar past WCW/WWE/TNA stars, but had problematic controls to prevent it from having any lasting appeal. I never played the Kinect motion-based wrestling game, Hulk Hogan’s Main Event, but I have seen clips online to witness it in its near-broken state that lives up to one of my favorite reviews on Game Informer where it became one of their worst rated games ever. There are a couple of low budget Avatar Wrestling games on the Indie Games channel on 360 that are basic affairs, but there is one Avatar-based grappler that somehow got a full fledge XBLA release with the much-respected, best-in-class FirePro Wrestling branding. Those games have been a decades-long line of some of the best 2D wrestling games of all time, and somehow Microsoft was able to secure that branding for an admittedly decent and accessible Avatar wrestling game, but a game that should in no way be worthy of that elite branding. That would be like Phillips securing the Zelda and Mario licenses for their own low-rent made games on their CDi system….oh wait. Sports-ball Forever! Time to highlight some of my favorite go-to sports games on the system. Starting off with football, there I got use to buying Madden every two or three years. I only rented the 360 launch title, Madden NFL 06, which wounded up being one of the worst debut Madden titles on a console ever. This is because of EA’s overblown “Target Gameplay” video they debuted at a previous E3 where the final game, while still graphically a leap above Xbox/PS2, was far from what they teased. To make it worse, that was the same year they debuted the doomed “vision cone” gameplay feature in the earlier PS2/Xbox versions that went over so poorly that they had to disable it as a default option for the 360 version and hide it in the options. This was also the first lead Madden game to remove John Madden himself (and co-commentator Al Michaels) from commentary in favor of a nameless afterthought of a radio-style announcer. Madden NFL ‘06 is easily the all-time worst lead-platform version of Madden!

This video encapsulates why Madden 06 was an atrocity of a debut on the platform…at least it had easy achievements.

EA stepped it up with later entries, with Madden ‘10 remaining a favorite of mine for the brand this gen. I still recall that edition was when EA initially introduced their cash cow microtransaction-focused “Ultimate Team” feature as a free DLC a few months after its release. How foolish I seem now for at first dismissing it as an interesting curiosity I could not bother to invest a dime into ever, but only to see it blow up in DLC sales for EA and become integrated across all of EA’s sports titles and other publisher’s sports games within a few years. I only picked up one college EA effort this gen via NCAA Football ‘12 which was technically free with a six-month subscription to Sports Illustrated, but I got the most out of that game, and was huge into its “Road to Glory” mode. Road to Glory had my created player play out his final year of high school, and then go through a full college season. EA were absolute pros at this point with their college game, perfectly capturing the college game pageantry by jam-packing the it full of college anthems, cheerleaders, mascots and first-class commentary from the old College Gameday crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brad Nessler. EA was also surprisingly generous with a community create-a-school option where users could create and upload teams and stadiums, and sure enough someone created my middle-of-nowhere Midwest FCS school and high school teams. It remains a heartbreaker (for good reason though) that EA pulled out of college sports games after the NCAA student athlete class action lawsuit, with NCAA Football ‘14 being their final installment. I do not feel that much love for EA though because of how they squashed 2K’s attempt at returning to football videogames with All-Pro Football 2K8. 2K signed on a couple hundred retired legends for their game, and players could pick a handful of legends to be the standout stars on their otherwise auto-generated teams. It was a fun, different approach, which EA quickly put the kibosh on by signing many of those legends away to appear in throwaway historical features in future Madden games. As I mentioned earlier though, EA did win back some favor with me by resurrecting the Blitz franchise with their excellent XBLA version of NFL Blitz.

There were a few other non-NFL games on the 360 I gave an honest try to, with Midway releasing an unlicensed, M-rated version of Blitz before they went bankrupt with Blitz: The League II. It showcases M-rated behind-the-scenes drama storylines, and more brutal and violent hits that bestow it the M-rating, and if you can handle that, then it is worth checking out. Finally, Backbreaker was an ahead-of-its-time pigskin game that debuted an all new physics engine that EA would eventually incorporate into Madden games. While the tech was not quite all the way there, the thing I associate most with that game is it playing P.O.D.’s “Here Comes the Boom” on every…single���kickoff. It was a huge detraction in my review, and I was surprised to see a few weeks later an email from my editor at the time passing along a note from the developers to revisit the game after an update addressing reviewer feedback, which did address a multitude of things, but at the top of the list was reducing the amount of times P.O.D.’s jam played to only twice a game, thank god! On the basketball side of things, I remained a huge fan of the NBA 2K series. The 360 carried over the awesome 24/7 mode I adored from PS2/Xbox era, which was an in-depth career mode for a single created baller, doing a global tour of the street hoops circuit. The 2K games struck gold in NBA 2K11 when Michael Jordan graced the cover and the game added a new historical Jordan mode where he relived his most monumental games with historically accurate rosters, and vintage 90s telecast presentation and commentary. The Jordan mode was a success, and integration of NBA legends became a big selling point on the 2K games going forward with future installments having a theme around the Jordan/Magic/Bird NBA breakout success of the 80s and the iconic ’92 Olympic Dream Team.

EA had a downward spiral with their sim hoops games, and I only tried out a couple demos of the earlier NBA Live titles this gen that did not win me over, including the attempted re-branding of the series with NBA Elite ‘11. That doomed demo was so glitch-laden that it got EA to cancel and recall the game from retailers mere days before its street date, and took them three years to launch another proper console NBA sim. I did love EA’s re-launch of NBA Jam however, along with the XBLA sequel, On Fire Edition. They hit all the right notes on re-introducing the classic arcade gameplay to a new generation. No idea why they have not done another NBA Jam since however, but at least On Fire Edition is back-compat on Xbox One and Series S|X. The PS3 consumed the bulk of my baseball playing time with their awesome MLB: The Show games of that era. However, I do have one chuckle-worthy memory of staying up late playing a lot of 2K’s arcade take on baseball, The Bigs, at a friend’s place one night. We played several games and I recall being impressed at how fast each game breezed by. I skipped all hockey sims this generation too, with the only time I digitally hit the ice this gen being EA’s killer NHL game on XBLA, 3-on-3 NHL Arcade, which delivered the hat trick of arcade fun gameplay, creative power-ups and intuitive controls.

For alternative and single player sports games, I already raved about Top Spin 2 during the 360 launch window. I could never get into EA’s thumb-stick controls for its Fight Night games, but I did enjoy 2K’s Don King’s Prize Fighter, which came from the same team that made the Rocky games on the previous gen I preferred more. Of all the MMA games, I briefly got into THQ’s UFC 2010, but the game always became a chore when gameplay transitioned into ground submissions. I enjoyed Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when it launched, but that series also had a fall from grace with several failed experimental games once EA stepped up the competition with Skate. One of the greatest mysteries in gaming history to me will always be Skate 3’s staying power in sales seeing it on sale for so many years that eventually EA repackaged the game in an Xbox One case with a sticker on it saying it is playable on both the 360 and through back-compat on Xbox One because there were no longer any other 360 retail games on store shelves. I tried a few times to get into Skate, but like the Fight Night games, the thumb-stick focused controls never gelled with me and I could never adapt. No Russian, No Cauldron

For several years straight, from the 360 launch in 2005 through 2012 I played every yearly installment from Activision’s flagship brand, Call of Duty. The first couple of years it was not that much though. Call of Duty 2 I only played several times in local couch multiplayer battles when friends brought over a copy. I always regretted never renting or buying it cheap to play through the single player campaign which I heard is excellent. Ditto that for the original CoD which eventually got a re-release on XBLA as Call of Duty Classic. However, I played through the entire campaigns for the next six games. CoD3 I rented from GameFly and breezed through in a weekend in split-screen co-op with my brother and did not think much of it at the time, but came to learn later that when playing in co-op it removes a few levels that proved to be too daunting to be handled in split screen. Then in 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and first person shooters as we knew it changed. 13 years later it still has two of the most powerful moments in a FPS campaign in the form of the nuclear blast and its immediate fallout in the failed helicopter escape, and THE sniping level of all sniping levels in the flashback mission which immerses the player so well into the sniper role at its apex moment, that few other games since have managed to achieve. It overall was an incredibly gratifying campaign, which was equaled with a revolutionary online multiplayer experience that popularized persistent online multiplayer unlocks with a seemingly endless barrage of weapon and character customization unlocks to keep players reeled in. I was never “hooked” into the multiplayer on a regular basis, but starting with CoD4 and for the next few games I would occasionally pop on and play with colleagues who did play all the time, and had a blast catching up while apologizing for not carrying my own with my less-than-ideal kill/death/ratio.

World at War was an interesting revisit back to World War II and I enjoyed Keifer Sutherland’s voiceover talents as a superior barking orders at me throughout. It also debuted its survival variant in Zombies mode that was a hit that year and frequently played with co-workers on game nights. While that mode would become a bigger focus and more expanded with each successive CoD game, for whatever reason it never became as popular or played as much then as in World at War. 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 somehow met the high bar for the quality of campaign that the first game set, and its “No Russian” level I will never forget and I was bug-eyed throughout it as I never experienced anything like it before or since while my character attempted to keep his cover. As good as Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles were, Treyarch stepped it up with 2010’s Black Ops and its Vietnam War setting. It remains my favorite single player campaign from this stretch of CoD games. The meaning of the “numbers” touched on throughout the campaign had a meaningful payoff, and I loved how Treyarch sprinkled in their own unique gameplay intricacies like “diving to prone” and my love for the RC Car killstreak bonus in multiplayer. No matter how much of a weak link I was for my coworkers in online multiplayer, as long as I got just one set of three kills straight to get that fun RC Car perk, then I considered that a successful multiplayer session! Infinity Ward had a satisfying conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy with MW3 in 2011, but 2012’s Black Ops II was surprisingly underwhelming to me. It felt like they tried to do too much with the campaign, and sprinkled in optional bonus missions I felt obligated to do, but broke up the narrative for me. Of course, it could have been CoD burnout by this point, and I have never played another CoD game since. If I were to play the campaign of just one CoD game after this from 2013 on, what would you recommend?

For five years I anticipated the low budget FPS efforts from Cauldron that had me reliving past historical battles and as a DC Secret Service agent seen above. Interestingly, while Treyarch and Infinity Ward took turns each year this gen delivering Activision’s big holiday FPS hit, quietly another studio, Cauldron, yearly released five budget-tiered FPS titles under the Activision Value banner. These little publicized releases always caught my eye, and I had no idea if it was the case, but Cauldron’s games felt like where Activision would send freshly recruited developers to get their feet wet before getting promoted to the CoD teams. Three of Cauldron’s five games were History Channel licensed games themed around recreating and reliving both sides of war in two installments based around the Civil War, and another in the Japanese theater of World War II. The history nut in me appreciated the History Channel-produced intro video for each level, and it was a budget-friendly alternative come down FPS game to breeze through in a weekend after the latest blockbuster CoD game. Cauldron also did a DC-terrorist themed FPS in Secret Service, and Jurassic Park-inspired FPS titled, Jurassic: The Hunted. I imagine all of these play horribly outdated now, but I still will appreciate them for what they brought to the plate. Dubious Honors

Hulk Hogan’s Main Event and NBA Elite 11 top the dubious honors list for reasons I already ranted on above, but wanted to make sure to at least notate here. Moving on to other bad games, here are a handful that I was not a fan of: Rogue Warrior was a super-short and barebones functioning FPS published from Bethesda, but bizarrely got AAA buzz and marketing. It did have a catchy closing credits song though. Turning Point was an FPS from Codemasters with an interesting concept of a post-WWII shooter if the Nazis won the war, but poorly executed and reason why Codemasters has primarily stuck with racing games since (although they did attempt one more FPS with Bodycount which I did not play, but understand is just as atrocious). One game that went on to have a misrepresented history I reviewed at the time was Bullet Witch. It was a middle-tier single player action game published by Atari, and while it had some problems I made sure to point out in my six out of ten review, I received serious flak from a few friends for overrating the game. While I addressed the game’s issues and marked it down appropriately so, I did have a fair amount of fun with the boss battles and messing around with some of the more powerful spells. Over the years I have seen many bill this game with the label that it is among the worst on the 360 with the same kind of tone and vitriol as ET received on the 2600. Even Mr. Microsoft Larry Hyrb poked fun at the game in an online video long ago. Again it is not a great game by any means, but it is far better than what a lot of people make it out to be.

An XBLA game that got one of their marketed themed event releases (‘Summer of Arcade’, ‘Fall Feast,’ etc.) was TMNT: Out of the Shadows. It looked to be a cannot-miss 3D brawler TMNT game, and with that level of hype how could it go wrong? Very much so in fact, and with some of the worst camera controls in gaming I could not put it down fast enough. Another painfully disappointing TMNT game was the aforementioned XBLA remake of Turtles in Time. It played well enough like the original, but the redone visuals did not capture the spirit of the affable 80s/90s cartoon like the original did, and it stripped out the SNES bonus levels and had poorly substituted voiceovers. Stay away! There were a couple of semi-decent 360/PS3 era Turtles games. Nickelodeon TMNT was a perfectly serviceable brawler that did a better job of bringing back the good memories of the arcade classics than Re-Shelled did. Ubisoft released a single player platformer/action game to coincide with the 2007 CG film, TMNT. It too was pretty straightforward, and not earth-shattering, but at least hit some TMNT fan service marks good enough to be a worthwhile entry. Danger of the Ooze is one that slipped through the cracks that I rarely hear talked about likely because it released late in the 360/PS3 lifecycle in 2014. This should be played by any Turtles fan because this is the standout Turtles game this gen from the platforming masters at Wayforward with their take on a pretty fun MetroidVania-style game the TMNT license seemed destined for all this time. Lightning Round Quick Hits

Microsoft did not release 360’s successor, the Xbox One until 2013, so with eight years between the 360 and Xbox One, a boatload of games hit that system and I played far too many of them which is why this is going on far longer than it should have. There remains a hearty amount of AAA, mid-tier, XBLA and other noteworthy games that I want to give their due, so bear with me as I attempt to rapid fire through these… -I got wrapped in too many open world games this gen, and I want to first give props to RockStar Games for managing to finish two of their behemoths in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. GTAIV is the only GTA I finished the storyline for, and Niko Belic will be one of my favorite protagonists. The cell phone activities were initially a chore to retain friendship ratings, but eventually I came around to bowling, cab rides, comedy clubs and rounds of pool. RDR was the ultimate Wild West open world game. Neversoft’s 360 launch title, Gun, was in my backlog still and I blitzed through that in the weeks leading up to RDR’s launch because I just knew it would blow it away. Gun was a decent effort from Neverseft, but quickly became obsolete when starting up RDR, which did not disappoint, and delivered a remarkably atmospheric experience for its time in 2010. I loved getting lost on adventures out in the wild, and that original score is masterful and could not be have been better crafted. That final several hours of gameplay based around the family ranch is an incredibly bold choice of gameplay that will always have a special place with me. Kudos to RockStar with their spooky-themed story expansion, Undead Nightmare, which is a hell of a side story to RDR that is well worth your time all these years later!

GTA IV put a lot of attention on its mini-games that were entertaining shoulder content, and Red Dead Redemption introduced a drop-dead gorgeous wild-west open world I would crave getting lost in and exploring for adventures. -Another one of my top 10 favorites on the 360 released on the same day as RDR, and I am talking about sci-fi third person thriller that is Alan Wake. I got completely absorbed into Alan’s quest to find his wife, and Remedy had a five star presentation to keep me on my seat. Some people criticized its style of combat, but it worked for me, and I believe it will go down as the only game where its deadliest weapon in its arsenal is a flare gun! Easily the spookiest T-rated game I have played. Do not skip out on the DLC episodes that put a nice bow on the story, and the XBLA sort-of time loop sequel, American Nightmare

-Two open world games that I shamefully have resting in my backlog to this day are GTAV and Bully. I picked up both on 360, and eventually picked up the Xbox One version of GTAV. You know what open world games I did play through though? The first two Just Cause titles. This satirical take on the James Bond-super agent was right up my alley, and Rico’s unique gadgetry like hookshots, parachutes, and wide variety of instant vehicle drops innovated in new ways to traverse its gigantic open world. The chaos and destruction those games both were capable of raised the bar with how creative one could be to lay waste to their surroundings. -I already commented above how the first Saints Row lived up to its potential from its E3 demonstration I saw a year before its release. The sequels surprisingly kept getting better and better. The first two games were essentially damn good GTA-clones, but with both games having more zany activities and side missions than in GTA. Saints Row the Third upped the outrageous quotient for its plot and side missions, and was groundbreaking for how far it pushed the boundaries with its whacked out style of storytelling.

-It did not feel right to include it with the racing games above, but another recommended open world title from this era is Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft and Reflections nailed making an open world driving game without races being the focal point. The spirit-car-swapping feature against all odds is cleverly explained, and actually works! -Despite its popularity I could never get into the Assassin’s Creed games which debuted in this generation. A friend borrowed me the first game and at first I was into its setting and gameplay, but that first game was notoriously rough around the edges and I believe I got hung up on a glitch that prevented me from making progress roughly halfway through, and I have inadvertently been done with the series since. I picked up a few other entries over the years and have been wanting to at least try them, especially hearing how the latest ones keep getting better and better. One day! -I finished my first Resident Evil game on the 360 with Resident Evil 5. That game also featured online co-op, but I ventured fourth and played it solo and still had an impeccable time with it. It put more of an emphasis on action to the dismay of critics, but having not played too much of prior entries that did not bother me, and there were still plenty of intense thrills had throughout.

This is easily my favorite arcade stick ever, and the exquisite 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot made its tall asking price worth it! -This generation saw collector’s editions become out of control, with games packed with all kinds of statures, Master Chief helmets, night-vision cameras and other gadgets for well over $100. The only one of these I invested in was 2011’s Mortal Kombat. I originally was not too hyped for that game because I had my fill of the series at that point after the three good entries on PS2/Xbox, and felt the series had nothing else to offer. My brother however is a big MK-fan and told me how he ordered the $200 edition that came with premium arcade-replica fighter stick. I went to his place to drop something off one day when he wasn’t home, and he told me had the game and stick hooked up and to give it a try while I was there. Within minutes of starting the story mode and realizing how they were reimagining the original trilogy and how they switched up the gameplay for that generation, I became immediately entranced with it and could not think of any other way to play it without that stick and could not rush home fast enough to pluck down a $200 order. I made sure to get a lot of use out of that stick, and is was absolutely worth it!

-Sniper: Ghost Warrior is an unorthodox FPS focused entirely on sniping, and for being a low-budget game at the time I had way more fun than I should have with it. Also loved how it did a 180 from games like CoD, where instead of one sniping mission to mix up the campaign gameplay, here there is one run ‘n gun mission for a break from all that sniping throughout the campaign! I am glad this game had a ton of success and City Interactive has released a few sequels that I hope to emerge from my backlog of doom. -I already elucidated on my Borderland 2 experience earlier. The first Borderlands was a surprise out of nowhere hit that I loved my first few days with it and could not get enough plowing through the campaign online with friends. Unfortunately I went on vacation a few days after it released for a week, and when I got back, sure enough, most of my friends were many levels higher than me and already vanquished the game, so I soldiered on the final third of the game on my own. It was a challenge and a half to beat the final gi-normous tentacle-laden boss, but I managed to squeak by it after gradually picking away from it behind a boulder for nearly an hour!

-I had a unique experience with the Portal games. The first one I initially played for about 15 minutes, quickly became frustrated with the teleporting mechanics and had to step away from it. A couple years later, an old co-worker Rick was one of many by that point stating why those games were some of the best games out there. I told him my case, and he offered to come over and bestow his Portal wisdom upon me. Many thanks to Rick, who did not straight-up spoil and told me what to do to get past Portal’s many puzzle rooms, but instead kind of nudged me into gradually easing into a feel for the core mechanics of the game and it helped greatly! I would not have been able to get into it without him. He had a surprise for me when he left, and left me his copy of Portal 2 to borrow and told me not to give it back to him until I finished it. I knew he was moving in a couple months at that point, and that compelled me to put all my attention into the Portal games. I am glad I did because both games are spectacular, especially the sequel which had a noticeably bigger budget to go all out with a AAA experience and narrative that came together to be one of my favorite games of that generation. -Bulletstorm was another innovative FPS with its implementation of a whip, and combining it with melee strikes and gunplay for a refreshing take on FPSs. It kind of came and went though, and I rarely hear people talk about it anymore, except for briefly last year when it got a re-release on Xbox One/PS4, with an extra DLC to have Duke Nukem replace the original protagonist’s voiceovers for the game. I will also associate the original Bulletstorm release for having one of the worst box arts of all time. It is just a no-frills footprint. If you played Bulletstorm before, sure, it will kind of make sense since kicking is a core melee attack, but if you were a potential consumer browsing games and had no clue about Bulletstorm then I would not blame you for not giving that cover more than half a second’s worth of thought.

-The trilogy of BioShock titles were all high ranking in my top 10 game of the year lists for their appropriate years. The first game immersed me into its aquatic utopia gone haywire, and it stood out from standard FPSs of the time with its heavy emphasis on its narrative and hunting down those audio tapes to get every nook and cranny of the story. Its “twist” was something else for its time, and remains one of my favorites to this day. The sequel had a lot of polarization because it was from a different studio, but I felt they mixed it up by playing as a Big Daddy for the whole game and I could not get enough of freezing Splicers and then doing a drill rush attack that shattered them into pieces. BioShock Infinite was an astounding way to wrap the trilogy with its mesmerizing city-in-the-sky setting, and one of my favorite storylines from this gen. Its two storyline DLC episodes that released around a year later are worth checking out if you missed out, especially the second episode that changed the gameplay into more stealth-based by playing as Elizabeth. It felt like a whole new game, and developer Irrational absolutely perfected the change-up! -Spec Ops: The Line will not light the world on fire for its stick-to-fundamentals third person action gameplay, but what appears to start off as just another rah-rah military shooter, eventually morphs into a far deeper and complex plot than what I thought it was going to be. A book eventually came out thoroughly breaking down its exposition because it stormed up that much of a discussion around it.

-Shmup fans had several worthy entries to play on the 360. Raiden IV and Deathsmiles were landmark new entries for the genre in their time. On XBLA, there were re-releases of a pair of renowned shmups from Treasure: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. A pair of original shooters also stood out among the XBLA crop with the free of charge student developed game, Aegis Wing and also the beloved Sine Mora that captured the pilot play-by-play stylings of Star Fox and successfully merging it into a shmup. There were also a fair amount of Japan-exclusive shmups for the 360, most notably from respected shooter developer, Cave. Many of them are region-free and can be played on American 360s, so please keep that in mind! -I already told some tales above about my favorite comic book games, and embedded below is a video where I and my friend Matt painstakingly dissect a ton of comic book games that hit the 360. Highlights include the shockingly good movie licensed games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine & Captain America. Not-so-good highlights include the movie licensed Watchmen, Fantastic Four and Hellraiser games. Matt also had a lot more hands on time with the acclaimed Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games on 360, and I have always respected his expertise in the genre so please give his takes a listen below! -The Telltale adventure/choose-your-own path story-driven games originally started off on PC, but became more and more popular with their console releases. I was 100% into the first two seasons of their Walking Dead games like everyone else. Loved the first one more, but my favorite Telltale episodic game is still Back to the Future. The Wolf Among Us was a fascinating twist on a mature dystopian fairy tale world. I was not impressed by their take on Game of Thrones, but I surprisingly enjoyed all eight episodes of Minecraft. I originally got that for my nephew who was huge into Minecraft at the time to play with, but he was not all that into this genre and I found myself getting into it instead. Telltale was pumping out so many of these episodic series that I could not keep up, and still one day want to go back and play through both Batman seasons they released, and their Borderlands series too which I hear is their best work.

Back to the Future remains my favorite Telltale episodic game, but the event-like nature of the first season of Walking Dead was an undeniable zeitgeist while it transpired. -The LEGO co-op games we know today based off nearly every license imaginable became ubiquitous this gen. Only one I put serious time into and was able to finish was LEGO Marvel Superheroes. This one is special to me because it was the first game that I got my nephew Carter really into right when he was old enough to start grasping modern controller-based games. Had to help him out in quite a few parts, but we got threw it, and now several years later his gaming skills have greatly improved, and I will gladly give him a humble brag on his conquest of finishing the tough-as-nails Cuphead.

-I subscribed to the Official Xbox Magazine for several years, until around 2009-ish, and I was surprised that they stuck with including demo discs for another year or two after that since downloading demos quickly made the discs obsolete. OXM did attempt a few exclusive disc goodies though, and one I always came back to was their own take on an episodic game called OXM Universe that lasted for about a couple years. The disc itself awarded up to 1000 “OXM” points based on checking out all the demos and videos on the disc. Those points could be used in the space ship station game, OXM Universe, which was entirely menu-driven to build space station tech and explore a galaxy. It did lead up to a decent conclusion if you stuck with it all the way to the demo disc that came with issue 100 and upon completing all the final tasks you are rewarded with a lengthy video filled with OXM staff past and present thanking everyone. THAT IS MIGHTY COOL OF THEM TO GO TO ALL THAT WORK FOR A DEMO DISC EXTRA!!! -I think one thing we take for granted in today’s console space is the ridiculous amount of weekly sales and specials on digital games across all platforms. It was not always that way. In the early years of the 360 digital marketplace, for a couple years all that was available was one weekly game on sale and one piece of DLC on sale each week and that was it for a couple years. Luckily, Steam was catching fire with their acclaimed Fall and Winter sales with their monster savings, and that eventually rubbed off on 360 and PS3 and by the end of those system’s lifecycles both started offering a surplus of weekly deals and flash sales. -Digital game preservation is something that is brought up more and more lately, and one thing that periodically ruminates in my mind is how the 360 handles patches/updates. For the longest time, most games had limits of 4mb patches until the later years in the system’s life where they started to change into the larger file sizes we associate with them today. However, the 360 has a nasty habit of auto-purging a game’s update on the 360 after several different games get played on the 360. So if you were to revisit an older comfort food game many years down the line long after the 360 online servers got shut down, any updates for that game were likely auto-deleted and cannot be re-downloaded. This could be huge for a lot of games whose patches likely helped patch out game breaking bugs and other issues that can no longer be downloaded whenever the 360 servers go offline. Just food for thought.

-Final random item I want to bring up is something you saw in the header image to this special. Yes, that is a leaning gallery of 360 faceplates! Remember those? They were kind of a thing for the first couple years of the 360 when Microsoft was flexing the customization options of the 360 so anyone can snap on or off a variety of 360 faceplates to make their system stand out in their own way. I never bought a single faceplate, and only procured them if they were pre-order bonuses, or part of some promotional giveaway. The only highlight of this was how I got my Madden NFL 08 faceplate, and that was when I participated in my Gamestop’s yearly Madden tournament where no more than four people showed up for the few years I participated. The year I won, was when I got the Madden NFL 08 faceplate, which sure as hell beats my Madden NFL 07 plastic beverage cup from the previous tourney! It will forever remain in my drawer with my faceplates for Full Auto, Eternal Sonata and Deathsmiles. It is not like there is some uber-popular YouTuber who has a unique fandom for that particular version of Madden who could benefit from it in any certain way. To the drawer the faceplate remains! ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) OMG, this took me a whole month to gradually pick away at. I did not come close at all to releasing this in time for the 360’s 15th anniversary of its launch. I feel that I could have made this into a mini-eBook and charged six cents for this!!! As you can tell from my many memories I have shared thus far, the 360 is a platform I hold in high regard. I waited three years to upgrade to the Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, so from late 2005 until late 2016, the 360 was one of my primary go to consoles. Which is why I had so many memories, good and bad, to get out of my system. If you want to catch up on one of about a dozen other flashback specials I have crafted like this (which are thankfully significantly shorter) over the years check out the links below. In the meantime, I will close this off with two embedded videos of episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted circled around the 360. They are the final installments of our history of comic book games and RPG games series. Both episodes focus on the games that hit for those genres up until the point the episode was recorded for 360, PS3 and Wii. Many thanks once again if you have stuck with me for these near-18,000 words of garbled memories of mine, I sincerely appreciate it and I will see you all next time if I can somehow muster enough energy after this beast of an entry for yet another anniversary flashback special!

Listen to us break down almost all the RPGs that his this gen released through 2008

And here we dissect all the comic book games released on these platforms through April of 2011 My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

If you made it this far and have yet to experience the THING that is Rogue Warrior’s end credits theme song, then I dare you to click it above and not have Mickey Rourke’s lyrical lashings remain forever stuck in your head!

Enjoy this montage of the many creative demises of the worst sidekick in the history of videogames! You’re Still Here!? Well Then, Let Me Tell You Another Story About the Shephard….Not That Shepard

It is not my tale to tell of “another story about the Shephard.” Hopefully, EA and BioWare will right that ship as they teased at the recent Game Awards a few weeks ago. I am talking about the other Shepard on Xbox 360, that being Lost: Via Domus’s Jack Shephard. Jack and most (not all) of the cast from the first season of Lost are in that game, but are not playable. Instead, a new offscreen Oceanic survivor is introduced as the playable character, Elliot. The game was an average licensed adventure-lite game affair (find out all about by click or pressing here for my original review), but at the time when it released Lost was in its fourth of six TV seasons, and I was eating up every bit of fan service that game offered. It did have a couple minor things never seen in the TV show like the Dharma magnet, and I loved its ending which got my mind reeling with it possibly tying into new fan theories from the latest episodes of the show at the time. One in particular being my favorite episode of the series, “The Constant.” Not a great game, but loved how it treated the license. That said, this hit a few years before Telltale hit big with its Walking Dead games, and I can only imagine if they were the ones to give their episodic adventure game treatment to Lost instead. Now that is another story about the Shepard I would be all-in for day one!

[mlmichaelharrison]

First Fight (Michael X MC)

Hey, anon, thanks for the request! I’m sorry it took so long but I’ve been doing a lot of writing and lost track of what’s been posted and what hasn’t etc. I’m also sorry that I focused more on the makeup part! I tried to focus on the argument but I wasn’t sure how ?? Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! 

Warnings: strong language. 

Word count: 883

Michael fucks it up, and you overreact, which is just a recipe for disaster.

He’s the one to raise his voice and defend himself, whereas you rely on snarky comebacks and a hissy tone. 

He’s the first one to make contact afterwards- about two days later he calls you late at night because he’s been thinking about it a lot.

You ignore his call, and then the few messages afterwards.

He doesn’t want to keep pestering you, so he keeps it short:

If you could just call me back we can try to talk this through. I don’t want to be fighting anymore. I’m not going to keep bugging you, but just know that whenever you message or call me, I will answer straight away.

You read the message sceptically and put your phone down with a huff and try to get some sleep, but you keep thinking about it. You don’t want to fight either. 

You lay on your bed staring at the ceiling for ages, wondering if you were out of line or just feeling guilty. 

You think back to the argument: quite a few curses, insults, you were both genuinely angry, but Michael couldn’t stop himself. It doesn’t excuse anything he said, he just burst under pressure. 

His entire walk home he was listening to heavy rock and metal music and stomping. 

You stormed home in silence, grinding your teeth and thinking about how angry you were at him. You didn’t regret anything because you were in the right. 

Once Michael got home, he just went straight to his room and spent the entire night playing GTA and killing the fuck out of some strangers with random cheats on. 

You stress studied- drowning yourself in maths equations and energy drinks. 

The two of you didn’t speak the next day (luckily it was a Saturday), but he automatically started walking towards your house in the morning to take you to the park like he usually did. He got two blocks away from you before he realized and immediately turned around, going back to his house. 

You were awake early and decided to stress revise again. Your dad noticed and tried to ask what was wrong. 

You alright, kiddo? 

Yes! Jesus! Please just let me study! 

On a Saturday? Don’t you normally- 

Dad! Please! 

You felt bad for snapping at him, but you weren’t dealing with your anger. 

And that brings us back to Michael’s text at around 10PM that Saturday. You stare blankly up at the ceiling and tried some mindfulness, as Maria had suggested. 

It didn’t fucking work. The whole time you were doing the “deep breath in” you could just smell that Michael wasn’t there. When you tried to “listen to your surroundings” you could only hear Michael’s laugh. You felt fucking stupid. 

And so did Michael as he stepped up to your door, at around 11PM, with a small envelope. He looked at the doorbell and raised his finger before moving his hand back to his side. He wrote an entire apology letter and folded it up with a physical photo of the two of you from a passport photo booth in town centre. He knew it was cheesy, which is why he stood at your door for about five minutes. 

Eventually, he posted it through your door, pressed the doorbell, and walked purposefully away. 

You were so confused to hear the doorbell and had to force yourself to calm down because you didn’t want to believe it was Michael, in case it wasn’t. 

You creep downstairs quietly, trying not to disturb your dad, and found the letter. 

You read it through smiling a little. You were still annoyed at him, but at least he had explained himself and apologized. 

You looked into the envelope to see the small strip of glossy pictures. One of the two of you smiling, one with your tongues out, one with you laughing at each other, and then the last one, which you can barely see yourself in, where Michael has his hand on your cheek, pressing you gently to the wall of the tiny booth, kissing you passionately. 

You smiled at the photos and turned them around to see some of his scribbly handwriting on the back. 

You’re the best part of my life. 

You could feel your cheeks burning up and you opened your front door to see Michael just turning a corner. You set the letter and photos down and sprint towards him. 

He has his earphones in, so doesn’t notice you running after him until you wrap your arms around him tightly from behind. He panics a bit and then turns to see you, tired eyes scanning your face. 

His hair has fallen flat and rests on his forehead and he quickly brushes through it with his hands, not expecting to have seen you. 

I’m sorry, he says sincerely, wrapping his arms around you in a tight hug and resting his head on your shoulder. You hold him close and kiss his temple. 

I’m sorry, too. You whisper, pulling back to peck his lips lightly. It’s really late, I don’t want you walking home alone. My dad can text your mum to say that you’re staying round mine, if you’d like? 

Michael smiles appreciatively and kisses your forehead. That would be perfect, thank you. 

Hope you liked it! 

[mapleleafstrash]

Offbeat - Auston Matthews

Annonymous said: maybe an auston matthews imagine where you somehow ended up being apart of ‘the guys’ with them showing up at your house randomly to pick you up to hangout and go to parties. and puckbunnies both are intimidated by you because youre always around and rude to you because you arent the typical super thin blonde, and get even more jealous of how close you are with auston in particular and then things happen and you n auston finally get together (surprise me with the how?) please and thank you :)

A/N: Hello everyone! Now I know everyone has been patiently waiting for Mason (Part 6), but I have other requests pending, and I find when I write other prompts or stories, it helps me write about other storylines I have going on as well. Creative juices, right? 

This was reqested a while ago and I appologize for the wait! I hope it’s similar to your request, and I do believe this will be another multi-part imagine. Let me know what you think!

Requested: Yes/No

Characters: Auston Matthews (Feat. Connor Brown, Morgan Rielly, William Nylander, and Zach Hyman)

Words: 4,691

Warnings: Language and Alcohol Consumption

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four] [Part Five] [Part Six] [Part Seven]

Different.

Unconventional.

Contrasting.

Distinct.

Peculiar.

Offbeat.

In your particular situation, those were the words that most described you best. Well, those were the nicer ones anyways.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

Your thoughts were interrupted by the sound of your best friend Connor. He, along with his girlfriend Madison, and your other close friend Morgan, were currently hanging out in your condo’s living room.

You gave him a small, reassuring smile, “Just school,”

He nodded, but pursed his lips.

Connor knew you better than anyone.

The two of you had met when you were six years old. By luck of the draw, you had both been placed onto the same house-league minor hockey team in Etobicoke. You had been given a hard time from the get-go that season, as you were playing with both six, seven, and eight-year old’s due to your division being branched out. It also didn’t help that you were the only girl on the team. Other teams you faced usually had two or three girls but not yours. You were the only one who’d been singled out by the league, forcing you to fend for yourself.

Even though Connor was a year older than you, with age being a usual dividing factor in youth dressing rooms, the two of you had become fast friends, and had been glued to the hip for much of your childhood.

As time went on, you switched to girl’s hockey as it had become more prominent a few years later, and Connor had made the jump to rep. Despite this, you both still went to each other’s games like nothing had changed, and made sure to still have your weekly hangouts at the Brown family’s home. Dan and Anne had even given you a key, that’s how close you were to Connor and his family.

When Connor was drafted by Erie when you were fifteen years old, you were ecstatic. Several times during the season you’d take a Friday off from school and drive down to Erie with the Brown’s to go visit and watch the Otters, and whenever he was around up near the Toronto area, you had to go see him play. And now, just a few short years later, he had just finished his rookie season as a Toronto Maple Leaf, and you couldn’t be more proud.

Through Connor, you’d become close to many of the guys on the team because you frequented games and social events, as requested by your best friend. Madison and him had been off and on until just recently, so when she hadn’t been around, you came to Maple Leaf activities instead in her place.

Inevitably, people, well more like fans of the team or puck bunnies as Connor called them, had discovered you. Thankfully, before the storm became to grave, you made all your social media private, but Connor and even some of the others had tagged you in photos multiple times. You were often seen in the background of multiple Leafs PR photographs or from other Leaf girlfriends Instagram’s. People knew who you were, and unfortunately some of them weren’t afraid to voice their own opinions.

“She’s so fat,”

“How do any of the guys even like her?”

“She just using them for attention,”

“I feel bad for Connor,”

Each comment was like a repeated stab in your gut. You were the first to admit that you weren’t the smallest girl around. Standing at five foot ten, and being a size sixteen, you were a bit bigger than the typical female that professional hockey players were often associated with. But you’d always been bigger. You were curvy, and when you were younger you were teased because of your larger hips but as you’d gotten taller you’d slimmed out. But since you weren’t a buck ten, and you weren’t the model type, people, mainly girls, ate you alive.

Sure, you’d talked to Connor a bit about it, but he was your best friend, not your boyfriend. As much as you loved him, you didn’t want to talk about your insecurities with him. You knew he’d just worry so you held it in. But you knew he was aware of the comments, and he often hovered over you when you’d all go out, just to make sure you were okay and to make sure no one was giving you a hard time.

All his teammates were great though. They all immediately warmed up to you during the season, and you were already particularly close with Zach, William and Kasperi because you’d known them from when Connor was on the Marlies. Of all the Leafs though, Morgan and you had become the closest. You guys clicked right away and you almost hanged out just as much with him then you did with Connor. He was your wing-man and you were his wing-woman as he put it. You almost had a sibling type relationship.

You went out almost once a week during the summer months with a group of the guys. Whoever was still around the GTA often came along and your condo was the meeting spot. Bars and clubs were the main places you went to, and occasionally a few of you would head to a baseball game. It was refreshing to be able to have some fun with everyone, especially when they weren’t as stressed as they normally would be during the season. But by going out, you just got more exposure, and that had led to an increase of hateful comments.

You couldn’t help but notice however, that these comments had skyrocketed after Auston Matthews and you were snapped a few times together one night when you had all headed to one of Toronto’s more popular summer clubs.

He had posted a photo of you, Zach, and William, and had dubbed you an honorary ‘liney.’ Even though he meant no harm by it, the photo had stirred up a lot of interest into who you were and Auston actually had to delete some of the comments and block several people due to their harsh words.

Trying to make it better, he then posted just a nice photo of the both of you, but it had honestly just made it worse. Jealous girls from every angle sought to attack you, so Auston was forced to disable the comments. He had apologized thoroughly but you had just shrugged it off. Even though you wouldn’t admit it, your thick skin was slowly beginning to taper off, and Connor had taken notice.

The part that had hurt the worst about the situation with the Arizona Native though, was the fact that you had been harbouring a massive crush on Auston for the better part of the past season. I mean, who wasn’t crushing on Auston Matthews? The only one who really knew one hundred percent about your feelings was Connor, and Morgan suspected at first, but he later gained confirmation. Thankfully he only teased you about it when it was just the two of you. William was well aware and Zach had clued in as well. It scared you sometimes, realizing any one of them could potentially let the cat out of the bag.

But the world had already decided you had no chance with Auston Matthews, before you could even try.

“Auston’s way out of her league,”

“He looks so uncomfortable,”

“Auston’s weekly bout of charity work I suppose,”

“Who does she think she is?”

When you had read those comments underneath the photo Auston had posted of the two of you, your heart ached. Who did you think you were? I mean, you even knew he was way out of your league.

Lately, you couldn’t help but compare yourself to the girls Auston typically took home with him. You’d been there several times to witness Auston pick his nightly hookup, and each time you watched, your heart sunk more and more. Blonde, average height, larger breasts, but most of all; stick thin. Everything you weren’t.

So later that night, you found yourself sipping on your fizzy vodka cranberry, with a pink umbrella because apparently, it wasn’t complete without one according to Mo. You sat rigid in the groups booth while you watched Auston survey the large crowd around you, obviously on the hunt.

“Cheer up pouty,” Morgan suddenly knocked into you, causing you to jerk forward as he took out your elbow that had been holding you up.

Sending him a quick glare in warning, Zach and William chuckled while they sat across from you. The four of you were currently on your own as Connor and Madison had gone up to the bar, and you had no clue where Mitch and his girlfriend Steph had ran off to.

Auston turned towards you from Zach’s left due to the sound of Morgan’s voice, “you good, Y/N?” He asked, looked towards you concerned.

You gulped, but nodded, looking away, “just peachy,”

Morgan howled in laughter, elbowing you in the side, causing you to yelp. Morgan suddenly winced immediately there after as Zach had kicked him in the shins, defending you. You sent him a grateful smile.

Auston had raised his eyebrows in confusion, “uh, okay,”

William chuckled low, and shook his head. Looking ahead of you, William sent you a wink, and you flushed. Your boys knew you way too well.

“Hey,”

Your eyes flickered up as you watched a tan, leggy blonde, wearing a barely-there type outfit approach the booth, well Auston specifically. You rolled your eyes and promptly looked away when you saw Auston look the girl up and down hungrily, his tongue darting out to lick his lips. Sighing, you caught William’s blue eyes dart towards you, a sympathetic look crossing over his features. You heard the unknown blonde giggle and you knew it, right then and there. Auston was taking her home.

Your thoughts were confirmed when Auston promptly stood from his seat and walked away with his new conquest.

“Does he even try?” I heard Morgan ask incredulously, and I bit my lip.

No, but he didn’t have to.

“Y/N!”

Looking over due to the shrill voice, you watched Madison wobble her way back to the booth, and a concerned looking Connor hot on her heels.

“Madison, slow down!” He called after her, the two drinks in his hands splashing around violently.

“Come dance with me!” Madison slurred, placing both her hands down flat onto the table, causing it to wiggle from her weight.

“You’re drunk Maddie,” you sighed, and she grinned, “no shit, so come have some fun!”

“Madison,” Connor warned, as he took a seat next to Morgan.

His brunette girlfriend then pouted, “please Y/N, Connie won’t come dance with me either,”

Morgan snorted, and Zach laughed, “Connie huh?”

“Shut it,” Connor spat, sending his teammate a glare.

“I’ll come dance with you,” William then piped up, and Connor whipped around towards the blonde, “absolutely not,”

“Oh c'mon Connie, your girlfriend just wants to have some fun,” William snickered and you groaned, knowing where this was going. Everyone was usually fine with William’s flirty personality, except for when another guys’ girlfriend was involved. Not wanting the two to get into it, you sighed, “fine, I’ll go,”

Morgan turned to look at you, and three other pairs of eyes zeroed in at the exact same time. They all looked shocked you had actually agreed, since you’d never once actually gone dancing when you’d been out with the boys.

“Great! Let’s go!” Madison chimed, clapping her hands together and Connor sent you an uneasy glance. Motioning for the boys to scoot, you stood from your seat and were essentially dragged out onto the dance floor by the very intoxicated Madison.

You weren’t concerned by her behaviour due to the fact you knew that not only Connor, but the others guys would be keeping a close eye on the both of you. It was almost nice knowing you had a big group of guys awaiting at your beckon call. It almost felt like you had more freedom since you knew if trouble came about, you’d have lots of backup.

As a new up-beat song played over the speakers of the club, Madison held your hands and began to bounce around. Moving with her, you smiled as she grinned at you, “There you go! Have some fun for once!”

As the alcohol you’d consumed finally started taking its affect, you began to feel warmth spread throughout your body. For a moment, you’d forgotten about your insecurities. You weren’t the bigger girl. You weren’t some leech that many people made you out to be. You were just having fun with your friends. No jealous puck bunnies. No asshole guys. And most of all, you’d forgotten about Auston going off with some girl. Well you had, until you spotted him.

There, about thirty feet away, he was swaying back and forth with the blonde who’d approached your table just a short while ago. With their bodies pressed tight up against one another, and Auston’s large hands gripping her hips tight, the girl was looking towards your friend with a lustful gaze. What irked you more, was the fact that Auston wore the same expression.

“Y/N?”

Flicking your eyes towards Madison, you’d then realized you’d stopped moving. You were standing stiff while bodies all around you continued moving in their alcohol driven motions. Taking a deep breath, and shaking your head free of all your thoughts, you slowly began bopping your head again and swaying your hips. It took every bit of strength within you not to stare back towards Auston.

“I need another drink,” you sighed, and Madison’s eyes brightened from your words, clearly agreeing as she nodded her head enthusiastically.

Walking up to the bar, you both took a seat and waited for the bartender to approach you. Once he got there, Madison ordered two tequila shots, while you ordered four. You downed them all one after the other, causing your best friend’s girlfriend to cheer. When the bartender came back for payment, you sneered out towards Auston, who was still getting up close and personal to his flavour of the night, and you just said to put it on his tab.

Now you were feeling fuzzy. You weren’t thinking clearly, and you were bitter. You were a hot, hazy, jealous mess.

As you turned to head back out onto the dance floor, you bumped into a hard chest. “Hey, hey, Y/N are you okay?”

Looking up, you met Connor’s eyes and you snorted, “what do you think?”

“Don’t do this just because of him, he’s not worth it Y/N,” Connor sighed, placing his hand onto your arm and rubbing it soothingly.

“Yeah well, clearly I’m not worth it either,” you bit out, before you pushed past your friend, and beelined to the washroom, trying to escape him and anyone else’s judgmental eyes.

“Y/N!”

You pushed on, ignoring Connor’s voice. As you travelled by your home booth, you could feel the others staring at you. But none of them dared to chase after you. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, they’d just never dealt with you when you were being over emotional. The only two guys besides Connor that would normally attempt to check in on you would be either Morgan, who honestly wasn’t sure what to do in this particular situation, or Auston, but he was a little preoccupied at the moment.

As you pushed the washroom door open, you walked up to the long sink and slammed your hands down onto the counter. Looking up into the mirror, you wanted to cry. Your face was flushed red, and your once decent makeup had begun flaking due to your sweat. Your hair was a mess, and your eyes had heavy looking bags beneath them. As your eyes trailed down towards your hips you bit your lip as you stared towards your body. You looked awful. Your drunken mind was playing tricks on you, and you were beginning to believe the words the jealous girls would always throw at you.

It was no wonder Auston had never looked at you any other way besides being Connor Brown’s best friend. You were nothing like the other girls.

“Oh no! Is Connor Brown’s little whore upset?”

You turned to your right to see a pair of scantily-clad girls, both of them giving you a devilish smirk. “I bet your fat ass is just upset because Connor finally realized how shitty of a friend you are for using him.”

You took a deep breath, your hands turning into fists as you tried to ignore them.

“Did one of the boys finally tell you no?“

You looked away, not wanting to interact with the two and give them the satisfaction of having an outburst, and you were about to walk away when one of them spoke again, “That or you finally realized you don’t have a chance in hell with any of them.”

“I mean look at you! You’re such a pig! Why would any of them want you!”

Stopping dead on your feet, the anger you were feeling suddenly began bubbling within you. You had finally reached your breaking point.

“Go fuck yourself,” you bit back, feeing your throat turn scratchy. Tears formed tiny beads in the corner of your eyes as you stood your ground. You sent them both a heavy glare, and whipped around on your feet, heading back towards the door. You didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t know what they were talking about.

As you exited the bathroom, you spotted Madison across the room. Walking briskly towards her, she gave you a sympathetic look.

“Y/N,”

“I’m leaving,” you stated, moving past her and towards the front doors of the club.

“Y/N!” Connor’s voice shouted.

Turning your head slightly, you watched your ginger haired friend bound his way up to you. Sighing, you stopped, and crossed your arms.

“Are you okay?”

You snorted, “No, I am not okay Connor,”

“Well, don’t leave alone, let me take you home,” he begged, reaching out to take your hand.

You moved back a bit, keeping him from touching you. He flashed you a look of hurt, “Stay with Madison, you’re here with her, remember?”

“No, I’m here with the both of you, and I’m more concerned about you right now Y/N, you’re not thinking straight.” Connor explained, “please, just come sit down for a bit and we’ll all leave,”

You shook your head, “I just need to be alone Connor, and I don’t need everyone pitying me. I’ll be fine,”

“Y/N,” Connor pleaded, “if this is about Auston,”

“It’s not!” you spat, your anger and insecurity bubbling over, “it’s not just about him, it’s about me! I just, I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep pretending that I’m okay Connor.” You cried out, tears now leaking down your cheeks.

“Y/N, I love you, you know that,” Connor sighed, before pulling you into his arms. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,”

You nodded, before wrapping your arms around his torso, and embracing him back. “You’re such a beautiful girl Y/N, and one day, some unworthy idiot is going to realize that too. Those girls, they’re just jealous because they can’t understand why we all love you so much. And I know the boys love you because you’re yourself, your gorgeous, funny, and truthful self. And I love you because you’ve been with me through thick and thin and because you’ve always supported me. Now please, don’t let the people that don’t know you make you destroy yourself.”

You sniffled, and hugged your best friend tighter. Connor always knew how to make you feel better.

“Are you two okay?”

Looking up, you met brown eyes. Connor turned towards his teammate and nodded, “We’re probably going to head out, Y/N’s had a rough night,”

“I can take her home if you want,” Auston said, “it’s no problem,”

The girl on Auston’s arms grimaced before sending you an unimpressed look. You looked down towards your feet, as Connor’s hand remained on your lower back protectively.

“We don’t want to spoil your night Matts,” Connor then replied, but Auston shook his head, “you’re not spoiling anything, I wasn’t getting a good vibe tonight honestly. I was just going to head out by myself anyways,”

You couldn’t help the smirk that appeared on your lips as the leggy blonde from earlier stood back from Auston, her eyes wide in shock, before she rolled her eyes and walked away.

“Uh, alright,” Connor said, “is that okay Y/N?”

You shrugged, “doesn’t matter,”

Connor sighed, before pulling you in for another hug and pressing his lips against your forehead. “Text me when you get home, please,”

“I will,” you promised, before pulling away and walking towards the doors, with Auston following you right behind.

As you pushed the doors open and began waking to your left, you immediately placed your hands in front of your face as several bright flashes blinded you.

Auston muttered something incoherently before you felt him place his hand down onto your back. As he led you away from the group of photographers, who were obviously waiting for someone high-profile to leave the venue, Auston was bombarded by several questions, including his upcoming season, his training regime, and surprisingly, you.

“New girlfriend Auston?” A male’s voice questioned, just as you were about to reach an awaiting taxi.

Deciding not to answer, Auston instead opened the car’s rear door and ushered you inside, his larger body following you behind. As the taxi took off, Auston gave the driver his address, rather than yours, causing you to give him a questioning look.

He sent you a reassuring smile, “it’s fine, some of those guys might follow after us, and I don’t want them knowing where you live,”

You nodded, and turned back to look out the window. You were honestly surprised Auston had even thought of that, and it made you feel warm inside due to him seeming to care about you and your privacy.

As you watched the lit up, downtown core pass you by, you couldn’t help the nervous feeling in your gut as you felt Auston’s hand rest on your thigh. You weren’t sure if he had even noticed he had placed it there when you had gotten into the taxi, but it almost felt like his touch was burning you.

“I just texted Connor, to let him know you’re just coming back with me,” Auston then voiced, and you nodded, “thanks Auston,”

As you reached Auston’s condo complex, you stepped out of the taxi and waited for Auston to pay the driver. He flashed you a small smile when he joined you and led you into his building. Pressing the elevator button, you rode in silence until you reached Auston’s floor.

“I’m just gonna use the washroom and get changed,” the younger boy told you, when you finally walked into his bachelor pad.

You nodded in understanding, and made your way into his living room. Taking a seat onto his long, plush, sofa, you stared out his condo’s window, and stared down at the city below. Even though it was well into the early hours of the morning, the city was still as bright as ever. You had always enjoyed Auston’s condo’s view. He easily had the best view of the city out of any of the other guys’ condo’s.

Your head had begun throbbing due to the alcohol you’d consumed slowly dying down. Sighing, you stood and walked into his kitchen, and began looking for his aspirin. You knew he kept his medication in the cupboard above his fridge, and you honestly didn’t think he’d mind. Grabbing a cold-water bottle from Auston’s fridge, you took a sip before you looked up towards the cupboard. Even though you were quite tall for a girl, you still couldn’t quite reach the handle’s on the twin doors.

Pursing your lips, you placed your hands onto your hips and looked around the room for anything to help you extend your reach. You considered using the broom that was in the crook between the fridge and the kitchen’s wall, but then you spotted one of the bar stools that sat against Auston’s kitchen’s island.

Even though they weren’t the most stable seats, they were tall enough for you to reach the cupboard, so you carried the stool into the kitchen and placed it up against the fridge. At first, you just hopped up onto your knee’s but your height hadn’t increased enough. Sighing, you gripped the top of Auston’s fridge, and shakily stood up onto one leg. Taking a breath, you then shifted your weight and brought your other leg up, leaving you fully standing on the rickety bar stool.

Reaching over, you grinned once you could finally open the cupboard. Spotting Auston’s aspirin, you grabbed the box of tablets and closed the doors promptly. Turning, you crouched down and placed the medicine onto Auston’s counter top. Moving one leg down to rest onto the steel step underneath the stools seat, you gasped when the seat teetered. Your shift in weight had caused the unstable chair to wobble violently. As it came out from underneath you, you suddenly felt another body grab onto you, and pull you into their chest while the seat clattered down onto the tiled floor.

“Are you okay?” Auston asked concerned, his eyes wide.

You flushed once you realized how close the two of you were. With your chests pressed together and Auston’s muscular arms wrapped around you securely, your heart thumped fiercely.

“Uh yeah,” you then got out, and Auston sighed in relief.

“You could’ve gotten hurt Y/N,” Auston then spoke, “why didn’t you come get me?”

You shrugged, pulling away, “I didn’t want to bother you,”

Auston rolled his eyes, “you never bother me Y/N,”

“Sorry about the stool,” you then said, looking down towards the piece of furniture. Auston sighed, “I don’t care about that, I care about you. If I hadn’t come out just now, you could’ve really hurt yourself.”

“Well I’m fine,” you declared, reaching out to grab the aspirin and walking over to lift the bar stool up right. Taking your water, you then made your way back into the living room.

“So what happened tonight?” Auston asked, when he finally joined you on the opposite side of the couch.

“I could ask you the same thing,” you returned, before taking another sip of the cool water.

Auston smirked at your words, and you looked towards him. “I just had a bad night, nothing really went my way,”

Auston nodded, “I can relate to that,”

You cocked your head, “blondie was no good?”

He laughed, “something like that,”

“Well, for the record, I didn’t like her from the second I saw her,” you explained, and Auston chuckled, “you never like them though Y/N,”

“Because they’re never good enough, you deserve way more than some slutty floozy from a bar or club Auston,” you explained.

“Really? Is that so?” Auston questioned, sending you a small smirk.

You rolled your eyes, “yes, any of you boys deserve more, and until you realize it, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for,”

Auston shifted in his seat, turning more towards you, “and what exactly am I looking for Y/N?”

You sighed, and pulled your left leg up into your chest to rest on, “I can’t answer that for you Auston, especially when you don’t even understand the question,”

Auston narrowed his eyes slightly, taking your words in. When realization finally dawned on him, his lips then curved upwards, “you’re good, you know that?”

You smiled towards him, and brought your water bottle back to your lips. Too bad you felt like you weren’t good enough for him.

“What are you looking for then Y/N?”

Blinking in surprise, you placed the bottle back down onto the coffee table beside you and thought before speaking, “I’m not really looking anymore Auston, I think, I think I’m just waiting,”

Auston nodded, “well, I hope you won’t wait for too long,”

You nodded, and looked away,

“me either,”

[astrogeoguy]

Galaxies Galore, a Major May Monday Meteor Shower, and Lunar-Looking Advice!

(Above: This image of the unusual-looking galaxy designated NGC 4088 in Ursa Major (near the Big Dipper’s bowl) was captured on Saturday night, May 4, 2019 by Ian Wheelband at the RASC Toronto Centre E.C. Carr Astronomical Observatory near Collinwood, Ontario. A total of 5.5 hours of exposure time were used to capture the full colour image using a camera mounted on his tracking telescope. Note the other smaller galaxies around it.)

Hello, Stargazers! 

Here are your Astronomy Skylights for the week of May 5th, 2019 by Chris Vaughan. Feel free to pass this along to your friends and send me your comments, questions, and suggested topics. I repost these emails with photos at http://astrogeoguy.tumblr.com/ where all the old editions are archived. You can also follow me on Twitter as @astrogeoguy! Unless otherwise noted, all times are Eastern Time. Please click this MailChimp link to subscribe to these emails. If you are a teacher or group leader interested joining me on a guided field trip to York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory or the David Dunlap Observatory, visit www.astrogeo.ca. 

I can bring my Digital Starlab inflatable planetarium to your school or other daytime or evening event, visit DiscoveryPlanitarium.com and request me. We’ll tour the Universe together! 

Public Astro-Events

It’s International Astronomy Week! To celebrate, on every sunny morning from 10 am to noon from Monday, May 6 to Saturday, May 11, astronomers from the RASC Toronto Centre will set up special solar telescopes outside the main doors of the Ontario Science Centre for public Solar Observing. Come and see the Sun in detail through equipment designed to view it safely. This is a free event (details here), but parking and admission fees inside the Science Centre will still apply. Check the RASC Toronto Centre website or their Facebook page for the Go or No-Go notification. 

Taking advantage of the moon and other bright objects in the sky this week, the RASC Toronto Centre astronomers will hold their free monthly public City Sky Star Party in Bayview Village Park (steps from the Bayview subway station), starting around 8 pm on the first clear weeknight this week (Mon, Tue, or Thu only). You don’t need to be an RASC member, or own any equipment, to join them – looks are free! Check here for details, and check the banner on their website home page or Facebook page for the GO or NO-GO decision around 5 pm each day. 

Every Monday evening, York University’s Allan I. Carswell Observatory runs an online star party - broadcasting views from four telescopes/cameras, answering viewer questions, and taking requests! Details are here. On Wednesday nights they offer free public viewing through their rooftop telescopes. If it’s cloudy, the astronomers give tours and presentations. Details are here. 

At 7:30 pm on Wednesday, May 8, the RASC Toronto Centre will hold their free monthly Speaker’s Night Meeting at the Ontario Science Centre, and the public are welcome. This month, the speaker will be Professor Marshall McCall, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University. His topic will be Big Galaxies and the Big Places in Which They Live. Check here for details. Parking is free. 

Eastern GTA sky watchers are invited to join the RASC Toronto Centre and Durham Skies for solar observing and stargazing at the edge of Lake Ontario in Millennium Square in Pickering on Friday evening, May 10, from 6 pm to 11 pm. Details are here. Before heading out, check the RASCTC home page for a Go/No-Go call in case it's too cloudy to observe. The rain date is Saturday. 

On Friday, May 10 at 7:30 pm, inside the Hamilton Spectator, the public are invited to attend  a presentation by Alanna Mitchell, author of The Spinning Magnet, all about the Earth’s magnetic field. Details are here. 

Saturday, May 11 will be International Astronomy Day, Science Rendezvous Day in the GTA, and Doors Open in Richmond Hill. U of T, Ryerson, and York University will all have science-related demonstration and booths set up in public spaces on each campus from 11 am to 4 pm. The Ontario Science Centre and RASC Toronto Centre will offer free solar observing, a telescope workshop (bring yours in for a tune up!), and an evening star party (weather permitting). The David Dunlap Observatory will host free tours of the big telescope, a mobile planetarium, and solar observing from 10 am to 4 pm. 

The next RASC Family Night at the David Dunlap Observatory will be on Saturday, May 18. There will be sky tours in the Skylab planetarium room, space crafts, a tour of the giant 74” telescope, and viewing through lawn telescopes (weather permitting). The doors will open at 8:30 pm for a 9 pm start. Attendance is by tickets only, available here. If you are a RASC Toronto Centre member and wish to help us at DDO in the future, please fill out the volunteer form here. And to join RASC Toronto Centre, visit this page. 

(Above: Every spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way hugs the eastern horizon during the evening hours, as shown here at 11 pm local time. The absence of our home galaxy’s obscuring stars, dust, and gas allows us to see the multitude of distant galaxies (red ovals) sprinkled across the sky overhead. This is just a small subset of them.)

Galaxy Season

We live inside the Milky Way. Our sun is embedded within its five thousand light-year thick disk of obscuring stars, dust, and gas. Because of this, our best opportunity to see other galaxies is to look directly up and out of the plane of the Milky Way’s disk, where there is less clutter to peer through. 

At this time of year in the northern hemisphere, the Milky Way hugs the eastern horizon in the evening hours. The sky overhead, which includes the constellations of Leo (the Lion), Virgo (the Maiden), Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair), Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), and Ursa Major (the Big Bear), is absolutely loaded with distant galaxies! 

Astronomers make the effort to take out their telescopes on clear spring evenings to see and photograph the many treasures that float above us. On my Tumblr post last week, I included an image of three spring galaxies in Leo. This week, I’ve included an image taken just last night near Collinwood, Ontario of an unusual-looking spiral galaxy designated NGC 4088. It’s located 61 million light-years from our solar system. While you are looking, see how many other smaller galaxies you can see around it! 

(Above: The galaxy imaged at the top of this post, NGC 4088, is located near the bowl of the Big Dipper, one of hundreds of galaxies (red ovals) within reach of amateur, large-aperture telescopes when used in a dark sky location during moonless spring nights.) 

A Major Meteor Shower

The annual Eta-Aquariids Meteor Shower is produced when the Earth passes through a trail of material left by repeated passages of Halley’s Comet, and those particles drop through our atmosphere at high speeds, leaving long streaks of ionized gas and minerals. We pass through the debris from May 3 to 11 annually, and we will be most deeply in the cloud around Monday, May 6. Your best times for seeing the meteors will be Sunday and Monday, especially before dawn. 

True Aquariids will appear to travel away from a radiant point in Aquarius (the Water-Bearer), which will sit near the southeastern horizon. The southerly radiant makes this shower better for observers at low latitudes. Watch for up to a few dozen meteors per hour on the peak night, and fewer than that during the surrounding nights. The very young evening moon will leave the sky nice and dark for this shower. 

To increase your chances of seeing meteors, find a dark location with lots of sky, preferably away from light polluted skies, and just look up with your unaided eyes. Binoculars and telescopes are not useful for meteors because their fields of view are too narrow to fit the streaks of meteor light. Don’t watch the radiant. Any meteors near there will have very short trails because they are travelling towards you. Try not to look at your phone’s bright screen – it’ll ruin your night vision. And keep your eyes heavenward, even while you are chatting with companions. Happy hunting! 

I posted a sky chart showing the radiant here. 

The Moon and Planets

The next two weeks of May will be an ideal period to view our natural satellite’s rugged terrain in binoculars and backyard telescopes at a convenient time of the evening! Fresh from yesterday’s New Moon phase, the young crescent moon will appear low over the western horizon for a short time after sunset tonight (Sunday). Then, on the following evenings, the moon will set later - climbing higher while waxing fuller.

(Above: Earthshine faintly illuminates the dark portion of the waxing crescent moon in this image by Dylan O’Donnell taken in late January of 2015. The best magnified views of the moon are found along the zone dividing the lit and dark hemispheres. NASA APOD for March 20, 2015) 

As the moon waxes, the sun is rising over its eastern horizon. East on a planet or moon is defined as the direction where the sun rises. Due to the moon’s tidal lock with Earth, the moon keeps the nearside hemisphere pointed towards Earth at all times. That means that sunrise on the moon takes hours - and the sun needs two weeks to cross the moon’s “sky” and set in the west. 

On Earth, we define morning as the daylight period between sunrise and high noon – or about 6 hours. But at any given location on the moon (except the poles), that process covers the period from New Moon to First Quarter – or about a week! The rising sun casts long shadows to the west of any elevated terrain, including crater rims, mountains, boulders, and faults. Shadows on the moon are nearly black because there is no atmosphere to scatter light. 

The shadows are particularly stark along the terminator, the pole-to-pole boundary line that divides the lit and dark hemispheres of the moon. Along that strip, the sunlight is nearly horizontal. Every night, and even hour-by-hour, the terminator shifts west – throwing new areas into stark relief. Keep your telescope handy and have a look on every clear night. Or, for a fun exercise, look at a feature early in the evening and look at it again a few hours later. Try holding your phone over your telescope’s eyepiece and taking a pair of photos at the two times – or draw what you see. 

(Above: On Tuesday evening, as shown here at 9:25 pm EDT, the waxing crescent moon will land to the lower left of Mars. A small star named Zeta Tauri (or Tianguan) will be positioned near the moon’s higher crescent tip.)

Let’s review what else the moon will be up to this week. Early Monday evening in the west-northwestern sky, the moon will be positioned just above the stars forming Taurus’ triangular face, and that constellation’s brightest star, Aldebaran. Use binoculars to capture the scene. Observers in Europe, Africa, and Asian will see the moon pass through Taurus’ face after dusk. 

On Tuesday evening, the waxing crescent moon will land 3.5 finger widths to the lower left (south) of reddish Mars. Look for a medium-bright star named Zeta Tauri (ζ Tauri) aka Tianguan positioned close to the upper, northern tip of the moon’s crescent. That star marks the eastern horn of Taurus, the Bull. 

The moon will pass through the twins of Gemini on Wednesday and Thursday. Then, on Friday the nearly first quarter moon will pass almost directly through the large open star cluster in Cancer (the Crab) known as the Beehive, Praesepe, and Messier 44. The moon will be centered on the cluster at approximately 10 pm EDT. Binoculars or a telescope at low magnification will show both the moon and the cluster at the same time. To better see the clusters’ stars, try to position the moon just outside of your optics’ field of view. (Binoculars will show the cluster to the moon’s upper left, but your telescope will flip that view around.) 

On Saturday night the moon will reach a 90° angle with respect to the sun, triggering its First Quarter phase worldwide. By this time, you might have noticed the moon in the afternoon daytime sky. At First Quarter, the moon always rises at noon and sets after midnight. The moon will end the week below the stars of Leo (the Lion) next Sunday night. 

Mars will continue to be visible for about an hour after dusk every evening this week. Even though Mars will be setting in the west just before midnight local time, it’s starting to dip into the twilight. Once the sky has darkened, look for Mars as a medium-bright, reddish pinpoint of light sitting less than one-third of the way up the western sky. Mars has been slowly shrinking in size and brightness as we increase our distance from it little-by-little.

(Above: The giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are both crossing the sky during the small hours of the night, as shown here at 5 am local time. In the coming weeks, both planets will rise early enough to be observed in the evening.)  

This week, the very bright planet Jupiter will be visible low over the southeastern horizon after midnight local time. If you are walking through the house in your pj’s during the wee hours, Jupiter’s bright beacon might catch your eye through a southerly window. Jupiter will reach its highest point over the southern horizon by 4 am local time and then descend towards the west as dawn arrives. Soon, I’ll start to alert you to when you can see the Great Red Spot and the shadows of Jupiter’s four large moons when they cross Jupiter’s disk. 

Look for yellowish Saturn, which will be rising about 2 hours after Jupiter all summer, sitting about 2.5 outstretched fist diameters to the lower left (east) of Jupiter in the pre-dawn sky. Saturn will officially enter the evening sky in the last week of May. Dust off your telescope because even a small telescope will show its rings! 

Distant and dim, blue Neptune is in the southeastern pre-dawn sky, among the stars of Aquarius (the Water-Bearer). The planet will rise a little before 4 am local time. But I’ll wait for summer, when it will be available in the evening, to look for it.

(Above: This week, Venus and Mercury are both swinging sunward in the eastern pre-dawn sky, as shown here at 5:45 am local time. Mercury will be difficult to spot, and both planets will require a low, open horizon.) 

Venus tends to be easy to see because of its extreme brightness. But our sister planet is approaching the pre-dawn sun now, so you will need a wide-open eastern horizon to see it just before sunrise. Venus will rise at about 5 am local time and remain visible until about 6 am. It will soon disappear in solar conjunction. 

The Lion Hunts

If you missed last week’s information about the spring constellation of Leo (the lion), I posted it here.

Keep looking up, and enjoy the sky when you do. I love questions and requests - so, send me some!

[harrisonfordi]

Here’s my (very late & very long) WSC London volunteering experience write up, before it becomes even more irrelevant and I forget everything that happened.

Featuring: my face, Tom Payne eating pretzels, hugs with Scott Wilson, forgetting how to English in the face of meeting Steven Ogg, guarding Norman Reedus’ pizza, and the holy account of having sighted JDM’s buttcrack.

Please stay away if you can’t stand: my face, my unsightly prose, people saying that Norman Reedus is an absolute sweetheart and they love him.

More under the cut, sweet peeps.

Alright, listen: Norman Reedus is an absolute sweetheart and I love him. But more on that later.

I decided to volunteer for WSC London last year, when I considered going for about half a second and then realized I have no money. At some point in October, I went to the website and signed up for the only thing there was left, which was a shift as Outdoor Security. It sounded terrible, but sure.

As the day grew closer, I wanted to do it less and less. Look, all I wanted was a high five from Steven Ogg and/or Michael Cudlitz -- was I really willing to be standing outside in the shitty London weather for 8 hours just for that?

Apparently the answer is yes, because here we are. And let’s not be horrible, there were some perks: you get an extra GA ticket for a friend, and you can meet the celebrities on Sunday after 4pm... if they’re still there.

On the Saturday, I got to the venue at 7am, went through the mandatory orientation, and then got sent to stand outside -- for about an hour. Long story short, the real security people found us redundant and sent us back inside. I can’t say that this wasn’t fine by me.

When I first walked back in, I wanted to get my bearings a bit, so I wandered around and ogled some of the actors that had already arrived. My train of thought went something like this: “Ogg owns my ass! Cuddles could murder me and I’d thank him! Josh McDermitt IS HOT!”

When Norman materialized (*fans self*), I just so happened to be upstairs and “helped out” when a massive horde of people ran to him and cornered the poor chap. I was supposed to hold them back, but, like, whatever, Norman Reedus is right in front of me. But it’s fine! He survived and went to his table.

After this, I started doing relief for other volunteers, and ended up helping out at Tom Payne’s line for a bit. Not much to say here, other than his presence is ethereal and he ate some pretzels. Here’s some photographic evidence for good measure:

- “Nomnomnomnomnom.” (You might think these were going somewhere, but they aren’t.)

I already stand around like a mofo for hours at my real job, so I moved on eventually. Walked around some more and ended up covering someone at Christian Serratos’ line for a while.

By this point it was already 1pm, so I went to have my lunch break and investigate with my friend for, like, half an hour. I put my coat on, zipped up (it’s a bit frowned upon to take pictures if you’re working), and then tried to get some proper proof that, you know, I WAS THERE.

Y’all have seen the videos of Cheech and Chong silly stringing from the balcony, so I won’t bother. Now, behold:

Seth Gilliam’s head being attractive.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan acting like he doesn’t know he’s the best looking person in the room, in Kensington, and in all of the Greater London area.

Fucking Theodore Douglas wreaking havoc, as per usual.

- “Is this nonchalant stance doing enough to conceal my evil nature?”

I didn’t spend much time around Austin, but he seemed sweet.

Lennie James acting like he doesn’t know he’s the best actor in the room, in Kensington, and in all of the Greater London area. Great actor, this one! I almost bought it.

Ross Marquand working up the energy for a realistic Al Pacino impression.

- “Listen, I just found out my brother might be a sex offender and I’m bummed.”

That patch of pale skin that surfaces from between people and hair is Chandler Riggs.

- “That Ines sure is trying to come up with a joke about my supremely posh accent and failing, huh? What a twat.”

And that’s pretty much it for Saturday. I went home early because I’d slept for 1 hour the night before and I was dying. So let’s jump straight into Sunday. Now... Sunday. NOW. Haha. That was a good ‘un! I mean, for me.

I got to the venue at 7am, went through orientation, and then to my position. Ruh-roh, what’s my position? I went to ask the organizer, who confirmed my rousing suspicion that the Outdoor Security position had bombed. Okay, so, what do I do? “Pick an actor and work their booth.”

Okay, so if you know anything about me, you know this: I like Daryl and I think Norman is cool. But, truth be told, I wasn’t even excited about him being there; duder has too many fans, all of which had priority over me. So, what was the point? By now I’d even forgotten he was there.

So, when I heard this, I started walking towards Ogg’s table and debating whether I should do Cudlitz’s instead. I was excited and everything! It took me about two minutes to remember that I could actually work at Norman’s table. Sooo... yeah, why not.

When I got there, I met the other volunteers, and ended up being assigned Norman’s platinum line (if I met you on Sunday and you’re reading this: HI!). He and JDM arrived together (they had adjacent booths), and were quite late. Norman went straight to work, but JDM hung inside the little space between the two booths for a little bit.

I had prime view of this area, so let me tell you something you already know: he is the most effortlessly handsome man I have ever seen. Mate, it’s almost infuriating; I’m not even a man, and I can safely say that underneath all the lust was the tiniest smidge of envy.

But getting back on track -- it is at this juncture that he bent down to pick something off the floor, and I was lucky enough to witness the most famous buttcrack I have ever seen in my entire life. Good times! I have already forgotten 87% of what happened that weekend, but JDM’s intergluteal cleft will perpetually remain.

After this, most of my day consisted of staring at Norman Reedus’ face for 8 hours, so there’s not much else to say, other than a box of his free pizza ended up in my impoverished hands:

- “The only thing that tastes better than pizza is free pizza paid for by a rich person.” - Me, 2017.

Quite late in the game, Norman left to do photo ops. He was supposed to leave for them at 1.30pm and get back by 3pm, but since he’d been late at the beginning, it was now 3.50pm and he still wasn’t back. Only ten minutes until volunteers were allowed to roam semi-free out in the wilderness in the hunt for autographs.

Backstory time: I’ve been a Steven Ogg fan since GTA V came out. Trevor is, without a doubt, my favorite character of any videogame ever, and it’s all due to this talented man. I’ve been fawning over this dude for 5 years now. In fact, when the season 6 finale happened, I wasn’t fussed about Negan -- I was excited about Ogg being on the show (RECEIPT). Needless to say, I was DYING to meet him.

I’d checked his timetable earlier on, so I knew he had to leave at 4pm because he had a Savior panel half an hour later. But since Reedus wasn’t back yet, I went to Steven’s line ten minutes early, and, although it was already closed, he was still there greeting the last few people in his queue. All I had to do was put  some sad puppy eyes on and the guys working his line let me in. YAAASSS!

Good Lord, was I nervous. I went up to him and he made the mistake of asking for my name and trying to strike conversation lmao. I tried telling him something along the lines of, “all I wanted from this weekend was to meet you” (for some reason I thought this sounded good), but let’s just say that I’d suddenly forgotten how to string words together, and it all came out weird, and Pretty Bad, probably.

He was very nice, though, so he said thank you, and agreed to take pics. Please forgive my “I woke up at 4am” face:

I.

LOVE.

HIM.

- “Hurr de durr, me is big fan.”

Anyways. At this point I was on a high, and I suspected that Reedus wouldn’t be back for a while, so I tried to milk my freedom as much as possible.

I headed down to Scott Wilson’s table and queued for a while. When it was my turn to meet him, I went for the lame, cool guy handshake, even though I knew in my heart that all I wanted was the awkward hug. So we shook hands and then, a pit of regret settling in my gut, I was like, “Can I-- uh, aaaah, flaign,en-sten,” and he just went, “Oh, come on, GIMME A HUG!” And I certainly am one to please:

- “Mr Wilson, is it OK if I adopt you?” - *thumbs up*

After this, I surveyed who else was plausible without having to queue up for three hours, and decided to try and meet David Morrissey. His line was already closed because he was knackered, and he wanted to finish meeting the volunteers that had made it in time and just gtfo. However, I am one sneaky sausage and discreetly got in there without no one noticing, because... well, why the hell not.

Thirty seconds later, his manager, the desire to go home making his eyes glow, went to the back of the line, pointed at me and said, “You were last, yeah?”

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

- “Sorry I murdered your adoptive grandfather.”

After all this, I went back to Norman’s table and waited, but still kept an eye on Michael Cudlitz’s booth (I’m insatiable), because he was doing general public only and I didn’t know when he’d be done. Or even if he’d sign volunteers at all, to be fair.

At some point Reedus came back and continued with the signing, the meeting, and all of that paraphernalia. Dude was supposed to be done by 3pm, but still stayed until after 7pm so that he could get everyone.

Now, a piece of warning: this is going to turn into the Reedus gushing hour, so if you hate him (and Lord, some people really do), it’s okay, we’re all allowed to be wrong, you can go now, bye bye.

Norman Reedus is a massive ball of pure good-naturedness. I already suspected this (I have access to the internet), but seeing it unfold in real time throughout the span of an entire day just about confirmed my suspicions. I can give you that this is a successful guy, who, on top of everything, is getting paid to be there and listen to people tell him how awesome he is. Not the hardest of lives, methinks. But he still came across as such an incredibly attentive and kind person (when he really doesn’t have to be), that it was sort of amazing to watch. He went above and beyond what was required of him with every single attendee in his line. He met hundreds of people, and all of them with the same enthusiasm and interest. At the end he even agreed to meet those that didn’t have any tickets for the signing, and that had been waiting around and hoping all day. By this point he had already overstayed for four and a half hours. His people kept telling him to just shuffle everyone along quickly, and yet he still engaged with every single person that came up to him and held each of them up for minutes. He had hugs and sweet words for everyone. He was just plain awesome.

Okay, I had to get that off my chest. We can move on now.

Working at Reedus’ table was awesome and all, but at the end I was feeling a bit torn -- meeting Michael Cudlitz was one of my few original goals and I didn’t want to miss my chance. I had been looking at his table for about an hour now, but I still was unable to move -- I’d stuck by Norman’s booth for hours under the slightest, most uncertain chance that I might actually get to meet him at the end, so I certainly couldn’t leave now.

When Norman was finally finished, the venue was almost empty, and the vendors were packing up (awe, luck’ll have it, Michael, Josh, and JDM were still signing, too). We all sort of gathered around the area, and waited. Then Norman’s manager told us that, although please no pictures, everyone that had been working with him during the weekend could go up and say hi......... AND THAT WAS MEEEEEE!!!!1!!!111!!!!!1!!

So, I went to the table, and--trying to sound as normal and un-pathetic as possible here--he gave me a good ol’ hug and I fully, 100% died as a result. But just rest assured that I went Happy™. I decided to give him a WSC poster to sign for me, because the volunteer t-shirts were, quite frankly, hideous. But then he pointed to my top and offered to sign it anyway, so I was like, “SURE,” and I don’t want to point any fingers here, but dude went straight for the boob.

Then I walked away and perished for the rest of eternity.

- “Ines, would you like me to sign your boob?” - “SURE.”

Photographic evidence of Norman Reedus being exultant mere seconds after having met me.

- “You, com’ere... that volunteer sure was dashing, amiright?”

After this I ran down to where Michael Cudlitz and Josh McDermitt were STILL SIGNING GENERAL PUBLIC (they were always the first to arrive and the last to leave, God bless their pure souls and their tired eyes). Josh initially said no to meeting anyone else, and Michael accepted to take quick pics with us. But as we were all queueing up for Michael, Josh started walking down the line, signing everyone’s t-shirts and posing for selfies. Things turned semi-awkward when he grabbed my t-shirt and lifted it up to sign it, and then almost undressed me in the process (which he acknowledged and joked about, I am Blessed).

- “Hello, I am Negan, who is me. Did you know I have PhDs in biochemistry, as well as immunology and microbiology, and I’ve completed my doctorate which makes me a doctor? T. Brooks Ellis loves my hair, Human Genome Project, Negan, fighting weaponized diseases with weaponisfsjefbawdawfegh...”

Look at that glassy-eyed, jet-lagged look, bless. He was just the sweetest. I adore that guy, as much as you're allowed to adore someone you don’t actually know.

And then FINALLY, I got to meet Michael Cudlitz. MY DUDE! Abraham’s been one of my favorite characters for a while now and I’m still pissed they killed him off. He was obviously tired, but still nice, and I’m very grateful his kind heart agreed to meet us all, especially when there were LOADS of us. I can now say I have a picture with Michael Cudlitz’s smirk, friends! THE SMIRK™!

- “The absence of red in your hair upsets me, good Sir, but pleased to meet you.” - “Fuck off and wrap this up, I’m tired.”

And that’s all, folks. Then I went home and died for the third and final time. I am still in a deceased state as of now, but you can stay tuned.

At home, I briefly searched on the interwebs to see if I’d photobombed any of you guys’ pictures of Norman (yes, I am that sad), but sadly this is all I found:

- “I have the artistic prowess of a precocious three-year-old.” - Me, 2017.

Awe, I enjoyed that.

I’m thinking of volunteering again next year, and actually pay for, like, A SINGLE photo op, so you might as well blacklist me from existence now and save you the trouble of encountering another awful write up like this one in a year’s time.

(This was actually fun for me.)

PEACE x

[awesome-john-willi-blog]

At iPhotoLounge we provide innovative fun activities for your guests. We capture the most precious moments and make sure that your guests are having a great time with their loved once. Our fun creating photo booth service is available in Toronto, Woodbridge, Maple, Vaughan, Thornhill and the rest of the GTA.

[savetopnow]

2018-03-08 04 FUNNY now

FUNNY

Awkward Family Photos

Cat Fancy

Beast Mode

Beetle Barbie

The Wrestler

You Complete Me

Babylon Bee

IRS Still Waiting For Liberals To Voluntarily Mail Their Refund Checks Back

Mark Zuckerberg Finishes Morning Reading Of Favorite Devotional ‘1984’

Christian Rebel Coolly Drops H-Bomb Into Conversation Like It’s No Big Deal

Pope Leaves Factory Sticker On Hat To Garner Street Cred

Opinion: Gender Is A Social Construct, But Only Women Can Have An Opinion On Abortion, But You Can Change Your Gender If You Want, But Oh Wow The Room Is Spinning Please Send Help

McSweenys

Welcome to Newscycle: The World’s Most Exhausting Cycling Workout

List: A More Realistic AWP Schedule

Open Letter: An Open Letter to the Guy Who Didn’t Believe My Ethnicity Even Though It Was None of His Business

Every Episode of This is Us

List: Literary Pet Names Using Puns Unworthy of Their Namesakes

Passive Aggressive Notes

Coming soon, from Pixar…

Donna, bring a sweater

You can’t spare three squares?

Happy Birthday, and see you soon! xoxo, Cancer

Namaste, asshole.

Reddit Funny

Dammit Lennac!

When you enter the wrong GTA code

This Is What The Olympics Should Be

Made a hideout for my cats

Subway reading

Reddit Humor

Homophobia at its best (social interaction prank)

The Never-Ending PowerPoint: Part I

Father proud of otherwise good-for-nothing son’s first-rate cannabis farm

Jeremy Clarkson tries to be quiet for once

Comedian Adam Hills' horrifying yet hilarious Lisa Simpson costume

Sad and Useless

Facekini: The Swimwear Trend That Refuses To Die

Meet Luhu: The Saddest Cat In The World

Indisputable Proof That Cats Are Liquid

Alpacas With Incredible Hair

Famous Paintings Recreated With Cats

The Blogess

Why are there penises all over the garage: an attempted explanation

Break all your legs.

Someone get me a monkey

Life is complicated.

Follow up

The Hard Times

Bad Trip: Somehow Vice Knows I Just Took Acid And Won’t Stop Asking Me to Write About It

Aging Couple Praying Band Does Not Play Encore

Winning for Losers: How to Win at Camping by Being the Only Survivor

How Do I Explain to My 7 Year Old That His Goldfish Died but Steve-O Is Still Alive?

Host Graciously Offers Band One Damp Towel to Share

The Onion

5-Year-Old Explorer Makes Contact With Life-Forms In Adjacent Booth

Episode 5, Part 2: Did My Police Department Miss Something?

Gregg Popovich Berates Spurs For Missing Nation’s Descent Into Oligarchy

The West Swing

Going To Bed Last Thing Tempurpedic CEO Wants To Think About After Long Day At Work

Whiskey Leaks

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Redskins’ Owner Unveils Newly Acquired Team Logo

Self-Driving Uber Suspended After Touching Self In Front of Female Passenger

OP-ED: A Man Can’t Even Hug A Female Now Without Her Noticing That He’s Raping Her

[fearandloathingingtav]

These photographs of Trump’s inauguration look like something straight out of Fear and Loathing in GTA V.

[decorbyb-blog]

7 Interesting Branding Ideas to Efficiently Design an Event

With a progressive and extraordinary design approach, an event is a grand prospect to boost your brand in the front of a stay audience. It is a gateway to permit your customers recognize approximately the respect of your label. From tablespaces objects to Birthday party decor GTA, every layout and different detailing have to glorify your emblem message. The following event branding ideas are some effective and contemporary methods to make your emblem outshine within the crowd:

  Turn Your Employees Into Brand Ambassadors:

Your staffs are your biggest assets and are indeed the first place in which you may pass innovative to make your brand event glitzy and glamorous. From their outfits to frame language, everything has a crucial role to play.

  Create Photo Booths:

Photos are one of the most important factors of any event. People like to click on selfies and organization pics and post them on social media. It is a completely huge component for social media sharing will boom your logo visibility. To make it greater interesting, create picture zones and cubicles with thrilling Table decoration in GTA and history conserving your emblem's logo and tagline. This is one manner to make your attendees your brand suggest.

  Branding With Freebies:

Giveaways are any other essential factor of occasion branding. Attendees love gifts but this is wherein you can painting your creative side. Pick up gadgets which can be ultra-modern and amusing but at identical time will create memories. Think past mementos and coffee mugs.

  Food Branding:

Most people devour with our eyes first. Therefore, whilst it is a brand event, presentation of meals can nail it. Be it beverage and beverages or desserts, if you want to stand out, you can paintings wonders with food branding.

  Tell your Brand Story with a Short Video Content:

Of route, there may be a welcome speech or even vote of thank you, but don't engage your occasion with long speeches and showcasing written texts. Communicate with the attendees through a thrilling video. Videos do not consult with repeatedly showcasing virtual signage of your brand but, you may inform the group of your contemporary services and products. Even you may proportion some testimonials of these benefited with your merchandise.

  Knit Your Theme in Every Facet:

No rely what logo you are, you need to host a subject matter based totally event with a motive. Your subject matter and challenge have to have a reference to your brand and occasion is the satisfactory place to weave your mind and make people respect approximately your brand's USP.

  Include Fun Activities:

Designs, decorations, multimedia presentation, complementing clothing and food branding aren't sufficient to make an occasion a grand success.

  For more info:- Table decoration in GTA