OK, Chapter 4 was a pain in the ass. It was me and not the book though. I should have moved on through the chapter instead of letting myself get stuck on the "Diagonal Insertion control. The rest of the chapter went pretty well. The "Whoops!" control and "One-card Middle Pass" Look sweet But I still need to work on them. My tendency is to flash the bottom card as I start the "Whoops!" control. The pass has a completely different problem for me. As I prepare to pull the selected card to the bottom I should be moving my right hand to start the Dribble. But I keep starting it like a regular pass. That works itself out with a awkward pause then a deck lift and finally a nervous card Dribble. Each night they do get better. Sometimes I just want to perform perfectly the first time and not have to practice ever again. But hey I live in the real world. Back to the "Diagonal Insertion". It took a bit for me to catch on. I re-read the move and went over it step by step. Finally I got the finger positions right and that helped me catch the "Pinkie Break".
When I first glanced over the chapter I thought the "Peek Control" looked lame. After I started playing with it I thought it was awesome. What I love about it is how "honest" it is. Its another one of those moves that just feels ballsy. The whole things super simple and almost nothing but acting. It lets you bring out your personality. And that's the real star of a magic trick. You, the performer.
I moved on to Chapter 5 after I felt comfortable with the moves from chapter 4 and felt that I knew what I needed to polish with them. Force Techniques. I love these. My secret desire is to be able to force a card no matter what magic routine I do. No matter what it is I plan to do. I want to start off knowing the card I will find, have them find, or have them think of. Its a comfort thing. If I know the card then I feel like I performed correctly when the reveal is done. I don't trust myself. It's something I need to work on. So Learning the "Force" moves was fun. In particular I love the way the "Balducci Force" looks. The flip cuts make it look confusing and the "Ribbon Spread" makes it look beautiful. Its tight and clean. Out of the three techniques that's my favorite. Followed by the "Goldin Force" and then the "Crisscross Force". The "Goldin Force" looks clean and smooth when I've got the rhythm down. And when I get it locked in I will use that like it is going out of style. It is a perfect stand up walk around move.
If you get the chance play Batman: Arkham Asylum. The game is so fun and you feel like batman. I beat it this last weekend. So this will be a sort of review. You start off feeling like a Superhero and throughout the game you never loose that. Even when you get swamped in the boss fights. In allot of games you level up. In Batman you get and modify your equipment. In most games as you level up you can take on bigger and badder guys. As Batman you can take everyone from the beginning of the game. The equipment you get or upgrade just lets you start the fights in better ways. Or they let you take out thugs without ever getting in a fight. By the end of the game you feel like you could do anything as batman and you would do it upside down. You feel like the comic from PVPonline. The only time I had any problems was when I let myself get overrun by thugs while I was trying to get higher combo scores. I would have had a easier time with that if I had done more "Challenge rooms" by then. All in All I would say this game will be one of my favorite games for a long long time.
The other game I beat was Halo: ODST. It wasn't long. Took me about a week. Lets get a few things out of the way. I have never played a Halo game before. And the only other Xbox360 shooters I have is Gears of War (the first one) and I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1.
While this was more polished than the zombies game. It was not what I expected from this life changing series I had heard about. I had been told Gears of War was great but Halo was significantly better. While I do not agree with that I will say it was a pretty damn good game. If it had not been for the awesome voice work and the way they told the story, I would have never finished the game. This was supposed to be some event that was significant in our war with the Covenant. Still after playing the game I am not sure what exactly was so significant. I kept playing to see how everyone got back together. I was interested in the side characters. Not in the main character or the overall Halo story they didn't talk about. I wanted to play these guys more than I wanted to play my own guy. The Stuff each guys says while fighting gave them personality. Especially Buck (voiced by Nathan Fillion). I wanted to see how he held his squad together in a messed up situation like that. And when it ended I was OK with it. It was a good story. If they make second game in this ODST line I will probably get it. I might even get Halo 3 Later on. I did not get to play the Multi player games. I don't know anyone else with the game so I can play the firefight mode. The Halo 3 multi player disk is cool but when I went to put it in all I could do was think how the controls were clunkier than both Gears and SOCOM. So I figured I could just play those.
So there we go, a good week of practice and two damn good games.
Terry
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