Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

You don't have to change a lot from the first modern warfare to make the second one just as good, and that's what Infinity Ward did. They played it safe, and stuck to the basics that make this game great. A solid roughly eight hour campaign, great online gameplay, and a new feature called Special Ops, where players gain stars for completing various missions. In the campaign, a player can choose between recruit, regular, hardened or veteran difficulty. Forewarning, if you dare to do hardened or veteran, be prepared to have your patience tested. The game is not easy, and beating it on hardened or veteran will get you a gold trophy on ps3. The campaign has a variety of missions, such as stealth, breaching, and just straight out "run and gun" missions. The main goal of the campaign is to take out a man named Makarov who is responsible for the current war between the Russians and the U.S. I won't give anything away, but nearing the end, the game picks up, and it gets pretty damn fun (and tough). The online is not a lot different from Modern Warfare, but it's new maps are a blast to play on. I still can't wait to play the map Wastelands again so I blow up some people lying in a bunker with my M203 Launcher haha. The online multiplayer is fast paced, exciting, and creative. You can fight however you want, and with whatever perks you want. If you want to have increased knifing range, you equip the perk Commando. If you want to be able to run continuously without tiring, you equip marathon. The variety is endless. Whether you want to blow stuff up with grenades, snipe from afar, or knife your way to victory, online gives you the option to choose whatever you want.

The special ops is a new featured added to the call of duty's which players do missions in order to gain stars. The player gains 1 star for beating a mission on regular, 2 stars for beating it on hardened, and 3 for beating it on veteran. There are five different tiers of missions, all getting increasing harder all the way up to the finale, which is killing 15 Juggernauts. Trust me, killing one Juggernaut on veteran is difficult enough. Infinity Ward even says in the description of the level "Is this really even possible?"

Overall, the game is not that different from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but it didn't need to be. COD4 got it right the first time, and all MW2 had to do was keep everything good, and leave out the bad. A must have. 90/100

Avatar

Hello again. It's been a long while since I've reviewed a video game or movie, and I figured it's about time I start doing it again.

Avatar

With a budget nearing 300 million, it seemed highly unlikely that James Cameron's Avatar would make a profit, but it did. It really did. Avatar is now the highest grossing film nationally and internationally. It just recently topped Titanic for the highest grossing film. Titanic, which was also directed by James Cameron, grossed 1.2 billion worldwide, while Avatar, being in theaters only eight weeks, has already accumulated over 1.7 billion. So what is it about Avatar that made it so much money. Was it the overdone advertising, such as Avatar Coke Zero, the Mcdonald’s gift cards, and the millions of commercials, or was it something else?

The first week Avatar was released it made about seventy million. Spiderman 3 made over 110 million it’s first weekend and made nowhere near the amount of money that Titanic made. If you think about it, a movie never makes more money the following week after opening weekend. But Avatar did. It made a lot more. There’s really one explanation to why it made more the following weeks: word of mouth. People really enjoyed the movie. And there’s good reason why. Avatar is visually the most spectacularly film ever made. The world of Pandora takes the film goer on a journey, and it’s no longer a movie. It’s an adventure, and you’re right there with the Na’vi (Natives of Pandora).

The main premise of the movie is about a handicapped U.S. military soldier trying to negotiate with the Na’vi to leave their territory so the military can drill up their land for a rare material named ununtanium. The plot is somewhat predictable, but the plot isn’t really what makes the movie good. The visuals make up for any holes in the plot. The whole world of Pandora is absolutely spectacular. The various animals, the vegetation, the floating mountains, are all so believable. In a logical sense, we understand that this is just cinema, and none of this is possible, but our creative self wants to believe it is real. We want to believe Pandora is real just as we want Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to be real. Avatar deserves all the attention it is getting, and if it doesn’t win the Oscar for best visual effects, I will be highly surprised. 90/100