Truely Gruelly

I finished doing my taxes today. That does not make for a fun time. It makes for a pain in my ass. I hadn't kept up with putting my receipts into my database so I had to do year's worth. I caught up for this year too. Now I have to send the government a check. Not a fun day all around.

I had some fun watching a few of movies this week. They were a varied bunch of films and they were all okay. I saw "Shanghai Kiss" which was an odd little love story. A twenty something year old guy who is drifting aimlessly through life meets a teenager who has a crush on him. He's a bit of a loser and can't figure out why this girl would like him. They're just friends because of her age. Then the guy goes to Shanghai where a relative has died and left him a house. He decides to stay there a while and gets an age appropriate Shanghai girlfriend. Soon he decides to go back to the States to see his young hottie. Not your usual romance. It was strange, quiet, and unpredictable. I enjoyed it.

I also saw the black and white director's cut of "Mist". It's yet another Steven King book adapted for the screen. Most of those aren't very good but I liked this one. A storm sweeps through a small town and leaves this mist behind. Turns out there are monsters in the mist and a bunch of people have to hide in a grocery store and figure out what to do. Try and find help or stay put. Some cool monsters, people acting monstrous, and gruesome deaths. One of the better King adaptations that I've seen.

"Cherry Crush" was the third movie I watched this week. It was the weakest of the three but still okay. A prep school kid with a talent for photography gets involved with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Intrigue, introspection, and murder happens and that prep school kid has to figure out what to do. It had a kind of film noir quality to it. Not the visuals but the attitude. An okay distraction after tax day.

I don't know what happened to my spam filters this week. A lot of spam seems to be getting through. Strangely it's coming through in twos. Two pieces of mail from the same place with two different subjects. Or sometimes the same subject. Kind of weird. I wonder if the spammers came up with some new trick to get their stuff through. It's been annoying. Seven hundred pieces of spam in my box today. Only about 25 of them got through the filter but that's way more than usual.

I ordered a part for my stationary bike five weeks ago. It's the V belt that makes the wheel go around. It takes the place of the chain on a real bike. It took them two weeks to get me the wrong part, promised to get me the right one two weeks ago, and now they promise me the right part next week. We'll see. I've started getting outside on my road bike in those five weeks but it's still cold out there and my strength and stamina aren't anywhere near they were at the end of last fall. I always have to start small again in the springtime. All the world's a circle.

I'm a water drinker. Right from the tap usually (don't believe the hype of companies that want to sell you water in a bottle). For some reason I don't like anything sweet to drink. Or anything carbonated. Usually it's just water and occasionally milk. I was in Manhattan last week and as I was catching the bus home I was thirsty and wanted a drink. Being nowhere near a water fountain (yes they still have those) I decided to buy something to drink. I hate buying bottled water so I decided to get one of the flavored waters (aren't all soft drinks flavored water?). I bought the Dasanti raspberry one and was surprised that I liked it. It wasn't sweet at all and had a mild raspberry flavor. The next time I was at my local super market I checked for it. The stuff is about $3.50 and change for a six pack of bottles. Gasoline is cheaper. No wonder companies spend so much money convincing people to buy bottled water from them. I'll stick to tap water thank you.

Now that I've paid last years taxes I have to start saving for a new computer. Oh, what fun. My tower is from 2002 and is a bit long in the tooth. Some really complicated Illustrator files have been testing it's limits lately and I want to crunch some video so it's about time for a new one. A new tower will run me about three grand. Maybe this summer I can swing it. Now you know why I don't buy bottled water.

Speaking of buying things I need a new coat for the spring. I like a good sports coat but they aren't cheap. Well they are if you get them off of Ebay. I got my last one there for $20. It's adequate but not magnificent. That coat has never been a favorite of mine. I bought it on a whim when I was really broke. My favorite I wore for years and the lining is shot. I wonder if I can get that lining replaced? I'd like a nice linen coat but I'm tired of the rumpled look. I never liked that look much despite having a linen sport coat for years. Ah well, that's what's been going on around here.

Comics I Bought March 27, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 4 new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Berlin - 15

The Authority Prime - 6

Savage Dragon - 135

Usagi Yojimbo - 110

Shanna The She-Devil HC (I decided I needed some Frank Cho in my collection)

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Godland - Celestial Edition One" by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli

I just went back and looked so I know it was August 2006 when I sampled an issue of "Godland". It was issue twelve, which is the end of this book, and I wasn't too fond of it. I didn't hate it either but it left me cold. Last year when they put out this oversized hardcover collected edition I figured maybe I'll give it a try from the beginning. I'm glad I did because I like it much better now.

In "Godland" the writer (Joe Casey) and artist (Tom Scioli) are working in the tradition of the Jack Kirby "cosmic" comic. That is a path that not many have chosen but they do it justice here. When I first read issue twelve back in the summer of '06 it read to me as a second rate Kirby story. I saw nothing special that interested me. In reading the whole story I see that they really do have interesting ideas of their own that they bring to the table.

"Godland" is the story of an astronaut, Commander Adam Archer, who was part of a disastrous mission to Mars where he was the lone survivor. Plus was given cosmic powers by some space aliens who were waiting for him on the red planet. He comes back to Earth and decides to become a super hero. He has his three sisters with him as his support team and soon an alien who looks like a giant dog shows up to help Archer find his purpose in the cosmic scheme of things.

I'm not one of those people who find the villains more interesting than the heroes but this book has some really interesting villains. They don't actually fight Commander Archer very much as they are busy pursuing their own agendas which don't usually include fighting super heroes. Except for the crazy lady who just wants to inflict pain.

There is plenty of imagination in this book. Lots of interesting characters and there are plots and subplots aplenty. The writing is quite smart. A sense of humor runs throughout that adds a lot to the story. Clearly those involved love Kirby's work but don't just want to ape him. They want to express their own ideas on the "Cosmic". That's what I missed the first time when I only read issue twelve.

Scioli is really doing his best to draw in the 1970's Kirby Cosmic school and sometimes it gets distracting. Don't get me wrong, I do think the art looks nice and works most of the time, but when he swings and misses it's painful. Especially in the earlier issue he uses some Kirby shapes and shading in such inappropriate ways that it comes off as a third rate imitation that's startling. He misses the point of why Kirby used those shapes like he did. Over all I think the art works nicely and only mention this because a few panels hit me hard.

I am definitely glad I gave "Godland" another try because I liked it much better having read the whole story rather than just the twelfth part. It is a well done book that not only mines a tradition that has been neglected lately but adds some new stuff to that tradition. Check it out.

Hail to the Boom Box in All Its Lost Glory!

I've always been a fan of the boom box. The portable stereo, radio, eight track player, cassette player, CD player, or any combination of the above depending on which era it was. I was never a home stereo guy.

As a kid/teenager I used to drag my boom box along with me to lots of places. Mainly outside around the neighborhood to listen to music on a nice summer day as we played stickball or some other game. I also brought it with me to work during my high school years when I was a dishwasher and later on an assistant cook. I used to ride my bike to work so I'd strap my boom box onto my belt by its handle and it would hang off of my hip as I pedaled. Who would have thought that you could ride a bike so easily with a boom box?

I had a variety of different boxes (box is short for boom box "Bring your box" was the phrase) over the years and I liked most of them. But the early nineties was the end of the boom box era. I think the boom box's demise was because of two things. The Walkman type music player that you listen to with headphones took over as the way most people listened to portable music and the decline of the cassette tape.

Both things are intertwined. First off it was usually one or two people in any given group who always brought the boom box everywhere. Everyone didn't have one. It was a commitment. If two boom boxes where some place usually the better one was listened to. Guys would take turns and swap music in and out but it was generally obvious which boom box was the best and that's the one you went with.

It was easy to swap music in and out of the boom box with cassette tapes. They were rugged. As long as you didn't touch the magnetic tape on the bottom you could toss them around. The weren't precious objects. When the compact disc came along you got better music fidelity but CDs, which were said to last forever, are pretty delicate. They have to be handled correctly. Swapping them back and forth wasn't easy as you had to be fussy and some were inevitably fussier than others. A recipe for conflict.

And it wasn't the guys with boom boxes, the music lovers, who first adopted CDs. It was the technology lovers and the rich kids. During my junior year of college (1986-87) I had a discussion with a couple of real music fans. CD players were still expensive and few people at my school had them. These two music fans were complaining that all the rich kids had expensive new stereos with CD players. They further observed that the music was totally wasted on these kids. All of them had thousand dollars stereos and two CDs. One of which was always Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". They both claimed they'd rather have lesser stereos and more music. One even claimed to have listened to his music through a telephone hand set that he rigged up. It was the only speaker he had at the time. He still enjoyed his music on it. That was a guy who loved his music.

If you were the boom box guy you had a lot of your music collection in the form of cassettes. Even if you made them yourself from your record collection. You didn't want to have to switch over to a new format. That's expensive. Plus it was over a decade before the average Joe could make his own mix CD. The boom box stuck around a little while because of the custom mix cassette tape. I saw guys on St. Marks's Place in the Village (NYC) selling mix cassettes on the street as late as the mid 90's. They were the last holdouts.

You can tell a product is going out of fashion because the companies that make them put less and less energy into their design and manufacture. Boxes from the early eighties were a sight to behold. All of the electronic companies had their best engineers and designers working on the boom boxes. There were some crazy nice music machines. But them all of those industrial designers moved over into the portable headphone driven CD machines. Boom boxes died. Or at least got mediocre and boring.

I listened to my music for years on my ugly, boring, crappy, Aiwa CD boom box. I never brought it anywhere since I stopped being a teenager so it's portableness became pointless. I still don't have a proper stereo setup. I have a receiver that a friend gave me and my speakers are from cast off boom box/shelf system stereos. That's hooked up to my TV by I listen to most of my music on my Harmon Kardon computer speakers.

I, of course, have an iPod like everyone these days. I've been noticing a nice little boom box renaissance in all of the iPod compatible boom boxes that companies are making. Companies are putting their talent and technology into this new boom box type and have been making some impressive models. At least according to the reviews I've read. The iPod really make the world go 'round these days. I don't have one of these boxes yet but I'm tempted. I want to relive my boom box glory days. "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen was a classic boom box song.

Comics I Bought: March 20, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 1 new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Ex Machina - 35

"The Saga of the Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances" (Yeah, I dug around the shop until I found this. I couldn't leave with just one comic!)

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Antoine Sharpe is The Atheist Incarnate" by Phil Hester, John McCrea, and Will Volley

I picked this book up having never heard of the series it collects (issues 1-4). I'm not that familiar with it's authors, though I recognize their names, but the artwork looked okay and I liked the basic premise written up on the back cover. The lead character, Antoine Sharpe, is a brilliant skeptic who, as an independent contractor, debunks things for the US government. I'm a fan of debunking. What's more fun than ruining some con man's fun? Penn and Teller's "Bullshit" is a favorite show of mine. And who can forget that PBS show where; I think it was the Amazing Randi (a real life debunker) went to Russia to check out a health spa run by crazy Russians who "charged" water with their minds to make it into health water. Good stuff debunking.

Strangely enough, upon reading the book, I discovered there was no actual debunking going on. For the first time in his career, Antoine Sharpe, runs into a real supernatural threat. That is a fairly common plot where fictional debunkers are concerned. It usually annoys me and started to here but then I was quickly turned around by the more original elements in the story. That and the overall execution of the comic which was done well.

You see the dead have found a way to inhabit the bodies of the living. And they want to live in Winnipeg. That causes a real big problem for the living. Especially the Winnipegers. Antoine Sharpe is called in to figure out what the hell is going on. He loves figuring things out. It's what makes him tick.

That's all you need to know about the plot. The story has some interesting characters, twists and turns, and kept me involved the whole way. The first three issues are drawn by John McCrea and the last by Will Volley. Volley does his best to match McCrea's style and generally succeeds so it all hangs together nicely as one piece despite the change in artists.

I'll have to put this book in the "pleasant surprise" category being that I was so unfamiliar with it yet enjoyed it thoroughly. If you're looking for a good read in an X-Files or John Constantine sort of way check this book out. It's from Desperado Publishing and is labeled as horror. Well worth tracking down.

You Gotta Love the Super Bowl!

I'm a New York Giants fan so this was a great football season for me. Well, maybe not the whole season because the G-Men played some games that were pure torture to watch as they barely hung on to win (they lost some too) against teams that, on paper, they should have had an easier time with. But then they got hot, played well in playoffs against some good teams, and went on and beat the unbeaten Patriots to win Super Bowl 42 (screw Roman numerals which are actually Etruscan numerals). A story book season. The teams first championship since January 1991. Hooo-Rah!

I downloaded the highlights of the Super Bowl from iTunes plus I video captured ESPN's post Super Bowl highlights show. I've watched them a couple of times and they do a descent job of telling the story of the game but the highlights are missing something. On some occasions the low-lights are really needed to tell the story of the game. The Giant's final game winning drive needs the low-lights to really tell the story.

It was a low scoring Super Bowl but it was filled with excitement. Every down was packed with intensity because both teams were playing well and both teams were capable of big plays at any moment. On offense and defense. The Patriots coach, Bill Bill Belichick even made coming back from commercial after a Patriots punt exciting as he threw the red challenge flag and made the refs go to the video replay because the Patriots noticed a Giant player didn't get off the field in time. Going into the fourth quarter the Giants were down 7-3 but then they put together a nice scoring drive to go up 10-7. The Patriots soon answered with a scoring drive and a touchdown of their own to pull ahead 14-10 with just over two minutes left in the game.

The Patriots scoring drive was a thing of beauty. A classic NFL drive where the quarterback spreads the ball around and the team marches down the field on eight to twelve yard plays. Tom Brady and the Patriots offense looked in peak form on that drive. They were unstoppable in a way that is familiar to all NFL fans as they've watched Joe Montana, John Elway, Brett Favre, and many other quarterbacks put together drives just like that to win games. In those kind of drives almost every play is a highlight.

In contrast the low-lights in the Giant's game winning drive need to be seen in order to put the highlights in context. The Giant's game winning drive was not a classic NFL thing of beauty drive. It was a chaotic, frenetic, unpredictable bit of football. Both teams were playing as hard as they could and throwing their bodies around recklessly because the game was on the line. The Patriots defense disrupted the Giants offense on a few occasions and the designed play went out the window as guys had to improvise and just play sand lot football.

Some of the low-lights: 1) On the Giants first set of downs they failed to make any yards on their first two plays and ended up have to go for it on fourth down. The game was on the line and they barely made the first down. 2) Eli Manning threw a pass that was almost intercepted. It bounced off of the defenders fingertips and if he had held on the Patriots would have won. 3) Eli Manning almost fumbled the ball away as he was tackled from behind after a short run. 4) Following the spectacular escape and catch by Manning and Tyree a second pass to Tyree bounced off of a defenders hands. Yet another potential interception that didn't happen. Another chance for the game to end but it didn't. 5) Finally, before Steve Smith's catch to make a key third and eleven conversion we have the two unsuccessful plays that got them to third and eleven. I think one of them was the almost interception I just mentioned and the other a sac as Eli ran for his life.

Most of the Giant's low-lights were dramatic and showed how hard both teams were trying to win the game. The low-lights were not the Giant's botching plays but the Patriots making plays. It was a near thing and on a couple of plays the game was decided by inches.

It was a game winning drive for the ages but a truly unique one. Both sides were playing their hearts out. The defense was creating chaos as the offense was trying to create order. I think in most game winning drives order wins over chaos. What makes the Giant's game winning drive so different is that order didn't so much win over chaos as order adjusted to chaos and tried to ride the wave chaos created. It was a crazy anything could happen drive and just the highlights don't tell the story.

By the way I watched the whole game winning drive the other day and the two minutes of game time when the Giants had the ball took about twenty minutes of real time. And that is without the commercials. That's how long the craziness went on. long live the craziness.

Comics I Bought: March 13, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 2 new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Palookaville - 19 (It's always an occasion when a new Palookavile comes out)

The Walking Dead - 47

Avengers Assemble Vol 1

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Sight Unseen" by Robert Tinnell and Bo Hampton

Here is a book I found on the shelves of my local comic shop as I was trying to find something to buy on a slow week. I had never heard of the writer, Robert Tinnell, before but the artist's name, Bo Hampton, was familiar but I haven't seen his name on a comic in quite a while. I flipped through it, it looked intriguing, and I bought it.

"Sight Unseen" is about ghosts. Specifically it is about a blind scientist who works in the field of optics and created a pair of glasses that allow him to see ghosts. Along with his assistant they are collecting data on the glasses and ghosts so they can present them in a paper to the defense department. These guys are not TV style ghost hunters but real scientists involved in real science. Needless to say things don't stay neat and scientific as murder, mystery, and real scary ghosts enter the picture.

The art was moody and atmospheric but sometimes looked sloppy. Some of the computer effects that were used in the coloring looked cheesy and didn't work well. Overall I liked the artwork but I question some of the artist's decisions.

Oh, and the lettering is horrible. Randy would be repulsed by it.

The writing is quite good. We get a bunch of interesting characters besides the two scientists and an interesting plot. I've seen and read a bunch of ghost stories but this one made the genre its own. It wasn't the same old straight forward haunting story or the you can see it coming a mile away twist ending ghost story.

The style the whole book was done in was kind of unusual. They seemed to be going for that quick image Japanese horror movie style that came on the scene a few years ago with "The Grudge", "The Ring", and "The Eye". I didn't think that type of style could be adapted very well to a comic but it was mostly successful. It didn't alway work as some of the bad effects I mentioned before came as part of the attempt to make this style work. Nice try though.

If you like your comics straight forward and traditional then look somewhere else. But if you, like me, enjoy searching out the new an experimental check out this book and see if it floats your boat. I liked it.

Saint Razamataz

Ahhh... pondering the imponderables of life. That's my game. A past time in which I like to indulge. Today's imponderable is, "Why do I write better at night than during the day?". What makes that an imponderable is that I'm a morning person. Always have been. I've been working at home the last couple of years and I get up at 7 AM and am working by 8 AM. I get the most done in the morning. That's when I'm the freshest. That's when I'm the peppiest. That's when I'm my most productive.

When I'm working on some piece of artwork I make most of my big creative decisions in the morning.That leaves the day for their execution. When I'm working on an oil painting I always mix my colors in the morning. Works best for me. The light is better and so is my concentration. The morning is when I think straight. So why is it that I write better at night?

Now certainly I don't write better late at night. And by late at night I mean an hour before or anytime past my bedtime. I'm useless when I'm tired. My mind gets all jumbled up and nothing makes sense. But I'm not speaking of that time. The time I mean is before bedtime when the sun goes down and the world quiets down a bit. Maybe that's the key. A little quiet.

As I'm working on the computer, easel, or drawing board I don't like it quiet. I work by myself so I need some noise to keep me company. I usually have on movies, music, TV shows, documentaries, or the Stern show. I don't actually watch the TV but I do listen to it. That's why I like shows that are dialogue based rather than action based. I find it easy to concentrate on my work while listening to something. As a matter of fact the noise helps me concentrate because I find silence distracting as my mind will wander into it searching for its edges. Of course there is really not much silence here in this world. Just sounds you have to concentrate a little more to hear. And as I'm drawing in the quite I strain to hear those sounds. Ruins my focus. When I'm writing the complete opposite is true.

I need things a little quieter when I'm writing. TV, music, talking, it's all a distraction when I'm trying to concentrate on words. I have to shut it all off or shut it all out. Writing with the TV on in a near impossibility. Things are a little quieter around here at night so maybe that's why it's easier to write.

Then there's the fact that I usually work standing up. My drawing table, easel, and even my desktop computer are all at standing height. But I've always had trouble writing while standing. It hurts to write standing for some reason. I can't block out the little aches and pains of the day when writing. I have to sit down. I started writing with a lot more regularity once I got this laptop back in '04 (time flies). I can sit down with it. Night is my time for sitting so sitting during the daytime and writing is a bit strange to me. The day is my time for standing and working. It's all so ephemeral. Who knows why these things are as they are?

So there is my pondering the imponderable for the day. I don't know if I'm any closer to a real answer but what the hell, examining the small things in life is what gets me through. And by the way, I'm writing this in the morning as a change of pace and it sure is hard. I'll have to look it over when the sun goes down.

Comics I Bought: March 6, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 1 new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Buffy Season Eight - 12

"Red Prophet: Tales of Alvin Maker Vol. 2"

And now for a review of something I've read this week.

"The Ultimates Volume 1" by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch

Did this really come out in 2002? Has it been that long? Yes it was and yes it has. I read the first five or so issues of this when it originally came out but this is the first time I've read the whole thing. Back then I found it to be alternately good and then a train wreck. I still hold that opinion having finally read the whole thing.

The good: first of all the art is top shelf super-hero stuff. From the pencilling to the inking to the coloring to the lettering everybody was talented and bringing their A game. Bryan Hitch does an excellent job bringing a verisimilitude to the world of the Ultimates that makes the reader want to believe everything is really happening.

The writing also has it's strong points with snappy dialogue, some plot twists, and powerful moments but it is the writing that is also the train wreck. "The Ultimates" falls into what I call the "cool moment" style of writing. A lot of the plot revolves around a cool moment that is usually a reveal of some kind. Unfortunately to really succeed with the cool moment it has to be preceded buy a bunch of dull moments. So we get a lot of pages of the characters standing around talking in a not very interesting way and then, bam, a splash page of something cool happening. The cool part usually works but at the price of the dull parts.

But the parts of the book that are really a train wreck are when the writer and artist compromise the reality the are trying to create. Such as when the Wasp criticizes Giant Man's costume as not having a good (or any) designer. Clearly Bryan Hitch spent a lot of time designing the Giant Man costume. It's a complicated, layered, though out, and nice design. That costume was used in a lot of the Ultimates ads because it was well done and original. Yet here the writer insults it for being poorly designed. Truly a disconnect.

Another costume related disconnect is Hawkeye and the Black Widow. They are the undercover black ops branch of the Ultimates. But there the are on there way to a mission walking down the streets of Manhattan clad in black leather from head to toe. I've walked down many a Manhattan street and that is not an outfit for undercover work. Very few people work in S & M leather bars.

I could go on and on with examples of the writer and artist undermining the reality they've tried to create but I've had enough. Maybe it's because lately I've been reading a lot of Jack Kirby's very imaginative work but I found a lack of imagination in "The Ultimates". It's hard to compete with Kirby's imagination I know but with a little more of it "The Ultimates" could have been much better.

"The Ultimates" is not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination and the "cool moments" parts really do work but expect some "what the hell?" moments too. If you only have to pay fifteen bucks for the whole series it's worth a read. I have volume two to read now. Maybe later.

Call of Doody! (Heh, heh, heh)

I just picked up Call of Duty 2 for the XBox 360. A used copy for only twelve bucks. That's how I prefer my video games. Cheap. My days of getting the newest games hot off the shelves are over. Video games ceased being worth fifty bucks a pop to me a long time ago. And now they're sixty bucks a pop. Thirty bucks is my upper limit now. I usually only spend that on spend that on certain new Nintendo DS games that I like a lot and I know are guaranteed to please. Otherwise I have no need to be on the video game cutting edge anymore.

I've been playing Call of Duty 3 for a little while now. That one was twenty bucks used. Since playing number three I've read that number two is supposed to be better so I'll give it a go. I've been enjoying number three but I've reached a point where I'm bored with it. That's because of the repetition of not being able to get past a certain point.

I have many pet peeves with video games and one of the biggest is "Saving". That's when you want to put the game down, do something else, and then come back to pick up where you left off. Some games do that perfectly well. But in others you have to find a "Save point" or reach the end of a level in order to save a game. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. In Call of Duty 3 it's become a problem.

First of all I never play video games on the default "Normal" level of difficulty. I usually crank things up a notch to "Hard". On some games there is a "Really, really hard" setting but I don't go there. That's for the hardcore crazy skilled players. I've played a lot of video games over the years and "Normal" is just too easy for me.

In Call of Duty 3 you go on "Missions" (the game is a WW2 combat game) and sometimes there are save points in the middle of the missions and sometimes not. Either way I can't just hit "Save" and come back latter to my exact spot. This leads to a lot of repetitive game play. I had to do a couple of missions over and over. Not just the hard spots but all the things leading up to the hard spots too. Since this only happened once or twice in the game it wasn't too annoying. But now I've had to try and complete this last mission I'm on too many times in a row. Boredom has set in.

It's longer than the other missions, deadly as hell, and kind of unclear. I understand what to do up to a certain point but then I just die in a hail of German gunfire. And have to start over again and spend five to ten minutes getting back to where I just was. After half an hour of that I'm bored. If I could save my progress up until the point I get killed I could figure things out but that's not how the game is made. Instead the repetition make me stop playing. "Saving" should never be the challenge of the game. But in plenty of games it is. I was enjoying myself most of the game. Otherwise I wouldn't have purchased In Call of Duty 2 but Call of Duty 3 is still a disappointment in the end.

One of the things I like about Call of Duty 3 is the fact that there are no "Health packs". In a lot of video games you have a "Health meter" (it's a cliché now). As you get hit the meter goes down. When it reaches zero you die. You can refill your meter with "health packs" or some such. This works in some games, like Zelda, but in a lot of these modern "realistic" type games it's out of place. The game makers create a highly rendered well thought out environment filled with imagination and once again you're forced to spend half of your time looking for health packs. Never again for me. I prefer games like Halo or Call of Duty 3 where you are either dead or alive. In Call of Duty 3 you could take a few minor hits but one bullet can kill you. No searching for "Health packs" ever. I like that.