Fight Night Picks

Nate Quarry vs Jorge Rivera - Two guys nearing the end of the career that have put together winning streaks, but I see Quarry as the favorite. I think his wrestling will be too much for Rivera and he should control the fight handily. Guessing a TKO by ground and pound.

Ross Pearson vs Dennis Siver - Here's a potential fight of the night. Pearson looked excellent in his proper UFC debut, putting on a striking clinic against Aaron Riley. Siver has won four in a row, two by highlight-reel spinning back kick knockout. Both these guys can go hard, but I'm feeling Pearson by TKO, but I could see this one going the distance and being close.

Roy Nelson vs Stefan Struve - Still gunning for that Burger King endorsement, Big Country tries to topple the Skyscraper. I should write for MMA websites. Anyway, I just don't see Struve being able to do anything against Nelson's weight advantage and substantial grappling ability. Nelson's striking has received attention after his knockout of Brendan Schaub, and Struve will have to use his reach to keep Nelson on the outside or he'll have that to worry about too. I would say Nelson will have to watch Struve's length on the ground, but I think Nelson is too sharp for that. Nelson by TKO.

Kenny Florian vs Takanori Gomi - Hmm, I'm still trying to figure out why the UFC signed Gomi. The guy is a legend, but he hasn't been relevant in what, three years? He was always so popular in Japan that the only way he would ever fight outside the country would have to be in some promotional swap (like Aoki is doing with Strikeforce) or if he had faded away. Does the UFC think Gomi has revitalized his career and can make a run at the lightweight belt and get a rematch with BJ Penn? (Incidentally, did you know Penn has not been taken down by a lightweight in six years? Cage Potato keeps bringing it up and it amazes me every time.) They must, because I think they're throwing him to the wolves by putting him in against Florian, arguably the second best lightweight in the world. I don't think Gomi's striking is as sharp as it used to be and I don't see any way Florian doesn't pick him apart on the feet. If Gomi tries to draw on his wrestling base he faces some serious jiu-jitsu. Florian by submission.

Mass Effect 2 Review

Mass Effect 2 is a superior game to its predecessor and Bioware should be given credit for fixing the majority of the serious issues with the original. More importantly, they made some key overhauls that not only better the game, but make it different from the first Mass Effect, so you are not playing the same game with different characters or story. Due to me being uncreative, here are some bullet lists.

THE GOOD

• Primary shooter/secondary RPG. This is the biggest change between the two Mass Effects. The first was an RPG first and a shooter second. This relegated the combat to underdevelopment. It looked great in previews and test runs, but seemed around halfway there when released. Fortunately Bioware looked at this and took the steps to fix it. Mass Effect 2 now plays fully like the 3rd-person cover shooter made popular by Gears of War. The cover system has been improved from its near-unusable state in Mass Effect to the key component of combat. Unlike the first game, you cannot just run straight into enemies and mow them down. Careful management of cover is required to survive and the controls to use it work well. The way ammunition works is different too. Formerly, weapons had unlimited ammo but had an overheat gauge. This was a decent idea but fell apart when you realized ammo management was unnecessary. Now weapons do use ammo, but they all use a single type that enemies will drop. While this seems like the new false front, it makes sense because of the six possible class types for your character and their limitations on what weapons they can use. Specific ammo types would create the details that Mass Effect 2 sheds. Building on this, the micromanagement of equipment has been removed. You will only upgrade to different weapons in the same class (like getting a different assault rifle or shotgun from the one you currently have) a few times, and the new one is always better. Instead, weapons as a type can be upgraded for your whole squad and you can change up your armor but not the armor of your squad. I'll discuss why I think this might be a little too much later, but overall I feel like the emphasis on squad combat while still keeping the RPG elements that worked best (the dialogue wheel, exploration, and tech/biotic abilities) makes Mass Effect a well-balanced and stronger product.
• The AI of your companions seems improved in combat. I only have one trip through the game under my belt, but the improvement is so exceptional I am assuming it is constant. Your teammates will usually move to cover if they are being attacked and often move up and use different angles intelligently. This is opposed to Mass Effect, where the common strategy was to run into the middle of the area and take fire from every enemy until death. The friendly AI actually is friendly now, instead of a nuisance you have to manage so they cannot screw you over.
• The environmental design has expanded. The game areas are now varied graphically and the level design is different in every area. Mass Effect suffered from two or three standard level layouts and designs that were monotonous mere hours into the game.
• The graphics look excellent and avoid the old technical hiccups. This point is a good compliment to the new level sections. Really the graphics follow more from the original, which looked nice at the time. Faces in particular are vastly more detailed and well-animated. The framerate holds steady and most importantly the ridiculous texture pop-in from the first game is gone. To be fair, it is present in some instances, but it is hardly noticeable and resolves in a second or less, opposed to the beginning of conversations being marred by it in the original.
  
• The side quests have been fleshed out more. Specifically, each of your squad's "spotlight" missions have received a big upgrade and carry significant consequences depending on how they play out. Various interactive scenes replace the skeleton combat scenario with maybe a choice at the end. Particular highlights include an interrogation, working from within an assassination, and trying to tempt someone from out of hiding and trap them in a nightclub.
  
• It is plain cool to play a game where choices you made in a previous game directly affect everything. Relationship choices, life/death choices, and how you treated the world in general can show up. Fortunately this is somewhat restrained, as you are not given constant updates or appearances from every character or old quest you did, which would feel over-the-top and not befitting the huge universe.
• They took out the MAKO. If you've never played Mass Effect, count yourself lucky you missed this. The MAKO was a six-wheeled vehicle that you drove around in during several story missions and in general anytime you dropped from space onto a planet. It had some weapons and often you were tasked with killing enemies while in it. Unfortunately it was badly developed, out of place within the traditional framework, and frustrating as hell to control. Oh, and if you flipped it, your whole party died. It does not matter that this rarely happened, because it happened to everyone at least once, which is ridiculous. It might be hard to understand how annoying it was unless you played the game, but trust me: it being gone is a Martha Stewart-esque good thing.

THE MIDDLE

• The story. I never thought Mass Effect's story was anything great, but it got the job done and Mass Effect 2 is the same. There are some serious curves thrown in throughout the opening, but they mostly fade away quickly without discussion. It also suffers from being the middle piece of a trilogy, as you cannot shake the feeling that everything you do is just setup for Mass Effect 3. Still, story has never been the chief goal of these games. Instead, prominence is given to extensive world-building with your ability to shape its outcome through your choices that exist in a now-perpetual world. While saying everything else is window dressing is an overstatement, it still is partially true.
• Voice-acting. Some of it is great and some not so much. The male voice for Shepard is still...off. Sometimes the lines come across as terribly overplayed and laugh-eliciting at the wrong moments. Some of that is due to the dialogue, which is overall solid but can still produce some real clunkers. Whoever voiced Zaeed and Mordin are the standouts. The former is basically Boba Fett with lines and the latter is an alien genius geneticist that speaks in rapid-fire minuscule sentences and fragments as he outlines seemingly everything running through his mind at every second.
  

THE BAD

• Resource gathering. Even though they canned the MAKO, this seems like its equally annoying replacement and not in the spirit of the new direction at all. In Mass Effect 2, you purchase upgrades for your ship, your squad, and your weapons by using quantities of four minerals. While you can find varying small amounts of them on missions, the main way to get them is by scanning planets and launching resource nodes. The problem is you need a considerable amount of all four to maximize your upgrades, and this takes hours of time. Basically, you go into a planet's orbit and start scanning by holding the left trigger and moving it around the surface. You have a gauge that will react whenever minerals are detected and then you can send out a probe that collects it. The whole process is time-consuming and boring as hell. Later you can acquire an upgrade that allows you to scan faster, but it is still a pain. It takes you out of the action and the story, but you have to do it to progress in the game. Certainly this is not something that should prevent you from playing the game, but it still grates, and seems like something that would have been in Mass Effect, with its much more varied options for equipment.
  
• Fuel. This sort of relates to resource gathering. Now, in certain parts of star systems, you must purchase fuel in able to move between points. What I fail to get is why only in certain parts and not everywhere. When you jump into new systems you do not need it, nor when you move around in interior clusters or nebula's. You only use it when you move between the clusters, nebula's, or other interior areas of systems. Fuel is thankfully not expensive and can be purchased in most systems at fuel depots, but I cannot understand why you only use it intermittently. In the big picture, this hardly detracts from the game, but it seems misplaced in the stripped down setup.
• Cinematic conversations. Now here is a good idea that went awry. The dialogue wheel was such a revelation in Mass Effect that Bioware could be forgiven for making the conversations always between two people that never moved and always stood a foot apart. So now they tried to step up their game and make everything the word I hate to use but which seems most appropriate: "cinematic." The characters will now move around during dialogue and sometimes interact with the environment. This works well for a little while, until you realize there are around four stock expressions and movements anyone will do. You can only watch Shepard crack his knuckles, clench his fist, and my personal favorite, cross his arms across his chest and assume the ultimate suspicious power stance, so many times before it gets irritating. Also stuck on repeat are instances in conversation where a character will get up and move around or examine something during a certain line and then will do the exact same movement with the same angle after they return to their previous position again and again. It gets unintentionally hilarious fast. Good try, and if Mass Effect 2 is any indication at fixing things that need to be, Bioware should get this under control next time.
  
• No customization is no fun. So earlier I said the less customization was an improvement, but on a smaller scale I think they might have taken too much out. While there was an overabundance of equipment in the first game, that mostly stemmed from the game giving you access to it too much, making ninety percent of it pointless. It was still interesting looking through the different manufacturers and mixing equipment with strengths for different characters that had vastly different abilities. That's totally gone in Mass Effect 2. The image of your characters never changes outside of few and far between weapon switches. The characters themselves have had their number of individual powers you can level reduced and the powers are more common among each member. It is certainly not bad enough that every character plays the same, but there has been a significant melding of the vastly different character classes from Mass Effect into two or three simple archetypes. This is certainly a subjective point, as the game is more streamlined for these changes, but I think it removes too much variety as a cost.

• The helmet glitch. Okay, here is something incredibly minor to finish up and affects nothing. The game does not recognize when your character is wearing a helmet. Since you keep your armor on constantly unless on your ship, this can create some hilarious moments. Watch in amazement as you take a drink straight through a visor and try not to fall out of your chair when your emotional embrace with your previous love leads her to assault your helmet with her tongue.

So there you go. I'm surprised I actually finished this. I probably left out half of the important things and am wrong about what I did talk about, but what are you going to do?

Liquidity Trap

I beat Mass Effect 2. Review forthcoming (fingers crossed).

HIS 403: We moved out of the immediate post-war years and into the '50s and '60s. Specific focus on the economic explosion that was supposed to appear and fade quickly but ended up sticking for years, in the West at least. We're going to discuss the importation of foreign workers to fill labor shortages next week, which has much to do with current Europe and its identity crisis problem. The powers also start to lose much of their imperial territory, with decolonization rapidly starting. Looked at the new youth culture and its universal impact not just in Europe but in many parts of the world, coming mostly from the dreaded scourge of America. Relating to that, the "Americanization" of Europe was discussed. On the Eastern side, we focused on how things changed in the Eastern block after Stalin's death. Particular focus on the 1953 uprising in East Germany, the 1956 one in Hungary, and the Prague of Spring of 1968. These were all stopped by direct Soviet intervention. Khrushchev may have wanted to GTFA from Stalin, but he could still get clamp down with the best of them. And in '68 under Brezhnev...well Czechoslovakia probably got off easy, since 'ol Leonid was Uncle Joe Jr. Oh yeah, and Walter Ulbricht, leader of the SED and basically the authoritarian ruler of East Germany, got Nikki's permission to build a big wall in 1961.

And in other HIS 403 news, I've started seriously working on my research paper, focusing broadly on Chechnya. I'm still working out my thesis statement, but I've been lucky to find some good books and especially an excellent journal article that looks at the Chechen Wars from a military/operational standpoint. I want to talk about counterinsurgency some in the paper, so this was a great find. Reading the information and seeing the horrors committed by both sides, you have to feel for the civilians caught in the middle. Just some tidbits: Kidnapping makes up the largest portion of Chechen GDP. The corruption in the Russian military is so high that the number one source of arms and supplies to the Chechen guerrillas is the Russian military. The author of one of the books I'm using, Anna Politkovskaya, was assassinated two years after its publication, as were several of her comrades that worked for or contributed to the activist newspaper she was associated with. Everyone alleged to be connected to the killing was acquitted. And last but not least, the Chechens infamously held an entire theater in Moscow hostage over the occupation in 2002. The Russian government's response? They gassed the building, killing all the terrorists and 130 of their own civilians...

In MMA land, we found out that James Toney will not get to KO Kimbo for his first fight, at least probably not soon. Slice is still set to fight Matt Mitrione, while Toney does not yet have an opponent. Not much of significance from Sengoku 12. Akihiro Gono picked up a decision win over a weak opponent. Maximo Blanco delivered a brutal head-kick knockout. And Jorge Santiago won his rematch against Mamed Khalidov. While not MMA, Manny Pacquiao returns to the boxing ring today against Joshua Clottey. It's not the Mayweather super-fight, but Pac-Man has already achieved legendary status and is must-watch.

Not Some Kind of Sage

The stars have exploded and I have more material.

At the end of Mass Effect 2, so maybe I can crank that review out next week.

Bought a significant amount of comics for the first time in several years. Hey, how often do you find a booth with everything 50% off AND a good selection? Rarely, and the last place I expected was in the swamp of Metropolis, Illinois. I got every Hellboy trade I didn't have except for one and a BPRD trade. Mondo Mignola.

The only thing I watched this week was Ichi the Killer. Well, I thought for a majority of the film that it was satire and absolutely brilliant, but then towards the end that wavered. There's some duality going on that reshaped what I was thinking. Enjoyable nevertheless. For sure: no one can do pain mixed with...sexual grime or something, quite like Asians.

In HIS 403 we looked at the aftermath of World War II.. Plenty of stuff in there about the Cold War not being a certainty until around 1948 and how Stalin and the other Allies went from a relative consensus to complete opposition. We also talked about De-Nazification and overall punishment towards collaborators, which was basically the Nuremberg Trials...and we're done, Hitler is still a BAMF. The political makeup mirrors the overall relations between the powers. Stalin is all about this Popular Front strategy...until the countries in the east are still so scared of Germany they're like, "Yes, please protect us Russia, communism is gold" and the countries in the west think Stalin sucks. Then it's Blockade time, but America shuts that down in a Berlin minute or a year, take your pick. Stalin wants time to recover, some cooperation, and a ton of territory everywhere. The West has some problems there and so it's time to party like it's 1949 in West Germany. Unlike consumer goods, Stalin wants his own Germany, so it's East Germany to the rescue soon enough. The people in the east get to watch the Social Democratic Party and German Communist party do the authoritarian fusion dance into the SED and we're set for approximately forty years of fun.

Upset central at WEC 47 this past Saturday. I thought people were underestimating Joseph Benavidez, especially with Torres coming off a brutal loss, but even I would've picked the mulleted Mexicano. Torres seemed docile on the feet and while he didn't take much damage on the mat he still got dominated. Jens Pulver may have had a badass walkout shirt, but that couldn't save him from the submission firestorm of Javier Vazquez. Pulver is a legend no matter how many fights he keeps losing but time passed him by long ago. It would've been great to see him get a win and just disappear, but that seems ever more unlikely. In the main event, Brian Bowles never really got anything going against Dominick Cruz, who has some of the most unorthodox striking I've seen. Bowles broke his hand with the first punch he threw, which certainly affected him. I'm assuming Benavidez will get the next shot at Cruz and the 135 belt, in what from here looks like a very interesting matchup between two young guys now at the top of the division.