gears in motion

Today during my lunch break I drove over to the south Best Buy to get Gears of War. When the guy was giving me the game, I told him I wanted the collector's edition. He looked around for it and asked his coworker, who told him they didn't come in. Apparently UPS or FedEx or whatever was late in getting the shipment in and they wouldn't have the collector's editions for a few days. I was pretty pissed off so I asked him if he can check the other stores to see if they had any. The north store was all out, but he told me the Bee Caves location had them, so he called them up and had them set one aside for me. I didn't even know there was a Best Buy on Bee Caves. After asking for directions, I set off to find this new Best Buy. Well apparently it's so new that it doesn't even have a sign in the shopping center and it's not visible from the road, so I completely missed it and ended up driving 30 mins past it. After calling my dad to ask if he knew where it was, I doubled back and eventually found it. Once inside, I noticed that the place was virtually empty. I guess not many people know about it yet. What sucked though was one of the few customers in there was in line at customer service, and she took FOREVER. They only had one retard working customer service, so I ended up waiting at least 15 mins for someone to help me. Finally some dude came to help me, so I explained what happened at the other Best Buy and he went off to get my copy. A few mins later he came back and began ringing me up, but had no idea how to ring up a preorder, so I had to wait another 10 mins for him to figure it out. So, what would have been a 45 min lunch break ended up being a 2 hour nightmare. Luckily I didn't get in trouble at work.

Anyway, Gears of War is unbelievably awesome. It took me a while to get the hang of the controls but now that it's natural to me, I am fully enjoying the game. Sadly, I read on a few sites that the game is only about 6 to 10 hours long, which is unfortunate, as good as the game is. I guess it'll at least let me move on to finish the rest of the games I'm currently playing.

I also downloaded the Live Arcade demo for Contra. Contra holds a special place in my heart, as it was one of the first NES games I ever played, it had the first code I ever learned, and I think it was the first game I ever beat. I spent countless hours with my friend playing that game. Much to my dismay, the XBLA version is a port of the arcade version, not the NES version. That means shorter levels and crappy graphics, even for the "updated" graphics. The music also sounds like garbage, and along with the craptastic 360 D-pad, it makes for a very disappointing experience. The famous code is also harder to do thanks to the sucky D-pad. I had been looking forward to Contra for so long too. What a shame. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 seems pretty good though. I might buy that and Lumines (even if it is more of a demo than a full game).