We went to New York Comic Con this weekend. Looking back, I’ve been going to geeky conventions for 25 years back when it was Dr. Who & Comic Books at local hotels and my dad would take me down and be bored to tears while I got my geek on. Back then there were crowds but manageable crowds. Maybe a thousand people would show up to these old Dr. Who Conventions, NY Comic Con had over 100,000 people on Saturday. It was insane but in an awesome way.

We arrived around 11, the show started at 10. If you were picking up a pass, the line was enormous (thousands maybe). I had my pass so I was able to get in pretty quickly with the family.

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Nerf : To make worse or weaken, usually in the context of weakening something in order to balance out a game. As in : ‘Why the hell did Blizzard nerf Marines’ attack damage?’

Don’t Nerf Me Bro! I’m tired of games nerfing my characters instead of finding a way to make it work. Don’t take a shortcut in balancing games or telling a story by wimping my character. In Metroid it’s the fact that in every new game Samus forgets how to turn into a ball or use missiles (in the latest rendition, she’s not allowed to use these weapons until ordered).
In Mass Effect 2, they kill Shepherd and nerf him/her completely using that as an excuse to depower your character.

The one that really bothered me recently was Mafia 2…Spoilers after this point…

At the end of Mafia 2 you go after a Mafia boss that needs to be killed. You plow through a few dozen of his best men and have to defeat him. Your best friend Joe is there and looks like he’s about to betray you but then realizes that you guys are brothers and fights with you. At this point you and him have laid waste to this city killing hundreds. No odds have been too much for you and your Rambo like skills.

Fast forward 10 minutes. Joe goes off in car #2 to be killed while you get a free pass. Screw that. There’s 8 people between the two cars and your character just lets Joe go off to the executioner.

Boo to Mafia 2 for two reasons here :
1) Do not nerf my character. Don’t make me plow through hundreds of enemies and then wimp out because 4 guys tell me I have to let Joe get killed.
2) Be true to your character. Henry was fiercely loyal. Joe was a brother to him. He doesn’t just accept that Joe has to go off and get killed.

Capcom did something that few companies do, they just sold a demo. Dead Rising 2 : Case Zero is a $5 demo for Dead Rising 2. The way I’ve been hearing everyone complain about companies charging (M$ increase for Live, $10 Initiative by EA and THQ), I think most people will be up in arms about charging for a Demo.

I’m not complaining. This is like DLC before the game comes out and it is absolutely great. Dead Rising is one of the really bright shining gems of the Xbox lineup. It had its quirks but it was amazing and helped start the deluge of zombie games we’ve seen since.

I’ve looked forward to Dead Rising 2 since I finished the first one, now we’re here 4 years later and it’s close. Once I heard Case Zero was up I had to get it and now I’m even more pumped for the finished game.

In Dead Rising 2 you play as motorcross superstar Chuck Greene. Your daughter has been infected and you need to do anything possible to keep her supplied with Zombrex which holds off the infection for 12 hours.

The feel of the game is very similar to Dead Rising. You walk around in an unending swarm of slow moving zombies. There are numerous psychopaths out there causing extra trouble for you. You need to save the innocents, collect money and kill zombies. All of those are pretty fun. Downside? Frank West, photo journalist (He’s covered wars you know!) is gone. Chuck Greene is cool but I loved Frank. Upside? Chuck doesn’t take photos, he combines items. Nails + Bat = Bat with nails in it. Bucket + Drills = Drill Bucket, throw that on a zombie’s head and watch the fun.

At the end of this, you get to carry your money, clothes and upto 5 levels into the main game.

Final word : Great game. It’s only $5 and gives you a real taste for what we’re going to be getting soon. If you enjoyed the first game or are curious about the second, this is a must have. More games should put out prequel demos. The only time I remember this happening before was in Fable 2 where you could play their pub games and it was horrible. Props to Capcom for figuring a way to make this work!

Gamerhusbands is a blog. As you may know, blogs print money. We frequently break our hundreds up into 20′s and fill our palaces with them so we can swim like Scrooge McDuck. The sarcasm is getting a little thick and in case you are a Philadelphia politician getting ready for a Gamerhusband windfall, let me stress that GHR is not based in Philadelphia and it doesn’t make money. In general, an enormous majority of blogs don’t make money. Blogs cost money. There are server fees, libsyn fees, software costs and other assorted costs. Blogs and podcasts are labors of love. In the case of Gamerhusbands and sites like us, we’re a creative outlet for individuals that didn’t exist before the advent of the internet and mp3 players.

Other sites out there are political. They’re individual forms of free speech which allow people to post news that otherwise wouldn’t get out. Twitter was essential in getting stories from the Iran elections to the rest of the world. In the last few US elections, sites like Factcheck.org are excellent sources for news and truth. These are voices that have arisen from these new mediums and they need to be nurtured.

Philadelphia has chosen to add a $300 Business Privilege Tax for blogs in the city limits. It doesn’t matter if your blog doesn’t make money, it’s now going to cost you another $300. If you’ve done the right thing and reported the $11 you made last year, Philly wants $300 from you. Thank you Philadelphia for remaining backwards. Thank you for remaining behind the times and letting bureaucracy overshadow sanity. Suggestion to you Philadelphia : There are many more Facebook and Twitter users in Philadelphia than bloggers. That’s a whole new market for your corruption. Thanks to the Philadelphia City Paper for writing an excellent article on this.

As gamers we’re used to vaporware. Duke Nuke ‘Em Forever has been coming out forever. The Phantom was a vaporware console that never saw the light of day. Now we have an improbable story that has turned into a real console.

A few years ago a handful of people on the GP32X.com Forums got together and decided to work on creating an open source handheld gaming system. They then realized that this endeavor would cost more money than they could afford so they sold pre-orders for these units. If I had heard of this back then, alarms would have rung loud about this being a scam. Fortunately I didn’t because these guys did it!

After several years they have created a handheld device that is a mixture of a PC and a console. It has a completely open source operating system. It’s a perfect emulator for old Atari, Commodore 64, old PC games, old arcade games, Nintendo and Playstation games. Most emulators will work on this device. It can be used to surf the web and even do some word processing.

They’ve sold out of their initial pre-order run and are taking orders for the next batch. It’s amazing to see a project like this make it all the way to production. Congratulations to the Open Pandora crew.

Sanctuary 4 Gamers has started a Site vs. Site Tournament. GamerHusbands signed up so if you’re interested in competing in the remainder of the match-ups respond back in the comments section.

Round 1 of the tournament is Modern Warfare 2. 6 on 6, best of 3 games. GHR’s first matchup was against The Gamers Garage. Team GHR consisted of Teetocks, Full Tilt 101, Dragon59, DrunkCase and Deadbeats. The Gamers Garage was headed by Crash.

GHR chose High Rise as the Round 1 arena. It was a close matchup until the very end when we pulled away and took it 7500 – 6500. It was much closer than it sounds and I was sweating the whole time. I would like to take full credit for dragging the team down. I am the anchor that almost sinks the GHR MW2 Team. DrunkCase lead GHR in this round with a great kill / death ratio.

Gamers Garage chose Sub Base as the Round 2 arena. GHR took a demanding lead and ended up winning this round handily. Final score was 7500 – 4500. Dragon59 had an amazing game and lead for most of it.

As we closed out the match, one of the Gamers Garage players was a douche complaining about our newb ways. Dual Shot-guns + Noob Tubes (I take full credit for being that Newb). But after she bounced from the room, the rest of the crew apologized for her douchiness and were very cool.

Thanks to team GHR for a great outing. Had a lot of fun and appreciate the effort and time everyone put in. Apologies to Adirrrtypoostick who was scheduled to be on the team. Unfortunately, Gamers Garage only had 5 and Poo was the last one to party up. If there’s future rounds he will definitely be involved.

Thanks to the Gamers Garage crew for a fun night. I checked out their podcast and enjoyed it. Give it a listen if you’re looking for something new.

Round 2 is scheduled to be Forza 3. If you’re part of the GHR community, are good at Forza and ready to represent GHR…use the comments section!

I’m not an IT guy, I’m a hack. Not a hacker either, just a hack. I hack at stuff until I get it to work. I can jailbreak iphones, mod systems, fix TVs, Tivos and computers. I liken myself to a monkey, I don’t invent any of this stuff but with a good guide I can piece stuff together. And if you give me 2 or 3 bad guides I can work it out too.

Recently I got a new router. When I got it, I had to make it work for Modern Warfare 2. I’m really not sure why this is such a hard thing these days, everything should plug and chug but it doesn’t. If you enter parties in Modern Warfare and keep getting booted (GHR_Superman) or if the Xbox Live Party keeps disbanding when you enter then you need to do the following. It’s not that hard and I’m going to explain it as simply as possible.

How can I tell if I need to do this?
In Modern Warfare 2 you can see your NAT Type:

• If it says Open, stop reading this and go play some MW2.  You will see this if you are direct connected to the internet (no router) or if your router is configured properly.
• If it says Moderate, you are behind a router and not all the ports that Xbox requires are open.  Keep reading.
• If it says Strict, you are behind a router and all the ports that Xbox requires are not open.  Keep reading.

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Left to Right: GHR_Superman (Sam), Teetocks (Scott), Full Tilt 101 (Bob), McWild (McWild), JDsBlackBox (JD), GHR_Maverick (Alfred)

We all woke up a little worse for wear. Late night + beer = tired gamers. Add in Alfred / Scott / Sam’s commute and 30 hours of being awake, it took us some time to get moving. Once we got moving we started our Day 1 plan of going to Fenway Park (Home of the Red Sox) before PAX-East opened. Unfortunately we didn’t plan the trip there very well and after an hour of walking (including 20 minutes at Boston’s Boston Market) we arrived at Fenway…

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We had a great time at PAX East. I know whenever I miss the PAX / E3 / Comic Con adventures I’m just as interested in what people do as to what was there. No worries, we plan to cover a lot of what we saw there but this article is about the GHR personal experience. We all hung out together for most of the time and I think this will (hopefully) be pretty comprehensive.

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