Gearheads, I apologize for not getting this up sooner.  I've been really busy lately and my wife had a death in the family and we went to the funeral on Monday.  It's been a busy time.  I'm also going out of town for a few days now as well so I won't be joining FFF this week.  SweetTea will be opening the FFF sign up thread tomorrow.

Any way I wanted to let you know that you can now make the donation for the redesign of Gearheads of War to bleszinski - at - gmail - dot - com through paypal.  Don't feel pressured to give anything if you can't afford it.  I know most of you are students and don't exactly earn a ton of money.

Gearheads will actually be moving to a new server shortly as well.

I just wanted to thank everyone in advance for helping make this, what I consider, the best gaming community online.

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OK, so I think I'm going to get some time with the single player of GTA IV today.  I played for a little yesterday and got a firearm for the first time.  So I'm working towards getting deeper into GTA.

I still haven't tried the multiplayer and I'm thinking what better way to do than with a bunch of Gearheads during a FFF.  I'll be on starting around 8:30 p.m. PST or so and we can go from there.  I'll let someone else host since I haven't played MP yet.

Sign up below and perhaps we'll take a break part way through the game to view us some Gears of War 2 game play trailer.

See you tomorrow!  

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So I don't really have ADD.  It's more just the kind of thing that everyone seems to have that has grown up in the MTV generation.  

Why am I writing about this? Simple.  I haven't been able to get into GTA IV just yet.  Before you go grabbing the pitchforks and the torches and get ready to show up at my front door to tar and feather me, I'll just say that I'm not qualified to say much about GTA IV simply because I've probably only played about six percent or so of the game.  I haven't even got to a point where I have a firearm yet.  Life has just been really busy lately and combine that with the fact that my daughter was sick Monday and Tuesday, it's meant really very little time where I could play GTA.

But my initial impressions of the game has so far been, "What's the big deal, it's another GTA?"  Like I said, you have to take what I say with a grain of salt so far just because I'm not very far into the game, but they've basically taken the concept of all the GTA's of the past and refined them, given them a nicer polish and put them on the new platforms.

Don't get me wrong, I've loved GTA games in the past but I've never finished one.  Part of my issue with the games of the past has always been control and I don't find that much has changed in GTA IV, at least in terms of control over the main character and the vehicles.  I wound up talking with Zoso about this over AIM and his reply to me was, "Just wait until you get like five hours in.  It really gets great."

That's all well and good, but I have a wife and a daughter and a full-time job.  I need my games to grab me by the balls immediately and not let go.  People can continue to criticize Gears of War for the lacking story, but that was a game that seized you by the gonads and didn't let go.  Call of Duty 4 was the same way.  I don't know whether it's because I have ADD or whatnot, but I have little patience for games these days that don't immediately give you some action.  The story could get remarkable down the road, but I'm just not the kind of gamer who loves to "put the time in."  I remember Shane Bettenhausen once saying about Zelda: Twilight Princess that the game got awesome after the first couple of dungeons.  I just don't have the time to wait for games to get awesome.  Design a freaking game that grabs me from the beginning.  I mean, you don't typically say, "Hell if you sit through the first crappy hour and a half of this movie, the last hour is just amazing!"

Like I said, take my criticism of GTA with a grain of salt.  I haven't played multi-player yet and I've barely scratched the surface of the single-player.  But I don't see why people are dropping such remarkable scores on it yet.

By the way, I know a lot of you guys like Yahtzee. Check out his blast back at some of the Nintendo fanboys out there.  It's a thing of pure beauty.

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I've been extremely busy over the past little while but I've made time to look into the upgrading of Gearheads of War.  It looks like we're going to be able to at least make some of the functionality changes sooner rather than later.

Here are some of the things I plan on adding:

• Recommended diaries:  This will simply require you guys to vote on a good diary so it appears above the other diaries.  I'm hoping this encourages really thoughtful, detailed diaries.

•  Auto-refreshing comments:  This will make it so that if you're on a page that new comments will appear on their own without you having to do anything.  These types of comments work really well, but they usually kill a blog's page views which could hurt advertising in turn.  But I'm willing to do it to try and improve the experience for the Gearheads.

•  I'm also hoping to add something else to the sidebar that will allow for much easier ability to post YouTube and GameVideos-type of embedded videos.

I'm going to need to start collecting the donations that people promised starting next week as I'm aiming to have the new look up by the end of May.  I'm hoping people can send paypal payments because that will probably be the easiest way to pay the designer.

Thanks in advance to all the Gearheads.  I hope you'll like the upgrades.

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Gearheads, I'm in the process of investigating upgrading our humble community here.  I'm not 100 percent sure how much it's going to cost and frankly, I can't foot the money out of my own pocket.  I know many of you have agreed to make a contribution to the site, but I need to know realistically if I can raise about $1,000.  That would be about what it would cost to get the site upgraded and only because I know a bunch of guys who do this kind of stuff.

I don't like to ask this publicly, but it's coming down to time to get this organized and moving and I need to have some idea as to whether it's possible to come close to raising $1,000 for the site upgrades.

Can you tell me how much you might be willing to contribute for the upgrade?  Please don't feel pressure to say you can if you can't. There's no hard feelings...if we can't get enough money together we can just stick with the status quo and be happy with it as is.

I just need to figure out if the upgrade is realistic or not.  Again, please don't feel pressured to contribute if you can't.  I know that economic times are tough right now.  Thanks in advance for just being a part of this community, which is the best gaming community on the Web, bar none.

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As many of you know, I've been a big-time COD4 fan since it was released.  At the same time, Gears of War is probably in my top three games of all-time.  Yet there is a dynamic to Gears that most people find incredibly annoying about COD4. It's called camping.  

Camping is one of the reasons why I can't stand playing COD4 in hardcore mode because so many people set up shop in one position, often using UAV jammer and a silencer and just pick people off as they run around.  It's probably good strategy in the "real" world when you're NOT playing a video game, but that's not usually why I play a fast game like COD4.  I like to be on the move.  Cautiously, mind you, but I like to move around, even if it is within the same area, but I don't plant myself in one area and stay there the entire game.

At the same time, when you hide in Gears of War, it's viewed as good strategy.  And it really is good strategy.  Maybe it's because the dynamic of one life to live in Gears versus the respawning system of games like Halo and COD4 (people complain about campers in Halo too).  Or maybe it's because the dynamic of essentially hiding (press A to get into cover) is built into the game dynamic of Gears?

But it's funny because nothing gives me greater pleasure in Gears than working a flank while someone is engaged with a teammate and dropping a boom on that unsuspecting person.  It gives me great satisfaction to blow someone to bits who never saw it coming.

At the same time, nothing is more annoying than running to a different position in COD and see someone laying down on the floor of the doorway you just entered and gunning you down.  Or the sniper who hides somewhere that no one can find because of the lack of the kill cam in hardcore.  Yet it is essentially the same strategy.  

Do you find campers annoying in COD?  Is there such a thing as "camping" in Gears and if so, do you think it's nearly as annoying as campers in COD?  I've been thinking about this for a while now and I think it ultimately comes down to style of stop and pop game play versus what is supposed to be "run-n-gun" game play in COD?

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I do plan on playing some GTA IV with Gearheads next week for FFF, but this week I think we'll do some Gears of War. I think I've found that Call of Duty 4 is fun but you can't really take a break from it.  There are so many people playing and they're playing so often that if your skills erode at all from inactivity, the game isn't nearly as fun.  I think we all learned that last week when we quickly turned  back to Gears.  Don't get me wrong, I still looooove COD4, but it's really frustrating that people are playing it as though it's a second occupation.

Regardless, we should be what Gearheads should be and that's, well, Gearheads and play some Gears.  I've played a couple of nights this week and had some fun, although I'm not a huge fan of JohnE's weapon swap choices.  Then again, it's just because my weapon of choice isn't readily available and is often stuck right in between a crapload of other power weapons on a lot of maps.  

Regardless, I can honestly say that I would probably be happy with Gears of War 2 if they didn't make any improvements but to improve lag when you aren't host and increase the consistency of the shottie.  I'd also would love to be able to take on other teams over XBL as a team in matchmaking.  I would imagine Gearheads would do pretty well in that instance.  

Sign up for FFF below and also vote on what would be the most important improvement in Gears 2.  Most of you would probably say that I would say the Boom consistency, but I honestly think that gets resolved if they fix the host issues.  I'll probably be on starting at 8:45 p.m. PST and I'll host a room (I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about host advantage in my room, but maybe that's because I naturally suck with the shottie).

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OK, I'm not one who typically loves Yahtzee's reviews on the Escapist.com.  I think the reviews are usually extremely gimmicky and I've gotten pretty tired of them.  Especially how everyone thinks that this is some sort of genius whereas he basically talks really fast and often states the obvious.

But I've got to say that this particular review resonated with me.  I recently got a chance to try SSBB and I just didn't get all the love for the game.  It was random and hard to even tell what the hell was going on.  There was just a ton of crap on the screen at the same time and Yahtzee definitely nailed the fact that the action backs off the screen too much.  I was baffled as to why this game was getting such ridiculously high scores and the only thing I could figure was that the people loved it for nostalgia sake.  They love it because they have the ability to be pretty much any Nintendo character they dreamed of fighting against others.  And even the epic battle that fanboys always dreamed about between Mario and Sonic.

I'm not coming down on the game, I just don't get it.  I played it and it seemed like something that would be a really temporary thrill.  Am I and Yahtzee way off base here?

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So we did what we needed to do and played some Call of Duty 4 right off the bat.  It was ugly as hell as we got our asses handed to us because we kept getting put on crappy maps.  Not only that, but the crappy maps also featured Domination AND we kept spawning on the wrong side of the map.  We did Bog then got Chinatown and finally ended with Countdown which led us to say, "F%^& this, we're going to Gears."

I had an absolute blast in Gears.  Seriously.  It was just awesome and for once, my Bob Dole shotgun was effectively working.  I must've taken a little blue pill before we got together.  I had two particular memories from the night.  One was a double boom kill that took out both Robbins and Zoso in Mansion and the other was a beautiful boom on Circuitz.  I think it was on Subway, but I don't remember exactly.  I just remember I had a tiny little concrete window in which to kill someone and it fit right in that small space and blew him to pieces.

But the biggest highlight of the night, and I didn't actually see this myself, was Zoso Fan's girlfriend was playing for him on Mausoleum and I think I was getting more booms or something when she headshotted Robbins with the sniper.  Apparently it was pretty brilliant.  I'll let Zoso recap how it happened because I didn't see it.

Regardless, I had so much freaking fun tonight on Gears that I was shocked by it.  Maybe it's because I'm just better at Gears than COD and people naturally enjoy games they're good at, but I just had one of the best times during FFF in a long time.

What about you?

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So we did Gears last week and I'm thinking we do some COD4 this week and perhaps we do a little Gears later in the evening.  

We should enjoy because there are only two more FFF until we'll be playing some GTA IV for FFF.  Imagine some amazing cops and crooks with the Gearheads.  I'm just hoping there won't be an incredible amount of lag.

Sign up below and we'll start around 8:15 or so PST tomorrow night.  See you then!

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I didn't mean to do this when I posted my diary yesterday about the couple in Australia who are involved in an incestuous relationship. But apparently it was unavoidable that the conversation steered into the heated discussion regarding gay marriage.

I don't want to recycle the arguments everyone made again, but I did want to ask the Gearheads community if you guys feel it's OK to discuss things like politics, religion and controversial issues like gay marriage and abortion on a site that is dedicated to gaming.  I was talking to my wife about the fact that the diary got a bit heated and she said, "Why did you post a link to that on a gaming site again?"  My simple reply was that I consider this a community of friends and this would be something I'd share and discuss with my friends.

I'm not sure how many of you know, but I run a blogging network about sports and we largely have a no politics rule on our sites because they can be divisive for a tight knit community brought together for a common purpose (like supporting the New Jersey Devils).  But I don't really view this community the same way because we all meet and talk on a weekly basis.  It isn't like too many of us are anonymous Internet voices.  We get to know each other, otherwise that person doesn't typically stick around Gearheads very long.  I also think that's one of the things that brings us together as such a rock solid community.

Any way, I'm not upset or anything about the discussion yesterday.  I felt it was a good one that probably won't change anyone's minds or beliefs, but I wanted to throw this open to everyone.  Should this site talk about things other than gaming?  I personally don't mind it as long as it doesn't become the dominant part of the conversation here and as long as it's only an occasional thing.  I think it's healthy to talk about these things with friends and sometimes hear a different perspective.  I once mentioned that one of my favorite Gearheads moments was when I first went through Gears on Insane difficulty with SweetTea and we had a ton of quality discussions about love, life, religion and politics.  He and I are pretty polar opposite on the political spectrum, but his maturity level and his ability to hold an intelligent conversation about something we were both so passionate about just floored me.  It blew me away and I remember asking him several times, "Are you sure you're only 18?"

At the same time, I know that if someone feels a certain way about a political or controversial issue, it can sometimes lead to that person getting irrationally angry with someone else.  I don't want something like this to hurt our Band of Brothers, sort of speak.

What do you think, Gearheads?  Should topics like gay marriage and politics be off limits here?  Should we stick to nothing but gaming-related issues?

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Check this out.  Apparently Rockstar games is giving out a giant foam shocker hand.  For those of you that don't know what the shocker is (be forewarned though, it's not for the faint of heart), well, read here. .

Rockstar is always on the edge of American culture and this just makes me laugh.  As goofy as the stupid idea of the shocker is, Rockstar certainly knows how to speak to the audience.

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