All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Well, just, um, happy Thanksgiving! That’s pretty much it.

And for all my friends outside of the U.S., fuck you, happy Thanksgiving anyway. 😉

Okay, maybe they’ve been sung about a little bit, but the real driving force behind the Patriots’ success has been…the offensive line.

Without that offensive line, sure, Brady would still be completing passes, but he wouldn’t be blowing people out and making a run for the record books. This is an offensive line so good it can make Eckel, a fourth-string running back, look as good as Maroney.

And the time they give Brady is unbelievable. And when you give Brady time, you are fucked, pardon my French.

All good coaches know that building a great team starts and ends with putting together a great offensive line. And New England’s is, right now, the best O-line in the NFL. Sure, they’re big, hunking galoots, and they don’t get their names in the paper all the time, but they’re the ones in the trenches really winning this game for the Pats.

The same goes for the defensive lineman, who are putting on a great rush, stopping the run, and holding up the line enough so linebackers on a mission from Hell have the time and room to make the play. Vince Wilfork is a force.

Still, though, ask me to put together a football team, and I’m going to start by building an offensive line. And there simply isn’t a better one in the league than New England’s.

Isn’t it obvious?

Here we come, Eagles…run away, run away…

This team is so good it even scares its own fans. 🙂

How sweet would it be if Miami goes winless and the Pats go undefeated? Add a little insult to injury.

I have to admit, Heavenly Sword is a great-looking game. Actually, just a pretty great game in general. It’s a combat-combo type game along the lines of Ninja Gaiden Sigma or Devil May Cry. Although it looks better than either of these (of course, we haven’t seen the new Devil May Cry yet, but it’s now a cross-platform game, so it may not look as good as PS3 owners hoped).

Heavenly Sword is also one of the first PS3-exclusives, designed to use the PS3’s engine, and it shows. It’s a wonderful-looking game. Pure eye candy. The voice acting is superb, as well.

Combat is fun, and easy to learn. You’ll be able to master it from the get-go. And it’s a lot of fun, it really is.

But it ain’t worth $60. Why? It’s incredibly short. You can get through the game in one sitting if you try hard enough. I’d say there’s 5 to 8 hours of playing time. And that just doesn’t warrant $60. Unlike the equally short Call of Duty 4, it doesn’t have extensive and excellent multiplayer play to pay for itself (or an expansion pack along the way, as far as I know, which Call of Duty 4 does have coming…)

It does, however, warrant a rental from Blockbuster or Gamefly or wherever you rent your games. Grab it, enjoy it, finish it, return it.

Definitely give it a look, though. You’ll have loads of fun just adjusting the camera to look at the main character’s wonderful rear end. 🙂

Finally. Finally, a game that’s really starting to push the envelope of the next-gen systems.

Assassin’s Creed was released today, for the PS3 and the 360. I’ve been playing it — very slowly — for about four hours now. The thing is great.

It’s an 3rd-person open-ended mission-based game centered around the Crusades. Well, mostly. I don’t want to spoil anything in this game. If you want to spoil it a little and read a real review, try reading Gamespot’s review, linked from here (this is for the PS3 version).

Gamespot gives it a 9 out of 10 and Assassin’s Creed deserves it. I’ll leak one small thing from the review that doesn’t spoil anything; the introduction — “Assassin’s Creed is a beautiful and exciting experience that you’ll remember for years to come. “

I think this one goes right up there with the Grand Theft Auto series. You’re going to love this game. For the love of God, at least rent it.

I’d write more, but I have got to get back to playing it.

Bottom line: Assassin’s Creed is the first game that is really announcing, in a loud voice, that the next generation of console games (and consoles, period) have arrived. After this, good games are going to start coming out fast and furiously (including Grand Theft Auto IV, although that keeps getting delayed…).

I’m only about an hour into what is supposed to be a blazingly-fast single-player campaign mode in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I can confidently say this is the best first-person shooter I’ve played so far on the PS3.

I’ve heard rumors that COD 4 is a bit better on the Playstation 3 than the XBox 360. I can’t confirm or deny them. All I can say is that this is a beautiful, beautiful game, and finally — finally — we have a game that isn’t all about mowing down Krauts in World War II.

The graphics are close to photo-realistic and incredibly smooth; the gameplay is intuitive, simple enough to master quickly, complex enough to keep you wanting to play on and on.

As I’ve said, the big knock against COD 4 is that the single-player mode lasts around five hours. Yeah. That’s it. I can guarantee you those are an intense five hours, but…it’s awful short.

However, there are rumors surfacing that Electronic Arts will soon be making an expansion pack available.

The main selling point of the title, though, is something I haven’t tested yet: multiplayer. The multiplayer modes of COD 4 are supposed to be amazingly good and fun. I can’t testify to it personally, but read the review I linked to above to read some comments on it.

I love this game, I have to say.

Ah. Smokers. We’re the last of a dying breed. In more than one way.

Anyway, for my brethren who smoke, I wanted to point out a good decision I made. My smoking ruins DVD players and such (hence a product replacement plan on my PS3 and so on). My computer and its IDE DVD/CD-ROM drives are not spared.

So, the drives start to get clunky. They have write errors. They skip when playing DVDs.

Today, I finally got something that will fix the problem for me. It’s an external DVD-RW drive by LG. It was cheap as all hell — about $60. It connects via USB, and it’s nice and fast, if a little bulky.

What I’m doing with it is the following: if I have a DVD I want to burn, or a CD, or if my regular drives aren’t reading discs, I trot out the external drive and use it (and try not to smoke for a few minutes, har).

When it’s served its purpose, I put it in a zip-locked plastic bag and put the bag on a shelf behind me. No smoke gets to it.

Anyway, it’s already proved to be easy as heck to use, it works nicely, and it didn’t hit the wallet that hard.

So, Marlboro men, there’s a solution for those frickin’ dirty laser lenses.

Seen Don Shula’s remarks about the Patriots? That they should have an asterisk placed next to them in the record books if the run the table and go 19-0 this year (he’s tried to back off a little since he made the remark)?

I love what Tedy Bruschi had to say about it:

“If someone questions your integrity, if someone questions who you are, if someone questions the organization you’ve been a part of ever since you walked into the league, would it upset you?” linebacker Tedy Bruschi [stats] asked. “So yes, it does upset me. I can’t control how people feel about it. I can’t control what comes out of their mouths. I only control what I do out there and what we do as a defense and what we do as a team. We keep winning and playing hard. If they want to keep saying those things, maybe we just need to play a little bit harder.”

Hehe. The Spygate thing, here in New England? We love it. Let these guys pile it on. Because it motivates the Pats more and more to beat the heck out of teams to prove they’re the real deal. Which they most certainly are.

However, I’d like to add that I think that if the Pats do go 19-0, Don Shula’s precious geriatric 1972 Dolphins team should have an asterisk placed next to it, because they only went 16-0.

The “fabled” 1972 Dolphins also only played two teams with a record over .500 that season. Kansas City and the New York Giants, both of whom ended up with the unbelievable records of 8-6.

In addition, I believe the Dolphins were fined a first-round pick…for hiring Shula, there were some shennigans that went on there.

Also, those evil Patriots who run up the score, they’re nothing like the 1972 Dolphins, I suppose, who on 11/12/72 beat New England…52-0

So Shula should stick to yelling at kids to get out of his yard and shut his trap about football and asterisks.

Let’s also not forget that taping a team’s signals is not illegal. It’s not what the Pats got in trouble for. You can tape a team’s signals. Yes, you can. You can do it from the booth. Every NFL team does it. But you can’t have a cameraman on the opposing sideline do it. That’s the only infraction we’re talking about here.

I think the NutriSystem has finally driven Shula insane, myself.

Okay, I’m going to break my vow of silence on things political for a moment. I wrote this a while ago, but it’s still very relevant…

WE UNHAPPY FEW

I’m the only one I personally know who wants to win the war in Iraq.

What of us, we band of brothers, we unhappy few who do support this war? Who find it repellent, as all wars are, but also recognize the clear and present danger Iraq still presents in one of the world’s most volatile regions? Our opinions are discounted. The debate, according to my Gen-X peers, is over, and we have already lost.

If this attitude wins, we have already lost.

The number of war supporters has shrunk dramatically as too many Americans press the snooze button on the terrorism alarm. For the remaining supporters, it’s now a world of whispers and long silences when people ask us our opinion — nobody really wants it. At social functions, I clam up so self-consciously that it’s almost physically painful. I don’t want to get up on the stump and wave the bloody shirt, but being surrounded by people who assume you must agree with them in your heart of hearts when you don’t is a decidedly unpleasant feeling.

I’m a political pariah. My liberal friends, over ten years out of college now, sometimes seem as if they were trapped in amber the first time their Political Science 101 professor warned them of that creeping evil that is known as the conservative. And though they “support the troops”, when they speak of setbacks and casualties, their eyes light up with a feral intensity. They want Uncle Sam’s nose bloodied. They’d actually enjoy defeat. Those of us who support the war are regarded as some sort of annoying rash to be treated with a topical Political Correctness cream. It is all too obvious that many of my fellow Gen-Xers have never had occasion to learn what earlier generations of Americans knew in their bones: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But that message, taught to me by my parents, wasn’t lost on me — something for which I am eternally grateful, even as my peers regard it as pitiful: what a shame it was he attended U.C. Berkeley and escaped without the proud badge of liberal guilt!

My friends interminably explain where I went wrong. And after scratching that itch, they can’t fathom its return; why I refuse to budge. They wonder if I’m a dangerous infection – while ignoring the diseased insanity of radical Islam.

Conservative defectors I know mostly concur that it’s time to withdraw and let the sects sort themselves out, no matter what the price in blood. They echo the sentiments of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey: “The only hope for the Iraqis is their own damned government, and there’s slim hope for that.”

Yet there is so much hope.

The war is treated in tragically American fashion; “Hurry up!” we shout, as if operations in Iraq were a frozen dinner that should take less than five minutes to microwave. Yet to withdraw prematurely from Iraq is to lose. America toppled a bloodthirsty dictator – and made him pay for his grievous crimes against humanity. We forged an interim government – shaky, yet it’s there. Surely these are good things. But winning means stabilizing Iraq before we leave and preventing genocide afterward. Is that a day or decade away? Unknowable. What we do know — or should — is that this war is a crucial test of our resolve in the international terrorism arena. This is a war that is necessary, a war that could have a profound positive effect – if we steel ourselves and win it.

There is no quick fix. Consider post-WW II Japan and Germany. How did those countries fare when they lay merciless at the hands of America? We would not even accept their defeat, because we are American, and we are a good people. We – as much as the defeatists hate this phrase – stayed the course. Indeed, we are still in Japan and Germany, and both would be in a shambles had we not labored for years to help them recover.

But the clarity needed to understand that this a just war and a war we must win is being systematically bled from the populace. Detractors rush us, like Orwell’s Winston Smith, into Room 101 in order to re-educate us; to hammer into our skulls that good is evil, evil is good; that war is never necessary. That two plus two equals five. Yet true freedom is the freedom to say:

My name is Kip Lange, and I support the war in Iraq.

Okay. So I went to the dentist for a checkup for like the first time in about eight years. I’m going to have to have my other wisdom tooth extracted; no big deal there.

The big deal is that I have around thirty-one cavities. The dentist came in the end, took my hand in a firm handshake, looked at me, and said, “I will rebuild it for you. I will rebuild it. But you must come to the appointments. I will rebuild it.”

Made me feel like the Six Million Dollar Man.

And then I had to make eight dental appointments.

Kids, don’t drink so much Coke (or snort it, either, for that matter), and for God’s sake, go to the dentist every six months or so, or you’re gonna end up like me.

But I will be rebuilt.

Heh.