I went to see Lights play live in Toronto the other day at the Phoenix Concert Theater.

If you're not familiar with Lights, she's a young Torontorian musician who plays catchy synth pop music leaning a bit towards the scene crowd. She released a 6 song EP last year and has been touring with it since then. I'm pretty sure she's a Christian, with a claim for a love for Jesus and taking influence from the Bible as well as a slew of Christian bands.

She is quite a certifiable cutie pie as well, not only because she is attractive, but more so because she embraces her inner geek. She's a World of Warcraft fanatic and often makes video posts about her adventures on her website. When was the last time you heard Rod Stewart saying he loved WoW? See!

It was a fun show, and the gal's definitely got some good stage presence especially for one so new to touring. Anyhow, here are a few pics:


You can view the rest over (here). I've attached one of her vids below. Later geeks.



Categories: concerts , lights , music

Our favouriate Italian plumber soars in his latest platform adventure out for the Wii. Traditionally, Nintendo excels at the platform gaming genre and Super Mario Galaxy does not disappoint.

If you're familiar with the other Mario platformers, then you'll know the story: the evil Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and its up to Mario to save her by hurdling through level after level. Nintendo doesn't deviate too much from this formula this time around. Clearly their Mario-platformers are all about the gameplay and not the storylines.

This time around, Mario is flying, jumping and twirling through planets and galaxies in hopes of collecting stars to open the way to his beloved Princess. In his adventure, Mario encounters all sorts of creatures, some friendly and some mean, and all sorts of environments, some heated and some frigid.

Galaxy never gets tired thanks to the variety of levels and all the different tasks that need to be completed. It's a far different Mario game than those of the old, where you start at A and head to B. This time around they shake things up a bit by mixing in levels where you have to race, where you have to hunt for different parts of a full star, and a slew of mini-games with a star to reward you for your efforts.

In total there are 120 stars scattered throughout the galaxies, hopefully enough to please the completionists out there. At the time of completion I had 80 stars, so there's still tons for me to do.

Nintendo takes advantage of the Wii-mote's technology by having you shake it to perform different functions for each level. It's a bit cheesy actually. If you think about it, the shaking of the Wii-mote to perform a function could be completely replaced by using a button to perform the same action. But they make you do so many different things all with the same hand motion that it seems to offer a variety. Well, it's still fun though.

Probably my favourite aspect of Galaxy is its soundtrack. Composed by Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo and performed by "The Mario Symphony Orchestra", the scores are brilliant and often pleasing to the ear. One can't help but get a feel for an epic adventure when the orchestral music hits.

Anyhow, I loved this game. It was beautifully designed and tons of fun to play. Definitely worth checking out if you have a Wii. Later geeks.

Categories: gaming , super mario , wii

Last year, my friends planned a trip to Ottawa in hopes of seeing the sights and sounds of the Winterlude Festival held every year. It worked out well because my pastor and his wife who lives there would have been out of town, and they had offered us their home for us to stay in for the duration of our trip. However, one thing we didn't plan on was mother nature's own intentions. There was a massive snowstorm that weekend, thus curbing our mini-vacation plans. I remember being sorely disappointed that we couldn't go, but it was not a total loss because I was buried in piles of work for my 4th year design project (that gives me an idea for a future post actually), so I headed back to Waterloo.


Fast forward to 2009, it is February, and once again, it's time for the yearly festival in Ottawa. We (and by we, I mean my friend Vicky) had the trip all planned out and the weather looked to be pretty fantastic for the weekend. The girl's stayed at our friend Kalei's place, while us men stayed at Pastor James place. The drive was pretty good at slightly less than 5 hours, but it felt like less, attributed to the good company in the car.

Once we arrived at James house (at about 1 am) we got right down to business and caught up with each other until almost 4 in the morning. It was good swapping stories and hearing about where we each were in life right now and where we want to go.


Saturday was basically our festival day. Let me start off by saying that frigid weather and a tired state from having 3 hours of sleep are not a good combination. We visited the Byward Market and did a little shopping at the Rideau Centre before heading to the festival. At the festival we got to see all sorts of ice sculptures, we walked on the frozen river, and best of all, we ate delicious beaver tails. We ate dinner at a place called St. Hubert (think Swiss Chalet, with a mascot and logo that looks like Wing Machine). We were planning to go skiing/snowboarding after dinner, but I have no way how that could be possible... more than half of our group was nearly unconscious. Cold + Sleepy = Bad. Instead we headed to Kalei's house to chill, and attempted to watch Hot Fuzz, but I think half of us fell asleep. When us men got back to James' home, we talked to him for a while longer and afterwards we talked amongst ourselves, sharing whatever struggles or worries that were on our minds. It was a really good conversation and great subsequent prayers.


On Sunday we visited The Met for church service in the morning (Another bad combination: sleeping at 3 am and waking up at 7 for church service). When I lived in Ottawa 2 years ago, The Met was operating out of this old theater that was retrofitted to be a church. The building was large but not as large as it is now. I think they are one (if not the largest) of the biggest church's in the city. They bought a new piece of land out in the subarbs and have erected a brand new building. It is quite a sight. The service itself was pretty alright. I think there's something with large church's like this that doesn't connect with me though. That said, the sermon spoken by Pastor Rick Reed was really good, focusing on Jesus' parables of the Kingdom of God and their paradoxes. We had a lunch at James house, with cake prepared by his wife Beate. The rest of the day was mostly recovering from our tired state by lounging around, and hearing stories.


I used a good portion of the afternoon to catch up with my friend and brother in Christ, Dayue. He's at the University of Waterloo right now (where I graduated) and it turned out that reading week was this week, so he was in Ottawa (his home). He's going through some rough times at school and I was just trying my best to encourage him and to not give up. I listened to all of his stories and experiences, and I swapped my own with him, so he could get a feel of what I went through (which was not terribly different from him, I did bad in my subjects at least in the first two years). It was really good to see him and connect with him again.

I should also mention that this weekend was also my birthday and it was great to spend the whole time with my close friends. They really took care of me this weekend, and it was much, much more than I could possibly ask for.

In the end, it was everything I wanted out of a short trip: spending time with my close friends, catching up with friends that I haven't for a while, and of course taking in the city.

Categories: ottawa , travelling

Mass Effect is the sci-fi action RPG epic from Canadian developer Bioware who has produced games such as Star War: KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter Nights amongst others in the past.

Mass Effect pits you as an elite human soldier named Commander Shepard. You, along with a squad of other specialists, some human and some alien, seek out a rebel soldier who has discovered the key to a powerful ancient technology capable of destroying civilizations. The story starts out as a simple cat and mouse story, but as you continue on your journey, it evolves into something much larger - a political ballad filled treason and corruption.

What makes this game so engaging is the captivating storyline, but more importantly, your interaction within the story. There are several points during the game where you will have to make life or death decisions in regards to some of the game's supporting characters and even your own band of infantry. Some of your decisions also affect your character's morality; if you make "good" decisions, you get points towards your paragon status, while conversely, if you make "evil" decisions or if you're trying to be a dick, then you get points towards your renegade status. I opted to be more of a dick in my campaign, and so my renegade points were pretty high. Just another fun aspect of the game.

The gameplay itself for the most part takes on the form of a standard shooter. Depending on what character archetype you choose, your character would specialize in either weaponry, techs (or electronics), and/or biotics (ie. spells). For my campaign, I chose the infiltrator class, moreso known as the sniper in leyman's terms. Whichever class you end up choosing, you're armed with 4 weapons (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle) and an array of biotic and/or tech abilities. In addition, two characters from your squad join by your side as you go through the missions.

Alongside all the shoot'em up action are RPG elements. Basically you gain experience points as you complete quests and kill baddies which helps you gain levels. After each level you're given skill points to assign and customize what your character's more specific specialities are.

The mission system I'd say is akin somewhat to Grand Theft Auto's system where you can continue with the main plot in the story or pick up optional missions to get a fuller feel of the storyline and the atmosphere while reaping up bonuses in cash and loot. My only peeve with the optional missions is that they are not exactly creative. When taking on such a mission, the goal will variate between an assassination, delivery, or exploration... not a wide variation. However, the story involved amongst them is still interesting and adds much to the Mass Effect mythos.

The game took me about 20 hours to play through and I can't wait to go through it again. It is definitely fun traversing across the universe, visiting different galaxies, and exploring new planets. Some of the cities are so large that it is quite easy to miss optional quests, which in the end demands another play through just to pick these up.

The voice work is pretty amazing which garnered much attention and rave reviews when the game first came out. Some of the special geek guest celebrities that were involved had me excited ie. Seth Green, Keith David, Lance Henriksen, etc.

Anyhow, if you're a sci-fi nerd, definitely check out this game, I'm sure you can find it in a bargain bin for $25, and it's well worth the money. Later geeks!

Categories: gaming , mass effect , xbox 360

If you're a subscriber to F4Wonline (and I know at least one of you are), you'll no doubt have heard our chief and emperor Bryan Alvarez herald this week as one of the worst week's in professional wrestling (that stemming from the big two, WWE and TNA). In fact, former wrestler Lance Storm weighs his two cents on the whole deal on his own website (here). While people would say that TNA produced the worst show this week (undoubtedly bad), I would have to disagree and say WWE is the huger disaster. I say this only because WWE is a publicly traded multi-million dollar revenue company and worldly renowned, thus having a larger magnitude in the grand scheme of things.

So let's start off with the WWE. Last Sunday going in to the Royal Rumble, they couldn't get any hotter than they were with three really strong angles; the JBL/Michaels/Cena angle, Edge VS Jeff Hardy with his hinted stalker being revealed, and Randy Orton's superstar domination... the latter two of which they ultimately fucked up.

In the Edge and Jeff angle, it was widely known that it was none other than Christian who was tormenting Jeff over the past few weeks, and the Rumble would have culminated with his return to the WWE. If you watched the Rumble or any of WWE's shows this week, then you will have learned that it was not Christian, but rather Jeff's brother Matt. Yup, Vinnie Mac swerved the audience. According to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, it was a last minute switch to Matt instead of Christian because Vince McMahon felt that too much people knew and were expecting Christian. Apparently Vince wanted to outsmart the smart internet marks. Assuming that it was Matt all along, the storyline makes no sense. Why would Matt as the jealous brother help Jeff win the world title in the first place? If you review the past 3 or 4 months of storylines involving you would see that it makes no sense.

But let's cut in a little deeper with some simple arithmetic here. If we assume that in America there are 300,000 marks (I'm trying to be generous to bend the numbers in favour of WWE) and approximately 6 million WWE fans based on the Raw ratings (fanbase probably much larger but again, I'm trying to bend it in favour of WWE), that would mean that WWE wasted a perfectly good angle just to swerve 5% of the audience, thereby punishing 95% of its audience from a good storyline. Not only that, but Matt was so over with the audience already. He was the leading babyface of the ECW brand (granted that doesn't mean much) and very over in his own right. But now that he's a heel, doesn't that decrease all his merch sales? I mean, that just sounds like a bad business model for the WWE (perhaps analogous to a smaller scale Steve Austin heel turn). Kids just don't like buying the heel merch.

They followed up the gawd-awful swerve with a ridiculous promo on Smackdown! this past Friday. It was a bad promo in delivery and design, and the cherry on top was that they played this evil music as background music while he was cutting it. The ultimate cheese effect. THANKFULLY though, the saving grace was that they kept things open for a Christian return as Matt claimed there's no evidence that he did any of that shit to Jeff, but there was evidence that he turned on him at the Rumble. Hopefully they pull the trigger on Christan at No Way Out in two weeks.

And now with Randy Orton, my favourite wrestler on the Raw brand. He went in and out of the Rumble show with so much momentum, and they destroyed it on Monday night. Not only that, but he and his fellow Legacy members, Cody Rhodes and Ted Dibiase Jr., were taken down a notch too. Shane McMahon made his return, and I'm not quite sure what he was trying to do, but the idea was that he was kicking the shit out of everyone because he was pissed off. I think he was trying to channel Steve Austin, but if you rewind it and watch it again, you can't tell what this man is trying to do. Let's think about this. Shane McMahon, the 39 year old non-wrestler/non-fighter, took out 3 young wrestlers on his own. Lets not forget that the night before Triple H (self proclaimed king) himself could not take out this faction because of their momentum. And if we think back a few more months to Survivor Series, Dave "The Animal" Batista, couldn't even take out two of them at the same time, that being Randy and Cody. So we're to believe that mild mannered Shane McMahon is not only much stronger than Triple H but even THE ANIMAL himself?! Bullshit.

Well, we'll see how they follow up the disaster that was last week on tonight's Raw.

This post went a few words too long and I didn't get to TNA. So in short, it was a complete bury-fest. Watch it for 15 minutes if you want to laugh, but then turn it off right after.

Later geeks.

Categories: TNA , women in wrestling , wwe