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I thought I'd just list a few things I liked and disliked about Gears of War 3. Warning: SPOILERS!

LIKED: The series finally spent more time outdoors than indoors or underground, and we got to see some color. I liked that. The near-monochromatic color scheme worked well in introducing the game world back in the first game, but as things moved faster and became more crowded, it became monotonous.

DISLIKED: GoW3 is only marginally less set-piece happy than GoW2 was, with plenty of sequences that turn the experience from a third-person shooter into a rail shooter.

LIKED: I liked how we got to see how the actions of two separate squads came together to result in the defeat of the game's first boss enemy, the Leviathan.

DISLIKED: I disliked how jarring the transition was, going from Marcus and Dom defending the ship, to Baird and Cole looking for groceries. Ultimately, though, the gameplay for the second team was more enjoyable.

I'm not sure why I had high hopes for this show, but inside of five minutes the indications were not good. Inside of an hour the show was struggling under the weight of all the improbabilities it had accumulated, and it was a major effort to stick it out to the end.

The program spends very little time in the future, 2149, to establish the current hostile conditions from which people are fleeing. There's a shot of a smog-covered Chicago looking not much different from present-day Beijing on a bad air day. The protagonists, the Shannon family, are violators of a law that limits families to two children-- their third child, a daughter, Zoe, is unlawful. We're given almost no time to see the family in its current condition, as police are at the door looking for Zoe within moments. Despite being a police officer himself, when the police find Zoe-- hiding behind the largest, most obvious air vent in the room, after an "exhaustive" search of overturning furniture-- Jim decides to attack the police. He is arrested.

We then jump years into the future, when the wife, Elizabeth, visits Jim in prison to tell him she and their two lawful children have been recruited to travel into the past, to the Terra Nova colony. A predictable plot where the husband then breaks out of jail and brings his third daughter with him to reunite his family in Terra Nova. Here is where the stupid starts.

Jim Shannon is a vice cop, so presumably whatever area of law enforcement that deals with population control is not his area of specialty. Still, presumably he would have known what his oldest son confronts him with later: that assault on police officers is a more serious crime than the original population control violation, and as a result, he's done far worse harm to his family. He is sentenced to six years in prison, where he's supposedly put into what looks like solitary confinement in a facility that is referred to as "maximum security". Why an overpopulated and overpolluted future is willing to spend cash on this kind of incarceration for what is presumably a first offense, and a simple assault at that, is baffling.

More confusing is the fact that despite being "maximum security" the cell door has an opening in it, without any gate or lock, large enough to pass objects through. The wife smuggles a laser weapon inside a rebreather, which the guard allows her to pass to her husband uninspected.

A team of Kazakh adventurers is planning to drive to the South Pole exactly 100 years after Norwegian Roald Amundsen beat Britain's Robert Falcon Scott in an epic race to the bottom of the world.

In an effort to help provide Kazakh language training for corporate executives, officials and students interested in working in Kazakhstan, a new training center - Kazakh Language Education Center (KLEC) - has been established in Alexandria, Virginia. Classes are scheduled to begin on October 1, 2011.

Kazakhstan, fresh from becoming the world's top of uranium producer, plans to produce a first batch of 1,500 metric tons of rare earths next year as it enters the race to compensate the shortfall of Chinese exports, a senior official said Monday.

Portal 2 feels very different from the first game. The first game seemed a lot like what it was: a new idea that came in from the outside-- outside Valve's usual Half-Life universe, and outside the usual thinking. Portal 2 feels a lot like that idea brought into the Half-Life universe, and expanded-- which is a good thing, I think.

I really enjoyed the backstory of Aperture Science and the comparison to the Black Mesa mythos that Half-Life is steeped in. The origin story for GlaDOS was terrific, and it came as a huge surprise to me that this came about organically, almost accidentally-- it seemed almost as if it had to have been planned from the very start, it worked so well.

Some have bemoaned the addition of other gameplay mechanics, namely the speed, bounce, and portal gels, as it takes center stage ahead of the portal gun itself, especially during the old test areas of Aperture. Some I know complained that the puzzles themselves were more limiting, allowing for one solution and one solution only, rather than multiple possibilities, as in some of the first game's puzzles.

Ok, here it is... your weekly recap of gaming: 6 days of gaming made me pretty happy for some reason. A big holler to Narcogen for honoring me with what little time I know is available. We added 200 points of gamerscore which ain't too shabby. Getting 10 achievements can do that to you. I was there. I saw it! Oh, and Narcogen seems obsessed with role playing games lately... You can tell because Fallout: New Vegas was the favorite last week. He played it on 6 of the days.

I could go on and on with the stats, but that is enough.

Kazakhstan plans to introduce the European standards of recycling water supply.

Minister of Environmental Protection Nurgali Ashim has announced at the Seventh "Environment for Europe" Ministerial Conference.

A two-day networking meeting CENTRAL ASIA INVEST takes place in Almaty on 20-21 September in the framework of the eponymous EU programme. The Central Asia Invest gathers together projects partners, beneficiaries, the EU representatives and Government Officials from the different Central Asian countries.

LA Noire just oozes atmosphere. It's got a frame story (soldiers returning to the US from WWII and adjusting to civilian life) that I found interesting, especially where it tightly integrates into the gameplay, namely in the Vice and Arson desks.

The expanded Black Dahlia plotline of the Homicide desk I found less satisfying, in no small part due to the fact that you're nearly always dealing with wrongly-accused suspects. Your character knows this, since the serial killer theory is one he supports, even when his boss and partner don't.

It's also where the wrinkles in the interrogation system are the worst. Picking out Truth is usually the easiest, but Doubt and Lie are problematic. Sometimes Doubt means "I know you're lying, but can't prove it"-- and you might not be able to prove it because it can't be proven, or because you didn't find the one correct piece of evidence (or did find it, but didn't identify it properly).