--Bloodburn.Com--

Stella Artois is a beer thats produced in Belgium. Even more, its made in Leuven, the city where i live. I really like this kind so i thought, why not make a review about some boose instead of a game.

I have been there a lot and have seen how they produce this beer, it was really interesting.

The beer is completely made in that place, this includes the preparation of the grain, the molt and even the bottling (putting the beer into a bottle/can).

Its a beer thats been made through the whole year and is one of the most famous beers from belgium, together with Duvel, Hoegaarde, Leffe and Jupilair. Its a good beer to mix with cola, vodka, whisky, redbull... since it won't make a complex or will shift. It has a strong but refreshing taste and is a classic blond beer.

Its like the most brands made with hops and grain. The fermentation happens inside the bottle and takes place for 2 a 3 months. The yeast will consume the sugars and make them into alcohol. This will produce a lot of CO2, which explains why the beer produces so many bubbles when its opened.

A other thing that this beer has is a strong "head" which will take a good amount of time before it is gone.


Well, i see that place everyday ^^
Anyway, the beer has a 5% alcohol per cent and is not so expensive. its legal to drink it if you are older than 16 in my country, but i guess you guy's have to wait untile the best time of your life is over before you are able to buy this legally.

In 1926, Stella Artois was launched initially as a seasonal beer especially for the Christmas holiday market. It was such a commercial success it became available year round and has been produced ever since.

The first Stella Artois beer was exported to the European market in 1930. By 1960, 100 million litres of Stella Artois were being produced annually. InBev opened a new fully automated brewery in Leuven in 1993, and by 2006, total production volume was over a billion litres annually.

The current package design and bottle design and shape was created in 1988 by David Taylor, founder of Taylorbrands. The design replaced a 1960s design and is inspired by the original 1926 bottle label.
The design incorporates the horn symbol of the Den Hoorn brewery and the date 1366 which is the date of the earliest recorded brewing in Leuven. The label also shows medals for excellence awarded to the brewery at a number of trade exhibitions in Belgium in the 19th and 20th century. The name Stella Artois is held within a "cartouche" which was influenced by the style of Belgian architecture of Leuvenes.

It is a good beer and its been produced for a descent amount of time. Im a bit proud that our beer from our town is so famous in so many countries, so thats why i wanted to tell a bit about this brand.

Okay, i have a question for you guy's. Whats your favorite brand/kind of beer and why? And have you ever drank Stella and what did you think about it? did you like it, or did you hate it?

Later in September, the sequel to the popular new IP, Borderlands, from Gearbox will be released. The original game was a near fully open world FPS RPG. Using unique cell shading graphics and a Diablo like loot system, gamers found themselves addicted quite quickly.

Borderlands 2, much like the first game, boasts to have millions of guns to find. Unlike the first game however, there really WILL be a big array of different types of guns. In the first game there WERE millions of combinations of weapons you could find, but most of them all shared the same gun model mechanics. Leading people to view the game as only having about 20 different guns to pick from. This has been fixed apparently.

Two new videos have been released showing off two classes and some of new new sweet weaponry. The siren is back and the gunzerker is featured in all his glorious duel wielding epicness.





I dont know about you but seeing those damage numbers popping up like before reminds me of the addictive game that the first was known for. I cant wait.

But you should.



There is a game out there called ARMA 2. It is one of the more sophisticated war simulation games. Recently someone created one of the most popular mods for the game called DayZ. It turns the game into a zombie apocalypse simulation.

When you start the online game (maps can hold 50 or so other players at once), you spawn in one of a few pre determined spawning spot. You get basic survival items, a backpack, some food, a bottle of water, and a basic pistol with some ammo.

The goal of the game is to just survive in a zombie filled world. Every movement you make, can generate sound, and attract zombies. Firing your gun will draw a nice crowd of them to come running after you. You will also run across other players, who may not have the best intentions and instead of working with you, will want to shoot you dead and take your supplies.



During your adventure, you will need to eat food and drink water or soda to keep hydrated. If you dont eat or drink for a long time, you can die. Usually when shot you lose blood (hp) and can fall unconscious, at which point other people can rummage through your pockets while you are blacked out, and take things.

The kicker is that after 6 hours of playing the game, permadeath is enabled for your character, that means if you die at that point, thats it. Your gone forever. You will have to create a whole new character and all your items are gone.

Death has meaning. You do not want to die.

While playing for hours, the game felt like a living breathing Walking Dead simulation. Creeping through the forest, keeping an eye out for zombies, or would be snipers on tops of roofs trying to take other humans out, the world wreaks of danger. That is what is so satisfying about it. Knowing that shit can go bad in an instant.

This is the zombie apocalypse after-all. Shit should be going down all the time. Ammo is scarce, you will quickly run out of ammo if you are wasteful. You will want to find abandoned houses and towns and outposts to look for more ammo.



Visiting a military station will probably yield you a good amount of ammo, and visiting a hospital will probably hold a good amount of bandages. Finding friends and grouping up is even more important, since one can watch your back while you trek through the vast 225km sized world.

You can even come across car and helicopter parts, once you have the correct parts, you can repair or build one, this would give you an extreme advantage to staying alive. However these parts take up 2 slots in your inventory, limiting the amount of necessary other items you may need.



The best part of this mod, is that the game is persistent. If you log out and shut the game down, your character information is saved to their servers. So you can log back into ANY other DayZ server and continue where you left off. This is groundbreaking as most if not all other servers for ARMA 2 are just maps, like counter strike or call of duty. There is a map that just resets. This makes the game more into a zombie MMO.

As of this writing, I am in decent shape. I have an AK-47, lots of ammo, a pistol with ammo, some bandages, lots of food and water and some flares and chemlights. I am moving inland to avoid contact with bandits (evil players) and want to try to compile parts to build a car. I wonder though, will I need gasoline for the car, judging on how the game works so far, I bet I will. That makes the game even better.

I have been gaming since I was a wee child back in the early 1980's. It all started when my Dad brought home our first gaming console, the Colecovision. It was like the cheaper rippoff of the Atari 2800. At my age that didn't matter much. Back then the games were pretty simple, Pac-Man, Pong, games were very simple and equated themselves more to parlor games, not epic adventures you can go on now.

Games came in the format of a cartridge you stuck in the top, and the graphics were simple colored blocks at a super low resolution. It was state of the art at the time and we liked it dangnabit! My very first memories of any video game was that of a game called 'Haunted House'. You were merely a set of eyeballs, floating around a black screen trying to find keys. The problem was that black screen was a maze, and you could only see the maze walls when lighting struck, lighting up the screen for a split second. Throw in some spiders and ghosts that can kill you in one hit and you have a game! My brother and I played that game for months!

Then much further down the line about 8 years later, I was introduced to a type of game that would change the way I enjoyed games forever. This game wasnt the TRUE form of game I am talking about, but gave me the feeling for it before it became a reality. The game was Final Fantasy for the NES.

The thing is, this was one of the first real Role Playing Games for a console, besides Dragon Quest. This felt more...free and open. That is what I am getting at actually. The feeling of freedom in the game topped anything else I ever felt. Knowing that I can make my character go in any direction I want. That cave over there, sure! What about that forest, lets go explore! The exploration feeling was just amazing and it got stuck in my head ever since.

Over the years more and more games came out, that built upon this format of game style. More "RPG's" came out and let you free roam across a 2D landscape. Then 3D gaming came to the public with DOOM and that made me think. I wondered "Wow, imagine if you could walk around like this, but out in the open, not down these corridors!". If I only knew at that age, what would be coming out 15 years later, I would need to wear adult diapers.

The term came to be, "open world games". This meant that the game world you could play in was, open. You can go anywhere you want, even if that means getting yourself killed, that was fine. It was your CHOICE to go to that dark forest at level 1. The freedom to do what you want when you want. Recently more and more games have bee adopting this style of game play, and I love it. Games like Borderlands.

While that game still is pretty linear, in terms not letting you climb hills of dirt to make a shortcut to a different area, the game did a great job in making you FEEL like it was open world. However there are games that did an even better job of being a TRUE open world. Games that also came in many different environments, and settings. One of those was Just Cause 2 that came out a couple years ago and still makes me think it should have won some sort of game of the year award:



This game has one of the largest playable landmasses available in the gaming industry. I once literally tried to run across it from one side to another, after about 2 hours I gave up. The sheer size of the world was not just the only thing about it, the ability to go where you want and do what you want was great. The amount of collectibles and interactivity within the world was groundbreaking. Even standing still and looking at the ground, the detail was immense right down to seeing scorpions crawling on the ground. Then looking up over a cliff and seeing for miles and miles in the distance, clouds descending on mountains, and oil tankers out in the ocean. It felt soo open and free.

ARMA 2 and the upcoming ARMA 3 took that style of game-play and incorporated it into a military simulation engine. To date, this is the most sophisticated and realistic war simulation game ever. So much in fact, that more than 10 actual government and private military organizations USE this game engine as a tool for their recruits. Google it yourself and see. The game world is just as immense as Just Cause 2, but with an ultra realistic approach to gameplay.


The recent game, Skyrim gives you freedom in a mid-evil fantasy world. Even with over 300 hours of game-play logged into this game myself. I am STILL playing it and discovering new things. The amount of game-play I get for $60 from a game like this is akin to going to a theater and paying $0.000001 per movie for life. Every time I enter the world I stand in awe at the view of distant storms and mountains and dragons flying around said mountains, and think...what am I going to do today..

Thats the thing about these open world games. They give you sooooooooooo much entertainment for your dollar. You just have to have the mindset for it. I personally know some people that tried to play the exact same games and quit after 10 minutes, why? They said they had no idea what to do and gave up. They failed to utilize their imagination and make a decision for themselves. There is no hand-holding, YOU make your own journey, not some programmer in a cubicle that wrote the code.

Far Cry 2 is another example of a fantastic open world game. This time it is a first person shooter. This game was torn to shreds by user reviews and critics alike, yet is one of my all time favorite games, so much so I am playing through it a 3rd time. Why? You get over 50sq miles of terrain to traverse and you can tackle any objective ANY way you want. Imagine your typical shooter game, there usually is only 1 MAYBE 2 ways you can go about killing someone since most shooters are linear. Not Far Cry 2, since it is pure open world, you can take on objectives in any way.

Say your task is to blow up an oil tank in some train station. You can climb a mountain nearby with a sniper rifle and shoot the tank, or the people first. You can strap explosives to your jeep and drive it into the tank and jump out a few seconds before hand and then take everyone else out in a firefight. You could just get a rocket launcher and blow it up that way. You can circle the place and sneak through tall grass and silently stealth kill everyone and then blow it up that way. The possibilities are nearly limitless. That is freedom of gaming, that is open world.

Handing off the adventure to the adventurer is one of the most groundbreaking things any game designer has done in the last 20 years of gaming. Games were built on interactivity, the more of that we have, the better the game. Sure, the story to a game is nice, but then again, tetris is one of the most profitable games in human history, what story did it have?

Interactivity and discovery is king. I think more designers need to remember that, and look back to the changes that have been made in the last 20 years and see where we came from. People, by nature crave freedom, this applies to real life as well as entertainment. You take that freedom, that discovery, that exploration away from them and all you have left is a movie, a TV show, something for some docile observer to sit there and look at.

That is not groundbreaking or interactive. I can only imagine what open world games 20 years from now will be like. Instead of having only a few square miles of exploration to do, we may have entire galaxies to explore and interact with right down to a molecular level. THAT is the day I will need adult diapers, not just for the game either.