Back to Freedom.  Some people have called it a victory for women because the Latino female lead character has small tits and doesn't wear a thong.  I'm more of a hairless forearm, tiny itty-bitty foot man myself, but I just don't see how any progress has been made here.  This is a picture of Freedom's Angel Sanchez:

Now that's an unattainable body type.  Little girls are going to play Freedom and say, "I want to be just like my hero Angel Sanchez, but my ass isn't a perfectly flat trapezoid... AHHH MY MONITOR'S ON FIRE!"  I don't even know where Angel Sanchez managed to buy those pants.  Maybe the alien invaders brought some technology to clothe her in-hugh-man bee-hind, as alien robots would say.  The point is, since Red Storm knew that I was going to have to stare at Sanchez's ass for the entire game, maybe they could have done me a little favor and made it out of two polygons. 

Here's another crazy thing about Freedom: the save system.

Here I am quick saving my game in the middle of a level.  No problem there.  F3 quick loads. 

When you die, you see this.  If you're like anyone who's ever - ever - played a game before, at this point you hit F3 to reload your last save.   Unfortunately, the geniuses at Red Storm were too busy designing games to ever actually play one.  Not only - for some fucking reason that someone at Red Storm should explain to me some day - can you not reload here, you have to sit and watch while the camera makes swooping motions around your corpse for six or seven seconds.

Then the game takes ten seconds or so to load the campaign map.  Let's see: Journal, Options, Save, Quit, Proceed.  Hmmmm... No Load.  That's okay, because you can just hit F3 to quick load.  Only you can't, since nobody at Red Storm ever thought  you might want to reload your last save after you die.

So what you have to do is quit back to the main menu (which takes some more of your precious time), where, perhaps by accident, Red Storm managed to cram in a way to reload a saved game.

This is too blatant to be a bug.  That leaves only two explanations: a) with holiday publishing schedules being what they are, none of the busy people at Red Storm ever found time to play Freedom: First Resistance or b) Red Storm couldn't care fucking less about either you or their shitty products.  Since Freedom: First Resistance also BLOWS UP YOUR MONITOR, I'm voting for b.

So is Freedom worth almost five hundred dollars?  You may be surprised to learn that, in my opinion, no it's not.  It's so boring, frustrating, and ugly that when it eventually BLOWS UP YOUR MONITOR you might actually be a little relieved.  Until you realize that all your money is gone and Red Storm has ruined Christmas.  Seriously, nice job you Scrooge fucks - I have eight dollars left to buy presents for people, some of whom are children.  Even Blaze and Blade managed to not make my computer explode.