Stranglehold Review

This is a video game sequel to John Woos blockbuster hit movie Hard Boiled. The game transpires after the events of Hard Boiled and has everything you would expect from John Woo. Stranglehold is a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC exclusive. Gamers will be in control of protagonist inspector Tequila, and Chow Yun Fat reprises his role as the stylish hero. The plot in Stranglehold is about a little girl being used as ransom; consequently, Tequila is sent to rescue her.

The storyline seems impertinent and takes a backseat to the slow motion and fast action. The gameplay is a swift action packed adventure from start to finish. Players will be immersed in a world that entails bullets flying, cinematic deaths, and plenty of weapons. Virtually the entire environment can be utilized to a certain extent.

If you cannot destroy a pillar, you can probably use it as cover or various other ways during a firefight. In a nutshell, the paramount goal in Stranglehold is to eradicate anything and everything that moves. Players will have a usual arsenal of weapons that include handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, a rocket launcher, and machine guns. In addition, inspector Tequila will be able to utilize four abilities known as Tequila Bombs. These abilities are mapped to the D-pad for easy access, and they all fit the game nicely. In Stranglehold, a visible meter will be at the top of the screen. You have to fill this meter in order to execute a Tequila bomb maneuver. Killing foes is the only way to charge up your meter, so do not be afraid to pull the trigger.

The first Tequila Bomb is a rudimentary health increase. The second Tequila Bomb is precision aiming. Precision aiming gives you a chance to slow down time and accurately target your adversaries. Firing at a particular body part will cause your opponents to act accordingly.

For instance, shooting at his head will cause him to die. Likewise, shooting him in the groin will coerce him to grab his private part and die (my personal favorite place to shoot). The camera will actually zoom in on the bullet in precision aiming mode. The third Tequila Bomb enable you to enter barrage mode. This is very similar to Scarface which gives you a balls mode rampage of destruction. It works the same way. You have a limited amount of time where your attributes are enhanced, and you are invincible. The fourth and final Tequila Bomb is a smart bomb. When used, it cause you to pulverize all opponents on screen instantaneously via a cinematic scene. The inspector will spin, (ala Max Payne 2) and only he will remain standing. Another gameplay aspect that will appease Max Payne fans is the aforementioned slow motion bullet time. There is a separate meter for this, and it fills up in the same manner as the Tequila Bomb meter. Slow motion can be initiated when running, walking, diving, and interacting with the environment.

Some of the things you will be able to do are running up and down railings and slide across counters while spraying your rivals with bullets (ala Hard Boiled movie). There is no doubt that many players will enjoy the standoffs in Stranglehold, but I found it to be rather arduous. The standoffs play drastically differently from the actual gameplay. Your objective is to evade and fire simultaneously, but this part of the game is cumbersome. The audio is amazing as you will hear gunfire and people soaring through the air. The graphics are somewhat hit or miss. Chow Yun Fat looks exactly like his real life counterpart, and the setting do look like Hong Kong. However, a good chunk of the enemies appear insipid. There is multiplayer in Stranglehold, but it is not as engrossing as the single player campaign. Stranglehold does have its flaws which are its short length, and the plot is a disaster.

If anyone is intrigued to get their next Max Payne fix, then answer is Stranglehold. The comparisons between Max Payne and Stranglehold are uncanny. From the slow motion bullet time effects to the surprisingly short game, Stranglehold is about as close to Max Payne as you can get. Even though avid gamers will cruise through Stranglehold in one day, that should not deter anyone from playing the game.

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Holding The Space - The Power of Positive Mantra to Change

I went to this acting workshop once and the guys running it were real guys of faith. All of them working actors. They spoke of having a positive attitude among many other concepts for being successful in such an erratic profession as acting. I noticed one guy, whenever you asked him how he was, he'd say: "I'm blessed, brother." However, the look in his eyes was fear, like he didn't believe it, but rather he was hoping somehow it would be true as soon as possible. Even with his apparent success, he was there with his partners giving this workshop to remind himself of all the things that were working in his life. You could tell he believed them all, but the look in his eyes was fear-- as though he didn't actually feel it. What he was doing was holding the space with his mantra: "I'm blessed, brother."

"In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god." [John, 1:1]

The word starts with you. Everything is a vibration. Go back to elementary science: all matter is energy and energy is neither created nor destroyed, it simply changes into and out of form by virtue of its vibrational frequency. You don't have to be a mad philosopher or astrophysicist to get this stuff either, you just have to look around you, closely. It's everywhere in nature. So it is, so it shall be. When you speak The Word you vibrate that word's symbolic meaning within your being, in the present moment. So staying positive and saying ""I'm blessed" is certainly better than saying, "I'm screwed, I'm gonna die a fiery death."

Unfortunately if you're in the habit of being negative, the latter might seem more true and easier to resonate with in the moment and that's what people generally do. Being negative then becomes a habit. Talking about failure, especially joking about failure is a way of hedging one's bets and avoiding the pain of defeat. If you expect hard knocks and you joke about it, when it comes you're not as hurt by having had faith and hoped for better. It's a real half-assed way to go and it invites the failure in because you're giving power to failure by being self-deprecating. It's that law of attraction that's become so popular with the movie, The Secret that's all the rage now. What you put your attention on grows: what you focus your thoughts on is what you will magnetically attract into your life.

The thing is, the creative energy is neutral. You and the creative potential of the universe are one. You can call it God or whatever you need to call it to grab on to it. It's there for you to do what you will with it. You've got this mind, given as a gift to you, to direct the light of your soul. You've got free will to create the habits that will attract to you success and prosperity and more importantly a sense of inner peace and it is all begins created with The Word. When the thousands of thoughts that flick through your mind at the blink of an eye flutter by your inner lens you can choose to grab on to any one, or several of those passing thoughts. As soon as you grab on to a thought and you react to it with emotion you start a chain reaction of creation. Backed by emotion thought moves one to speak The Word and hence your reality is created.

Let's say you have to give a speech and you're terrified of public speaking. Your mind is racing, your negative mind is feeding you worst case scenarios and what you grab onto the worst of them and become emotional about it. Then you likely express that fear. You speak some words in relation to it-- expressing your fears to those close to you. All the while your giving more and more power to what you don't want-- to get up and bomb in front of an audience. Thus you keep your reality in place by the habit of your thoughts. Hopefully, you have the balance of the positive mind, telling you that it's going to be okay, telling you how prepared you are or that you're doing it for a higher purpose, driving you to then create a more positive stream of thoughts to act on. Want to see this type of "space holding" in action? Watch professional sports. The athletes pump themselves up for game day and seal their minds as best they can against defeat. What they're doing is holding the space for the win.

So let's go back a moment. Millions of thoughts, you grab one or a chain of them and project these thoughts backed by emotion. Then you speak The Word. These are the elements of how you project your reality. Remember, the mind projects the light of your soul. Human broken down into it's roots, "Hue" and "Man" are as follows: Hue meaning light, Man meaning mind-- light-mind. A human is the light (of the soul) projected with the help of the mind in the present moment. So "holding the space" simply means maintaining the present moment by virtue of your thoughts and words and deeds. Very simply it is how you are projecting in each moment. We all do it , constantly. Mothers and Fathers hold the space for their families. Friends hold the space for each other. It's whatever you're doing to keep your present reality in place. Think of a mother watching silently over her children as they play. She might go about the house, working unnoticed, making the home peaceful and perfect. All the while, her thoughts and intentions are on her children's safety and well-being. With her sixth sense, she's listening for sounds that might indicate the children are in need of something or facing danger. This is holding the space.

I first heard this term "holding the space" in the kundalini yoga community. It's a natural progression when you understand how yogi's work. They discipline themselves through yoga and meditation until their power over the mind gives them the control of their reality. Not bad for the price of admission, I'd say. So everywhere I went these yogis were talking about holding the space and quite honestly it annoyed me. It seemed like hippy buzzwords to me and very often, like my aforementioned acting friend, we can sometimes use buzzwords in a knee-jerk fashion. After hearing the term "holding the space" enough times, I realized it really meant something more than its apparent buzz. It means controlling your present reality by first holding the mental space and then choosing which thoughts you will project, and then back with emotion and ultimately by speaking the word, sparking the process of manifestation.

You can't control time but you can affect the space which you occupy within that time continuum. That is how we are on this earth in a nutshell. We're occupying space within time. When I was growing up, if someone was a real mope, we'd call them "a waste of space." It comes down to how you occupy or "hold the space" in each moment. Since everything comes down to a vibration, a frequency, you have a choice with that vibration: whether to go higher or lower.

What my acting friend knew was that by using a mantra he was seeding his mind with the vibration he wished to create: Living a blessed life. The more you repeat a mantra the more it vibrates within you and changes your mind's vibration--The Word in action within the mind. Yogi Bhajan has often been quoted as saying, "fake it until you make it." Essentially that means hold the space in your mind by first by believing it even if the outer picture is in conflict with what you yet desire to create. Mantra helps with this tremendously. In the practice of Kundalini yoga we use many sacred mantras whose mere vibrations are like a telephone numbers to many different sacred elements of the universe. These high powered vibrations serve to clear all the subconscious crap that gets in the way of what you wish to project and thus create. Any mantra spoken from the gut, backed with belief and emotion will do the trick. The idea is to seed the mind for change.

"We must become the change we wish to see." --Mahatma Ghandi

When your mind changes, you change. When you change, what you project changes. When what you project changes, what you experience changes-- and this becomes what you see in front of you.

Holding the space means keeping your focus on your intention until the picture outside created, maintained and then held to your satisfaction. Many people feel out of control because they don't have the strength of mind to hold the space that they want to experience. Everything is everything. Keeping the physical body strong and the mind clear, strengthening the mind with disciplined meditation and using mantras to reinforce positive affirmations are all tools one can use to hold the space they desire in their lives.

What kind of space are you holding in your life?

Patrick Lacho is an IKYTA certified Yoga instructor and writer based in Los Angeles. He teaches a yoga bootcamp http://www.ybc40.com, which takes students through a forty day transformation using yoga, meditation and sound. More articles and discussion about yoga, philosophy, spirituality and more can be found on the website.

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