The Avengers Film Series- Ranked and Reviewed- Part One

As part of my ongoing (and inexplicable) efforts to isolate and bewilder the fine honey community, I'm going to rank The Avengers series and then review them. Normally, you would think that this would include 3 or 4 films. But The Avengers was a bold move trying to bring cross-film continuity into cinema. By that, I mean in order to understand plot elements in Captain America, you had to have seen Thor. It was a huge gamble because if any one of the five films that set up The Avengers was a dud or if the film proper was awful, the whole exercise would have been futile and would have been a spectacular way to burn a billion dollars. I'm not actually being poetic there. I looked up the budgets for the six films and it ended up equaling precisely 1 billion dollars ($140 mil for Iron Man, $150 mil for Incredible Hulk, $200 mil for Iron Man 2, $150 mil for Thor, $140 mil for Captain America, and $220 mil for The Avengers). Obviously, this gambit wound up being a wild success as The Avengers alone grossed $1.51 billion worldwide which means that, ultimately, the other films could have been released for free and they still would have made a 51% return on investment. But I digress, this blog isn't going to talk about the economic qualities of the Avengers Initiative, but rather the cinematic qualities of each film.

As you know, I tend to be a bit long-winded when I blog. So I'm going to try and keep this installment under 2,000 words. In the first part, I'm going to rank the films from 6 to 1 (with 6 being the blandest and 1 being the best). In the second part, I'll provide my viewing recommendations so you can experience the Avengers with minimal time requirement.

"Should we do something?"
"No, just stand here and look cool for the commercials!"

6. The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk was Marvel's follow-up to the universal success of Iron Man. Full disclosure: I never actually saw much of The Incredible Hulk. I can honestly say I've only seen the last 20 minutes on FX on night when I was bored. The story is well-known by the society's collective consciousness (due in part to it being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde if Mr. Hyde took steroids) and the film just never looked that intriguing. Unfortunately for the Hulk, most of America, Marvel's casting studio, and even Marvel's movie gurus agreed with me. Not only was Hulk the least financially successful of the Avengers prequels, it was also the least significant to the overarching story. All that happens is that Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk because they're trying to recreate the Captain America Super Soldier Serum. And somehow Bruce Banner transforms from Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo between films. If they can successfully change actors between films and no one will comment on it, you know you have a dull story. The last piece of evidence to support this being entirely forgettable is the Hulk sequel has been put on hold until after the Avengers sequel. So everyone else will get a second (or third) solo outing before they'll even consider making a follow-up to The Incredible Hulk. Yawn.

The Top Five Things in Mass Effect 3

First, let me begin with a sincere apology to all the fine honeys who read this blog and don't play Mass Effect. You ladies have really missed out. I'll tell you what, I'll make it up to you by talking about the Hunger Games next and how that girl you hated in high school is exactly like Clove. But for now, we're going to talk more about interstellar politics, spaceships, aliens, guns, and explosions. Hurray!

Like I alluded to yesterday, the best way for me to handle Mass Effect 3 is to break it up into composite parts. I know it can be hard to tell, but I really like this game. If you're the type of person who puts stock into numbers, I'd give it 4.75 English Muffins out of 5. Someone burned a bit of the last muffin, but you can scrape off the black stuff and still enjoy its nooks and crannies. I feel the real measure of a game is talking about the things you liked and the things you didn't like. It gives a clearer picture of what people would like about the game than just a raw score and rambling.

5. Squadmate Closure OR They Should Call It Terminus Graffiti

Going into Mass Effect 3, I thought it would be easy to release a revised "Top Whatever Squadmates". The wheat would be separated from the chaff and it would confirm my every complaint about the poorly written characters. But I wasn't permitted to be that lazy. With the exception of Jacob Taylor (more on that later), every other squadmate had significant and meaningful closure to their story. More than that, it also improved my opinion of every non-Jacob character. Best of all, their involvement in the story never felt cliche or forced, but rather an organic growth from the story.

Jack became an effective & caring teacher for biotic teenagers, rather than a selfish nihilist. As a non-Jacob, she saw growth as a character. Is this what you'd call a "character arc"? It feels good!

No one did anything that felt out of character or that looked like three separate kinds of impossible. Not everyone survived, but not everyone died either. It honestly kept you guessing. The ones who did die died in an awesome way, which is how characters we care about should die. No one wants to see Darth Vader die from a complication in his breathing machine. They want to see him die from a complication in his breathing machine, caused by Force Lightning after he threw the Emperor off the Death Star!

The real genius of this set-up is the squadmates' stories are interwoven into side quests and other areas of otherwise non-essential importance. Each person is in a believable scenario, and it's just as believable that Shepard would run into them there. The side quest would still make sense if the former teammate wasn't there, but the end result wouldn't be as good. It rewards your hard work for keeping people alive (except Jacob). Honestly, I could do a whole separate update on just how great each and every one of these moments was (and I just might). For now, it's enough to say that these quests which were pretty boring in prior Mass Effect games provided an absolute roller coaster of emotions. I'm going to close this entry out with the best moment from the Former Squadmate Quests: The Conclusion to Grunt's Investigation of the Rachni.


4.The Search & Rescue system

In a vacuum, the Search & Rescue system is merely adequate.  But this review is not in a vacuum, it's in the context of all other Mass Effect games (even the terrible iOS game). The absolute worst non-Kaidan, non-Jacob part of every Mass Effect game has been gathering resources. In Mass Effect, it revolved around methodically clicking on every planet and/or asteroid and hoping the game asked you to press A a second time. If you were real fortunate, you'd have to go down to the surface on the Mako and navigate the seemingly randomly generated terrain to get to spare resources. God help you if it's not immediately clear if you should go up the side of the hill in your ATV.

I'm 73% sure I can go the rest of the way up!

 In Mass Effect 2, they decided the solution would be to force you to meticulously scan every square inch of every planet from space, hunting for four different kinds of resource in the hundreds of thousands of... um... whatever the standard unit for video games is. I don't have to say anything about this, the sheer slowness of the scanning and silliness of the concept has been a running joke on the internet for two years now.


In Mass Effect 3, instead of hunting for resources, Shepard now uses the Normandy's stealth engines to perform interstellar search and rescue for vital war assets (think way ward capital ships, stranded spec ops teams, etc.) in Reaper-space. This is balanced against the fact that scanning for resources draws the attention of the Reapers, who will destroy you if they catch you. This gives the entire affair a feeling of tension prior resource gathering mini-games lack. This does have the unintended consequence of making you outrun the Reapers often, which undermines them as a threat. But even though it's not perfect, the fact that resource gathering is no longer the worst part of Mass Effect is a minor miracle.

The Top Five Minor Characters in Mass Effect

So I'm less than 180 minutes away from the release of Mass Effect 3! It's been an incredible fortnight, but I didn't cover nearly as much as I wanted to. But before I am utterly consumed by the fight against the Reapers (Harbinger can suck it!), I'd like to talk about the little people. After all, the minor characters are often our favorite (isn't that right, Boba Fett?). And these aren't just minor characters, these are the minorest of minor characters! To qualify for this list, the character can't be a major fight, appear in more than one mission, or have any real consequence whatsoever.

You take the three on the right. I'll take the innumerable armada in the background. LET'S DO THIS!

5. Mr. Thax (Mass Effect 2)

We don't every meet Mr. Thax, so that's why he's fifth on the list. However, we do know that he's a krogan and has his employees (also Krogan) speaking in a very dignified fashion. The fact that I was the first person in internet history to write "Lord Wrexington of Urdnotshire" should indicate that I hold proper Krogan near and dear to my heart.

4. Richard L. Jenkins

The L stands for Luther. What else would it be?

 Sure, Richard L. Jenkins may have had five lines of dialogue before being unceremoniously gunned down by Geth Drones five minutes into Mass Effect. But in those five minutes, he managed to look damn good in a beret. Not many men can say that. And he wasn't around nearly enough to be annoying. So that makes him a better teammate than Kaidan and Jack already. Jenkins, you may be completely useless in a firefight and not understand the most basic concepts of infantry tactics, but you never once wiped your brow to try and impress me. I salute you.

3. Li the Turian Mechanic

"Hey did you catch the game last night? No, too busy saving the galaxy? Bummer. It was great."

 Li, who has a much more complicated and hard to pronounce Turian name (and he goes by Li in the game, so it's not racism), is a mechanic on the frozen planet of Noveria (because you gotta have an ice world). What stands out about Li is that he is, remarkably, the closest thing to a normal person in either game. He knows about current events, but is mostly just interested in keeping his comfortable mechanic job.  Sure, he can talk about the crazy things that must be going on in Peak 15 or the scandals surrounding Administrator Anoleis, but he'd rather talk about cars. Plus, he's one of the few people who is unconditionally nice to Shepard. In a galaxy of extremes, Li is a bastion of mediocrity and he revels in it.

The Top 16 Mass Effect Squad Members Part III: Then Things Got Awesome

Yesterday, we had a major milestone in Mass Effect squad members: they started to get good. Now, this is where my job gets tricky as it's no longer a matter of whether or not the character is awesome, but how awesome are they.

8. Tali'Zorah nar Rayya/vas Neema/vas Normandy

"Look me in the visor and say that!"

Tali Three Names in Two Games is the first of the squad members to feature heavily in both games. In Mass Effect 1, she's this shy, super curious alien gypsy (or "Quarian") who happened to be in the right place at the right time or, arguably, the wrong place in the wrong time. But I'm confident she was in a place to get an incriminating voice file of the bad guy in Mass Effect 1 at a time when Commander Shepard and his crew were busting skulls in her neighborhood, thus thwarting the bad guy's inevitable cover up attempt. Throughout the course of the Mass Effect 1 adventure, Tali spends her time in engineering being awed by how awesome the SSV Normandy's Tantalus Warp Core is. Most impressively, she never made a single "tantalizing" pun. Later on, you find out she's on a rite of passage with her people to find something, as the ancient Quarians would say, "totes legit". Then you give her a data disk with all the Geth's homework assignments on it, thus enabling the Quarians to cheat like crazy.

In Mass Effect 1, Tali is mostly there to give you a culture lesson on the Quarians and add depth to the universe. As a character, she's not particularly exciting or interesting. Luckily, Tali returned with a vengeance in Mass Effect 2. For starters, she's in charge of a Quarian Spec Ops team that you run into on your first mission. Unfortunately, Quarian Spec Ops is about as useful as the French Army in World War II. If memory serves, by the time she joins up with your squad, there is one survivor in her unit, and even his survival is contingent upon your ability to blow up 30 foot tall robots with lasers for eyes. But I'll get into the details of Tali's military career a bit later. As a result, Tali is pretty much at home only with Shepard and is incredibly protective of him. Rather than being relentlessly curious, Tali develops a backbone and is capable of making her own decisions. Her loyalty mission is extremely close to Mass Effect 1 in spirit and is a very moving story. The only downside is there's not really a strong dilemma to go along with it, but that's a minor blemish.

"Ow! My spine! It totally got crushed!"

But now I'd like to talk some about her military career, short and inglorious. It isn't really Tali's fault, it's more a product of her having heavy expectations from her superiors and little respect from her subordinates. For once, I will bore you with minutia, so fine honeys, do your thing. We know Tali's father is a very important figure in Quarian culture and she did well on her pilgrimage. We know from Tali's loyalty mission that her father was extremely ambitious. So from the start, Tali's assigned a mission that probably won't work out under the best circumstances. Tali's father really wants her to be like him and lead the Quarians on a grand campaign of ass-kicking. The thing is Tali was a member of an ass-kicking, name-taking crew, but she was never a primary ass-kicker or name-taker. She was an engineer and was good at breaking robots' programming. But because of family pride, she winds up over-promoted. Her soldiers know this and don't really respect her. She's just a teen girl with a famous father to them. As a result, they ignore her orders in the first mission of the game and they get their spines crushed. Her soldiers seem to be more loyal after that, from what little we see, but their mission is just too much.

The Top 16 Mass Effect Squad Members Part II: The Mediocre Three

Yesterday, I went over the bottom of the Mass Effect space barrel. Today, things continue to improve. These characters aren't great, but they certainly don't have the myriad of flaws that yesterday's bunch had.

11. Kasumi Goto (Mass Effect 2)

Tragically, Kasumi Goto was born without a forehead.

 Kasumi Goto is different than all the other characters I'll discuss. She's the only one to be made available after the game was released, coming out via downloadable content (DLC) a few months after Mass Effect 2 came out. That means people had to pay $7 if they wanted this character. As a result, BioWare tried their damnedest to make this DLC bundle worthwhile. And they succeeded at making the bundle a great value for $7. The shame is none of it has to do with Kasumi. Specifically, her loyalty mission is both fantastic and unique. It requires you to infiltrate the party of a interstellar arms dealer, James Bond-style. Schmooze up the host and impress some people with your tuxedo wearing prowess (or dress wearing prowess, if you're a Lady Shepard) all while scouting out the party and sabotaging their defenses. And the practical reward for the mission is a fantastic new submachine gun that is the most accurate and deadly of all the SMGs in the game. The thing is Kasumi herself is entirely forgettable and not needed for this mission at all.

As a character, Kasumi strives for that Joss Whedon style best seen in the short-lived but oft-cited cult TV show, Firefly. She'll make sarcastic quips and never take things as seriously as she should. Honestly, you'd think I would love this. But it really just undermines the tone of the much darker Mass Effect 2. It's not that characters can't be funny or make wise-cracks, there's just nothing else to her character and that won't cut it in a game of this caliber.

Maybe her motive was to wear leather pants?

From a broader standpoint, she has no reason to work with Shepard and Shepard has no reason to work with her. Kasumi is a master thief, so that means she's good at sneaking around and taking things. But Shepard is on a mission to fight a bunch of enigmatic aliens and their cybernetic monsters. I don't think the Collectors really have anything you could steal from them. Certainly nothing that requires a specialist. And what does Kasumi get out of it? Is it money? Revenge? Boredom? To appeal to RPG fans who adore Japanese culture and would typically not try out a Western RPG like Mass Effect, thus broadening the game's market to an untapped demographic? Is it fashion? I honestly don't remember. It's a bad sign if I can't remember why a character would sign up for a suicide mission.

The Top 16 Mass Effect Squad Members Part I: The Bottom Five

Like all good space operas, Mass Effect is just as much about the people as it is about alien worlds, cosmic mysteries, and shooting cosmic mysteries on alien worlds.

KILL IT WITH FIRE!

While the crew of the SSV Normandy (for the uninitiated, that's the name of your spaceship) is filled with lovable characters (all right, it's mostly just Seth Green as the lovable pilot and a non-licensed knock off of Scotty that are truly lovable, but that's beside the point), it's really the squad that matters most to the story. Being a video game, almost all of the exciting things and moments of drama occur when you're fighting on foot. Concordantly, most of your time will be spent on these missions. So its important for the squad members you fight with to be unique, memorable and interesting. While almost every squad member in Mass Effect 1 & 2 succeeds at the former, there's some struggling with the latter. Obviously, there will be spoilers ahead. If you were planning on trying out the best games of 2007 and 2010 but never found time to do it, stop reading now. Without further ado, let's dive into the first part of a comprehensive ranking of the best, the worst, and the most mediocre of what Mass Effect can offer.

16. Jacob Taylor (Mass Effect 2)

Remember when I said most of the squad members were unique and memorable? Well, Jacob Taylor is the reason why it couldn't be all the squad members. He is so bland, so devoid of passion and intrigue that when I initially discussed this article with the Bean, we honestly forgot he was in the game at all. The thing is every other character has strong principles and motives and display superb talent before they join your squad. But that's not the case with Jacob. Jacob winds up contradicting his own viewpoints a lot. He joined up with Cerberus (a radical pro-human group) because they get results. So he's an action first, damn the consequences kinda guy, right? But then he decides that he's super hesitant about following the orders of their leader. So he's a man of honor then? No, because before the game, he was a thug on the Alliance payroll who took missions the Alliance couldn't officially sanction. As for his abilities, he's probably the least qualified person on the Normandy in that he is neither a telekinetic crusader, spec ops veteran, or vigilante who simultaneously fought three companies of interstellar mercenaries to a stalemate all by himself, but he was the main character of the terrible iPhone game Mass Effect Galaxies. So I guess that was his main qualification. In a nutshell, Jacob can't decide if he's a rebel or a conformist, has no real interesting back story and is not particularly clever or smart. I guess he's supposed to be an everyman, but some convictions wouldn't hurt.

Happy Bill Murray Day!

I hope everyone has enjoyed their endless cycle of do-overs today. It occurs to me that today would have been an excellent opportunity to write about the Top Five Bill Murray films, but given how little time I have to update today, I feel like it would not be much more than "Five Bill Murray Films". But what the heck? I can come up with an informal list in the hour before February 3rd. And if I can't, I'm sure I'll wake up and it'll be the morning of February 2nd again.

5. Groundhog Day

This is in fifth place primarily because I really just wanted to write a quick update before bed and then go back to kicking my legs up. But Groundhog Day reminded me that I can do better. So thanks, Groundhog Day, I was really looking forward to reclining my chair too. But on topic, it's a very funny movie with a standard "Jerk learns to stop being a jerk" subplot but with a few nice quirks and Murray's own comedic flair. I thought things got a bit dark with all the suicide attempts, but I feel like it's also a logical progression of being trapped in the same day over and over.

You magnificent bastard, I read your book!

EMPH Turns 100!

Well, just like I promised, I took a brief hiatus for Mother's Day and now it's time to resume the Blogathon! Wait! Father's Day just passed?! Oh crap! Well, I guess the blogathon will resume now after a lengthy intermission. I lost track of the number of days I had left, but we'll just call it 10 so we can have a nice, even number to work with going forward.

For the longest time, I planned on doing something special to commemorate the 100th post on the English Muffin Power Hour. Unfortunately, I never got around to the specifics, so I'll probably give you guys a Top 5 List and throw in a funny (albeit nerdy) video at the end. Since the official start of summer is just around the corner, I present to you: the Top 5 Reasons Why Summer is the Best Season.

5. Baseball Every Day

Unlike basketball and football, you can expect there to be a baseball game on almost every single night somewhere during the summer. While it may dilute the meaning of each individual game, I think people tend to overlook the brilliance of this system. For this three month block of time, you can count on baseball on television just as sure as the sun rising to brutally scorch the morning. Want to go to the movies tonight? No problem. Baseball will welcome you back with open arms tomorrow. Football will ignore your calls for a week or two if you try to have a life outside of it. Then it will spread catty rumors about you, because football can be petty that way (but we love it anyways).

In the name of the Maddux, the Tom, and the Holy Smoltz.

"But Hunter," you say, "don't you have a passion for the Atlanta Braves that could conservatively be described as 'overzealous'? What if I don't like baseball?" First of all, the answer to both questions is "Yes" and "I forgive your blasphemy." And that's the reason why this is only #5 on the count. There are some sad souls out there, my readership included, who don't like baseball. I cannot understand why, but I pity them and the hundreds of hours of fun they miss out on.

4. Swimming Pools

Now, I haven't been to a swimming pool yet this year. This is largely because, due to marathon training, I have a terrific farmer's tan. If I went to the pool, I would look more like a gigantic Yin-Yang in trunks than an awesome dude (albeit a very handsome Yin-Yang). Pools are great for three primary reasons. First, they provide relief from the the sun's ongoing War on Happiness. Second, it is the only socially acceptable time for a grown man to go down a slide. Third, the fine honeys... I mean, working on my tan. Because that's what I do when I'm not working out at the gym. Or saving kittens from fires.

3. Longer Days

Nothing is more depressing than being trapped in perpetual darkness. It's one of the many reasons I left my job as a Morlock (also, they had horrible dental). During winter, it is so very easy to start working before dawn and not get out until after dusk. And then, when spring rolls around, daylight savings time kicks in and you still don't get used to hanging around with the sun after work and class. But in the summer, the sun is around all the time. You can ride your bike at 8 pm without any sort of ridiculous bike attachment.

2. Ice Cream Trucks

Now this one definitely hasn't been a factor for me since I was a little kid. After all, a few months after getting my driver's license, I realized that the grocery store had all the ice cream sandwiches and popsicles I could ever want. And I could get them whenever I wanted. This revelation was followed by maniacal laughter, ice cream headaches, and then stomach aches. But once I could stand up again, I also realized that I no longer needed the ice cream truck or its catchy jingles from the public domain.

So why is it #2 on the list and it front of my beloved Braves? Because no other season delivers its seasonal food to your door. There's no pumpkin pie truck in fall! There's no hot cocoa truck in winter! There's not a ham truck around Easter (although the influential House Cat Lobby is pushing for legislation to make this happen). The ice cream truck is a quintessential aspect of summer and no season can boast a similar bond between man, machine, and the tilt of the Earth's axis.

1. Adventures

The best thing about summer is it marks the return of the adventuring season. Want to hike for God Knows How Long down a trail? Sure, it's summer! Want to see if we can find an alcoholic beverage that doesn't make Hunter throw up? Why not? It's summer! Plus, there's a reliable influx of awesome people from abroad. Now, I admit, this one is here because of school. For as long as I can remember, I have been a student or been close friends with students, so I suppose life away from academia could have adventures all the time (or chronic depression). But for me, summer time has always been about spending time with truly great people (and if you read this blog, that means you). The rest of the year is filled with countless obligations that get in the way of just kicking back and enjoying life.

Blogathon Day Two: Top Five Things I Learned from Half Marathon Training

Tomorrow, I'm going to try updating before the 11th hour. But, the 11th hour still counts as today and I'm a man of my word. So, just a reminder that if you want to blogathon to keep going, please donate to Special Kids. Let's keep the blogathon moving by bringing back everyone's favorite new series: the Top Five!

As you may have guessed by reading the subject, I'm going to be discussing the Top Five things I learned while training for this Saturday's race. Unfortunately, it's 11:40 as I write this. So I'll actually have to be succinct.

5. Never ever, ever order soda at a restaurant. For starters, it's well over two dollars for a soda at most restaurants these days so you're better off saving your money. But, on topic, hydration is essential for any sort of distance running. While getting a Nalgene water bottle has been a big help, I've found it's just as useful to order water instead of soda when I eat out. Not only am I drinking healthier and cutting out a major cause of calories, but it also prevents you from collapsing into a sweaty heap in the middle of your run. Mind you, you'll still be sweaty, but at least you won't be a heap.


4. Purple Diet Gatorade tastes exactly like Grape Koolaid. In the words of the Kool Aid Man, "OH YEAH!".

The Top Five Sandwich Shoppes in Murfreesboro. Or, SUCK IT SUBWAY!

So far, today has been crazy productive and I've decided to extend that productivity to the blogosphere via osmosis. I also want to continue my favorite hobby: starting up new features on the blog and then never doing them again! So today's feature will be The Top Five or the Most Common Non-Pornographic Thing on the Internet.

Over the past few weeks, I've noticed a blight spreading across Murfreesboro. And no, it's not the awesome Blight from Dragon Age that involves lots of swords and fireballs and epic quests across the land. This is a scourge of sub-par sub sandwiches. I speak of the rise of Subway. In the past three months, no less than four new Subways have opened. How does this keep happening? I understand that part of the problem is that there is a cultural stigma around eating at home in Murfreesboro and, to avoid the shame, most families eat out all the time. How else can you explain the hundreds of restaurants all over? But even then, you'd think the sheer level of competition would discourage Subway from multiplying like vermin. Whatever the case, here are five sandwich shops that are substantially better than Subway in almost every way (save for numerical advantage and geographic convenience).

The sandwich shoppes are evaluated on the five most important properties of sandwichology, according the the Luncheon Institute of Hunteria. Each category will be ranked on a scale of 1-5, because I have a theme going, with five being the most awesome and 1 being the most anti-awesome:

1. Deliciousness- The sheer quality of the sandwich
2. Speed- How quickly the sandwich is made
3. Price- Or how many hours you have to work for your sandwich
4. Deliciosity- This is the product of deliciousness times price times velocity then divided by pi (for dessert)
5. Coke- The availability of Coca-Cola products or, barring that, a delicious fruit punch.

Incidentally, this also is my list for Best Cheesesteaks in Murfreesboro too. It's probably coincidence.

5. Penn Station

Penn Station has one of the best sandwiches in Murfreesboro. If it didn't, it wouldn't be on this list (unless this whole thing is meant to be ironic). But by that, I mean it is bigger and tastier than almost every other sandwich on the list. The problem is it's also substantially more expensive than every other sandwich on the list and your sub won't be done in a timely fashion. Then the drink situation is a complete disaster. Not only is it not a Coke place, it also lacks even the most basic delicious fruit punch.

Deliciousness: 5
Speed: 2
Price: 2
Deliciosity: 6.36
Coke: 1
Total: 16.36

4. Newk's

Located in the Avenue Shopping Center, Newk's is a cafe that can't decide whether it wants to be formal or casual, so it does both. While its sandwiches aren't as big as Penn Station, they have much more variety due to their delicious soups and salads. Like a strong offensive line in football is to a quarterback, a strong soup can make a good sandwich great and a great sandwich legendary. As an added perk, the half sandwich & coup of soup combo is cheaper than a regular sized sandwich at Penn Station. The drinks, however, are a mixed hat. While it is a Coke place with Dr Pepper (which is full credit), it suffers when it comes to sizing. You have two choices for a cup: ridiculously tiny water cup (~6 oz) or more soda than any human should drink in one sitting (~32 oz). On the bright side, service is surprisingly quick.

Deliciousness: 4
Speed: 3
Price: 4
Deliciosity: 15.28
Coke: 4
Total: 30.28