i add to what Genny posted...

-How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down?
Maybe the nParticles in Maya2009 will help you out there, or if you have access to Realflow.
could can get away with doing this without nParticles. I think nParticles are only useful if you want them to collide with stuff...


-How do i cange the shape and color of things in key frames (if i edit a poly after a keyframe it just changes the shape for the whole thing)
Changing color over time, a really simply of doing it is right clicking the attribute and seleing set keyframe, the timing will act different depending on type of keyframe, stepped, spline etc(check out the graph editor). Changing shapes over time, check out blendshapes.
changing colour can be done by keying the material attributes, but i dont know how this would go with textures.... as far as i know, the only way to animate a texture is to have an animated texture.
and yeah, blend shapes are what you want to use if you want to animated modifications to the meshes (not suggested if you're using it for a game as it'd be heavy on memory and limited)

-I have shoulderpads for the bad guy that are going to be skulls but the lower jaw needs to hang down over the shoulder and be on a hinge (the bad guy swings his arm the jaw might bounce up a bit)
I'm not sure I get that question, but the first thing I thought of was Set Driven Keys, check it out. The thing is, articulate character animation takes work.
you can create a hinge for them and parent invisible rigid bodies to the skeleton so when the skeleton rotates the hidden boxes rotate and make the jaws move. although, if you want the bounce.... perhaps setdriven keys will work, but i currently don't see how that will work easily. you should be able to make the hidden rigid bodies bouncy and the jaws bouncy, but i'll leave you to decide if this works


-I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that
Rig something really really simple then animate it, if it handles badly then it needs work.
what? a skeleton as in a skeleton model? or are you doing soft skin rigging? if it's an actual skeleton model you should be able to get away with the classic 3D Heirarchy approach. Easiest to do those approaches by parenting bones to joints
if you're actually soft skinning your characters then you just smooth bind the mesh to a skeleton and play with the weights. (you'll need to read the maya's inbuilt tutorial or go find on on the net, or get a tutorial from here with rigging in it)


-should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot
/shrug
i believe jay has answered such question in someone's blend shape head thread. (jay is the man at blend shapes)

-The armor of the final good guy and the bad guy glows, and the bad guy's armor is gunna need to have smoke coming out of it, blue smoke. How would i do glow effects on armor?

Do you mean like a soft bloom effect? (like that effect in some glamour portraits) that can be done in post. Or like zhroom zhroom light saber affecting the lighting of surrounding objects type of effect? In that case you will have to tweak the shader to appear to be a bright surface, and you'll probably have to do some parenting and light linking if you're not going to use FG.
smoke can be done with particles (there is a prebuilt smoke effect), glow can be done in post, or in maya's crude post by adding glow as the material's special effect

and also how do i simulate the sun with lighting effects haha forgot that one
with directional lights. are you going for an outdoors scene? and what do you mean by lighting effects?