My Time

You have a rendevous with death...

2009-03-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

This review for Gears of War 2 comes late because I had the chance to play it co-op throughout, once a week, with a friend. Developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft exclusively for the X-Box 360, I think it’s fair to say that this was one of the most anticipated games of the year. The first Gears of War set a standard, not only for third person shooters but as a graphics benchmark for consoles in general. Gears of War was in my opinion the most impressive looking game of its time and it remains a fantastic showcase for Epic’s much-licensed Unreal Technology 3 game engine.

With over five million copies of the first Gears sold the anticipation for the sequel was sky high. Did it deliver? If I may cut to the chase I would say it certainly did. Gears of War 2 improves on the original in every way and serves as a textbook on how to deliver a worthy sequel.

The story of Marcus Fenix and company continues as the Locust Horde’s relentless assault on humanity reaches endgame. The cities of Sera colony have sunk into the crust, one after the other, until only the final bastion of Jacinto remains. As a testament to the polished mechanics of the first title, return players will be glad to know that the control scheme is completely intact. It worked fine then and it works even better now! This insures the game feels comfortable right from the first scene. Other then that they did what a sequel should do and that’s advance the core concept in any way they can. The additional enemies, weapons, vehicles and tactical extras added a tremendous amount of variety to the Gears universe, which is proving to be an even more wacky and wild place than previously thought.

It’s not just that the game play is good; in some scenes it’s bloody excellent. Battles taking place in bizarre environments are brutal and unpredictable. Interesting combinations of enemy types and unusual set pieces create a constant challenge with nothing becoming bored or stale. Overall the pacing is quite good. I thought the game started with a bang and ended with some very satisfying battles that put the skills you honed to the test.

I quite liked the story in Gears of War 2 and there were many great scenes, both big and small. Many have said that Dom’s subplot was clumsy and ineffective but I disagree. Without giving anything away I think the story illustrates a hard fact about civilians and conflict that was told in a stark and brutal manner. I also like how this game ended. It was a satisfying conclusion that opened up the possibilities for the inevitable third game.

The online multiplayer segment of the game is substantial but came riddled with issues. Patches have since been dutifully released but some bugs remain. New to the game is a co-operative Horde mode where you team up to form an online quartet and look to survive wave after wave of Locust enemies. It’s a lot of fun and sure to become a stable game mode in the future.

Gears of War 2 promised to be a badass blockbuster and I think Epic was true to its word. I had a ball, I will play it again, and I am really looking forward to seeing how this world and its heroic characters continue to develop in future games. So long as serialized titles come out as great as this, you won’t hear me complain in the least!

Once upon a time in the magical kingdom of Zzzzzzz... Trolls! Must pop troll zits with my pistol... Zzzzzzz...

2009-02-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

For a change of pace over the holidays I went through Fable 2, a light-hearted fantasy role-playing game developed by Lionhead Studios and its industry leading founder, Peter Molyneaux. Between the first and second Fable Lionhead was purchased by Microsoft, meaning that Peter was now in the market of making X-Box 360 exclusives. I was especially curious to see if Peter and his team were going to take special advantage of the console like Epic Games has done with Gears of War. Sadly this wasn’t the case.

Before I get into that however let’s give the good stuff its due. In Fable 2 you play a hero born from a powerful bloodline, one that allows you to wield magic. A hero hunting villain is hot to kill you in hopes of ending the line and preventing your kind from stopping his plans for world domination. For the rest of the story you are building yourself up in order to facilitate this final showdown. The quaint land of Albion is a pretty enough place to go for a walk in the forest. You’ll encounter a modest variety of enemies throughout the realm and dispatching them is Fable 2’s best feature. At any given time the player can use a melee weapon, a missile weapon, or a suite of magic spells. Mixing up these attacks as you see fit is what kept me in the game to its completion.

Fable 2 claims to provide variety for your character but I was left nonplussed with the customization available. In theory the things your character does has an effect on their appearance. Good characters begin looking saintly, evil characters demonic. Eat pies and get fat, eat celery and get thin. Use melee weapons to get buff, use magic to get enchanted looking. In practice however characters get funnelled in certain ways. All characters will use the three attack options on a continuous basis, I mean they're there and fun to use so why wouldn't you? This means that each hero is strong looking, tall, and has blue lines of power on their face. My wife played completely differently than I did in almost every way but by game's end our characters could have passed for brother and sister. By that I also mean that she looked a lot like me, a VERY BIG girl with cankles and the quads of a linebacker. Going on the all-celery diet couldn’t halt this genetic predisposition. That my wife couldn’t make a heroic female that looked feminine in the traditional sense, or even a sword-maiden possessing her own slim figure, was in her own words: “disappointing.”

This lack of depth is a theme that can be found throughout the game. Fable 2 has all the options of a role-playing game but there is little below the surface. There are few weapons to match the mere handful of skills and spells to master. What this means is that after just one play through your character can already do everything so there is no point in going through it again. The wardrobe is threadbare, the equipment list equally so and most of it is silly. You can buy property and earn rent money but all this money is good for is buying more houses because everything at the market can be bought for a handful of coins. The world itself is cut up into bite-sized regions that can be entered and exited only in certain places. It’s not an open world in the real sense of the word. The quests you undertake can be amusing but they’re all short, single-chapter affairs and there aren’t many of them. The jobs available are beyond repetitive and most use the same mini-game mechanic as social interaction with people, so both aspects of the game get old real quick. Marriage and child rearing is present but more even tedious than in real life. (I don’t know how they even managed that!)

One aspect of the game I liked was a jump forward of many years. There are opportunities to do something (or not) and when the story jumps your choice has a definite impact on the world. Buildings will have gone up or have come down. This alone could be the basis of a great game but like everything else it was handled in a very basic, limited fashion. You get just a taste of this mechanic. The idea itself, like so many others in Fable 2, seemingly don’t benefit from having earned the developer’s strength of conviction.

Worst of all however are the bugs and other forms of technical imprecision that abounds throughout the game. Your character moves poorly and tends to get caught on objects. The game slowdown and stuttering is brutal during combats. Finding button prompt locations is a chancy, clumsy exercise. The menus lag badly and weren’t given enough thought as to how people were going to use them. The maps (not that you need them much given the simple geography) are not helpful. Finally the co-op feature touted in this title is unplayable because they couldn’t do anything reasonable with the camera. An exclusive game of this nature demands a modicum of polish in order to properly represent its console and Lionhead failed to deliver in this regard.

My wife downloaded the Knothole Island addition and after completing it in a single sitting I’ll warn you that it’s just more of the same. You’re also paying too much for it. If I paid $60.00 for thirty lukewarm hours of Fable 2 gaming then Knothole Island should come to us for about $4.00 but it actually costs about triple that. It’s also way too easy if your character has already completed the main quest. If Lionhead wants to pump this game for more money they should at least make their episodic content a real challenge as chances are it’s going to be played by advanced characters.

That my wife played the game every bit as much as I did was a nice change. We got to talk about the title throughout our play and witness the consequences of each other’s actions. This was especially handy because we got to watch the ending twice, which made us both perfectly certain that it was rubbish and a waste of time seeing as for the last hour of the story you do NOTHING of consequence. She made no bones about why Fable 2 grabbed her attention though. She’s very busy and has her mind on other things right now. She is willing to play a game provided it’s both exceedingly simple and ridiculously easy. She could and does play better but can’t be bothered to expend the energy these evenings past.

She’s quite right, as usual. Fable 2 is indeed simple and easy but on the other hand it isn’t smart or polished enough to come off as charming, merely as struggling. Thin content and shallow depth might be the hallmark of a game geared towards casual play and in truth the stink of that particular fear lay thick on Fable 2 but it’s more than just that.

Lionhead Studios has never been a technical powerhouse but you don’t need to be to make a great game. That said it appears that Molyneux’s Microsoft-owned company is getting outstripped mightily by other game developers, especially its role-playing peers. After playing Fallout 3 and Fable 2 in the same season it feels like the former came from a future generation. It didn’t however, games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect have become the standard and so the comparison works in the opposite direction. Fable 2 feels old right out of the packaging and is a lacklustre showcase of what the X-Box 360 can do. If you are only going to sink time into one role-playing game this year, Fable 2 isn’t what I would recommend. Better to stay with the times.

IT'S... ALIVE!!!

2009-01-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Activision Blizzard C.E.O. Bobby Kotick came up with an interesting answer to the question: How do you exploit a successful game franchise with yearly titles and have them not turn into watered down crap? Actually it was a question of his making and ‘exploit’ was his term of choice. It wasn’t a move for squeamish gamer purists however, people who might hesitate just because an idea could be considered artistically unsavoury. What he did was take the popular Call of Duty brand and allow two separate developers to work on alternating titles. Each team had two years to make a game and they would be published on concurrent years. The games would get the time they need to ensure a minimum level of quality and yet there would be a new product to push every Christmas. The people who cared about games would be happy and the executive who only cares about money would be happy.

One thing this plan had going for it was Activision-owned Infinity Ward, creator of the original Call of Duty and its sequel. These were the developers that initially captured lightning in a bottle with their tight gun play, intense atmosphere, and dedication to historical facts. All other companies that would make a Call of Duty game, be it for personal computer, console, or cell phone would have an established standard to achieve, to say nothing of their proprietary engine and other essential pieces of game tech.

The catch - and there’s always a catch - is that the other company, called Treyarch Corporation, did not share in equal success. Call of Duty expansions and the number three title in the series were generally considered good but not great. This consensus was exacerbated when Infinity Ward’s next game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare became a smash hit, one of the highest rated shooters of all time, and a multiplayer power house.

It was at this time when enthusiast gamers began expressing their impatience with the Kotick business model. It was clear that the now revered Call of Duty franchise was at its best when in the hands of Infinity Ward and that Treyarch’s attempts were a distraction. When Activision announced that the next title in the series, the unnumbered Call of Duty: World at War, was not only going back to Treyarch but back from the fresh modern setting to the overplayed World War II theatre there was much dismissal and general disdain. Not to worry, we were told. Call of Duty 3 was not indicative of Treyarch’s abilities, they weren’t given enough time to shine and that would not be the case henceforth.

So now, with the kinks of the Kotick plan ironed out what was the result? How does World at War stand on its own and how does it measure up to Modern Warfare, one of last year’s best games?

The first thing I’ll say is World at War is an unsettlingly accurate clone of Modern Warfare. I use the term unsettling because while playing the game feelings of a Frankenstein transplant were evoked, of a brain being moved from one body to another. I’ll credit Treyarch with this: they managed to make a game that doesn’t feel like they made it.

That said however, they did copy an award winning game and so naturally World at War has a lot going for it. The thing is the game is so much like Modern Warfare that if you read that review a year ago you’re pretty much up to speed on this game. (In truth that’s why I took so much time laying out the unusual history of the franchise rather than talk about the game itself.)

But on to it we’ll go: World at War looks and plays nicely, exactly like Modern Warfare did only with a World War II skin. There have been some minor additions to the game engine like limb damage and flame throwing effects. Other than that it’s a by the numbers Call of Duty with a tank level, a plane level, a sniping level, etc. This isn't the first time we players get to attack the Reichstag in a war game but they do a nice job and it is the first time we get to experience the event in High Definition. The horrors of war are revealed to the player dutifully, from torture to air strike survivors to soldiers on fire falling almost gently to their knees before lying down. You can play the single player chapters in co-op mode but in what must have been a design oversight you have to complete the level in single player mode before it unlocks for co-op. This was an annoyance for those of us who wanted to play with friends right off the bat.

The multiplayer component mimics its wildly popular predecessor right down to the levelling up for new weapons and perks. The expansion here was the addition of tank levels, or levels where tanks re-spawn and can be entered to boost firepower. These levels are larger to accommodate the vehicles which results in more sporadic fighting amongst the infantrymen but I found it to be a nice change.

One value added feature deserves true praise and that is the ‘Nazi Zombie’ mini-game. Nazi Zombies you ask? I say why choose? In this mode you (and a buddy or three if you wish) are holed up in a building while wave after wave of Nazi zombies try to get through the windows and into your sweet, succulent brains. You get points for every zombie you kill and these points can be redeemed for weapons hanging on the wall or to open up new areas. This mode has become a gamer night favourite and is a great example of what other kinds of games can be made with the engine. A full game version of this mode with an expansive haunted mansion to explore would be an instant classic!

So yes, World at War is a good game and yet my usual enthusiasm for titles of this calibre is usually more effusive. I’m finding it strange to applaud a developer whose best effort to date, their crowning achievement, was to become the shadow of another team. Am I being too sentimental in thinking that games should have their developer’s personality within, their sense of style embedded somewhere in the code? Or is cloning success the cost-effective wave of the future? Mr. Kotick, who upon Activision’s merger with Blizzard under the auspices of the Vivendi media conglomerate, now runs the largest video game empire on earth. I would guess that he’s the one with the most say in the matter, at least until he discovers another product with more appealing numbers than video games.

Surely there are other industries worthy enough to be exploited? I hear he likes modern art.

A Ten Megaton Triumph! Break out the Fancy Lad snack cakes!

2009-01-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

Another year, another attempt to resurrect my neglected blog. I have buried myself in all of the excellent game titles that crop up come year's end to say nothing of the momentous news events of 2009. I've been absorbing all and not letting a drop out, reading rather than writing, playing rather than pontificating. Now I've come up for air and will do my best to provide some reviews...

Video game enthusiasts can be a particularly demanding breed of customer. These days every industry makes use of the Internet to connect with their base to a certain degree but game players were pioneers in this regard and they have taken the outlet further than most. To that end they are not only opinionated but determined to project their views in a public forum. As a result huge groundswells of public sentiment are not uncommon.

There are advantages to this phenomenon. Game developers can receive as much feedback on their work as they are capable of processing. One hopes this constructive criticism assists in creating a better product down the line. There is a dark side to this feedback as well however, when enthusiasts erupt into rabid howls of protestation when one of their sacred cows switches owners and moves into another dairy farm. Such was the dilemma Bethesda Softworks found themselves in when they had the audacity to secure the rights to the formidable Fallout franchise from Interplay Entertainment. Despite the hail of outcry from such highbrow institutions as the fan site ‘No Mutant Allowed’ Bethesda persevered to release Fallout 3.

The story begins with brief, character building scenes of your birth, infancy, childhood, and approach to adulthood. All of this takes place in a hermetically sealed Vault that protects your community from the ravages of a nuclear holocaust that occurred some two hundred years ago. Play truly begins with a tragedy that forces you to leave the Vault and enter the irradiated wasteland where Washington D.C. barely stands. There you will find mutated life forms, pitiless raiders, and the last remnants of human civilization in all their motley factions. You will arm up, pick a direction, and scavenge your way towards adventure!

Those familiar with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games will feel at home here. Their signature open world in the first person perspective is on display. To say however that this game is merely ‘Oblivion with guns’ is grossly unfair. It’s obvious that Bethesda has learned much from each game they have made and Fallout 3 in my opinion is their finest effort yet.

There are few games one will spend more time with than a roleplaying game. In Fallout 3’s case it was around sixty hours from beginning to end, making sure to take my time and see what the world offered. I was delighted to discover that nothing got old in this time, nothing felt repetitive. The combat, a combination of real time and turn based style remained satisfying throughout. The many computers to be hacked and locks to be picked presented some well thought out mini-games that broke up the fighting scenes nicely. The conversations with non-player characters along with your dialogue options were not as advanced as what we have seen in similar games such as Mass Effect, but they were to the point and got you back into the action with minimal fuss.

Given all that must be done to create an open world game I was impressed by how expertly all aspects of this title was crafted. This was especially true with the character development system, the statistics that tell you who your character is. The system is better than what Bethesda has used in their Elder Scrolls games, it is not nearly as exploitable and each of the twenty levels the players advance through adds something interesting to the character. This information is conveyed to you with a simple yet stylish menu system that I found pleasant to navigate and manage. The point of all these disparate components in a roleplaying game is to immerse you in your character, to let you know who that person is so that you may better become them while you play. In this regard Fallout 3 did an excellent job. While playing I became my character and acted as I thought she would rather than what I might do. This is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give the game designers and I feel what must be at the heart of a successful roleplaying game.

The second part of that immersing equation is the world itself, is it worth exploring and interacting with? Again Bethesda did fine work in this regard. It was a brilliant idea to have the game take place in Washington D.C. after the bombs fell. Seeing America’s greatest monuments, scarred but still standing is a surprisingly emotional experience. To discover the regal throne of Lincoln, all but the Great Emancipator’s head, is to experience not only the awe of standing before the real thing but also to feel a great injustice at its defacing. I had no reason, or quest if you will, to fight my way into the Capitol Building but I did, as any tourist of the age would. Despite its ruin it still felt sacred. Though my character was heavily armed I still performed the cautious tread of one who walks on hallowed ground. The game abounds in such history and the dread of what may come if humanity’s Final Solution comes in the form of a nuclear holocaust.

If all this sounds too sombre and dreary for your tastes then worry not, for Interplay’s original vision of camp 50’s Americana clutched in the cold war mentality remains. A retrospective on the Duck and Cover era continues to be perversely humourous. Bethesda has made sure to mine the material and provides a light hearted counterpoint to the horrors of the waste. When hiding in the dark, eating mole rat meat and drinking toilet water just to survive, the anecdotes of President John Henry Eden on the radio will always cause you to crack a smile.

I found the various missions or quests throughout the game to be enjoyable and their rewards interesting. Many have been unsatisfied with the game’s ending and in truth Bethesda could have thought it through a little better. This is not uncommon however; ending a game seems to vex developers of all calibers. In games however the final ten minutes does not have the impact it would on a movie. Sixty hours of play over the course of a month is a true journey after all. You do it to get there and if the game is good then you don’t want to end at all.

Bringing the Fallout franchise out of the 90’s and into the new millennium required significant changes to the formula. When Bethesda did this they were the objects of an inordinate amount of disdain. This is regrettable, made even more so by the fact that Fallout 3 is a terrific game. Thankfully the final product seems to have silenced most detractors and even the most nostalgic of players must grudgingly admit that the franchise is in able hands. While not the most polished or refined video game I’ve played this year it is still one of the best and surely the most ambitious. It should not be missed and given the level of overall improvement I’ve seen, I’d wager Bethesda’s next offering will also be a must-play.

The Undoing of a Leader by his Own Fears...

2008-12-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

With this incident we really got to see what our Prime Minister is made of and nobody, regardless of political association, should like what they see.

Harper's attempted attack against Liberal Jean Chrétien’s vote subsidy was just the start of it but when you think about what it would have meant to Canada the timing could not have been worse. The original point of this subsidy was to limit the influence of corporations and unions on government policy because they were essentially prohibited from making big donations. When these kinds of wealthy institutions get their hooks in we start seeing all kinds of signature legislation being lobbied like, for example, deregulation of banks.

In a time when the world is reeling from the results of such policies Harper thought it wise to get that ball rolling again in Canada. Did he not see how illogical that was? Was he so blinded by the short term wounds his political enemies would have suffered that he didn't see this policy to be the opposite of what all Canadians were hoping for?

That is a leadership test that he, Steven Harper the man, failed miserably and that's a serious problem because leadership should be his priority. He should not his party's attack dog, he has a country on the verge of crisis to run.

You can say what you want about the coalition but it happened and that in itself shows a willingness for three of the four parties to work together and unify, an act that completely caught Harper off guard. It's not just that our Prime Minister can't do this himself, he can't even envision it happening under any circumstances amongst his peers. What is a man so unprepared in this way doing running a minority government? Our whole country needs to ask itself this question.

What the coalition did do is bring about the most shocking turn yet, a descent into divisiveness that only Sarah Palin could be proud of. Desperation caused our country's leader to malign a huge swath of our citizenry and in a televised address he created an 'us' versus 'them' paradigm where days ago none existed. It's obvious now that Harper's civility towards people who think differently than him is a thin veneer. There are apparently 'real' Canadians and others who are foreigners in all but name who have no place forming a coalition against HIM.

The Bloc may indeed want sovereignty, albeit privately these days, but they are still Canadian citizens, today, and mostly likely tomorrow too. They have a say in our collective destiny. They are not second class citizens and their involvement in any Canadian process should not be held up as suspect or vaguely labelled as dangerous. Any attempt to do so, as Mr. Harper did, should be appalling to all Canadians.

The last thing Canada needs is a leader who will gladly stoke these flames of disunity, where one half of our country is seething at the other half. Did America's latest string of elections teach both him and us nothing?

Harper's legacy is that he lead the Conservatives back in force on the national stage. That's a notable accomplishment that all die-hard Conservatives and Western Canadians who support the party can be proud of. Even they however have to see that he has to step down now for the good of the country. Being a Prime Minister is bigger than his vindictive agenda, he's clearly ignoring that, and in doing so demonstrates that he is unfit to lead. So long as he remains in power the divide will grow.

That there is no clear alternative does not excuse his deep and dangerous unwillingness to rise to the occasion that the times require of him. At least with a coalition the spirit and guiding principles of a minority government; of working together despite differences of opinion, would remain intact.

THAT is the government we voted into office.

I support the Governor General's decision to prorogue Parliament however. Harper will eventually have to answer for his actions but in the mean time Her Excellency is giving a chance for tempers to cool off and for both sides of this issue to come up with measured responses. Hopefully out of this break some true leadership will emerge.

The Path of Least Resistance... Ice Burn Eh? Seriously, Why Am I Not Getting Paid Huge Sums of Money for These Pithy Pearls?

2008-12-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Resistance 2 from Insomniac Games is the highly anticipated sequel to the fairly enjoyable Resistance: Fall of Man. Insomniac is one of Sony’s prize jewels, an exclusive PS3 developer who makes big hits on a tight time schedule. This time around however, for the very first time in fact, I wasn’t pleased with their output. This game has its moments and is sure to be enjoyed by many but I’ve played too many shooters to accept a second-rate product from a first-rate company, especially in the saturated season we fortunately find ourselves in.

Resistance 2 continues the story of Nathan Hale and an alien invasion that takes place on an alternate earth in our World War II era. The all-powerful Chimera have filled America’s skies with massive warships and are exterminating the nation in a maelstrom of nuclear fire. Playing Hale you will visit various locales throughout the States, gun down the inhuman enemy in droves, and perform the standard suite of special forces-type missions that are always used in games to explain how one man can destroy whole battalions of troops, detonate massive pieces of architecture, and change the course of a war.

Resistance 2 achieves an impressive scale in terms of both the size of its enemies and the amount of them on screen at a time. To do this however they had to sacrifice a large degree of detail. This isn’t so bad when the game has you in large, outdoor spaces but when Hale goes indoors to military bunkers the game looks cheap. The only time the game’s many indoor segments look pretty are when you are traversing through predictable alien environments with their mirror-like sheen, weird geometry, and utter absence of anything else. Just what are the aliens doing with those acres of empty real estate? Even when the environments of Resistance 2 look okay they don’t ever live or breathe. The atmosphere throughout the game is thin.

It’s apparent that the developers fell in love with Call of Duty 4 between their first game and the second. All of the shooter mechanics have switched over, from the iron sights aiming, to the 'red screen' health regeneration, to the limited weapon inventory. This could have been a good thing if they were able to achieve such precise results as Infinity Ward did with their game, but Insomniac didn’t. The shooter controls are spongy and inaccurate despite fiddling with settings so instead of achieving the more satisfactory ‘stop and pop’ style of gun play you’re forced to ‘spray and pray’ instead. As well the HUGE crosshairs are awful, part of that word is made up of 'hair' as in: thin strand of, for a damn good reason.

Hale is a super-absorbent bullet sponge on normal difficulty and as a result you don’t need to respect the lines of fire. You wind up learning that it’s okay to be hosed down with the glowing tennis balls that passes for lethal ammo because they hit you to little effect. Perhaps they had to make this concession due to the number of enemies attacking you on screen but the end result is unrealistic and inconsequential feeling combat. When an enemy has you in its sights and is plunking away at you three, four, five times, you know you still can take a couple more rounds before you need to get behind cover.

This slavish mimicry to another game went to the point where it even worked against Insomniac’s established strengths. This company has always been great at creating a variety of interesting, imaginative, and even wacky weapons with which to dispatch your foes. In the first Resistance game you eventually had access to a huge variety of firepower and the strength in that was there was always a different way to approach a battle. In the second game they went with the 'two weapons only' mechanic which is fine for realistic shooters but not so good with far fetched enemies. Every time a giant-sized monster appeared on the screen I knew there would be a rocket launcher or similar heavy weapon lying in wait for me. In Resistance 2 you are told in no uncertain terms how to play their game, a little too much for my tastes.

Hand holding: every game needs it to a certain degree, to keep players moving along, but when it happens too much it becomes the unwelcome guest. I don’t know why Insomniac thought that pulling the player out of the game into even the most minuscule of cut scenes was a good idea but it abounds and is wholly unnecessary. Another gripe I have in this regard is a certain type of enemy that cannot be killed in any way. You have the ability to bring down a three hundred foot tall creature but this one type of medium-sized enemy remains impervious to any and all weaponry.

Taking this to its logical conclusion one should surmise that an impenetrible enemy will spell the doom of the human race eventually but worry not, for there are invulnerable humans to balance out this clear advantage. Hale gains companions in this game, annoying tough guys who cramp Hale's style and chew up scenery trying to justify their existance. Also, the enemies rush right by them to attack you. Apparently poor Nathan didn't get the memo to pick up his invisibilty device and so you get to watch wave after wave of Chimera ignore your teammates and come right after you. You can hide behind your buddies but hilariously this does you no good. You are the squad's resident spank-monkey so pucker up and yes sir, you may have another. This my friends looks and plays as half-assed and unacceptable as it sounds.

What’s at the heart of these design choices is a ‘play our way or the highway’ philosophy that exposes the limitations of what you can do in the game. Once players experience this stuff they lose immersion. These are old school shortcomings and I don’t mean that in the good way. Most designers have dropped these conventions and so I am perplexed as to why Insomniac went back to them, to old design compromises that weren’t even present in the first game?

Beyond the single player experience there is what seems to be a beefy cooperative game and multiplayer competition. If you liked the game mechanics then these are welcome additions that will add value to the disk. After finishing the game I briefly tried these modes and came to realise that there was no way I was using this particular shooter to grind through a bunch of levels and upgrades. I just didn’t like it enough to spend any more time with it.

Perhaps Resistance 2 to was going to be a higher quality game that got rushed to completion? Few companies have been as prolific this generation as Insomniac has and maybe this game is revealing where their development schedule is starting to tear at the seams. I'm guessing of course. The first Resistance game was treated by most, including me, with softer gloves because it was Insomniac’s first attempt at a mature shooter and there was much of their good work ethic in place to mitigate some of the freshman errors. Now with this sophomore effort we see the game they supposedly wanted to make with the experience of the first, and the end result is my own personal final verdict on the franchise: Resistance isn’t a very serious shooter and it doesn’t need to be followed any longer. I won’t just be trading in Resistance 2 but the first title as well because this series isn’t going anywhere I’m interested in. Oh well, there’s always Ratchet and Clank.

Victory, History, Sanity...

2008-11-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

My intention was to write my thoughts regarding Barack Obama’s victory the morning after but - being an Internet junkie - I was treated to more activity and exchanging of ideas than any other time in memory. With all of the pictures from around the world, news articles and emails sent to friends my free time has been hijacked by hope.

By eleven o’clock that Tuesday the friends I was sharing the moment with finally allowed themselves to believe what was happening. In retrospect it was a spanking early on but the effects of the last eight years were really hard to shake off. At that point one friend had the brilliant idea of going outside, finding a pub, getting some food, and soak in the moment with others. Sure enough the first spot we hit was packed, all eyes on the T.V., and it was here we watched President-elect Obama give his acceptance speech.

It was simply amazing, both the speech and the response it invoked. People were cheering with tears in their eyes. There were hugs and high-fives. I have never seen even one-tenth of that excitement and emotion during any Canadian election. I thought this strange but only for a moment. America is still the leader of the free world and when they get it right, we all benefit.

So the numbers, they always tell a tale. Over 122 million voted, more than any other election and the greatest percentage of Americans since women were allowed to vote. That in itself is phenomenal. The count is not entirely complete but Obama got a projected 53% of the popular vote against 46% for McCain, that's a difference of just over seven million voters. In the electoral colleges however is where the thumping really took place. Obama got a projected 364 to McCain's projected 162. What does that say? Obama’s team ran a fantastic campaign, one for the ages. His votes were better distributed in big states and they wound up meaning more. This is what is meant by the ground game, campaigning and spending advertising money in all the right places.

One part that chills me is the number of stars and planets that had to align in order for this win to happen. The Obama campaign was as flawless as these long, protracted, and nasty battles can get. He was eternally calm, on point, and possessing a message that remained constant and effective. McCain on the other hand couldn't have been more sloppy. His campaign was always changing directions, woefully lacking in discipline, full of mudslinging, gaffes and embarrassments. There was so much drama that it’s still going strong even though the election is over. On top of that there were disastrous wars and a tanked economy, all of which worked in Obama’s favour. Yet still the popular vote was just 53 to 46. What are some of these people looking at? The voting majority of America has seen the light but there is still much darkness there.

96% of black voters went with Obama and there’s a joke somewhere in those numbers. I have to ask, who are these other 4%? What were they thinking? Just the thought of it makes me laugh. You have the chance to vote in not only the first black American President but clearly the candidate who ran the best campaign but no, instead you decide to let history pass you buy. These people deserve “I VOTED FOR McCAIN” t-shirts. We need to identify them so that we can offer our sympathies. What are they going to tell their children and grandkids? “It was a great time in our history son but I said ‘aw fuck it’ and voted for the angry white guy.” I want to be there, I want to see that conversation play out. I want to hear a kid reply: “Grandpa, you’re a dick!”

The Republican Party is in shambles after this. The Grand Ole Party has been hit by a crippling schism; divergent paths in its evolution. The old-school conservatives; small government, pro-business veterans have been jumping through hoops trying to convince the new-style church and state evangelists that they have their interests at heart, but it’s not true and so the bible belt isn’t buying it. If they have it their way then Sarah Palin is the future of the party. That would be glorious for the sheer comedy alone and would have the upside of all but ensuring Obama’s two terms while the party purges itself of the unbelievers. I expect blood, guts, and horribly funny things being said in the years to come.

Alaska, man what a crazy piece of real estate! Not only can we thank them for a two-time dropout-raising, clothes-whoring, hockey mom of a rogue V.P. candidate but they nearly re-elected Senator Ted Stevens. This is the “Internet is a series of tubes” guy. Just a week earlier he was CONVICTED of seven counts of making false statements. This old man got his home remodelled by an oil company. By remodelled I mean they lifted the whole thing in the air, built another home underneath it, and then put a swanky deck around the whole thing. This speaks volumes of the whole democratic process in general and not just America either. His supporters and the key people that got him elected probably don’t care that he’s a crook, hell he’s probably stolen from them! They just want someone on their side, who will vote the way they want him to in order to protect their interests. They could give two shits if he pads his pockets in the process. You can in fact be a convicted felon and still have a seat in the Upper House. The senate however can hold a vote and ask you to leave because you are, in fact, a sleazeball.

I’ll be following that one with glee, as will I be following the potential doom of another Senator; the Democratic-hyphen-Independent Joe Lieberman. This guy shit-talked his own one time too many and now Majority Leader Harry Reid seems finally, FINALLY preparing to draw the political knife across his throat. Joe campaigned for McCain and raised the spectre of fear among his Jewish constituents by insisting that Barack Obama meant danger to Israel. Lieberman sits as chairperson of the Homeland Security Committee and the democrats kept him around because they felt they needed his vote. His presence and backbiting mouth mocked them though, revealed their cowardice and inability to act decisively. Now with more wins in congress I'm hoping they feel they don’t need him but I think they should have axed him from the caucus despite his vote and fully regain their honour in doing so. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is already extending his hand to the guy and if Lieberman takes it then he’ll be revealed for what he was all the time: a Republican in all-but name and a rank political opportunist besides. Stay tuned.

There has been new electricity going through my body this week. Is that the change President-elect Obama was talking about? Any day now all of North America could be plunged into a full-blown depression and perhaps there has been so much damage done already that Obama won’t be able to pull his country out. What is of comfort to me however is that even if the going gets rougher the leader of the free world is once again a charismatic intellect and what’s better, a person who looks and sounds like someone from our time. Barack Obama just might be the first modern ruler on this continent and that is going to be history that we get to watch unfold every single day.

Holy Welding Torch of Christ This Game is Awesome!!!

2008-10-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

In April of 2007 a man by the name of John Riccitiello began work as the new Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts, one of the two largest video game conglomerates on earth. EA had fallen victim to its own massiveness in the years prior. In order to grow it had purchased and then cannibalized smaller, more imaginative game developers, absorbed the talent into their own offices, and centrally ran all operations. What happened as a result is that the people and projects they assimilated became infected with the shortcomings of the company entire: there was too much bureaucracy and too many levels of hierarchy. This took decision making and creativity away from the game development teams. As a result EA earned a rather poor reputation for making nothing but thin sequels, movie tie-ins, and sports games that did little to differentiate themselves from year to year.

One of Mr. Riccitiello’s first tasks was to issue a surprisingly frank mea culpa for the company. The big, bloated, centrally operating model was called a mistake. Instead the company would be divided into ‘city-states’ that would enjoy more autonomy and be able to make its own decisions about the games they were creating. As well, the company turned away from focusing on obtaining licences to make games with other people’s intellectual property and instead create their own fresh ideas. Over the past year and a half video game enthusiasts saw encouraging signs resulting from this shift in leadership structure in games like Army of Two, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Spore. Now with the arrival of Dead Space I think it’s safe to say that the company has truly turned a corner and is once again a best friend of the hardcore gamer.

Dead Space is a story-driven horror shooter that takes place on board a massive mining spaceship that the main character has been sent to repair. The player soon learns that something has gone terribly wrong aboard this star-faring factory and by game’s end the full nature of this evil will be revealed. From start to finish I found this game to be one of the most polished and engrossing video game experiences in memory. Video games are large affairs utilizing dozens of people working with very advanced technology and usually on tight time constraints. There is usually something or other that doesn’t work right for has room for improvement. I honestly found none of this in Dead Space. It is one of the most finely made games I’ve ever played.

I played Dead Space on the PS3, it looked absolutely fantastic and it played the same. The USG Ishimura is a spine-chilling place to visit, just brimming with atmosphere. The environments are subtle and solid, conveying both the super-science required to construct such a thing and the patina of age that convinces you of the ship’s sixty-plus year history. The Ishimura appears somehow both old and new, making every room captivating. Add to this the absolutely superb lighting and sounds and you have a place you dread entering further even while at the same time you cannot wait to see what’s next.

The entire ship is set up as a series of dungeons that you travel back and forth through, using a type of subway system as your main hub. Each of the twelve chapters brings you to one of the ship’s section, some of them twice. Some players might not like the re-using of levels in this way, preferring to be set in one directlion and the player moves constantly forward seeing new things. Being a spaceship I thought it made sense the way it was laid out and seeing how the Ishimura is packed with so many overwhelming set pieces I didn’t mind having to revisit them from time to time. Some of the rooms in Dead Space are straight from a madman’s funhouse and will have you gaping at them in wonder.

Combat in Dead Space takes the average shooter conventions and turns them on its head. The monstrous enemies seem fine with you shooting them in the body, instead you have to take off their limbs to stop them from eating you! Dead Space is dozen hours of gruesome dismemberment and to this end they give you the right tools for the job, cutting lazers and saw blades abound. Other games have had realistic damage models on their enemies but none I know of use the technology to create the core mechanic of the game. It is not only immensely satisfying, it results in your character being as big a monster as your foes are. It’s not enough that your enemies are scary, you have to kill them in ways that scare you too!

Like many games in the survival genre Dead Space has you collecting credits, ammunition, health packs, and other tools that you can store in your inventory. The wealth you discover can be used to purchase weapon upgrades and more powerful suits of armour. This isn’t anything new but it is done very well and creates an excellent inventory management system. True survival fans can play the game without ever buying health or ammo, leaving themselves at the mercy of the random loot drops. This can create a great deal of tension, as fans of games like Resident Evil 4 will attest. There were many times in my play through where I had to favour weapons that I was constantly finding ammo for while others languished. As well, dragging myself through the game at half health with none in reserve made for some nerve-wracking encounters. In a display of smart design ammo and health can be purchased for those who need the help but then the money spent can’t be used for weapon and armour upgrades, which is the true survivalist’s reward.

The story in Dead Space is truly excellent, the characters are believable and the plot is a tightly twisted conspiracy. There are not only plenty of scary thrills and revolting gore but the psychological overtones of some of the plot points are truly disturbing and had me thinking about them days afterward. Once I had completed the game I jumped right back in to see it all again rather than play new games sitting on my shelf. The game allows you to play a second time with all of your upgraded equipment, though you can only do so on the difficulty level you initially chose. You cannot take your medium difficulty character and play on hard, for example. This might irritate some but I appreciate this choice as hard with a fully decked out character isn’t really hard at all. The variety of great looking armours, plus the fact that not every weapon can be even half upgraded with a single completion means this game can be enjoyed many times.

Dead Space is a full-spectrum package and EA has planned to go multi-media with the concept from the get-go. To that end there are comic books and an animated feature already out. Other movies and of course sequel games are apparently in the works. As games get more expensive to create the recouping of costs by maximizing exposure of the property is probably the future. I can’t speak to the quality of those other products but I’ll obviously vouch for the game itself, emphatically.

It seems one of the ongoing themes of this generation of video games is products with great potential married with serious flaws. I think one cause of this is a great many software developers are still learning the new technology. Another cause is the compromise developers are making in trying to make their product more approachable in hopes of selling to a wider audience. Dead Space is remarkable because it has steered clear of that design philosophy. It’s a game without casual compromise, relying on tried, tested and true mechanics from the genre it exemplifies. In avoiding too much new ground it perfected what it was offering and in doing so comes off as a flawless experience. I cannot recommend this game highly enough, it has become one of my all-time favourites.

A retrospective as unecessary as the election that prompted it... Plus news... And disco...

2008-10-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Canadian election received almost no time from me because its outcome was easy to foresee. When it became evident that none of the players involved could muster any inertia then stagnation would inevitably become the end result. In retrospect however it stands to illuminate the shortcomings of each and every party, which at the very least is what you want a pointless election to provide.

Stephen Harper gathered his forces, marshaled all of his considerable resources, selected the time of his ascendancy, and still could not move the country to a majority. You can’t even pretend there will be a better next time because there is not a single excuse to explain why he was held back or why the winds weren’t in his favour. He set the stage, this was a drama of his making, and still we weren’t collectively convinced. It’s clearly not about the vagaries of the situation but the inabilities of the man. I would be surprised if Harper stuck around for any great length of time. His value to the Conservatives at this point is being a relative success story, for thrashing the Liberals in a couple elections and raising the identity of his party as high as he personally could. To stay on is to invite eventual defeat and since total victory seems impossible to reach then why risk the legacy built? The Conservatives are back though, now their task is to find a likable figurehead, something made all the more difficult due to Harper’s authoritarian style. It is hard for a leader to emerge from a regime of followers.

Stéphane Dion of course is absolutely finished and so are the Liberals so long as they coddle him. Dion ushered in the weakest Liberal party in a hundred years they say. Had he done this while combating a power house then an excuse for him might be made but no, he lost to a chronically uncharismatic opponent. He should never have been there in the first place. Stéphane glad-handing his way to Liberal leadership undermines what’s wrong with the party entire. Politics, it really does change people, it changes how they view the world and how one interacts with others. Negotiation is key in life but when it perpetuates itself overmuch then personal potential gets left behind. The Liberal party, through its constant internal manoeuvring, stopped being a meritocracy and instead became a mediocrity. The politicians who have stuck to it the longest rise to the top and they do so in such a way where all the rest have a comfy place secured for them so long as they fall in line. I’ve heard it being called The Peter Principle. Such a formula purges the greatness from their ranks. Barack Obama, who at 47 years of age stands poised to become the next President would have never had the opportunity to emerge in the current Liberal party environment. He achieving his potential would have hurt too many feelings and upset their perceived natural order. This is still a lingering effect of the so-called Culture of Entitlement. Political parties need to be built so that the exceptional can break away from the herd and make history with their blessing.

Jack Layton and the N.D.P. never had more of the spotlight, had never before spent that much money, but they ignored their ground game in hopes of loftier ideals. This is evident when you seen that they secured nearly twice as many votes as the Bloc but earned fewer seats. Sure the people voted for them across the board but they didn’t win elections. They were the ultimate vote-splitter and that happens not by chance, but by party failing. In a political race you need first and foremost a good list, you need a census. You need to find out where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and where you’re the big maybe. The N.D.P. could have won quite a few more seats if they identified where they had a half-decent chance and then campaigned like hell in those places. Had Jack done this in Toronto he might have taken the city whole, rather than hold on to a mere two seats. Layton kept it federal, which was pre-mature. Get the seats first, secure the ridings, and then look to the higher heights.

The Bloc is at a crossroads. They shored up Quebec and made good gains but they did this on a platform devoid of separation talk, an age-old pillar of the party. So what does that make them now? As I see it they have two choices. They can play it safe and remain a party that does little but see to the interests of their home province, or they can risk re-branding themselves as a true federal force. If they want to continue making gains they have to explain to the country that the virtues of Quebec and the lessons learned guiding that province can be imported nation-wide. It’s okay for a federal party to have a home province, the Conservatives have Alberta and the Liberals have Ontario to a lesser degree. The difference is a mindset and outlook that expands beyond the provinces. Gilles Duceppe needs to find the spirit of Quebec that lay hidden in other parts of Canada. Perhaps that is a task his successor will attempt.

Elizabeth May orchestrated a serious set-back for her emerging party and probably made herself dizzy in the process. No seats, not even for herself, and that is entirely her fault. There are a couple salient facts that brought about this conclusion. First, she picked a riding where she wouldn’t have had to run against an incumbent Liberal or N.D.P. Better she thought to take a run at the extremely popular and competent Peter McKay. Recall that she also tried to make backroom deals with the Liberals and N.D.P. whereas they wouldn’t run in ridings close to home provided she didn’t field a candidate in their sweet spots. Dion’s Liberals of course accepted this shortcut to democracy, Layton rightly blasted it. When your party compromises itself to that degree right from the get-go you have to question its validity in the first place. The Green Party displayed all the shortcomings of both the Liberals and N.D.P.: Too much political manoeuvring, not enough attention to the ground fight. Now they risk irrelevancy. Elizabeth should have picked a fight she could have won and done it, making no friends in the process. That is how you forge an identity. Alliances come later, when you can bargain from a position of strength and people start to respect - or at least fear - you. The game is still about leadership, you need to be in charge of something to effect change and the first thing you need to master are your own principles. The privilege earned to be apart of the debates was squandered. Now the Greens need to prove themselves all over again.

That is all the rumination of Canadian politics I’m likely to do for a while. I like it not to linger in malaise. Our country’s politics has fallen into a trap that I see cursing generations of peaceful intellectuals throughout history. There is an aversion to bloodshed; there is no thirst for seeking victory from the defeat of others. There is too much accommodation in these races, too much thought for the day after. Such ideas may seem reasonable to the fortunate pacifist but they foster timidity which is like cancer to government. I’m actually content that Harper won it because at least he doesn’t act as if he is fearful over losing his job. We should probably pay all these people less money. Politics should remain a calling, not a career path. The results of the latter are all too uninspiring as we can plainly see.

Too many narratives will blur the image of a candidate.

Thanks to Marc for this article and his thoughts. This one goes over all of the course changes in the McCain campaign and how they have worked against him. By contrast Barack Obama has been an ocean of consistency in his run for the Presidency. He’s had one message, that of change. He has not once discarded it; instead he amazingly broadened yet refined that message to ensure it encompassed all of the topics to have come up over the campaign. The lesson to be learned when comparing these two campaigns is obvious.

Blackwater mercenaries now actually on the water.

This is cool! Blackwater has put together something of a warship that serves as a helicopter platform. They’re going to sell their military services to merchant ships that fear Somali piracy. I’ve been reading Prof. John Keegan’s “A History of Warfare” and it seems the rise of mercenary armies seems to come at the end of a civilization’s life cycle. Using them to help wage a war in Iraq is a sure sign of American decadence. That said the audacity of this business plan; the very American “can-do” mentality is rather appealing.

Pakistan and U.S. to arm tens of thousands of tribesman.

It looks like poor Pakistan is going to be hastened on its way to hell thanks to the desperation of all involved. The Taliban in the north has control over much territory and the solution to this is to arm the other half of the people living there. Arming tribesman in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets is what created the Taliban. This is a classic case of history repeating itself. I wonder then why Pakistan thinks they are going to achieve different results this time.

The 70’s news article that inspired the movie Saturday Night Fever

This is a rare, old gem. With a surprising amount of literary prose and structure a reporter uncovers the youth sub-culture of disco dancing as it first emerged. Reading the article I immediately gained new respect for the movie because it captured the atmosphere of the article perfectly. I always found it interesting that the most colourful and flamboyant street cultures come from the most industrialized, dark, and dirty of places.

Half-decent game gets half-assed review and title...

2008-09-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

The game front has been a bit slow as of late, this is the calm before the Christmas storm. It gave me the opportunity to finish off the last game on my list of second-rate shooters and that would be Frontlines: Fuel of War for the X-Box 360.

Frontlines was put together by the newly formed Kaos Studios, who were formerly called Trauma and worked on Battlefield titles like Desert Combat. This is what piqued my initial interest in this game as the Battlefield series has always been a well-respected online multiplayer franchise with its own distinct, clear-cut style.

And this indeed is what you get with Frontines: a clean shooter cut from the Battlefield cloth. I found two things working against it however. Its use of Unreal Technology didn’t separate the game from the herd on a visual level and the oversaturated genre that is the post-modern military shooter didn’t help this in this regard either.

As should be expected the story is as limp as the title. Fuel of War? That's just plain fuel. Filling up a tank is no different than any other combustion engine. You're not saying shit with that line. If that's what you went with then what titles were discarded? Gasoline of Battle? Petrol of Skirmish? Strange but it's an ironically apt title. Frontlines lacked individuality or personal style, its own soul, which is a shame because it played competently overall.

In addition to the standard arsenal of weapons Frontlines features drones, or remote controlled attack vehicles. Miniaturized versions of tanks and helicopters mixed up the gunplay and offered a new perspective of the battlefield. Less successful were the many vehicle sections that brought nothing new to the table. The best part of Frontlines was the large maps and multi-point objectives that you had to complete without a lot of direction. You were allowed to attack the problems any way you felt like and take the heat for your decisions. These levels rewarded exploration and a patient approach, which is a far better design model than pushing forward through a script in order to activate and deactivate spawn points.

If you like how Frontlines plays then it’s a good platform for your online multiplayer as well. There is a robust community and they are releasing downloadable content like extra maps. Myself, I’ll probably be crawling back to Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat.

I also downloaded Wipeout HD on the Playstation Network, a futuristic, anti-gravity racing game with an old pedigree. The slickness of its 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second is only matched by the cool techno soundtrack. The Playstation seems to be pulling ahead of the X-Box when it comes to downloadable games. This title, Ratchet & Clank’s Quest for Booty, and the episodic Siren: Blood Curse illustrate a high level of quality, a new game experience rather than a nostalgia trip. By comparison X-Box released Braid, a game with great art but essentially a Mario clone, and Duke Nukem 3D, still a really fun shooter but clearly a product of its times. LIVE is regularly touted as the superior experience but these days I mainly see that as spin.

So far 2007 was a better year for games than 2008 but it’s an unfair comparison. To that end here is a list of games and their release dates that are on the horizon. (I'll be updating and adding to this list as more information becomes available.

Dead Space – October 14
Fable 2 – October 21
Little Big Planet – October 28
Fallout 3 – October 28
Resistance 2 – November 4
Gears of War 2 – November 7
Mirror’s Edge – November 11
Call of Duty: World At War - November 11
Left 4 Dead - November 17

Okay, so now it's nine potential game purchases over the course of a month! This industry, it is recession-proof! All of these games are getting glowing previews and all of those games are coming from developers who know what they are doing. It is therefore a ridiculous amount of content that can totally reverse my personal verdict on 2008. I hope it does.

Today's Special: Sad Kitten Sandwich with Extra Cheese

2008-09-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

October 14th: Election Night in Canada! This very special event only happens around three times every four years so I’m sure we’re in for almost nothing of interest. Now in order to get his way Prime Minister Stephen Harper had to break his own fixed election legislation. Well good for him, that’s what I say. Look at what fixed elections have done in the U.S: nineteen goddamned months of mostly unattractive people in pant suits and flag pins saying the same things over and over again. They will have been interviewing for the Presidency for almost two years and they might only have the job for four. That’s bananas!

Plus, fixed elections have created a nerdy version of the football-desk style of news-casting that just isn’t working. Have you caught this act yet? They have four or five old dudes, actual journalists from back in the day for the most part, who go over every perceived nuance in tedious detail. Then they pass the camera over to a new generation of analyst douche-bags who pack in their very best sound bites for all of the sixty seconds they’re allotted. You can smell their desperation; this is their big chance to make an impression in hopes that one day they’ll be invited into the inner circle. Everyone in the American election process, from the politicians to the pundits, is shilling for a fucking promotion.

We got it right in Canada, kids. Six weeks, in and out, and we’re done. We pick the next steward of our collective mediocrity with minimal fuss and then get on with our lives. There’s no chance to get drunk on pageantry, no time to snipe at who stood behind what Greek column or green backdrop. What’s that? Harper’s on YouTube tearing the head of a cat off with his teeth? No time to look at that; the election is almost over. We better finish this one before they call another.

When you’re the Prime Minister and you want to hold an election you have to request that the Governor General dissolve parliament. Man it would be cool to see that actually happen just one time. All the members would be begging the G.G. not to push the big red DISSOLVE button. Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean would not flinch from her solemn duties, however. With wide, hellish eyes and snarling teeth she would push that button and then all of parliament would melt into a huge pool of vanilla soft serve ice cream.

Speaking of which, who’s your honky this time, Canada? (Cricket sounds on the internet) How did they get here? I’ve been talking to friends and there is no clear-cut answer for people of our age and outlook. Sadly, most people have resorted to strategising, meaning they’re not voting for someone so much as they’re voting against someone else. How about that Canadian spirit, eh? As mushy as the Wonder white bread our politicians are made of.

It seems many don’t like Steve Harper for the same reason we would always pick him last to be on our sports team. You don’t like him because he reminds you of a middle management type: you know, the guy who fails utterly to inspire or make you feel good about your job but will bust you every time you make a filing mistake, no matter how small or hidden.

Stéphane Maurice Dion, who by all accounts is a thoughtful, intelligent man, is unfortunately nothing but third-place weakness on display. I was in disbelief at how the Liberal leadership convention played out. Was it not supposed to be a competition? Was a winner not supposed to emerge atop the pile of defeated? Gerard Kennedy seems like a solid guy but that political ploy he helped orchestrate is a far cry from his hockey playing days of old. He was barely behind Dion but I guess felt that folding in order to curry favour with the new party leader was better than risking getting beaten fair and square. At least Bob Rae deserves some props for sticking to his guns.

Shortly after the convention Dion announced that Kennedy would be his special advisor on election readiness and renewal with – get this – “intimate involvement in all aspects of election readiness and the platform.” Sounds kind of gay but it fits because it looks like those two have fucked each other and their whole party now.

What they should do is get down on their knees and BEG Jean Chrétien to come back. You need blood of the warm, red variety to win elections and it has been drained out of Canada’s premier governing party.

Who else is left? Gilles Duceppe? I like the guy, he’s got some panache but that sovereignty thing is a killer. If it ever came to pass I would have to say that I was born in a foreign country. What about Elizabeth May and the Green Party? She’s got a pretty impressive resume. It looks like she’s going to be shut out of the debates again even though they get a million in federal funds on account of the votes they received. They even have an M.P. now that former independent Blair Wilson of West Vancouver’s Sunshine Coast joined the team. The Prime Minister says that that inviting the Green Party into the debate would be like giving the Liberals two seats. That’s some classic Harper distain for you. He can’t stand the fact that Canada produces more left-leaning political parties than right-wing ones. How dare we organize government representation that reflects our personal views and beliefs!

I think Jack Layton has been rather successful this term. It’s unfortunate he’s got the reputation of being the angry-crazy man. I suppose that comes with the territory of living in perpetual opposition. I think that’s who I’ll be rooting for this time around. He’s been consistently against the Afghanistan military misadventure, he was quite the muscleman on the Clean Air Act, and the skin that stretches over his skull is clear of mar or blemish. I hope he continues gaining percentage points for the N.D.P. It doesn’t hurt that he’s married to fellow M.P. Olivia Chow either, that’s a reassuringly competent political couple right there. Do you think they’ve ever, you know, done it in Parliament? A quickie in the Legislative Assembly perhaps? A little in-and-out during the Victorian Tea Tour? I could point them out a couple decent spots in Queen’s Park.

At any rate this is the pettiest of elections. It’s just power for power’s sake: Harper’s making a run for his majority, and figures now is better than ever. This is nothing but ego politics and serving the country is way down on the list. It bugs me though. If he gets even the slimmest majority it’s a free pass to make all kinds of changes to our country. We’ll wind up going to whatever war the Americans pick next. Rick Mercer is liable to get really audited, with pliers. Canadian movies will suck even more, which hardly seems possible.

Here’s hoping that Canada doesn’t want a majority government. I don’t think Canadians should be telling other Canadians what to do just because 51% percent think one way and 49% think the other. Look at what Bush did with those numbers. Regardless of who wins we should still all be cool with letting people do their own thing. Hopefully that wishy-washy mindset will prevail. It is, after all, the Canadian way.

In this post I will claim that some Americans are unsmart and just like that - PING - I'm on a watchlist...

2008-09-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Look at that picture. Putin is sooo going to tap that.

My self-imposed moratorium on politics ended when the Republican National Convention rolled into town because, as the kids on the streets say, the shit just got real, son. Sarah Palin exploded on the stage with the best-in-show performance that secured the love and loyalty of her party’s base. That’s all it takes, one good speech, and with that she has generated enough credibility to take a run at the White House.

First I want to give a shout out to my main man Levi Johnston. He’s the stud who impregnated Bristol Palin.
The guy fucks this chick and as a bonus he gets the best seat in the house at the convention. What a twist of fate! The only thing I got the last time I fucked a seventeen year old was a massive guilt trip as she sat there hugging her knees while rocking back and forth saying: “I thought you were the one but you are SO NOT the one! Daddy’s going to kill me!” Actually it’s a pretty good memory, I’ve got no cause to complain.

We are seeing the normalization of teen pregnancy in America and it seems to come hand-in-hand with the dumbing-down that population is experiencing. I think I’ve figured out why the Republicans are all so gung-ho on banning abortion. Unwanted and teen-birthed children grow up to become their base, and their military of course. Planned Parenthood is the domain of professional thirty-somethings, a tool of your average Democratic voter.

There was much sweet hypocrisy uttered during the convention. Rudy Guiliani was the best example. His jokes were tired, he tried and failed to be self-deprecating and his attempts to inspire others met with similar success but when it came to attacking Obama he transformed into a spear of lighting. He had the gall to dismiss the efforts of community organizers and then deride his party’s opponents as elitist. Remember it’s the Republicans who consistently and effectively champion tax cuts for the rich. This however defines an important distinction as to what elitist means when mouthed by the neo-conservatives. It’s not wealth or standing but education and the ability to use it intelligently that is a target for insults amongs this party. The theme of this election seems to be people who are proud to be stupid versus those who are worried that they are smart.

An arena filled with people chanting “drill baby drill” is scene from a fictional dystopian political rally, a dark future satire. To my dread and amazement it happened in real life. I think the G.O.P. see vainly searching for sufficient oil in Alaska and the Arctic as a win-win situation. Hitting the jackpot is of course a mathematical possibility, something that pleases their scratch-n-win sensibilities. Failing that, the environmental destruction of the north is sure to hasten the apocalypse, and I believe that if some of the evangelicals don’t get to see it in their lifetime they are going to feel cheated.

The Republicans vowed time and again to “shake up Warshington” and that was just too rich. They have had control of the Executive and Judiciary branch for the past eight years. They controlled the Senate and Congress for five and six years respectively. America is a mess of their making and they want voters to believe they can fix it better than those who opposed those decisions in the first place. It doesn’t make any sense but remember this is the party that supports teaching creationism in school and refuses to believe billions of humans driving cars and consuming factory-made goods have an effect on the environment. We are talking about a people who are embracing wilful ignorance.

What’s telling about the Republican mindset is there is no admission of wrongdoing when it comes to their domestic and foreign policies. I saw no accepting of responsibility, expressions of guilt or attempts to atone for the war crime that is the Iraq Occupation. Instead, Sarah Palin mocked Barack Obama for talking about the war and not once mentioning the word VICTORY. Palin insists that a nation can engage in a pointless, illegal, immoral war that kills thousands and turns millions into refugees yet still somehow emerge victorious, all the while remaining unrepentant. This is delusion and it threatens to sweep the country yet again.

I think it’s insane that the American presidential race is a close one but I must admit it fills my dark heart with a certain amusement. Is the American majority truly this stupid? Are they really that averse to admitting their own collective mistakes? Are they still willing to continue down a failed path in hopes of achieving different results? In 2004 it was already common knowledge that the Iraq War was a quagmire based on lies, and that Bush was an idiot, but the American people let him keep his job anyway. A precedent for making comically wrong choices in the face of facts has been firmly established.

The vice president I would like to have sex with as if she were a seventeen year old who had a mother in the White House - oh shit that's my autism kicking in - pull out!

This link is to prove that when my friend Marc talks I am actually listening. It's a Sarah Palin fansite that will update you on all things Sarah Palin and give you handy tips like what hand basket you can co-ordinate with your shoes for your trip to the Infernal Pits of Torment.

It's not moose killing that defines leadership but moose dressing really sells it for me.

This article not only introduces you to some of the issues Ms. Palin stands for but why she connects with her voters. This is not the America I grew up with.

And now for something completely different... Well not THAT different. I'm still talking about games and being a jerk...

2008-08-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have been playing Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution whenever my lovely wife isn’t playing Civilization: Revolution, so if you really have to go pee right now then don’t bother reading the rest of this. Just go out and buy yourself a copy of Civilization: Revolution, safe with the knowledge that the game has earned my recommendation. No, this site will be gone by the time you return. It will have been erased, a rumour, like so much urine down a…

Holy Christ in Hell this new medication is making me more crazy than usual! I really need to get a proper prescription, maybe from a doctor. Anyway Civilization is an old game. The first was in 1991 and there have since been many versions that refine the game and take advantage of new hardware. This particular iteration has been made especially for the game playing console.

If you haven’t ever played Civilization it goes like this: you are the ruler of a race. You start with one meagre city at the dawn of recorded history. Your people are ignorant and disgusting, they know nothing. You haven’t even invented pottery yet. Pottery! Just how are you bringing water back from the river? Probably with the hollowed-out head of one of your own infants. Your own son, because you were thirsty, how could you? You barbarians make me sick!

From this monkey-like state you will elevate yourself. You will build things like granaries, libraries, and barracks. You will invent things like writing, mathematics, and religion. You will explore the world, finding natural resources, friendly villages, and even ancient artifacts like the Seven Cities of Gold or the Arc of the Covenant. You will create settlers who will found other cities, you will pay for roads to connect your cities, and you will even meet other civilizations making the same climb through the ages as you are. Sure they’re nice at first but then they get pushy and demanding, think Catherine the Great with a coke problem. They’ll demand you hand over Lao Tzu. Old Man Tzu! Wee little Chinese guy, wouldn’t hurt anyone, but they want him. Don’t worry though, that bitch Cathy is the reason you’re inventing catapults and submarines in the first place.

You can play the game warlike or peaceful and chances are you’ll do a bit of both in every session. The game runs through the entire human experience from bronze working to intercontinental ballistic missiles. You win the game by creating and maintaining a civilization that reigns supreme either through military domination, scientific discovery, economic mastery, or cultural pre-eminence.

A question that a devoted Civilization player might ask is: Is this game the same as the Civ. IV I’ve already got on the computer? The answer is no. This is a re-imagining of the core Civ. idea. It has been simplified, plays out on a smaller world, and you can play an entire game in about three hours rather than killing your whole weekend. It’s a great game of Civ. but it’s not in competition with the main product.

The game is such a great departure from all of the grim shooters and horror faire that I usually love. It’s whimsical and casts the whole rise of humanity in a quirky light. It’s a simple game to start but takes time to master the nuances. It’s a beautiful looking game with lots of supplemental information in the menus, be it better playing tips or the actual historical significance of all the game elements from Stonehenge to Charles Babbage. (Who? Ahh! See? This be some educational shit up in this bitch. I be learning yo!)

For the first while you would do well to play against the computer and get your empire building up to snuff on one of the five difficulty levels. You can however play on-line against multiple opponents. Another neat idea is the Game of the Week feature. Everyone from around the world can play on the same pre-generated map and your score will appear on a leaderboard denoting the finest Civilization player on earth!

This super-addictive turn-based strategy game can be found on the X-Box 360, the PS 3, and even the Nintendo DS hand-held. It is in my opinion the best PC-to-console game I’ve ever played and that’s because it’s its own game, a perfect distillation of Sid Meier’s original idea to put the entire human race in the palm of our hands.

How can anything be so right and so wrong at the same time... I mean besides me, of course...

2008-06-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

Ahh yes, Metal Gear Solid! We come to it at last! If the blithering of pungent otaku hermits is to be believed this legendary videogame franchise is said to act like a combination of Viagra and powdered rhinoceros horn on the superfluous appendage of the fanboy elite. Crafted over the course of years by the very kensai of console gaming, Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 4 – Guns of the Patriots is said to be the conclusion and crowning achievement of this twenty year old epic. The game’s protagonist, Solid Snake, nears the end of his life and with his last remaining days he will battle all adversaries, both old and new, for the freedom of the very future itself!

Not bad, eh? So after all that let me just come out and tell you what you want to know right off the bat: Guns of the Patriots is a must-have PS3 title for two reasons. The first is because the latest Metal Gear has some of the greatest things I’ve seen in a videogame. The second is because this game has some of the most ridiculously pathetic things I’ve seen in a videogame. With but a single Blu-Ray disk you get all the heady highs and basement-bottom lows this medium has to offer. I regard Guns as an old high school girlfriend; gorgeous, tight, and thoroughly fucking retarded every time she opened her mouth. The constant hassle of breaking up and making up (read: cut-scenes and load times) are more than ameliorated by the high quality hate-sex (read: game play.)

First, the sex - I mean game play. From the moment the menu screen loads up you know that you are in for a treat! Metal Gear Solid 4 truly is a game that has to be seen to be believed. Graphics-wise whatever measuring stick you want to whip out, this Metal Gear will satisfy. Environments, textures, particle effects - the game excels on all fronts and is one of the finest looking console titles around. The sound, both in music and effects, is right in step with the visuals.

That however is not the great part. The game engine is capable of real time cut-scene quality close-ups that can then swing out seamlessly into the third person view. They prove this by often transitioning directly from cut-scene to combat and the only way you can tell the difference is because your H.U.D. returns to view. With the touch of a button you can shift between the traditional third person, to the newer over-the-shoulder view, to the first person/aiming down the sights perspective at any time. You can play this game in any of those modes and it will serve you well to use all three on the fly in any given scene in order to see exactly what you want to see.

What this amazing multi-view does is make Guns not only the decent stealth game it always was but a truly great shooting game too boot. There are seventy weapons to find or buy and while you can only hold five at a time the other sixty-five can be quickly accessed out of the pause menu and then equipped. You can even buy ammo and special attachments mid-battle. Assault rifle not thrilling you like it use to? Pull out your drum-fed grenade launcher or perhaps one of the Javelin or Stinger missile systems. The sheer volume of weaponry at your fingertips, from tranquiller darts to rail cannons, makes it a Metal Gear for all players and all playing styles.

This variety, the level design, the difficulty settings, plus the tons of secrets to find and special rewards to earn give the single player story more re-playability than most narrative-driven games. Perks like an in-game digital camera and virtual iPod allow you to take pictures while you play and create your own soundtrack with music from the current and all previous Metal Gears. The on-line component – aside from a torturous registration procedure – is surprisingly good once you understand that this is a multiplayer shooter that is not in direct competition with games like Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3. The game’s stealth elements are married very well with the standard on-line modes and encourage you to mix up your techniques. The overall polish, thoughtfulness, and product depth say one thing above all: there was a lot of skill and love put into this game.

The sad irony to be found in Metal Gear Solid 4 is that a title with such excellent game play and features doesn’t require the crutches of complex narrative or elaborate cut-scenes to add value to the product. Alas poor Guns has been not only been saddled with such conventions but brought to its knees under the weight it must bear. In my experience Metal Gear Solid 4 stands alone in this regard: not only is it the most comically horrible action story ever told, it requires HOURS of your patience to tell it.

There are chapters or acts in this title where the game play and the cut-scenes share equal time! This goes far beyond getting up to make a sandwich. True Story: One time my lovely wife was watching me play this game until a cut-scene came up. She then went into the kitchen and started preparing lasagna for our dinner; four layers of meat, tomato sauce, cheese and pasta sheets. She finished this noteworthy task, popped it in the oven and then returned to the living room.

“Are you on the same cut-scene?” She asks me.
“Uh-huh,” I nod, suddenly realising a film or glaze had fogged my eyes.
“Wankers,” she cursed and then went to mix herself another Cosmo.

Wankers indeed. Metal Gear’s storyline is a leviathan of narrative excess, an effort that is too galling and self-indulgent to simply ignore or gloss over as we do with so many of the games we love. Every single melodramatic Japanese anime cliché can be found within from cute animal sidekicks to weapons-laden weddings, emo ninjas to giant robots. Dead people come back to life only to give a monologue and then they die again!

Spoilers, you gasp? Respectfully, I say fuck you sir. This trite nonsense needs to be dragged out into the cleansing sunshine where we can all watch it shrivel and expire. Skipping cut-scenes would normally render my outrage moot but within these vignettes are button prompts that earn you cash and opportunities to move around the area in order to find extra equipment. Suffer through the cut-scenes and you are rewarded in ways other players won’t be. “Watch my movies” the developer is telling you, “and I’ll give you the camera.” In my mind this is the very height of egotism.

I will admit there were a few exciting action sequences and truly touching scenes, rare moments that were smothered by the meandering dialogue and pointless back-story. I have played all of the four main Metal Gear Solid titles and I can appreciate the reams of fan service this game provides. Defensive diehards have proposed that such things are what a “Metal Gear” game is made of, as if this point somehow makes the title beyond critique. This story and the huge swaths of time it takes to tell doesn’t merely besmirch the game play however, it actively works against it. The narrative destroys all manner of pacing. The excitement you feel after finishing a scene is left to dwindle and die once the cut-scenes enter double digit minutes. Having started my second go-through and skipping the cut-scenes I’m happy to report that unfettered the game takes flight. The pacing is restored despite the fact that you will still sit through multiple load screens between chapters.

Writing about this most bi-polar of games has brought out my own extremist reactions and so I thank you, gentle reader, for my own spot of self-indulgence. Again I reiterate my recommendation to put this game in the collection. While playing, I think you will find it a superlative experience and while watching, you will bear witness to something… Well something truly unique anyway. At last we gamers have our Ishtar! We have our Waterworld! It is an entertainment milestone worth mentioning.

Words from people you don't know on games you don't care about...

Jay from videolamer.com approached me with the opportunity to have my writing appear on his website! After reading several articles I thought it would be a good fit. The site is equal parts irreverent and insightful with a good measure of the potty humour that you know I love to roll around in. This review also appears on videolamer and I hope others will follow. If you're are looking for a new and interesting gamer site then I recommend checking out the above link.

On Writing and Video Games...

2008-06-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

The importance of video games to human development cannot be overstated. I believe there have been three major inventions that have radically expanded the human species and the reality we continue to create for ourselves. The first would be movable type and the advent of the printed word, the second would be motion pictures, and the latest revolutionary intellectual force would be interactivity. Video games and the internet that many of them run on has irreversibly transformed the human race and set our consciousness on an exciting new course of development.

I marvel at the advancements this medium has displayed in my lifetime. From photo realistic graphics to complex game mechanics to real world physics we are seeing video games mature and match sophistication with the other, older mediums in a relatively short period of time. I feel however that in one particular area video games are stagnating, shockingly and perplexingly so.

Not nearly enough games are telling us stories worth paying attention to.

These personal thoughts have coalesced into this essay over the past few months where I have played some of the most technically impressive games of my life, all the while having to suffer through some terribly ineffective stories. The magnum opus that is Grand Theft Auto IV is really just a thin tale of crime and retribution made even cheaper by how much material it shamelessly lifts from other sources such as The Wire. The latest Metal Gear Solid is even worse; a melodramatic abortion without subtlety or restraint. You may disagree with my two examples and of course that’s fine. To make my point I instead ask you to look over your own collection of games and take note of the many worthwhile titles where the narrative runs from poor to just plain awful. More often than not, story is the weakest part of any game. Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Army of Two, Dark Sector, Devil May Cry 4, Halo 3, and Condemned 2 are titles I’ve recently played or replayed that easily come to mind. I loved the game play in each of these titles but the story in all of them was very poorly imparted. There were interesting concepts and imaginative scenes but the good writing needed to thread them all together was absent.

Good writing can and does take place, which is why the culture of narrative failure present in the video game industry is all the more mystifying. Epic, far-reaching stories have been effectively told in this medium. As recent examples I thought Mass Effect, Bioshock, and the Half-Life episodes did a fine job, at least fine enough given the overall ineptitude of their peers. Small, contained and compelling stories have also been told. In Portal we have the simple arc of a malfunctioning A.I. who hopes to lure a test subject to their doom only to be outwitted and destroyed… That and cake. Portal exemplifies the fact that it’s not what story you’re telling but how you tell it. How come so many video game developers don’t know how to tell their own stories?

Being an avid game consumer but admittedly looking from the outside – in, I have come to speculate on why effective storytelling seems so vexing to game development. Just as movie writing isn’t the same as book writing, is there some radical, hereto forth yet to be discovered skill-set needed to create the video game equivalent of a page-turner? Has the industry not committed to the writing process as they have to coding or animation? Are video games inherently at cross purposes with story telling and only rare geniuses can occasionally skirt this inevitability? Perhaps each major development house has a different answer to my question but what I can say with absolute certainly is that we, the players, should be taking some of the blame.

We accept these stories, you see. We pay, we play, we praise, and all the while we remain mostly silent on the quality of the narrative. We are silent because we have accepted that poor storytelling is the norm. We tell ourselves that the medium is still in its infancy, or that the luminary artists of literature have not yet embraced games as a career path, or that story is naturally going to take the back seat to a product that allows you to shoot people in the head for hours on end. We make excuses for the developers who in turn fail to consider story as a priority. They are not motivated to evolve.

We should demand they evolve!

If a story goes nowhere, falls flat, is uninteresting, has been told too many times, or is just preposterously stupid then it should be pointed out, emphatically. The enthusiast media’s ranking system leaves much to be desired and has been rightly vilified as of late, yet it is the only system we have and it should be made to take the writing more into account. If a game comes with an idiotic or half-assed story it should be mentioned and a perfect or near perfect score should be out of reach.

Our personal criticisms should always be constructive of course, but they should be vocal enough so that they are taken to heart by the game creators. By the same token if a game tells a fine story it should be encouraged, even if the other aspects of the game are not up to snuff. After all, isn’t turnabout fair play? For too long we have accepted awful writing because the visuals and game play are excellent.

We should be putting the writing up to the same kind of scrutiny we give the screenshots and trailers. Dedicated game players no longer accept poor quality graphics and surprise; the vast majority of games these days look beautiful, I dare say even excessively so. We the players can and have affected the culture of gaming on a wide variety of issues - for both good and ill depending on who you ask. Now we need to begin a new groundswell to bring the writing proficiency in step with the other, more advanced aspects of game design.

Video game industry to exceed 68 Billion dollars by 2012.

Last year the industry made over 40 Billion in revenue, double what it earn just five short years ago. The industry is massive and seems to be growing at an incredible rate.
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If they start selling this thing at Walmart then you'll know I was right all along...

2008-06-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

I’m surfacing from yet another blog hiatus. This time is was a vacation away from all family and children; just me alone at the house for two weeks. I KNOW!!! First there was shell shock, then gibbering insanity, then relaxation, then deep relaxation, then underwear-deep relaxation, then pizza. The last time both wife and children visited relations in the old country I partied like a fiend of various varieties and found suitable alternatives to sleep. I remember barbecuing a chicken with a beer in its butt-hole. Why should he be the only one left out at the party? This time around I surrounded myself with the hobbies and home improvement projects I would never get around to otherwise. It seems age has rubbed me into but a nub of what I use to be. I even lack the youthful hellfire to complain.

I finished Grand Theft Auto IV or at least finished the main story. In my case this accounted for around 65% of the game’s total content over a 45 hour period. Since the remaining side missions are sure to be more of the same I’ll take a break and get back to it during a lull in the release schedule. Rockstar’s latest opus was a very nice game overall with decent value. In parts it was suitably exciting and in others was surprisingly therapeutic. My fondest memories are driving in the early morning or sunset with that perfect radio tune kicking in. Liberty City was made for cruising.

It is not the perfect or revolutionary experience proclaimed by the videogame enthusiast media. These people are getting worse, not better at observation and objectivity. Lots of post mortem internet discussions have brought up a litany of critiques; things that honest reviewers could have easily pointed out from the get-go rather than the tongue bath they twirled out. My personal gripe was that the camera control and shooting mechanics are inferior to all of GTA’s third-person peers. Seeing as you’re moving the camera and shooting all the time it definitely detracts from the game. Others have remarked about the lack of interactivity; the city seems in place only to tell the main story. Driving controls have frustrated some. The constant barrage of annoying cell phone calls the character is subjected to is another common complaint. These points have merit but in the end I think the spirit and style of the game exceeds its short-comings. So get a copy, borrow mine, have fun with the good.

I re-played a ton of good games, most in co-op modes with friends. There is a thirst amongst all my friends, some who don’t own consoles, for more cooperative content. Some developers are hearing the message. I played the demo for Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution; an updated console version of this seminal franchise. Most of you have played Civilization; the first versions of this game could be stored on a single floppy and made the rounds in high school. Really it’s just a big monopoly game where you build cities and armies, promote science, earn wealth and survive in the world against opponents trying to do the same. This new version is great fun and really, really cute! It looks appealing, is simple to learn, is suitable for gamers of all ages, and has infinite re-playability. It’s coming out on multiple consoles and I can’t think of anyone who will be disappointed by this game. Sid Meier’s has been making whimsical games forever and it’s nice to see that he still has it.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has come out. I love it. It’s everything a bunch of geeky books should be. Yes, I am indeed deserving of your pity should you have any to spare.

So this was the obligatory nerd post and I will try for world events and politics later in the week. Thanks to Marc for sending me this article. The cracker-jack FBI investigation in this piece is only eclipsed by the journalistic integrity of the expose. First, hit the link and see the picture…

Can the Democrats and Captain Obama stop this picture from becoming reality?

This article has Al-Qaeda, WMD, the White House in ruins and the FBI getting all over it! There’s only one problem; that picture is art for an upcoming video game called Fallout 3. In it America has suffered a nuclear war that had nothing to do with terrorism or the Middle East. The so-called “Islamic extremists” website posted a picture it found on the internet and this is somehow newsworthy to you and me. I don’t expect government agents or “journalists” to know these things on sight. I was however hoping they would have the fact-finding acumen to prevent this kind of nonsensical embarrassment. After the Iraqi invasion’s own form of fallout it is more chilling than ever to think that our opinions of people on the other side of the world are being potentially swayed by hacks who don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

In other news it seems the Chinese have developed a new ultimate weapon; man of metal or iron – an Iron Man if you will. This strange and certain threat has been seen flying at jet speeds by means of all-powerful boot propulsion and the footage has been witnessed by yours truly on the television. This deadly opponent to democracy wraps himself smugly in red and yellow; the very colours of the Communist Chinese flag! Surely their Maoist mandarin pride got the best of them. I don’t think they thought we would notice. Luckily for us every single solitary toy I’ve either bought or stolen for my children hails from that empire and their lead-painted standard is known to me.

Watch the skies, true believers! It’s not like there’s anything you can do because Iron Man will blast to atoms while his suit disperses his pent-up urine over your crops but watch the skies nonetheless. It’s both the least and most we can do!

(Seriously, how does a guy pee in that thing?)
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News, news, more news and nothing else aside from my snarky comments... My Time: Educational once again but for how long?!?

2008-05-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm lifting my personal embargo on news and have been able to stomach passing by the Democratic Party primary articles on my way to things that really matter. I'm cooking up a response to the whole Hillary vs. Obama charade but I'm waiting still, waiting for that whole ridiculous super-delegate thing to sort itself out. Their call will factor heavily into my premise about what this never-ending dry run is really all about and I want to give them a chance to make their fateful decision before going off on a rant. Oh yes! Rant I shall! Rant like the randy rants of lower Rantington while wearing my freshly pressed ranty-pants! In the meanwhile, seeing as I'm not going to be reviewing games for a while what with Grand Theft Auto IV owning my soul, I though it best to return to world events. After all they do deserve our attention... Not necessarily all of the stuff I focus on but every so often I try to rise of the level of 'Actual Relevance' like this first piece...

Myanmar – slash – Burma Hit By Cyclone. Tens of Thousand Dead.

Those poor Burmese can’t catch a break these days. The cyclone and the twelve foot high wave that followed caused an incredible amount of damage, as the picture above clearly attests. Many of the missing may wind up dead yet and the number of displaced must run in the hundreds of thousands.

Getting aid to Myanmar is problematic. The ruling generals are not well liked around the world, especially with the violent suppression of protesters and monks back in September. The world at large wants to give aid but the generals say it has to go through them, which naturally no government is willing to accept. What this probably means is that the assistance New Orleans was given after Katrina is going to look timely and efficient compared to what the Burmese are going to get.

You ever wonder why Myanmar is still called Burma by all kinds of people in the media and politics? It was those pesky generals who renamed Burma after their successful coup and since their government isn't officially recognized by a great many nations neither is their name-changing decree. Kind of neat, huh? It's the same with Canada; I insist on calling my place of birth Atomic Cockistan but it's just not catching on, not even with the collector's stamps and freshly minted coins.

Donald Rumsfeld… More of a douche than previously thought… Impossible, I know but...

Rumsfeld has often been characterized as a bully and a schemer (by me) but here we see he wasn’t above a spot of bribery as well! Lt. General Sanchez was the first star-spangled commander to rule over Iraq. It didn’t work out though, mostly because he wasn’t given the troops and staff needed to pacify a country that had its government and army disbanded. So of course he came off as a failure and as a result his military career was over. I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to rise as high as a three star general (the highest a Latin American has achieved) and not be allowed to hit the final two stops on the military mountain.

Our man Donald wasn’t through with Sanchez yet though. If the retiring Lt. General were to sign off on a paper that would basically shift the blame of moving troops out prematurely away from Rumsfeld then he would have a plum Department of Defence position waiting for him as he entered civilian life. You have to stand in awe of the gall of this toxic warlock. He fucks the man’s career through his own disastrous military planning and then is shameless enough to dangle a carrot in front of him in some vain hope to avoid his due culpability. I feel bad for these lifetime military men who had the misfortune of serving while he was Secretary. So many good careers have been trashed on account of this criminally incompetent destroyer of civilian infrastructure.

P.S.: I wanted, badly wanted, hotly desired you might say, to make a Dirty Sanchez joke but the good Lt. General (retired) deserves better than that.

Orson Scott Card vs. J. K. Rowling! Fight! BAM! What? One punch and it’s over?

Steven Vander Ark is/was a big Harry Potter fan and created a comprehensive website containing all things Potter; a web encyclopedia if you will. J. K. Rowling seemed not only flattered by the fan’s devotion but actually used it herself when writing for the sake of convenience and continuity. She even presented him with an award! I'm not sure what kind of award Rowling would give to Vander Ark, maybe something along the line of: "You're a penniless nerd and I'm richer than the Queen so here's a medallion of tin shellacked in gold paint. Thanks for the free publicity, sucker!" Anyway Vander Ark believed his project was at a place where he could make some money for his labour and began the plans to put it into book form. That’s when Rowling litigators went to work and J. K. herself claimed to be 'violated' which - let me tell you - if that clip surfaces on the internet you'll find it here first, gentle reader.

Fictional Commentary is allowable by law provided sources are sited, something legendary author Orson Scott Card points out and many other shocking things besides. I loved all the Enders books as a teenager but I'll ashamedly admit that I never caught onto the many suspicious similarities between his work and Harry Potter. 'Tis the doom of men that they forget,' eh J. K.? I love it when writers get pissed with each other, the verbiage that gets bandied around is of professional calibre. Rowling gets totally called out in the link above, violated, if you will. I wonder if she will take the time to respond between her appointments with the plastic surgeon?

Once again I will poo-poo on someone else's hard work like the elitist gamer-nerd douchebag that I am...

2008-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

I did the ‘midnight madness’ thing again for Grand Theft Auto IV. This time the gamer-wife Mike met up with me and we marvelled at the hundreds long line ups at all the stores that were selling the game, of which there were many. Crazy! I did the same thing for Halo 3 and there was barely anyone in attendance. That said the game went on to break all records. If the huge crowds are any indication then this game is going to dominate like nothing else before it. This week all over the world there have been hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands on account of this game. When the papers start putting up real figures I’ll put them here.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a dense, open world game. It’s so big that after putting a couple hours into it last night I felt as if I was actually progressing in reverse; that I was somehow undoing what I did the night prior. I am pretty lost right now with little idea of what to do. This hasn’t happened since I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I had to sink over 300 hours into that game before I felt I was done with it. You may not hear from me for a long, long time.

I cannot even begin to review this game. My first impressions are quite positive despite being overwhelmed. Liberty City looks bloody amazing! It has a perfect combination of realism and artistic style. The game is begging you to go for a ride. There are many times when I get the urge to just drop whatever task or mission I’m in, steal a sports car, find a radio station that’s pumping a filthy beat, and just take off with no intended destination. This is an embryonic virtual reality experience and let me tell you this child is going to grow into one hell of a bright kid!

Just prior to this I quickly completed one of the last mediocre shooter titles I was interested in this year and by that I mean Turok. The first Turok: Dinosaur Hunter came out eleven years ago and grew into a franchise of four games. While the first was well received the sequels received increasingly more critical reviews and the series eventually died. Disney bought the rights, created Vancouver-based Propaganda Games to develop a new title, and basically wound up repeating the lacklustre performance of the last go around.

Overall Turok is mired in sub-par design in almost every aspect of the game. It uses the eponymous Unreal Technology to run the game and the developers weren’t able to make it shine as nicely as other third party developers. The environments are dull, rather fake looking, and use a slim palette of colours. The character models and dinosaurs look pretty good but it's nothing new and therefore fails to impress.

They didn’t get the shooting entirely right and in my bible this is the one sin thou shalt not do. A most excellent standard that good shooters adhere to is the ‘aim down the sites’ style of play. Press and hold a button and your weapon is brought close to the eye which in turn magnifies the center of your screen. It approximates taking aim with a real rifle held up to the cheek. It’s very effective and there is no need to change it unless you manage to come up with something equally revolutionary. Turok opted for none of this and the aiming is nothing but a slight magnification of the screen. It’s as if they had trouble rendering the draw distances. In the end you almost never use the aim feature and the limp mechanic in place is thus wasted. As a result the shooting winds up being imprecise and mushy feeling.

The game was marketed as a world of complex A.I. There are enemy soldiers in the game and neutral but easily angered dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were to be a random factor that you could use to take out the soldiers, to lure them into traps and the like. If you messed up they would attack you instead. The end result however is far less interesting than they originally claimed. While there are a few seemingly scripted occurrences of pitting dino versus man you mostly go through the game dispatching a bunch of reptiles, then man, then lizards again, then man. In total there are four different types of carnivorous dinosaurs and some of them get different skins in order to fake variety but it doesn't work. More was needed.

Turok is also guilty of abusing Quick Time Events (QTE) like no other game in memory. Rather than pump round after round of ammunition into the smaller, quick moving dinos it is much easier to approach them with a knife until you get a button prompt. Hit the button and you are treated to a gory cut-scene of Turok stabbing a lizard to death. I thought this was quite cool at first; it mixed up the shooting a bit. After doing it around twenty times however it became really old and even worse, it became what felt like a loophole to exploit. When the game started to throw six or seven Velociraptors at you one merely has to pull out the knife and bounce from one to the next, killing each creature with but the push of a single button. It was way too easy and there wasn’t nearly enough variety.

With all this criticism laid out I will admit that Turok had a few decent moments. In the first half of the game what kept me playing was the stealth aspect. Turok can sneak around quite a bit and kill silently with either the knife or a bow that’s powerful enough to pin people to the wall. I haven’t played a stealthy game in a while so it was pretty fun to switch from the run and gun mindset.

The other interesting thing was later in the game when you have your pick of all the heavy duty weaponry. Each weapon had an alternate firing mode, like having an assault rifle with a grenade launcher mounted beneath. At one point I realised that my guy was carrying a pulse rifle with twelve concussion grenades, a flame thrower with five napalm grenades, my bow with ten exploding arrows, and of course a trio of good old fashion fragmentation grenades for throwing. That is a lot of boom-boom - even by video game standards - and so I spent the next hour exploding my way through several rooms of enemies. Seeing as the physics were decent it actually stepped up the fun in a way the game didn’t advertise.

Towards the end there were a few big fights in some interesting areas that were good enough to carry me towards the end of the game, which was a predictable letdown. After completing the single player story I tried the multiplayer which is absolute lag-ridden garbage. I don’t understand why companies who can barely make a passable single player experience try to jam the much more demanding to develop multiplayer component into the game? They must work for years under delusion and it saddens me. What’s worse is that they have tied a great deal of X-Box Achievements with the multiplayer so I’m pretty sure this is a game that will remain half completed in that regard.

So in the end Turok is exactly what you would expect from a first time company that gets Disney to sign their cheques. Metacritic gives it an aggregate review score of 69% and I guess that sounds about right if even a bit generous. This game is really only for head-cases like me; people that treat the shooter genre as some kind of university thesis and needs to play all of them in a vain hope of further informing their overblown opinion. At the very least I hope the game was a positive learning experience for Propaganda Games. I’m eager to support Canadian game developers with my time and money, even when they’re off to a so-so start.

In New Orleans people are still living in tents under a highway.

Hit the link and hear the spoken word performance of a man who lives with a couple hundred others in tents under a highway. It appears that all levels of American government have abandoned these people. What the fuck is this if not the signs of Western society in decline? Hurricane Katrina hit on August 23, 2005, about two years, eight months ago.

Rodents, mousetraps, and a grim tale of operational excellence...

2008-04-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

I cannot tell you why I remembered this today, nor can I tell you why I'm compelled to write about it. I ate chicken wings very late last night, that could be it, or perhaps the onset of a neurological disorder? Oh the things I'm willing to do in the name of content! Anyway...

There were many mice living between the walls of my first apartment. The beautifully converted attic was spotless but I lived right next to a rather large vegetable garden and the legion of vermin it hosted tended to be a rambling bunch. I stuffed as many holes as I could find and wound up keeping everything but canned food in the fridge but in the end I had to resort to traps. As the picture above attests they're rather cute but the even sound of them scrabbling away in the dead of night can make you feel unclean.

One trap in particular was noteworthy: It would go off reliably every few days and after a couple months this thing looked like it belonged in a horror movie. Blood had soaked into all of the wooden base and the killing bar was crusty with whatever you might find in a rodent's skull in addition to bits of bone and fur. You might think that any sensible rodent would have nothing to do with what was clearly the Auschwitz of mouse traps but sadly no; in exchange for a spot of cheese they would merrily place their fuzzy little heads into the merciless jaws of what became known as Old Gruesome.

To replace Gruesome with something less monstrous - and in retrospect more sanitary - would have set me back a mere two dollars but the whole project entered a weird place somewhere between a high art and a fraternity dare. As the trap became positively gunky and could boast ending the lives of over fifty mice it eventually snapped its way into my heart, much like the favourite club of a seal hunter.

As all evil eventually consumes itself the trap broke; its' powerful spring had been coated with enough blood to rust it through and it snapped into pieces. Old Gruesome's final victim did not fare much better and I finally threw both of them in the trash; victor and victim, embracing for all eternity, buried deep in the bowels of some nameless landfill.

There were other mousetraps but like a grown man landing his first sucker-punch it just wasn't the same. Lesser traps lacked one-tenth of their predecessor's stamina and broke regularly, which led me to believe that Gruesome gained some measure of vitality through its' many acts of murder. If an argument can be made that mice have souls then I'm certain Old Gruesome hungered for them.

I miss him still...

Yes this bionic eye article DOES have a picture of Steve Austin in it...

In hopes of not completely wasting your time with this post I am submitting an article that talks about an artificial eye complete with a hook-up to your brain. They claim this technology might be implanted into your head in about five years. It would be so cool to look deeply into your lovers eyes and see NIKON in tiny letters around the iris. I'm pretty sure that as soon as I'm able to start replacing my perfectly working parts in favour of bionic I will. I've got two words for you... TELESCOPIC NIGHT VISION. Yeah, I know. Don't worry, I'll save a space for you in line at the doctor's office.

Wait, oh sorry. That was three words.

Another overblown review complete with a title that is attempting to be humorous...

2008-04-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

The next game to be reviewed from the so-so pile is the long delayed and often re-imagined Dark Sector. This title was developed by Ontario’s own Digital Extremes and put out by D3 Publisher for the X-Box 360 and the PS3. The project began as far back as 2004 and I actually remember it well because its teaser trailer was one of the first to come out for what is now this generation’s hardware. Dark Sector started out in space but by 2006 it got a make-over into a bleak secret agent story that was released just this year.

Four years is way, way too long a development cycle to make a video game. A game of course takes that long only when there are serious problems afoot and it’s been my experience that when the game is finally released those problems are still there. Dark Sector is sadly no exception.

I am still very keen on the premise of Dark Sector. Imagine if you will the fictional Eastern bloc nation of Lasria. This country is cut off from the rest of the world and left to develop advanced weapons technology and experiment with strange biological compounds. Something with regards to the later went wrong, killing or altering most of the poor country’s populous. The story begins with the protagonist; a hard-bitten American assassin, infiltrating the country in order to get to the bottom of things.

Dark Sector makes use of Digital Extreme’s proprietary Evolution Engine and this is the first time we get to use it in play. I thought it did some things rather well such as lighting, particle effects, and explosions. I thought in some places it needs to improve such as enemy movement animations and textures, and in a couple areas, such as human faces, its absolute rubbish. The main character’s head is weirdly shaped, too small, and from the sides his eyes bulge out awfully. It’s not only impossible to empathize with such a grotesque figure; you actually want to have nothing to do with him. Being this is the engine’s very first time out however these issues should be forgiven.

For reasons I don’t want to explain the main character quickly comes into possession of a strange weapon; The Glaive. This multi-bladed boomerang actually saves the game because it works really well, is damn effective, and improves in interesting ways as you go through the story. The glaive is quite the butcher’s tool and the removal of enemy heads and limbs makes for a satisfying bit of shrieking, bloody execution. In this Digital Extremes did such a good job that the game has been banned in a couple countries. For this, at least, I commend the developers.

There are other, more conventional weapons to use such as machine pistols and shotguns. I was pleased to see that these secondary side arms get a fair work out as well. You can actually wield the Glaive in one hand and a small gun in the other and this dual action is pretty slick. The combat in Dark Sector is by far its best feature.

The game boasts a weapon upgrade system so that your firearms can get tricked out to match the increasingly powerful enemies. If you’ve played games like Resident Evil 4 or even the newer Army of Two then you know that this kind of development can add a lot to a game. In Dark Sector however the developers totally missed the mark. The system seems installed as an afterthought; it’s too simple, it’s poorly implemented, and the greater impression winds up being what the upgrade system doesn’t do rather than what it does.

Having a game where the main character sneaks through a spooky Soviet-styled city while making contact with the black market or other colourful characters seems a great setting just brimming with possible stories. It worked wonders for Half-Life 2. Unfortunately Dark Sector’s environment and level design is some of the most boring in memory. The setting itself is sadly nothing but window dressing for a number of courtyards connected by side streets where you fight and fight and fight. The Lasrian city has no life and there is so little to distinguish one area from the next that you can immediately spot when they are reusing an asset that you visited not even an hour ago. As well there are many times when you will find yourself walking down a series of winding hallways with nothing happening. Pure speculation; I suspect this is a trick to let the computer buffer the next real encounter in order to facilitate shorter load times. The trouble is this design decision plays hell with the game’s pacing.

The story itself is scant and it seems to intentionally leave out a great deal as if all will be explained in a sequel but that scores this title no points in the here and now. That said, the boss fights were pretty cool and we don’t get too many of them in a shooter game. Some scenes had their moments and were able to convey emotion and intensity; there are graveyard and other 'haunted' scenes that deliver. For the most part however the game was a fairly flat experience. Finally there is an on-line component to Dark Sector but like so much in this game it’s too light in content to improve one’s opinion of the title.

What disappoints me most about Dark Sector is that you can see a fantastic game lost somewhere in here. If there was more to do in Lasria, if there were more people to meet and some side quests to complete, if the buying, selling, and weapons upgrading component of the game was at least as good as anything it’s trying to ape, then I would have loved this title. In the reviews I’ve read this game was often compared to Gears of War and Resident Evil but it cannot hold a candle to either.

What tipped the scales and made me buy this game at full price was that it comes out of London, Ontario and I felt that if I’m going to throw my money away at least let it be to a home grown cause. Supporting Dark Sector does in fact feel something like a charity and I hope that Digital Extremes realises that if they are going to make a sequel they need to rebuild almost every aspect of this game from bottom to top. I hope they attempt to give it an honest try.

Old video games with their titles changed makes for incredibly obscure humor.

In further attempts to avoid any and all news items I give you this site. If you were not born in my time you will not get most of this humour. If however you are my mother then it's worth checking out if only to be envious of the mad photoshopping skills my generation possesses. We can make anything look like anything else. It's a gift.

Shooting cyborg zombies is great fun but once they start pontificating on foriegn policy we're told it's pretentious...

2008-04-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

I have been wasting what time I can burning through a number of second-rate games and this is in fact a public service to you; the gentle reader. I am more than willing to be the canary in the video game mineshaft when it comes to the first person shooter format. It's strange but I much rather play a mediocre shooter than a top notch racing game or dating sim. If I were to guess what it is that brings me back time after time I might say... oh, I don't know... THE SHOOTING.

These are titles that I was looking forward to optaining upon release but when they got reviews in the 6’s and 7’s my priorities naturally changed. Such titles can be usually picked up for half-price within a couple months of release thanks to the numerous copies to be found in the used aisle of your local game store. I’m going to review a few of them this week in hopes of getting back into blog-making form, to tighen up my blog-gina, as it were.

BlackSite: Area 51 was developed and published by various wings of Midway as a multi-platform release that was mostly skewered by the gaming enthusiast media. The game’s developer even went so far as to publicly denounce it by outlining the difficulties faced in the development cycle before leaving the company. Juicy! I was willing to slog through this potentially bad game because I absolutely fell in love with the demo and after finishing it my initial impressions stand. I’m happy to keep this one in the collection.

BlackSite is an alien/robot/zombie shooter (seriously, all three) that I must admit fails to deliver in several aspects. The story and level design are lacklustre in addition to being short in duration. As well the developers were unable to add a co-op element and the multiplayer is forgettable. So why am I not slamming it? Here’s why; it’s a shooter and the shooting is bloody excellent! If you get this one thing right with this kind of game then in my books most other factors will be forgiven. In BlackSite the weapon of choice is this meaty, chugga-chugga M4 carbine and it felt like a much-needed extension of my dick! This was one of the most satisfying weapons I have used in a game and as the ladies will not hesitate to tell you, I aim to satisfy! This one element made the game at least a fun-filled, visceral experience.

This game was something of a throwback; like an old Doom or Quake game. It’s hard to explain but when playing you don’t feel like a soldier with a rifle – as you would in Call of Duty 4 – but more like a mobile weapons platform. It was actually a nice break from some of the slower moving, more realistic titles I’ve been playing lately. You just move through the funhouse at high speed and blast away any zany creatures that happen to pop up. No strategy, no taking cover; just pure, unadulterated run and gun.

Throughout the game you travel with a couple soldiers who you can direct with the most rudimentary of squad commands. Though other games have fleshed this out far better in Blacksite it is nonetheless an effective mechanic. With a click of the button you can ‘paint’ a target and your team-mates will go after it with gusto. I quickly found that as battle was joined it was important to give your squad targets in order to maximise your power. This and an interesting Squad Morale system kept the fights interesting. As well, I have to give BlackSite props for using the Unreal Technology to create some of the most realistic character models I’ve seen to date. Even Bioshock with its herky-jerky character animations could take a tip or two from what Midway did with the same middleware.

BlackSite has its more than a few shortcoming; one of them being it happens to be very critical of the United States and the Iraq War it started. The game’s not-so subtle message was that volunteer soldiers are being betrayed by their government with such measures as extended tours, stop-loss policy, and institutions such as Walter Reed Hospital. I don’t think these concepts are going to sell games this year and perhaps this is because Americans don’t want to hear about that stuff right now. The reviews I read were fairly harsh and dismissive to the topic; they even questioned its place in a game. I feel it’s a topic worth discussing and any venue is better than nothing. Such talk of a nation’s culpability does not however sit well with the citizenry even in the best of times.

I won’t go so far as to say that this game was reviewed unfairly and in truth I would be very surprised to see a sequel of any kind. Overall I felt the good outweighed the bad and I found the highly charged political aspects interesting. Now I've played through on the 360 version and also did a few chapters on the PC and will vouch for them. However I hear the port to the PS3 was not as good. Let the budget bargain bin buyer beware!

The news these past couple weeks has not been doing it for me. It's been either too dumb (Clinton vs. Obama) or too depressing, but I will leave you with this.

In-Meatro is coming!!!

My comments are thus... VAT GROWN MEAT!

The new new face of freedom... Kind of looks like the old face of fascism...

2008-04-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

The gamer-wife Mike and I finished Army of Two last week and were pleased overall. Developed and published by Electronic Arts for both the PS3 and the X-Box 360, this game is heavily focused on two-man cooperative play. Utilizing Unreal Technology 3 in the third-person shooter format, the game has you taking the roles of a mercenary duo as they travel the world killing ethnics for cash. Play this game and you get to live the dream!

Beyond a standard game that you can simply play with your buddy; titles like Gears of War or Halo 3 for example, Army of Two has put in a series of special two-man manoeuvres in hopes of enhancing the cooperative spirit between partners. Indeed, some of these abilities are vital to completing the levels and in that way treats co-op as a different genre of game rather than an alternate mode as presented in predominantly single player titles. These special moves tend to work in making the game original and they do so by setting up a precedent that carries through the experience; there are roles to play, you must play those roles when they come up, and these roles will switch at any given moment.

The best way to illustrate this is to describe the Aggro and Stealth game mechanic. If one player is shooting at enemies effectively they will earn the Aggro; meaning their character glows red and becomes the target of choice for the enemy. While this is happening the other character automatically enters Stealth; which means they become transparent and even enemies that are nearby will ignore them. This allows that player to flank the enemy or move through the map to a safe place. Aggro, Stealth, and the lack of either are three states the player will find themselves in and it can change with the placement of but a single bullet. While in Stealth if you take out a couple guys with their back to you then Aggro will be your reward. Your role suddenly changes and you must react effectively, in this case by playing the aggressive role. Your partner’s role also changes the instant yours does and they must now work off a different strategy as well.

This back and forth game mechanic adds new weight to the quickly concocted plans, trash talk, and demands for immediate assistance that creates the bond of camaraderie which makes co-op games so enjoyable amongst friends. In this way Army of Two succeeds; the addition of new rules enhances the co-op experience. The other half of the game; its polish and presentation is mixed bag. Personally I liked it and liked what it said, including the subtext. Others may fairly have a different opinion entirely.

Army of Two is undoubtedly the most American game I’ve played in a while. It assumes that heavily armed Yankees have a place and role in other people’s countries so even when they parachute in uninvited it’s for the greater good. There is much talk of terrorism of course, and arms dealers, and hostage taking, and all the other things that quicken the news media’s pulse. There is also much jocularity amongst the mercenaries while they work; head-slapping, high-fives and air guitar between bouts of destruction. Inappropriate? Perhaps. Fun after three or four beers? Absolutely. Army of Two may not be in good taste but it tastes good.

One place this game literally shines is the weapon upgrade system. With your hard earned wages you can buy and upgrade weapons to a delightful degree. New barrels and grips, extended clips, grenade launchers and more can trick out your gun including a ‘pimping’ of it’s appearance; to plate the whole thing in gold or silver and jazz it up with all manner of trim and filigree. More than making the weapon worthy of a rap video this appearance alteration affects the stats of the weapon. When you tote around a Stinger Missile System that’s been decked out to look like a pirate cannon you of course draw attention to yourself, and therefore Aggro. Mike and I spent much time in the shopping menu, too much time.

Army of Two looks pretty good overall, graphically it gets the job done. The same can be said for level design, story, dialogue, and music. These aspects of the game are passable and it’s the two-man manoeuvres plus the weapon customisation that make it worth trying out. If you and a buddy have the same console then this game is worth you going halves to get a copy. I hope the game does well enough to merit a sequel, I want to see the two-man stuff expand beyond basic training because I think the developers are on onto something.

I’m at least mid-way through a game called Dark Sector so I’ll write about that next. As for news I’m not finding much that’s interesting…

On the paper trail that lead to torture…

This is an in-depth Vanity Fair article on how and why torture became common practice at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I haven’t finished it, I’m finding the play by play record keeping of the tortured subjects to be quite off-putting.

Iraq Attack – Green Zone is the new End Zone

The Sadrists are still giving the Americans hell, shelling the fortified Green Zone, killing three soldiers and wounding a couple dozen over the weekend. Meanwhile in Basra the militias continue to control the port city, repelling Iraqi forces to the point where around 1,000 newly trained troops fled the field of battle, going AWOL rather than fighting their own kind. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki has been soundly trounced over this and any illusions that remained as to his effectiveness or strength have been shred away.

Presidential hopeful John McCain has been downplaying these outbreaks, stating that Iraq is returning to a state of normalcy. It seems the Republican talking point is to set the stage for America to remain in Iraq indefinitely no matter how much tension their presence creates. Plus, just to be different, they’re going to lie about it the whole way through.

Cause and effect rules all, don’t you think? Operation Iraqi Freedom has a much lower body count then the Viet Nam war for many reasons, not the least of which is the strategy of troops remaining in their fortified bases in order to avoid casualties. Doing that gave the streets to Iraqi gangsters however and guys like Moktada al Sadr was able to increase their influence by taking over governance of the neighbourhoods. Once that control was established his militiamen could then shell Americas’ biggest fortified compound for days and the troops have not yet been able to stop them. It just goes round and round.

There will be no troop reductions. Surprise – surprise!!!

That America needs every troop they can spare in Iraq is nothing newsworthy. This article goes a bit deeper though in outlining the direct and close relationship the President has with the four-star general in charge of Iraq. It circumvents the chain of command, which is strange in itself because that’s heresy in military organizations. It’s weird to read the quotes of a national leader who says things like "I said to the general: 'If you want to slow her down, fine; it's up to you.' " Sounds like the stage is set to pass the buck when the shit hits the fan, if you ask me.

Could I fit anymore clichés in a single sentence?

You may notice that the guy's eye is white as porcelain... So that's not the Bloodshot they're talking about...

2008-03-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

I finished Condemned 2: Bloodshot over the weekend. It was late at night and I was alone in the dark. Of course I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Not only was Condemned 2 a damn good game but it was the perfect way to cap off this terribly long, bleak, and depressing winter. If I could complete this title with my sanity intact then I had hope I could get through March without descending into a Jack Nicholson-like episode straight out of The Shining.

Developed by fear aficionados Monolith and published by ye olde tyme Sega of America for both the PS3 and the X-Box 360, Bloodshot seems poised to up the ante on a modest original title that became a sleeper hit. I own and loved the first Condemned: Criminal Origins and have loaned it out twice to friends so that they may attempt to enjoy it. One returned it days later saying there was “no fucking way” they were going to complete it. My second victim wasn’t even able to manage speech in this regard; he just handed it back in, shook his head and literally sputtered something unintelligible.

The mood and atmosphere of Condemned is simple to explain if you’re not familiar with the series. Condemned is a video game attempt to capture the essence of films such as Silence of the Lambs or Seven. You play a detective in a Serial Crimes Unit and you are hunting mass murderers. You serve and protect in a fictitious city that has succumbed to all manor of urban blight and social decay. The crime scenes are all abandoned, derelict, and well… condemned. Within these ghettos and urban ruins psychosis, violence, and death have taken over. While solving crimes you go mad and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Parents you’ve been warned: Condemned is a relentless and unrepentantly violent hobo killing simulator. The weapons of choice are whatever you can find within the crumbling environments; boards with nails through them, plumbing pipes, axes, hammers, toilet seats, prosthetic arms, gumball machines - if it’s not already clear by now this is one grisly product. It is however gripping, anxiety-filled stuff.

Mixed in with the disturbing bum fights are crime scenes that your character must investigate with special tools a la C.S.I. As gruesome as the head bashing is, the collecting of evidence and solving of crimes is thoughtful, interesting, and a great break from the horrifying action. Of course the crime scenes are the leavings of serial killers and so if you’re put off by close-up photography of a severed head or passing a UV light over a maimed corpse then you will find this aspect of the game just as disturbing as the rest.

So if you didn’t know already this is what these games throw at you and they do a really good job of it too. The first Condemned was rather basic in its controls; we’re talking two buttons that you have to push at the right times for the most part. The difficulty lay not in mastering the controls but in mastering your fear and Condemned can play your emotions like a fiddle. In order to appeal to the experienced gamer the second Condemned title added some more variety and options to the player. The main character, presumably a rookie leg-breaker in the first game is now a force to be reckoned with in the back alley death-match circuit. You don’t just beat a hobo until he stops moving, oh no, that’s for rank amateurs! Now you dispatch them in style by ramming their heads into urinals or television screens. In this way the game becomes more of a martial art or arcade styled game but I don’t think it suffers any because of it. When a game moves from a niche into the mainstream it needs to expand on its premise and Condemned is doing a fair job in that regard.

The crime scene investigation aspects of the game were also expanded and in this they did a masterful job. Once you arrive at a scene your office will ask you a number of questions revolving around the particulars of the incident and you must treat it as a puzzle, unravelling what truly happened to create such a mess of blood and entrails. The game rates you and unlocks better police equipment that you can use throughout the game. The combination of swinging heavy implements and deductive reasoning gives this title some nice variety. It does a good job keeping you off balance and guessing at what comes next.

I liked the cultish conspiracy story that Condemned 2 told and I thought that some of the environments or levels were among the best I’ve ever played. The game had some minor bugs and glitches, things quality assurance and play testing should have caught, but certainly not enough to detract much from the overall effectiveness of the game. As well I hear the on-line extras they added are a waste of time but I don’t play these kinds of games to be communal at all; horror is an intensely singular experience.

So if you like the survival horror genre then I highly recommend this one, it is right now the scariest and goriest franchise out there. Other horror classics like Silent Hill and even Resident Evil couldn’t hold a candle to the scariness of the first and this new one just blows the old competition out of the water.

Here are a few other things I found floating around the Internet lately…

Barack Obama’s speech on the State of Racism in America

I’m putting this up here for posterity. I hope you’ve heard the story of Obama’s pastor preaching some inflammatory remarks and rather than simply disowning the reverend the presidential candidate explained how things came to be this way. We haven’t heard anyone speak like this since Trudeau, Kennedy, or Dr. King and that’s why it’s worth pointing out. His thoughts and experience on race is most honest and insightful. A lesser candidate would have simply thrown their old family friend under the bus but Obama sought to elevate the dialogue instead. This is well worth the read.

Frontline Double Documentary: Bush’s War

All told this is something like four hours of quality viewing. If you’re fine with watching the program in ten minute segments on a small screen then it’s all at the link ready to go. Otherwise try to find the full version on-line. P.B.S. has been creating great documentaries on the Bush Administration and its running of Operation Iraqi Freedom for years now and this one is the whole succinct package. The first two hours are amalgamations of numerous documentaries they’ve made on individual topics or people. The last half contains quite a bit of new material. So far it seems that this is the definitive version of events; of the run-up to war, its initial execution, and a play by play of what all went so terribly wrong. Again well worth one’s time.

A Manned Mission to Mars may have to be a one way trip…

I found this thought provoking and in line with topics I have touched upon in the past. This essay goes over how vastly more feasible it would be to engineer one-way trips to Mars. It’s the getting astronauts back which make the voyage prohibitive and so in the name of human exploration volunteers would be asked if they would be the first to colonize the far away planet. These people would probably not come back and would probably not even survive to their full span of human years. It is a hell of a thing to ask anyone.

The article rightly points out that this wouldn’t be the first time this kind of high risk exploration has been undertaken. There were no guarantees even when crossing weeks of ocean to hopefully reach one of the newly discovered continents and who knew what lay in store for the pioneers. The reality of space travel is so much more daunting than anything we’ve done before and this is what may be necessary to even start. It beggars the question of course: Would you go if asked?

I don’t believe in god but when looking at our solar system I always am always forced to re-evaluate my stance. It’s like the planets are a treasure trail laid out right where we need them. Each one has something we desperately need; water, metals, various combustible gases. If we made it to one it could re-supply us in order to get to the next. If we’re going to get them - and let’s be clear, we NEED them - the sacrifice is going to have to be monumental.

Don't mind my husband, the shriners are taking him to the zoo... The cage over his face prevents his tongue from touching anything...

2008-03-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Gentle reader I give you Big Dog! Not me actually, it's Boston Dynamic that's developing it for the Pentagon. Had I constructed this robot the rather dull sounding name would have of course been upgraded to Panzer Stomper IV or perhaps I just would have gone with Neo-Proto-Deathbot because let’s face it; the doom of our species probably lay somewhere within that hollow metal frame.

We can’t program evil yet but its coming. If we can make cheese evil with the advent of Kraft Velveeta (tm) then anything is possible! Computer and robotic circuitry is inherently malignant by virtue of geometry, much like the hives of insects.

Big Dog currently walks, can ascend angles, and carry considerable loads for our convenience. Thanks to Mike J. for this Youtube demonstration.

What walks down stairs and feeds off your tears and is the sound of despair…

Let’s get real for a minute. Putting a rucksack on Big Dog is a form of clever propaganda. Take it from me; I’m on the Internet and therefore know all about these things. You see, the army will always require a soldier to carry his own gear; it builds character and hatred. An infantryman who doesn’t carry his own pack is called a sailor in most Christian nations. They have Big Dog acting in a subservient role so that the beast appeals to our sense of laziness and entitlement. We want one so that it will carry our crap. On the other hand it doesn’t have a head meaning it will never know joy or happiness. It will therefore kill us without remorse because we have cursed it with a hellish existence.

We’re going to see what Big Dog is really capable of once it starts terrorizing Will Smith through his suburban home a la Velociraptor in his next summer blockbuster. After that we’ll hear of them being dropped out of the sky into some defiant, oil-rich, fundamentalist fiefdom. Then they’ll be prowling our very own streets after Leaf games and we’re going to have to look into their soulless television screen faces for retinal scans in order to prove our identity. Man’s best friend indeed!

Meanwhile in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh, a baby girl born with two faces is being worshipped as a reincarnated god. Reincarnated into what? We humans, we’re just all over the place, eh? If we’re not deciding to sit on a toilet for two solid years so that our skin becomes stuck to the seat then we’re preparing to sell the most expensive champagne in the world at $6,485.00 US a bottle. It’s been a heck of a couple weeks for news! In case you just got back from a far-away place the human race is still just spinning its wheels for its own amusement.

Violence in Tibet - Protesters clash with Chinese police in Lhasa.

This might wind up big or it will just go the way of other Chinese-squashed uprisings. The dead are nearing one hundred in Tibet and violent demonstrations are popping up in India, Barcelona, and other sympathetic nations. The poor Dalai Lama has really been bent over a barrel on this one, when I’m 72 I hope my life is going easier than his. One day he’s slamming the Chinese over waging cultural genocide. The next he’s threatening to resign as head of Tibet’s government-in-exile if his people don’t simmer down. Of course he's not there - couldn't be in Tibet if he wanted to. Asking people getting hit with batons and teargas to show restraint is like me admonishing British football hooligans, telling them "relax man, it's just a game."

Don’t expect the Chinese people to pursue peace on this; they support the hard stance.

We’re seriously living in a time of moral disconnect but this isn’t surprising because when hundreds of millions of people believe the same thing it has the power to alter our reality. By rights China has earned the reputation worthy of Myanmar, North Korea, and Iran for its human rights abuses, both pre-emptive and reactionary. They’re fast becoming rich however so not only does the world at large turn a blind eye but they get the Olympics. I expect these kinds of incidences to increase through the spring and summer up to the games. It’s going to be real interesting to see how that turns out.

Admiral William ‘Fox’ Fallon: ‘Retired’ between now and the publication of this article.

This is a great article from Esquire Magazine that features Admiral Fallon; a lifetime military man who headed Pacific Command and Central Command, which includes the Middle East region of the earth. I defy you to read this article and not wind up somewhat in awe of the man. In his youth he was a fighter pilot landing on aircraft carriers. Towards the end of his career he was brokering peace and communication through economic expansion in some of the most benighted places on earth. Admiral Fallon was the one man standing up to the Bush Administration and their thirst for war with Iran. Perhaps this article was the final straw of pressure that either forced him out or caused him to throw it in. Either way it writes up as a grievous loss in my opinion.

The arrogance of Bush and his cronies never ceases to amaze. Consider if you had a man of Fallon’s ability and experience who was duty-bound to serve and council you, would you not take a man such as this in the most serious of stead? If a guy like Admiral Fallon had a different opinion than you in the matters of war and foreign policy would you not at least second guess your own outcomes and motives? Even if you didn’t agree with him on everything, would you make life so untenable that the good Admiral would leave? It is fucking crazy how drunk on their own ignorance these neo-cons are, scary too.

Keith Olbermann points the Integrity Cannon away from President Bush for a change.

If you like reading/watching Keith’s Special Comments from his Countdown news program then this is a good one. It started with Clinton financial fundraiser Geraldine Ferraro saying that Barack Obama wouldn’t be where he is today if he wasn’t black. Nice. Clinton called the remarks regrettable but didn’t denounce or fire the woman for her racist remarks. (She left on her own volition after the public at large labelled her a dried-out old bigot.) This kind of skulduggery paves the way for Keith to hit the Hil-Dog (not a bad robot name) with a double barrelled blast of righteous outrage and sound reasoning. It’s all worth your time.

The next slum might very well be those god-awful, cookie-cutter suburbs…

I found this article very interesting. It goes over the trend of populations moving back into the cities after fleeing from the core in the 60’s and 70’s. With the suburbs starting to empty out of working class people you can naturally expect the gangs and drug trade to move in. We already know that marijuana and artificial narcotics owe their life to those sprawling anonymous neighbourhoods, soon prostitution and other illicit forms of finance might make the move as well. More than ever our city developers need to plan properly; to make sustainable, mixed-use communities that won’t fall out of fashion in a few decades time.

New war deserters find support from old war deserters…

Anytime Toronto makes it into one of the big American papers I’m compelled to put it up here. This article goes over the draft-dodging sub-culture that began back in the Viet Nam era and is getting a small revival from those who challenge the Iraq War. What a shame that this depressing predicament has become a cyclical thing!

I sh00tz t3h magik bult wit my BRAINZORZ!!!1

By using existing medical technology (EEC, ECG, etc.) this company can make retarded looking headgear that allows you to play video games with various impulses. You know, what passes for your mind. While cool in theory that’s all this toy will be unless the big game makers get behind the technology, which historically has been a tricky thing when it comes to emergent gadgetry. Getting a crummy Harry Potter game on board is one thing, Call of Duty 4 is another matter entirely. I don’t know dudes. On one hand it’s more like Virtual Reality which is really keen. On the other hand how I am going to slip that thing on in the living room and have my wife retain what little attraction she still has for me? I'm going to look like I'm waiting for my day trip on the short bus.

Then again if I touch Hermione Granger with only my brain am I breaking any laws? Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Cure Light Wounds spells will feel a little colder after this day...

2008-03-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

I remember being twelve years old when a couple of older kids invited me to play Dungeons and Dragons one afternoon. I created an ineffectual elf that was both overwhelmed and awed by the other, more experienced and more powerful player. This fighter, fresh from the mind of a smug fourteen year old, rode into the dungeon on a war horse and was equipped with weapons and armour that far outstripped mine. I was assaulted, taunted, robbed and left unconscious in a room with only 1 Hit Point - a mercy bequeathed upon me presumably so that I might be used as fodder again on the next rainy day.

That was enough however, I was hooked for life.

I borrowed the two flimsy soft cover books that comprised the game at that time and over the course of a week I transcribed all the rules and tables into a series of blank notebooks. I knew that I would never get the money to buy these tomes from my parents, who as expected did not understand or condone the past-time for the duration of my teenage years. I then went on to make my first dungeon; an ogre-infested subterranean fortification that housed The Father Diamond, a jewel of obvious great wealth. The next time the three of us got together for a game I offered to run it, to play Dungeon Master.

Throughout my school years I played this most unpopular of games and from it stemmed parallel interests in reading, writing, ancient history, archaeology, mythology, religion and eventually politics. The game was a gateway to other avenues of study and in learning about real world events and culture one’s game and characters became more authentic and believable.

Since then I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons or other types of role-playing games right up to this very day. The game I’m currently running has been the longest and most involving story I’ve ever done with a great group of players. The game changes dramatically when being played by adults. When young the game is merely another form of competition but as you get older it mellows into a cooperative experience. Despite HD television and photo-realistic video games Dungeons & Dragons remains an excellent way to spend some time with friends. It provides a unique communal experience; an exercise of the brain, an expansion of the imagination, and the simple comfort of a kitchen table or fireside gathering. For all the good times had on Thursday nights lo’ these past years, we owe one man in particular a debt of gratitude.

E. Gary Gygax; The Original Dungeon Master, dies at 69.

The talented artists of the Penny Arcade comic strip drew up a fitting tribute to mark the passing of The Great Gygax. Do hit the hypertext and read Tycho’s impression of the game and its infernal codexes. It is a far grander thing then anything I could hope to write!

To celebrate the life of this most unique and nerdilicious of men all Wizards of 17th level or higher are invited to my house where we shall break our Staves of Power in unison. The simultaneous Retributive Strike will be seen for miles around and is sure to be perceptible in both the Astral and Ethereal Planes! In truth however I believe Gary’s death to be a ruse, a hoax to prevent the zero levellers from disbelieveing. No doubt the very creator of the Tomb of Horrors has long had his phylactery prepared and will rise as a Lich upon the next full moon. His reign of terror on low level players will continue throughout time, as it should. New “4th Edition” rulebooks will be out in June and of course I will not be able to resist buying them. When I eventually make a new game with the upcoming rules you can be sure that ‘Gygax’ will make an appearance as some godly game-smith, a trickster deity of the bizarrely beautiful.

To those who have never played D&D I was trying to be funny in the above paragraph, please disregard.

X-Boxes turning a profit for the first time ever…

In other gaming news it seems that the X-Box has become profitable for the first time in seven years. The original X-box cost the company over four billion dollars but they knew a price would have to be paid in order to shoulder their way into the market. While they have stopped losing money per unit this doesn’t take into account the 1.5 billion dollar extended warranty program they had to enact in order to prevent a recall on their chronically overheating machines. Time will tell if the X-Box 360 will actually turn out to be profitable in the end. This years gaming line-up seems not as strong as 2007 and with Blu-Ray being the dominant technology the 360 will no longer be on the leading edge. Some video game enthusiast sites are already predicting that we will see yet another Microsoft games console before the decade is up. I could live with that.

What this article doesn’t comment on is that smashing psychotic hobos with lead pipes and sledgehammers is a ton of fun. I’m replaying Condemned: Criminal Origins on my X-Box in hot anticipation of the sequel coming out next week. I was worried that the second chapter would not be as good as the original sleeper hit until I recently downloaded the game trailer. It shows a pig-faced man getting bludgeoned with a prosthetic arm that ends in a hook! Oh joy, high art indeed! This corrupter of society is coming to both the PS3 and the 360 so stay tuned!

The Douchebag and the Prince

Here’s some news that’s only slightly more fitting for a supposedly grown man to chew over. Prince Harry, third in line to the throne of England - Long Be His Reign - has set his sights on a military career and wanted as little special treatment as possible in this regard, including being posted with his unit in sunny Afghanistan. In a surprising turn of character the British press agreed to an embargo on the topic thus keeping Harry’s whereabouts a secret. A couple small European news outlets reported it but nobody managed to notice, not until conservative Internet giant douchebag Matt Drudge let his 20 some-odd million readers in on the operation. Hours later the British government announced that Harry would be returning immediately, his safety no longer assured.

Okay, first of all, Matt Drudge, in case you haven’t already sussed out my opinion of you, you are in fact a giant fucking douchebag. Actually you know what? Douchebag isn’t a sufficient descriptor because ‘bag’ denotes a limited or set amount of material within, and your douchbaggery is more like a constant stream, so I’ll amend my characterisation of your personality and from this point on refer to you as a fucking douchenozzle.

What kind of a douchenozzle messes with a young guy’s career and endangers his life just to get some hits on their already popular website? As a news item this piece is worthless. We the reader simply go: “Oh really,” before moving on with a click of the mouse. It doesn’t educate us in any way. In order to give us less than a second of amusement you ruin a kid’s deployment. Fuck you and your bullshit “Support Our Troops” flag-waving.

The only people who really care that Harry is in Afghanistan are his family and assholes who think killing the prince would score points for their side, so nice going, you intelligence gathering service for terrorists! As I see it the only good to come out of this is that now the empire of Great Britain hates your douche-pumping guts. You can’t go there anymore which is too bad, because the mushy peas are bloody excellent. I dearly hope that young Prince Harry uses the power and influence of the monarchy to exact some righteous vengeance on your pillow-biting ass.

Since this story has been reported you have no comment to make which I see as typical, you cowardly, douchenozzley worm.

Victor of Iraqi Freedom Arrives to Fanfare and Applause

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad visited Iraq in full state panoply, publicly announcing his trip and travelling outside the fortified Green Zone. President Bush, eat your heart out! While there Mahmoud got kissy-face with the leaders of the hour - as is the fashion - and reminded Americans that they are not liked.

Iran and Iraq do about eight billion a year in trade and as time goes by this is sure to increase what with war-torn Iraq needing, well everything. As it does so too will Iranian influence, importing cultures and values through mercantilism is as old as time. Strip searching and home invasions, not so much. Poor, poor America! There’s a number that’s making the rounds this week, it’s a big number, a number that describes Operation Iraqi Freedom’s price tag: THREE TRILLION DOLLARS. But who needs affordable health care, right?

Did Chavez get caught with his hands in the terrorist cookie jar?

A Columbian operation to kill a Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia leader holed up in Equator got Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez hopping mad! Chavez has vocally supported the leftist F.A.R.C. in the past but oh-ho what do we have here? Evidence on the rebel leader’s laptop indicates that Chavez supported them to the tune of 300 million dollars. Sloppy Hugo, very sloppy. Most regional powers fund rebel organisations whose ideology line up with their own but no one wants to be caught doing it. Destabilization and attrition policies are a dirty part of power government. This and the bellicosity Chavez is displaying, not to mention the tank positions on the border, comes off like an admission of guilt. Let’s hope Hugo’s bruised ego doesn’t plunge Venezuela into a war, they would be fighting American proxies and playing into their hands. I liked the old Chavez better. The Chavez that emerged after his failed referendum is a bit too much of a blowhard. I want less Soviet jet dick-waving, more red-hot and spicy Chavizmo!

Mini-Put Sweeps Russian Elections!

Who knew? Putin’s appointed protégé pwned the Presidential elections and he did it without a fourteen month primary! Putin himself will claim the Prime Minister’s seat and continue ruling Russia in all but name. That these two would come into conflict, be it foreign or domestic policy is highly unlikely.

So what’s better or worse in the long run? I can’t tell anymore. I made a point not to follow the American Primaries anymore than reading front page headlines because I knew that fatigue would set in. This shit seems endless at this point, it's nothing but non-scandal after non-scandal. Obama and Clinton are still fighting, meanwhile John McCain can now start actually campaigning for the Presidency instead of campaigning for the chance to campaign for the Presidency. That one sentence sums up the past few months in American politics and it STILL made me weary to type it. Does all this mean the people of America will have a better government? Remember this is the same mechanism that picked You Know Who! What if the Democratic nomination is ultimately decided by the super-delegates? What of democracy then? Our U.S. brother and sisters will merely be voting for the person that was picked for them to vote for. I mean who fucking cares at that point?

Russia took care of their freedoms in their typical cold-blooded way but now everyone is on the same page, lock-stepping in unity and they can continue with the business of returning to the Superpower Superfriends Club. Meanwhile the U.S. dithers, drunk on their own pageantry. I wish I could act all smug and superior (as we Canadians love to do) but our issues are just as bad only the opposite.

Our government has election-aversion, at least that pussy Dion does. Who cares if you're unelectable, show us some bloody principles and stand up for what you believe! That's the Catch 22 of this: Dion is unelectable because he lacks all fibre of leadership. In order to look like a leader you have to stand up in opposition and show that you're not afraid to call an election you might not win. That's takes balls, leadership balls, and people will see it. But if you don't take that first step and instead let Harper intimidate you then the cycle continues and you become more and more unelectable. The first step in not being a loser is not being afraid to lose. Meh! Feh! Sneh! What more could you expect from the guy who initially placed third at the Liberal caucus.

What title could I give a blog post as worthless as this? I thought about it for five minutes and came up with nothing...

2008-02-29T06:57:00.000-08:00

Hello to whoever’s out there, I’m back. It’s been about a month since the last entry and yes, that’s way too long for a guy who said he wanted to start a blog. Can I give you a reason? Nothing substantial or worthwhile to report I’m afraid. I took a vacation, I’m doing some other writing, its winter time, Britney Spears; Bullshit excuses one and all, I mean why would you waste your time, right?

On the game front I went through Mass Effect, taking around fifty hours to do so which means I saw a good portion of the game but not everything. As I said before the pacing can get slow but overall this is a worthwhile waste of time. The story and combat outweigh the performance issues and repetition. The game is good throughout and bloody brilliant at the end. It’s truly a great sci-fi epic that promises more in the future. I played as a really nice guy and when the new downloadable content hits the streets later this year I’ll have another go playing as a cruel bitch. The game is coming to PC this year and there it will shine the brightest as the technical issues and load times will be vastly reduced. Do yourself the favour if you are so inclined.

I also finished Devil May Cry 4, a game I was long waiting for, and unfortunately I have mixed feelings. On the good side it looks excellent and plays like a dream. This action fighter is highly polished and all the new mechanics are a great addition to the franchise. On the bad side they really got real cheap on actual content. You visit most of the game’s environments twice; once going forward and then in reverse. You fight the same boss monsters two and even three times. The amount of recycling going on was absolutely galling.

I have a theory for why they resort to this vile practice. The title was multiplatform; it came out on both the PS3 and the X-Box 360. In order for this highly demanding game to fit on a standard DVD disk and therefore work on the 360 they had to re-use levels and bosses. We might see more of this as time goes by what with the data storage differences between Blu-Ray and DVD. The unfortunate part about the recycling is that after going through it once there is no desire to play it again; I’ve seen the levels twice and some of the bosses three times! This is probably the best rental game out there today though, do so or if you know me borrow mine. I’m bound to take this one back for store credit.

Rock Band is still demanding most of our time when my gamer wife Mike and I hang out on Tuesdays. I play Anna Stesia; lead guitarist for Itchy Clitchy, our acid-punk-new-jack-rock band. I don’t enjoy rhythm games enough for them to take up floor space in my living room but I have to admit that Rock Band is a very well made and highly polished game. It’s a pleasure to interact with and navigate through. Mike has been downloading songs-a-plenty off the Playstation Network so now his library is quite daunting. You can play for hours without hearing a repeat. This new genre of game is going to be huge, you can see it. Not only will casual gamers flock to this stuff but these games have the added benefit of helping you really appreciate music of all genres. When you have to learn a song you discover what’s great about it, why it has the fans it does. Interactivity is GOOD for the art of music. I see Rock Band as pretty well the ultimate family game out right now.

I’m going to give my hot wife some props here. She finished Halo 3 and is starting to shoot the shit out of stuff in Unreal Tournament 3. Eat your heart out! This little woman started gaming with photography simulators and cute cartoon character cat burglars. Now every time I say “FLACK MASTER” or “ROCKET SCIENTIST” she makes this metal-as-fuck face and proceeds to rock out with her cock out. Corruption is mine sayeth the Dyno.

In the name of posterity and filling up the internet with superfluous information I’m going to list the release dates of all the games I’m interested for the first half of the year. Looking at the list I see my tastes have really streamlined. I used to play a wider variety of games but these days if fun and frolic does not entail shooting someone’s virtual son or daughter in the face then I’m not interested. If I get to bash them in with a sword or axe then I guess that will do on occasion - and in that way I’m something of a homicidal renaissance man - but really the running and the gunning is where I’m at.

ARMY OF TWO March 6th

CONDEMNED 2 - BLOODSHOT March 14th

DARK SECTOR March 29th

GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 April 29th

HAZE May ???

TOO HUMAN May ???

METAL GEAR SOLID 4 – GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS June 12

BATTLEFIELD – BAD COMPANY June ???

That’s uhh… That’s a lot of games. This list is sure to get pruned once reviews and impressions start rolling in. To that end I’m waiting patiently for F.E.A.R. FILES, JERICHO, TUROK, FRONTLINES: FUEL OF WAR and BLACK SITE: AREA 51 to hit the cheap aisle as word on the street says they’re worth checking out but not at full price. As you know I always listen to the streets, I am the streets!

I’ll try to touch on news stuff later on.

Yo Adrian!!! You gotta cut me, Adrian! Not there Adrian, that's my ass! God help me if I start bleeding out my ass...

2008-01-22T08:48:00.000-08:00

The Year of Our Lord 2007 was not a bad first round of boxing when spectating the video game console wars. The Apollo Creed-like X-Box 360 came out strong, landing solid jabs and hooks on the sluggish yet sturdy Balboa PS3. By middle year both were in a rather unexciting clench what with the lack of titles released but in the final minute of the round both pugilists started landing some serious blows on each other, letting us know that we were in for a decent fight.

I think in the second round that is 2008 we are going to see a far more even match-up. Microsoft's momentum may finally start to wane and from here on in the X-Box 360 might face an uphill battle.

The problems lie in keeping the 360 at technological parity with the PS3 over the next five years or so. In the past couple of years Microsoft has done a very effective marketing campaign convincing us that the 360 is just as powerful as the PS3 but costs less money. They did this so that the two machines would be in direct competition for hard-core console gamer business. Hard-core gamers will spend far more buying games than any other demographic and that is how these companies intend to recover their considerable development expenses. As of this writing neither console is operating in the black and despite cheery predictions both might not do so this year.

The 360 now has two fairly serious setbacks in this regard, limitations the PS3 does not possess. One of them is a lack of either built-in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Not only does this limit the total size of what a game can be but it also adversely affects the streaming of data from the disk while in game play. A 360 game will have to be smaller in size and that data will take a longer time to process. The second issue is the decision made by Microsoft to not allow game developers to load game data on the HDD; all the game must run directly from the disk. What this means right now is fairly long load times and minor issues with frame rates and other visual imperfections. Mass Effect perfectly illustrates the struggle the 360 has with ambitious looking, lengthy games.

I think these two issues are going to really make themselves increasingly apparent in the next couple years. It hasn't been a problem this past year because multi-platform developers are making games with moderate-spec PCs and the 360 in mind. Game tech advances however at an incredible rate so at the heart of the issue is whether or not the 360 is future-proofed or is it a machine with a game PC-like life expectancy?

There is something to consider in the video game industry right now; just because 'next gen' hardware has been made, it doesn't mean that software developers are going to capitalize on it smoothly or easily. The reason why so many PC developers have gone like gangbusters on the consoles is because they were the best trained to do so by making last-gen, high-end PC games. This is especially true with regards to the 360 and its very-PC-like architecture. It gave the 360 a killer launch year. The PS3 however is radically different and the companies that made games for the PS2 had little previous experience that was relevant. They are well on their way to learning however and what they are doing with the Cell processor is very encouraging. We've already seen some pull-away, titles suitable for the PS3 that the 360 can't play with all the features intact (Unreal Tournament 3, for example.) This year it looks like we will see even more.

The PS3 took a real ass-kicking for sticking to their guns and making such a high-end device with options and capabilities no one knew what to do with. In the long run however it looks like they made the right choice. They took their time, they didn't succumb to short-term solutions, and now they have a machine that third party developers (like Crytek, developers of the super-advanced Crysis) are very interested in because they find the unit has much room for growth.

The X-Box 360 offered a stripped down console at lower prices and advertised their lean product as giving customers the power of choice. Hard drives and high-def players were an option the buyer could consider rather than being forced upon by the company. Choice is all well and good but these options have a direct and deep impact on how advanced the games themselves are going to be for that system. In order to include all your customers the lowest common denominator must apply. 360 games therefore have to run without using the HDD and on standard DVD. None of those two issues are going to be the industry standard much longer.

In a couple years time Microsoft may very well find it having to reverse some key decisions in order to justify hard-core gamer loyalty. They may find their product being described as a middle-tier unit; the step between the Wii and the PS3. That might not be a bad place in the long run (the Wii seems to revel and thrive in it) but their yearly financial expectations will have to be seriously lowered from that point on. Halo 3 broke all kinds of records but it wasn't a game built for a mid or low end system - no blockbuster is. You want the big bucks, you have to play in the big game.

If I'm still writing this blog a year from now we get to see how wrong I was and you get to read how I'll explain all of this ass-wind away. Stay tuned!

Two all-cloned patties, special clone, cheese clone, cloney-clone-clone-clone-clone...

The cloned meat for us to eat; it's all good baby! You don't have to worry your pretty little head because the F.D.A. released a final risk assessment that's over nine-hundred pages long, giving replicant livestock the two-thumbs up. I want to make a comparison here. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about a fantastic world of elves and dwarves and dragons - you may have heard of it. Now if Tolkien made a quicky brochure outlining Middle Earth we readers may have not have felt the magic, but Tolkien wrote around nine-hundred pages and what that did is give us a dense and complete enough picture so that we may suspend our disbelief and enter this world while we read his fiction.

And that's what this fucking shit is too! It's the same thing except instead of the Dark Lord Sauron we get diseases mankind hasn't even thought up names for yet. It takes the F.D.A. around nine-hundred pages to convince Americans what we all know in our hearts to be wrong: Cloning animals for food is going to get us into serious trouble. This technological advancement is going to result in ass-blood, as in blood pouring out of your ass, non-stop. I have NO PROOF to support my notion but be honest, you believe me more than the F.D.A., right? I am armed with nothing but profanity and alarming imagery but I know that in this particular case you hold my predictions in higher esteem then F.D.A. doctors and scientists. That's because we humans have evolved with a moral core that steers us away from wrong-doing if we choose to listen. You won't touch cloney burgers because you know that lunch comes with 32 oz. cup of ass-blood on the side. Search your feelings, you know this to be true! We all do.

It's total war between the Mexican government and the drug cartels.

This is an interesting slice of news. The drug situation at the U.S. border has become so intense that they are really cracking down on the cartels now. I guess they should seeing as the gangsters are packing rocket-propelled grenades. It's amazing how wrong-headed our drug policies are. Prohibition has resulted in producing criminals with the money and connections to sport military-grade hardware. This isn't taking control of the situation, in fact this situation is a result of total lack of control. We need to legislate and tax these products, that's how you get them back under government control again.

I've always found it interesting that so many narcotics grow wild in third-world countries and that it's the developed nations (those with money and therefore most likely to enjoy the luxury) that ban them outright. I guess in the end we don't want to give these developing nations a product that might make them legitimately wealthy. We keep them in their lowly place and if they bring the bounty nature offers them to market they are branded as criminal regimes. Convenient that.

In todays hip-hop the expression 'Drop The Needle' has a whole new meaning!

Is this even news? I guess I find it strangely satisfying, like potentially finding the answer to a question I never asked. "How do those rappers wind up so buff?" It could be the hiring of personal trainers and chefs, maybe there is lots of time to pump iron while on tour, but in our quick-fix more-is-more society shooting up growth hormone is as good an answer as any. The allegations are there but I guess we'll have to see if this story goes anywhere.

What if you could live in a world where Darth Vader was YOUR father... So awesome...

2008-01-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

If your consciousness could enter limitless realms of virtual reality that were immersive in every way would you be willing to give up your physical form for long periods of time and perhaps even indefinitely? This idea might chill some. I think that not only is our technology moving towards making this possible but our society is developing to accept this fate on a subconscious level. Ascending into a spirit world is a global mythological theme from the dawn of history but I wonder if might wind up being a self-fulfilled prophecy.

You see something with your eyes, it gets logged as a memory, and in the doing certain parts of your brain are activated. When you remember the thing you have seen, when you elect to see it again within your mind, the same parts of your brain spark to life. Scientists have performed experiments and have seen this occur. The brain doesn’t care about the temporal aspect of the viewing; visualization is as good as a stored memory for eliciting an emotion. This may be salient in re-prioritizing the value we place on real life and a simulated version. If our brains are fine with either and our consciousness resides within, who are we to get picky?

Matter, or at least our concept of it, is for all intents and purposes an illusion. It’s solidity and stability; its permanence can be questioned. Atoms in part or wholesale wink in and out of our existence and this has given rise to quantum physics and the theories of alternate universes, that atoms may spend times in places other than our own reality. If other universes are apart of nature then there should be no stigma in us attempting to create our own, we ape nature continuously and to the benefit of all.

Human corporeal existence is a wearying exercise in compromise. I cannot spend an hour on a beach in Tahiti after work because of natural laws such as space and time as well as man-made hindrances such as finances and responsibility. What we call life is in fact a prison planet of boundaries and limitations that we have accepted utterly. The great promise of virtual reality is that we may escape these chains. Glorious, gorgeous Tahiti might be constructed down to the last grain of sand and we might get there after work in the same way we send an email. A simulated existence has the dual benefit of not only being exactly the same as the real world but also being something far more fantastical. Rather than beaming to Tahiti we might wish to fly there instead so that we may admire the ocean view and cloud formations along the way. A life lived in virtual reality is one that might see more, do more, experience more, and therefore live more.

A human in motion through our world consumes in great quantities and expels waste in equal fashion. We burn our surroundings steadily, much less of course when we sleep or are inanimate. Our requirements for public and private space become much reduced when our consciousness is shunted to another realm. A civilization that spends significant time within a virtual reality will use resources more efficiently and thus become more sustainable and long-lasting than what we are currently. Our society might start small in this regard and still reap significant benefit. Many of us work on computers in an office. If the office was in a virtual building you could still attend meetings, have access to the Internet, and have discussions with co-workers but you would not burn gas, use paper, or even spend a premium on fast food lunches.

Modern society has shifted its focus dramatically in the past couple decades. The infrastructure of our cities is mostly built, we don’t seek to expand as we use to, rather now we concentrate and vertically integrate. In our increasingly dense communities our focus shifts to entertainment, to diversion, and to solitary study. With the necessities of life not requiring all of our day’s attention we give ourselves more and more time to indulge our wishes and whims. This trend increases with every generation and it seems to me the modern way of living prepares us for a smooth transition to a virtual existence.

Like every human on the planet I dearly hope that our species might live on for the rest of time but it won’t unless we do some truly miraculous things. Living on a planet with minimal environmental impact is just the tip of the iceberg. One day our sun will alter in intensity and even the smallest change might make this world inhospitable. It will eventually burn out and essentially destroy the solar system itself. Long before such inevitability we might be victim to some catastrophic event such as a massive asteroid. At one point or another we will need to leave this place if the human race is to have a billions long year history. We may never achieve faster than light travel and so we’ll have to get to other stars the old fashioned way; taking hundreds and even thousands of years. Virtual reality becomes an absolute necessity at this point. We must lay dormant whole civilizations, revive them only when absolutely necessary, and in those long stretches in-between give them a life to live.

Video games are the tip of the virtual reality spear. Humans in vast numbers enjoy looking at a simulated reality of one kind or another to the point where it is now an industry exchanging billions of dollars yearly. As I type this I am doing so on a virtual piece of paper and you are reading it in similar fashion. Watching television, whether it’s a movie taking place in Japan or a hockey game is another virtual reality stepping stone. The Internet and its explosive usage is a self-evident testament to our desire for virtual libraries, shopping malls, and arenas of competition. Fake or representative versions of real things are useful and we all learn to appreciate them because of the convenience they bring. The more we use these fake things and take them for granted the more real they become. This doesn’t cheapen reality; it expands our definition of it. We are all training for the kind of future I’m describing whether we know it or not! Don’t worry, it’s a good thing. This is a serendipitous development of events. We need this. The first heaven we visit will be on-line and it will be of our own creation.

A good time to start thinking about buying a Playstation 3…

Warner opted to put their high-definition movies exclusively on Blu-Ray disc and now that most media publishers have weighed in Sony’s proprietary format has the clear advantage. Other companies like Universal, who at first stated they will produce only HD DVD product, have backtracked, stating that they too will provide Blu-Ray material. Industry experts are calling Sony the winner and that HD DVD will eventually go the way of Beta though in truth even the unsuccessful storage medium take a while to finally die. If you are going to buy a new high-definition disc player for movies however, take a tip and go Blu-Ray. No point in having to buy something else a few years from now.

Boat fly-bys are SO not as cool as plane fly-bys…

I wanted to touch on the DEF CON 4 episode of the month. Small Iranian Revolutionary Guard speed boats got nice and close to a few U.S. battleships travelling through international waters off the Straits of Hormuz. It was a very tense situation because military analysts have predicted that if Iran was going to take down the big battleships they would do so with explosive laden small boats that could get in quickly and avoid being targeted by the big guns. It is said the Iranians issued threats over the radio but this has since been questioned.

I watched the video footage and there is no question that it was pure and blatant provocation. I think those U.S. boats should be commended for their restraint and nerve because any captain would be well within their rights to torch those boats in order to safeguard their crew mates. It was however a win-win for Iran's forces. They got to witness U.S. naval readiness firsthand and that is probably some A+ intelligence. If the U.S. did strike an Iranian boat they could play the victim and enjoy the negative U.S. press that would surely come. It was an asshole move but an effective strategy.

Everyone loves to read a great speech, right? RIGHT?!?

I’m trying not to follow the American leadership caucuses because this is journalism at its lowest, drama for drama’s sake and the tiring punditry over every teeny tiny thing that comes up. The news agencies have no filter, it’s like they have to fill all twenty-four hours of the day with this stuff and quite frankly, there is nowhere near enough real news material.

This link however is Barack Obama’s concession speech in New Hampshire, where he lost by a low margin to Hilary Clinton after beating her in Iowa. You can really see how he has studied the words of Martin Luther King and is evoking the style to great effect. This is damn fine piece of writing and oratory. I hope he wins!

Darth Vader gets a makeover!

My picture today is from this art exhibit. There are some very neat versions of the iconic, glossy black villain. In retrospect Vader should have had multiple helmets to convey his mood. One for when he was going to terrorize an Ewok village, one for when he was going to torture a princess, one to impress the Emperor, and maybe one for when he just felt like spending a night alone, by himself, some quality ‘me’ time. If that particular helmet had curlers that would fuck us all up. When a guy who can crush your throat with his mind sports a set of curlers men like me get scared as hell! There is just no beating a guy that tough and crazy. Darth Vader in curlers would make Han Solo curl up and cry. Darth Vader in curlers wearing a Wookie pimp coat may be my Halloween costume next year.

The Iowa Caucus is in full swing but I can't seem to care so you'll read about none of that here...

2008-01-03T09:04:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, gentle reader! I hope you enjoyed your holidays as I did mine. One high point was my daughter’s transformation into the Master Painter upon providing her with an easel and art supplies. It dominates our living room as it did on Christmas Day but I don’t have the heart to move it yet. You see, the Master Painter flourishes when working before an audience, someone who can listen to her running commentary. There are already about forty original works, should you drop by the home you may secure one before they enter the art world proper.

The turkey was another high point, it came out great. Gravy from scratch still vexes me. Who would have though that combining stock, drippings, and flour to make a divinely smooth concoction that makes love to your mashed potatoes would be difficult? I’ve received advice to this end and more than once been told about gravy making powders. Don’t get me wrong, in me you have a man who loves powder but in this case it seems wrong to throw down your culinary integrity in favour of DOW Chemical thickening agents whose inner working we are wholly ignorant to. Once I’ve perfected making good gravy from scratch then I can decide if it’s worth the effort. Until I get it right I’ll never know what I’m missing.

I just remembered something! I am not in fact a fifty year old woman and this isn’t her blog. I should therefore stop talking about cooking.

I received an I-Pod Nano which is cool because I’ve wanted one but it underscores how old I’m getting. You know you are getting old when you can’t easily incorporate modern technology into your life. The little black nano is sexy and the snug leather carrying case with its magnetic snaps only enhances the sexiness but now I must do things to make it functional. I must find music in MP3 format to download and then I must actually find the time to listen to the device itself. I drive to work, I work, and then I go home to raise children at various levels of intoxication. Ear buds to not lend themselves to this regiment.

New Years was especially lovely. Good friends had us over for a private pre-party social and stuffed us with finger foods. Thank you Joel and Emma! I briefly played the Wii again and it remains a gimmick. I know I'm alone on this and in truth I prefer it that way. I also belted out a few tunes on SingStar and was impressed with the high quality of microphone. Though my wife and I were home and cozy by nine we had a great night together talking in the New Year.

My thoughts remain fixed on Pakistan and their turbulent times. I feel especially bad for Bilawal Bhutto Zardari; the nineteen year old son of Benezir Bhutto. First of all this kid is going to develop something of a Harry Potter complex while attending university at Oxford. He’s going to have to deal with his mother’s death while walking the storied halls of that institution as kids whisper, point, and politely pump him for information.

Bhutto the Third ordained to eventually rule Pakistan

What’s worse however is that he has been appointed to replace his mother to rule the Pakistan People’s Party in time, which when one looks to the viciously pruned Bhutto family tree is something akin to a death sentence. Of course young Bilawal’s father Asif Ali Zardari will act as court vizier while Bilawal finishes school and a long-time member of the party will be the candidate in the upcoming election, but it looks that in the long run the line of succession will trump all.

The mindset of the Pakistani masses confounds me. Is not the concept of democracy and voting for leaders a response to dynasties and appointed rulers? The Bhutto’s have become a royal family and what’s most perplexing is that they have been elevated to this lofty post by the citizenry themselves! Do none of them think that leadership of their own country can come from within? What is the point of endorsing a nineteen year old who is years and even decades away from performing the task to which he has been assigned?

Bhutto’s Manner of Death Questioned

Thanks to Marc for this tidbit, it’s worth going over. For a little while a member of the Pakistani government claimed that Bhutto died as a result of her own clumsiness, that while she was ducking down to avoid being shot she hit her head in the car and died as a result of skull trauma. There was the predicable response of outrage and request for inquiry. The story has since receded back into the woodwork.

If you were a desperate fool and thought that such semantics might tarnish the title of martyr that Benazir Bhutto has earned then you might try the above weak ploy. It is however a tactic that cannot stand up to the facts of the case. Bhutto was attacked by a man wielding a gun and wearing a bomb. She died after his attack and the exact manner is utterly irrelevant. Had the assassin not attacked she would still be alive.

Some fool must have believed that this kind of hair-splitting would be a worthwhile gamble and in doing so they not only exposed their own flawed judgement but tipped the hand of President Musharraf as well. Anyone willing to capitalize or spin the death of another has to appreciate the fact they died at all. If Musharraf thought Bhutto’s death was a bad thing he would not try to fight the fact that she would be regarded as a martyr. As well, he is the President and a General. If he wanted Bhutto protected he could have, in fact no one in Pakistan could have done a better job. So while I can’t say he ordered the kill I’m prone to believe that he knew it was coming and did nothing to prevent it. There is no doubt in my mind that he knew this smear attempt was coming and did nothing to prevent it either.

Conflicting Stories on the Basra Pull-Out

Thanks to Mike for this article. A while back I posted a link regarding Basra and the British troops that pulled out in order to halt the violence directed against them. The end result was a more peaceful province. Now it appears that the original report may have been only so much good press for the peace of mind of the English back home. Iraqi officials are stating that Basra is as lawless and violent as ever and that the British pulled-out before the task was completed.

Into the Valley of Death

This article shows us what life is like serving in Afghanistan in one of the most contested stretches of land in the entire theatre. Here a small group of American soldiers are fired upon daily by the Taliban and of course it takes a heavy toll.

On-Line Gaming Gone Evil

Thanks to Jeffrey of Pundit for sending this excellent article out. It explores a Korean MMORPG called ZT Online. Most games use time as their currency: you play a lot and you get more powerful. One clever but corrupted businessman decided that if money is used instead of time players could get everything they can afford and he would get rich in the process. Not a bad concept for a certain kind of player; those with coin and a busy agenda but this being Asia it’s taken to the extreme. The story starts with a wise and benevolent girl who becomes Queen, tries to buck a system that compels people to fight, and winds up getting gang raped repeatedly in prison. Hey now, that's my kind of fairy tale!

Assassins make the dreams end... Death is merely incidental...

2007-12-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading the daily news for years now and like to think that I have a grasp on various world events. That said there are some occurrences where I simply do not have the experience or mindset to fully comprehend. Some stories take shape in your mind with the answers you know, with the knowledge you have discovered. Other events take form from the questions you create out of the confusion. You become versed in the facts at hand but the core of the issue; the true understanding is just not there.

No doubt you have heard that Benazir Bhutto has been killed.

Well, they finally got her. Benazir was shot at a political rally just twelve days from the election that was sure to make her Prime Minister for the third non-consecutive time. The assassin blew himself up afterwards, killing some twenty people.

Bhutto’s return from exile was a sensitive diplomatic gambit over a year in the making. She would endorse President Musharraf’s tenuous hold on power for a third term and he would drop the corruption charges that forced her out of her own country. Together they might have achieved a stability in Pakistan that neither of them could manage on their own. The White House gambled heavily on this union, it would justify the billions in military aid Pakistan has received over the past several years and keep a chief ally in the War on Terror solvent in the face of internal crisis. What a mess!

The Life and Times of the Former Pakistani Prime Minister

Islamic Fundamentalists like the Taliban have been steadily gaining ground in Pakistan and the Oxford educated Bhutto was presumably a threat to them. It is said that Musharraf has been fighting the extremists but the Pakistani military and their intelligence agency has always had close ties to the Islamists from as far back as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

So why did it happen? No scenario I can cook up makes complete sense to me. Musharraf was no fan of Benazir but without her the best he can hope for is to rule Pakistan as a tyrant, shuffling the nation in and out of martial law. She was far more popular than he and the assassination of Benazir is going to generate a tremendous amount of backlash against the Islamists. They can’t win an open fight against the military and that is what the public is going to howl for. The pro-democracy faction who supported Bhutto’s political party is in a very dangerous position, being the most likely to become incensed but the least likely to stand up for itself. Benazir was all the leadership the Pakistan Peoples Party had. I don’t see this death being good news for any of the three sides.

Al-Qaeda Claims Responsibility

It’s interesting to watch a country pull itself apart. I wonder how many Pakistanis truly believe that a more powerful nation will arise from this multi-sided conflict. History has many more examples of the opposite occurring; of countries who wind up fractured and in disarray through sustained violence and are forced to bargain from positions of increased weakness on the world stage until they are ripe to be exploited by their more stable neighbours. A wounded and weary nuclear-armed Pakistan is one of the potential nightmare scenarios that strategists have warned us about for years now. It’s not often that the death of one single person can tip the world so far out of balance.

We Like Our South Asian Leaders Dead

There are many articles out there today discussing the life and times of Benazir Bhutto from historical pieces to personal reminiscence. By all accounts she was a very intelligent and charismatic person. I like the above article best though, it’s written with a non-western perspective which goes back to the limits of understanding I face on topics such as this. This author takes for granted a concept that I might never come to naturally myself. It’s a very good read and the last remark I’ll leave on this.

It's remarkable that prayer and fear adopt such similar poses...

2007-12-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

As the year draws to an end I find myself thinking on the commitments I’ve made in my life. Can I maintain the ties that currently bind and do I have the strength to make more? We all desire things we do not have or think we might enjoy a different set of circumstances but without commitment they will never come to pass. I wanted to improve my writing and so I created this journal but even this simple pleasure demands more time than I have to give most weeks. The family I started with my beautiful wife appears some days to be a monstrous commitment; a thing with an appetite so great that by nightfall I am stripped of all my energy and patience only to be left with doubt and feelings of inadequacy. I worry that I take more than I give when it comes to the friends I have committed to and in doing so I take them for granted.

I am not quite forty but deep in my being I feel that my life is at its half-way point. My capacity to change seems diminished these years. In my wild youth change seemed to occur by choice but now change seems to take place due to circumstance and this unfortunately is a far less empowering notion. A commitment to change is invigorating because therein lay the seeds to self-improvement but a mandate to change underscores the ineffectual aspects of your existence, over time it can leave one feeling windblown and on dark days even victimized.

Such goth-ridden ennui!!! Surely this level of introspection will hasten the decay of my still delectable nards! Perhaps I need to commit to a change in perception? A re-invention of one’s world-view has always entailed a change of identity in my life. I am not the boy I use to be but what manner of man I am? Not young, not old, but already carrying baggage from both destinations, I am marooned in a duality of video games and RRSP contributions.

As I’m writing a co-worker just came by my desk and inquired as to where he might purchase a pipe to smoke his marijuana. What an excellent non-sequitur! I told him that bongs might be a nice way to inhale - or so I’ve heard, of course. He said a pipe is required, something he can stow in his car. I think it’s a sad story because if you’re going to smoke a bit of dope then you should certainly be doing it with a loved one nearby to laugh at - or so I’ve heard. Of course it’s or so I’ve heard. It’s always or so I’ve heard…

It’s such a silly society that has been constructed for us to inherit. Is that a benefit of aging? Shall we too get the chance to vote in stupid laws of our own? The Pope, Hilary Clinton, and a few other idiots have been publicly speaking out against video games. Why must every generation have its officially sanctioned tool of the devil? Does no one ever look back and say ‘geez that fad didn’t amount to much after all.’ Where the hell were these alarmists when Heavy Metal came on the scene, or the hippie rock of the sixties, or Elvis, or the god-damned Jitterbug? Remember when dancing the Jitterbug was going to turn you into a sex fiend? My grandfather and I had a good laugh when he reminisced over that one.

It’s always something but what I don’t get is that someone like the conspicuously awkward Hilary was no doubt doing her best trying to fit in while grooving to the then much-reviled Beatles and now she’s liable to become the President? Alice Cooper was and still is one of the most insane, blood-spitting rock stars out there but now he’s a semi-pro golfer who runs a quaint looking pub. Anyone familiar with Gene Simmon’s rise to reality TV stardom can plainly see that the tongue-lashing front-runner of KISS is nothing if not a doting parent and wise old jew these days. If you and Hilary Clinton loved kissing the sky with Lucy Diamond or whatever the fuck you kids did for kicks back then, why would you shit on its modern contemporaries today? You turned out just fine, didn’t you? Or is there something you’re not telling us?

Hey have I stumbled on the cure for my blues? Should I commit to nothing less than changing the world in order to give my life new meaning? It’s a thought that fills me with a sense of exhilaration, delusional though it may be. Will you, gentle reader, entrust me with this awesome and surely corrupting responsibility?

Don’t answer. This plane, I have landed it. It was a round trip, a full circle. Thank you for flying. Here’s some of the news I came across this week.

I’m no girl but this face looks like it could freeze a vagina!

President Vladimir Putin has been fairly elected as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and why not? He’s been everywhere and rooting for him has been a guilty pleasure of mine these past twelve moons. Putin’s graceful slide into the uncontested rulership of Russia proves once again that effectiveness trumps morality on the world stage every time. Nuclear frikken poison people! Tom Clancy didn’t have the balls to invent it in one of his books and we were too afraid to even imagine such deviltry until someone critical of Putin died from polonium exposure. Another female dissenter was shot dead riding an elevator. Who on earth could shoot a woman? It’s horrible, it’s monstrous, it’s cold-blooded in the extreme… I imagine it takes some true grit however. It all sounds very Russian, don’t you think? Anyway I found this to be an interesting read and the pictures are great too.

Sure he’s a cold fish but he swims in a lake of money!

Thanks to Marc for this supplementary Putin article that follows the fortune he allegedly amassed. You can’t begrudge a Soviet-styled power broker a forty billion dollar pay-off now and then, can you? Most would but I got a thing for leaders who fashion themselves after James Bond villians.

I hate to say I told you so but really I never hate to say I told you so…

Surprise! The United States is deeply concerned over the prospect of failure in Afghanistan. They can’t bring in any more troops and so naturally their NATO allies are following suite. You see, the world at large would just love to transform the bandit-spawning narco-economy into something less scary but without the required (here comes that word again) COMMITMENT it’s just so much ass-wind standing in for foreign policy. We white people, it’s true we’re the most awesome people of all but I have to tell you that we can be pretty damn arrogant most times. There are in total around 40,000 troops in Afghanistan and somehow these übermensch were going to change the destiny of twenty-seven million people, a great many of them for which the words soldier and citizen are interchangeable because they have been at war with others and themselves for decades! It was, still is, and the history books will condemn it as pure delusion. One line says it all. Our Canadian government and its armed forces leaders need to read this one line and let it serve as a wake-up call. This comes from the U.S. Admiral and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs:

“In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

I would not play basketball with that kind of partner never mind go to war! The Canadian soldiers who have died and their grieving families deserve way better than to have done so in a second-rate misadventure, a campaign of lesser priority.

In my mind it is an unforgivable sin of leadership to entrust your military with a mission they cannot complete. Military engagements are won by making a wish list of everything your forces could possibly need and then doubling it. The commitment to this plan of action was far too small and in doing so blood and treasure was pointlessly wasted, to say nothing of our reputation as an effective and serious nation. It’s simple really: If you don’t commit fully, then you just don’t go, you find an alternative course of action and you take military occupation off the table. Our government paid but a pittance of Afghanistan’s true price in order to cynically curry economic favour with an ally whose pretence for warfare is even faultier than our own. In this our government has failed us, utterly.

The C.I.A. is doing nothing wrong but they don’t want you to see it anyway…

This issue is making news but stuff like this has happened too many times lately for me to think anything will come of it. I’ll throw it up for posterity and continuity however. So the C.I.A. took videotapes of them torturing Al-Qaeda members but then they destroyed them. I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt that they were destroyed because the tapes captured some truly monstrous behaviour. Some say the White House said ‘don’t destroy the tapes’ and others say the opposite. Lawyers are counselling all concerned parties as to their responsibilities and culpability, which really says all you need to know about how morally ambivalent the U.S. Government has become. Look for even a shadow of strong leadership in this issue, you will not find it.

Adorable sounding physics lessons can be found on YouTube.

I’m going to download these physics presentations from M.I.T. professor Walter Lewin over the holidays. They sound really interesting!

The Reuters Pictures of the Year 2007

Reuters pictures of the year are always neat. The one above is from the collection and is of a Canadian soldier seeking cover just second after his location was shelled. A thousand words indeed.

My game tastes seem to be refining... I wish to kill more people at faster speeds...

2007-12-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

The deluge of worthy games continues but I have seen the high water mark, the tide begins to ebb ever so slightly. In the strangest twist of fate ever I am honestly thankful of this because the quantity of desirable product through the end of 2007 was forcing me to do questionable things. If one possessed a perfectly excellent game (in this case Call of Duty 4) and one was dying to play it, why then would that person buy another (Mass Effect) game? Even worse, who in their right mind would only play the first chapter of the new game and then set it aside once ANOTHER hotly anticipated title (Unreal Tournament 3) hit the shelves? No one with a strong command of his faculties, to be sure. Games I have reviewed in the past couple of months are insisting they be re-played, they actually nag my brain whilst I am spending my time constructively. I literally have more games then I can play right now and I try to calm my increasingly indignant sense of responsibility by assuming there will be lean times on the horizon; a dry season where each of these purchases will receive time meriting their financial commitment. It seems I am becoming some kind of game-storing camel or squirrel. Is it mere coincidence that a newly emerging hump and steadily fattening cheeks liken me to these animals on a physical level? This is me coming to grips with what appears to be my early-blooming mid-life crisis.

So I took Mass Effect out a couple times and she puts out well enough but the chick is slooooooooow. Is it legal to compare a sci-fi epic to a blond chick? How about a Downsy blond chick who’s into the Dramamine? There is a ton of reading and dialogue to get through and you can even complete missions without drawing your weapons. Outrageous! Even as I wrote that last sentence my monocle popped off! Some people will love this and I can appreciate it because at its heart I can see there is a good game here, but I need to wait until I’m terminally ill and on the couch for ten hours a day before I can even touch this. The game has two minor points that disappoint and both issues can be blamed on X-Box design parameters. All the game data has to sit on the disk and what this results in are brutal load times and sub-par frame rates. The 360 can’t completely handle this game and Microsoft has either got to let designers put stuff on the hard drive or this will be the shape of things to come.

Unreal Tournament 3 however is the opposite of Mass Effect; it’s no golden-haired drooler with a touch of the Downs but rather a crystal-snorting redhead who likes to burn stuff. Developed by Epic Games and published by Midway, the Unreal Tournament franchise enjoys high status in the world of on-line shooters. There have been many incarnations of the game and aside from providing a lightning-fast shooter experience it showcases Epic’s proprietary game engine which they lease out to other designers. To this end Unreal Technology has been used in hundreds of games. There are well over fifty games using Unreal in this generation alone and that number will soon exceed one hundred. Thus far this console war's only winner has been Epic Games.

The overall art design and story in Unreal Tournament 3 is amongst the most hilariously over-the-top I’ve ever seen. My first instinct was to simply dismiss it as obvious and adolescent, but in the end I kind of liked it because I guess it’s just so damn ridiculous. “So bad it’s good” might be aptly applied here but I’ll hold off until I secure the proper permit. The main characters wear this crazy space armour all covered in needless embellishment, but that’s not metal enough so they wear skirts or sarongs also made of armour, but THAT’S not metal enough so they sport facial tattoos as well. This unrelenting passion for testosterone blasts any sense of realism or connection you have with any of these cartoon characters. The best is the weapons though. It looks like they took the front end of Camaro's and Trans-Am's, quartered them, and then had weapon barrels sticking out the middle. If these weapons are in any way a form of phallic compensation then I would be the Ron Jeremy of Unreal Tournament. The story is stupid, and makes no sense, and is filled with clichés, and you don’t care, so that’s all I’ll say about that.

Nonetheless if you own a PC or a PS3 then you should get this game. What? Why? You see, the addition of a single player story mode is a kindness that Epic provided as a tutorial for players to become acquainted with the various aspects of this game. It allows you to play this game on your own against the computer thanks to some excellent A.I. programming. In the end however it’s really nothing more than value added to the multi-player which is the focus of the product. In this regard the game delivers! The fighting is amazing and this is achieved with blinding speed, gorgeous graphics, well-designed levels, and balanced mechanics.

There are around forty maps and they range from good to bloody excellent. One in particular played out like an epic story for me; it was a Capture the Flag game that had me coasting the open country on a hoverboard only to stop here and there in order to take part in some intense firefights. The game transcended from a contest into my own little adventure while war and havoc occurred around me. Vehicles play a huge roll and they come in all shapes and sizes including some alien walkers and flying demon squids. Such is the pacing of the game that you wind up jumping in and out of vehicles constantly, using their superior firepower to waste foes only to discard the wreck once it becomes severely damaged. The packaged vehicle segments you find in so many other games cannot hold a candle to this style of play.

If you want a gritty, realistic shooter then Call of Duty 4 is for you. If you prefer a gratuitous futuristic fantasy running at hyper-speed then give Unreal Tournament 3 a spin. Between the two there is simply too much good on-line multi-player action to give either title justice.

Game developers pressure the enthusiast media to no end...

Thanks to Marc for passing this article on to me and in doing so turning me on to the Gamasutra website. Sadly it seems the behaviour I singled Ubisoft out with is far more widespread than even I figured. I was surprised to see that a supposedly cool company like Rockstar (makers of Grand Theft Auto) were as corporate and Orwellian with their product message as the rest. It all appears so foolish really. It seems evident that the focus should be on making a game worthy of praise rather than jiggering the media.

Doughboy here loves his African art but he's a total fucking NOOB!!!

This spotlight on the C.E.O. of Activision, who upon merging with Vivendi will create a conglomerate to rival the giant Electronic Arts, is a good example of why I think video games and the media are in the state they are in today. Mr. Kotick is no doubt an excellent businessman but he’s not a game player and therefore has limited experience in making an actual product better. He can sell it better, he can promote it better, he might even be able to motivate actual game makers better, but in the end he is hawking a ware he doesn’t fully comprehend. Put in its simplest terms the purpose of a video game is to be fun. The fact remains that only devoted game players can tell you how that comes about. They can tell you how the product rates when put against its competitors in the marketplace and they do so with their purchases. Until the game industry matures to the point where game designers get old and experienced enough to secure executive level positions most big game companies will continue to fly blind and focus sales tactics off the product, where the current leadership feels comfortable and in control.

The men who read these books are now in my belly and boy did they give me the meat sweats!

2007-12-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

I haven’t abandoned the news or current events entirely, they have merely had their priorities adjusted while I’m reading Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. I’m nearly finished The Golden Compass and it has really drawn me in. I think Mr. Pullman has created one of the most exciting and believable child heroes in fantasy fiction and yes, I completely agree with you in that there are too many of them as it is. Lyra is a bit different however; she’s not the usual, cerebral weenie who finds her confidence and courage at the end of the book. Rather she’s something of a self-assured unholy terror right from the get-go. Lyra’s true strengths lie in her being an uber-kid; her vast quantities of determination and deceitfulness are the only tools she needs to overcome a variety of legitimately discouraging obstacles… Well that and a spot of future telling… Oh yeah, and one of the most insane combination bodyguard/all-terrain vehicle a ten year old could ever hope for, but still I think most of the credit belongs to her.

Nearly twenty years ago fantasy and science fiction were stitched together into horrid, clunky abominations. The Shadowrun line of books and games we’re forerunners of this Frankenstein-style genre-splicing. They thought it hip to have elves sporting assault rifles and I detested their products roundly for it and their other short-cuts to creativity. Writers have since had time to hone their surgical techniques and now we are treated to something far more subtle and interesting. The Golden Compass bends time in its own alternate version of earth. Oxford remains firmly in the 1600’s, London’s moved ahead a bit to the 1800’s, and the North Pole seems to have been catapulted into the 1940’s. It somehow works even if the end result is a Texan cowboy and a polar bear sharing a hot air balloon ride.

The reviews of the just-released movie are not altogether kind and at the time of this writing it’s getting a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Such is the peril of making a fantasy book into a film; the medium has a lot going for it when it’s kept firmly in the mind of the reader. Seeing a cowboy and a polar bear in a hot air balloon probably looks preposterous but having a writer set it up for you as a climax to an excellent adventure scene is an easier sell. When you read a book you don’t have it entirely play out in your mind like a movie; it’s a shadow version of sight, there and not, the visual intermixed with the sentence structure, all of it incomplete and yet somehow cohesive in the end. Fantasy movie makers must be careful to not make things too blatant. As well time plays a heavy roll. A book that takes you two or three weeks to read gives you ample time to digest the wacky and wild, there’s a rest period between meals. In a two or three hour movie it can result in way too much at once. It has the same effect as the Mandarin Buffet has on me; too much cheap food under one heat lamp, all of the combined smells turn me off the concept of lunch completely.

It has however been an interesting news cycle this past week so for the sake of posterity I’ll throw up some links.

Russian President puts the cool back in Cold War...

There goes our man Vladimir! One day he’s scaring the hell out of all Europe and on the next he sweeps his party into a Parliamentary election victory with an impressive 64%. Plus have you seen him without a shirt on? Weapon of Mass Seduction more like it! With the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty now serving as Putin’s toilet paper the Russians are free to move tanks, jets, and helicopters wherever they please throughout their western regions. I hope the European Union enjoyed their time negotiating with Russia as some kind of spent drunken has-been because those days are over.

Hugo Chavez can't get ahead in politics. Get it? It's a PUN!

Chavismo looks to be in need of Viagra. I just had to post his picture. Look to that massive, swollen, torrentially perspiring melon of his and those teeny, tiny books! He looks like Ogre King of Hobbiton! He must eat one-hundred head of steer every fortnight! The little folk who serve him must have to butter-skate on his skillet before they fry him up a thousand eggs!

This is Hugo’s first defeat since assuming power, though he remains President until 2013. He was looking to fast-forward his socialist Bolivarian revolution by giving himself the power to unilaterally alter Venezuela’s constitution and remain in power indefinitely. It proved to be too much to ask despite the fact that he is wholly beloved by his people. The vote was close and chances are he will take another run at these changes again.

This, the Russian election, and the one in Palestine last year show us the full range of democracy, how one government system can result in such different outcomes. Power to the People sometimes has pretty crazy results. Russia loves the strength and identity Putin has restored in their hearts and for this he seems poised to become all but a Unitary Executive. It’s what they have demanded with their votes so you can’t rightly disqualify the notion even if it does collide with our version of government. When the Palestinians voted for Hamas the U.S. and Israel howled in disbelief, thinking that the servile Fatah party was the only viable choice. They never stopped to think what would motivate the Palestinians to pick what they have labelled a terrorist organization. They don’t get that things are just that bad for these people, that a free choice for anger and outrage is better than accepting the yoke of servitude in some sham of an election.

Hugo Chavez has given his people more education and empowerment than any Venezuelan leader before him. I find it both reassuring and ironic that in doing so his own people have come to realise the difference between the struggle and the figurehead. Chavez will be gone one day, one way or another. Their work will go on.

If Iraq sucked any more their women would be prostitutes... Oh wait, that's happening too...

Iraq has been rated the third most corrupt nation on earth, sitting below only Ethiopia and Myanmar, both of which I don’t think are even human countries but rather some kind of emerging simian stone-age empire. I kid, I kid! Just because a nation doesn’t have a space program doesn’t mean they’re destined to make my acid wash jeans for pennies a day in a sweat shop. I know these things but I can never seem to remember them. By the way acid wash is coming back and it’s coming back big because it’s awesome. Fuck you!

So you have to pay several hundred dollars to become a police officer in Baghdad. I’m trying to think of a better way, a more nefarious way, to cause a society to collapse in on its own moral crapulence but I think this is the clear winner. What do you think these new police officers are going to do on the first day of work? If you said: “Why Dyno, they are going to re-coup their losses of course,” then I would say: “Why do you bother pointing out the obvious to me? Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?” And then you would say: “Let’s not fight. I have this dime bag and it’s never going to snort itself.” And then I would say: “How can I not love you? Here, let me unzip that fly.”

Afghanistan: Big in the Bandit Business since 982!

What I find interesting in this article about the Afghan road between Kandahar and Kabul is that if you picked up a newspaper five hundred years ago you would probably read a very similar article. There are bandits on this ancient trade route still, and they will rob and even mutilate you as they did back then. What I don’t like about the article is how they spin the repaving of the road itself as a humanitarian effort. Read any military history book, building roads is not a P.R. move. You can spend a quarter million dollars on asphalt or you can spend a full million in repairs to your battered motorcade. That the Afghans get to use the road when American Humvees aren’t convoying on it is purely incidental. It’s like when a fly crawls over your shit. Letting the fly do it doesn’t make me a fly-lover. “Go ahead, fly! I’m done drawing with it, it’s all yours.”

It's kind of stony but I would still eleven herbs and spice the fuck out that shit yo!

Its Dinosaur With The Skin Still On Time kids! They found a Hadrosaur with skin and muscle still attached and in good form in a bizarrely fossilized state! You get to actually see the cool dinosaur scales. Already this has given them corrections on what the Hadrosaur actually looked like, stuff the bones didn’t tell, like for example it has a meatier backside for the T-Rex’s to dine upon. It sucks that dinosaur’s became extinct because you know that they would be delicious on the barbecue.

But-but-but the nuclear bombs and the hating our freedom and the terrible terror!

I will surely return to this topic because the blow-back is even now huge and will not go away any time soon. The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons capability gave the Persian regional power a clean bill of health. They don’t think there is a program and they don’t think there has been one in years. This report was given to Bush in August but that didn’t stop him from war-mongering about nuclear holocausts and World War III. Already there has been downplaying and spin control. It is now clearly evident that the response Bush was trying to muster against Iran is in no way justifiable given the actual level of threat. Carrier Battle Groups are stationed off the Gulf of Hormuz, bombing campaigns are ready to go, and for what? No weapons, no weapon programs, nothing even close for years. It’s the lies of Iraq all over again.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction...

Keith Olbermann is my favourite pretend-older brother because he’s been calling Bush on his shit and taking him out behind the woodshed for years now. His comments on this latest issue are hellacious even by his own excoriating standards. I have never heard anyone speak about a world leader in these terms in my life! You can watch the show or read the transcript. It is a scorcher!

Here lies Dyno who perished alone in the dark, buried by tinsel and suffering from Legionnaires' Disease...

2007-12-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

I’m starting to hate the festive season already, which is early for me. The stores have already become some kind of fuggy smelling clown-show. It’s hard to catch the holiday spirit when all about you stinks of car exhaust and feet. Any day now my lovely wife is going to proclaim that if we don't have our tree up in the next forty-eight hours we shall be regarded by child services and her parents as lazy layabouts depriving our podlings of magic and memory... Oh and let's be clear about this, by 'we' she means me.

I shudder in anticipation of hearing the utterance. She will say; "Honey, why don't we get the tree out this weekend, okay?" Translated from the wiven-tongue this non-question means; "Go deep into the bleak hole where I have commanded you to banish all other manner of thing that offends my eye and do not return unless you find the half-dozen dust-caked and mould-spotted boxes that contain our Christmas Cheer. While down there if you find that thing - you know that thing I was talking about - then bring it up too because last time I asked for it and you didn't bring it and so now I'm asking you again and if you don't bring it up again this cycle will continue FOR THE REST OF YOUR FOOLISH, WORTHLESS, AND PITIFUL LIFE!!!"

What I am looking forward to is Christmas Day. I want to dump a bunch of presents on my daughter and watch her go crazy around the living room while I’m stretched out on the couch, nursing a huge fucking mimosa while the savoury smells of a freshly-stuffed turkey waft through the room. Oh that’s right! I’m doing another turkey; it’s like the Pringles of sadomasochistic kitchen rituals, you can never do just one! In truth I’m looking forward to spending time with my family but more particularly I’m looking forward to time with them while they’re not bugging me, where there are more interesting things going on like presents and good food to occupy them. I would do this every weekend if I could, just for the peace and quiet. Christmas is the time of year where we all live like millionaires for a day and blow a wad of cash just to keep everybody off each other’s backs.

The response to my charity drive has been very positive and encouraging thus far. If you are thinking about making a donation to buy toys for the children stuck at Toronto Sick Kids hospital then please do so. To reiterate, you can make a purchase from the Toronto Sick Kids Wish List (linked below) if you want to buy something on your own or I am still pooling money together from friends to buy a batch of hand-held consoles. In both cases any donation is tax deductible. Contact me if you would like more details.

Child's Play Wish List - It's what all the cool kids are doing

What with the foul Toronto weather and other domestic issues, I’ve been home even more than usual. We finished watching the third season of Weeds which continues to be excellent. It’s a perfect blend of dramatic tension, raunchy humour, and contemporary satire. The second season of Dexter has officially entered the ‘holy crap’ phase of the story arc and has gone from damn good to bloody excellent. What’s nice about both these shows is the consistency they manage. This is not a given when it comes to shows with great potential. The second season of Heroes has floundered for this reason but we’re still watching in hopes that it recaptures old glory. I thought Battlestar Galactica had similar issues last season but by the finale all was well. We caught their Razor movie tie-over and it was very good; a nice mix of story fill-in along with some new stuff that both shocked and awed. What should we watch next? I want to see The Wire but we can’t find a clean copy online. Nip And Tuck has been mentioned as jolly perverse programming so that’s in the running. Deadwood perhaps, how does it hold up to these two? I’m also curious to see what Mad Men is about.

I finished Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, only so that it lying there incomplete wouldn’t nag me while I started Mass Effect. Made by the excellent Insomniac Games for the PS3, it illustrates an important lesson in video game entertainment: that so long as a title is made really, really well it's worth playing regardless of the subject matter. Ratchet & Clank is up there with a Pixar movie: the pictures are clearly targeted towards children but the quality is so high that adults have no problem enjoying the material.

While the story in Tools of Destruction is simplistic and the humour zany, the characters are lovable, the environments are beautiful, and the game play is great fun. One could call these games shooters because the titular characters pack a couple dozen weapons with which to solve their problems, but these cartoon characters wind up going to war with a wagon of fireworks and magic tricks. Things blow up pink or turn into penguins; disco balls emitting an irresistible beat serve as hand grenades. This game dazzles the eye with a digital carnival of light and colour. It is pretty. It makes one feel young and silly again. Point of order, my wife finished the game first. She said it was fun but too easy. Her seal of approval means more to the casual gamer than mine ever could.

Penny Arcade comic strip

An explanation of the incident itself, including relevant links

Video game publishers view the enthusiast press with utter contempt

I’m throwing this up because it ties in with what’s becoming an ongoing topic: that of video game journalism, how lost it is, and how it's not likely to get much better. The victim in question is one Jeff Gerstmann; a personality in game editorial and as much a veteran as this new media can hope for. Jeff was put in the unfortunate position of having to review a game made by a company that purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising from his employer. The game in question reviewed poorly, receiving a 6/10. For this he lost his job and it has become a rather public incident amongst the game-playing nerf-herders we call a community.

The video game review matrix I outlined last month is sadly becoming something of a meme. The ‘Out of 10’ marking scheme that makes use of only four or five numbers is mentioned now as a given. It is one thing to feel you know something through sober personal analysis and quite another to be given concrete example; it’s the difference between conspiracy and fact. We can see now that as the cost of production increases the need to protect investments from fact-based scrutiny are now being fully enforced by publishing companies. Respected people are their losing their livelihood over this shit. More than anything it renews my faith in the power of the written word.

You just need to be more careful than ever where you’re getting it from…

If you love this game so much why don't you marry it? Well, I bought it and that's kind of the same thing...

2007-11-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

I picked up Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on Tuesday night and brought it over to my gamer-wife Mike’s place so that we might have something shiny and new to look at. After passing the controller around for two hours all in attendance were pretty wowed by the lush beauty and tight playability of the title. I started the story myself on Wednesday evening and completed the twelve hour story on Saturday. I devoured this game, I simply couldn’t put it down, and if Uncharted hadn’t already interrupted my progress in Ratchet & Clank then I would fire it up again searching for the treasures and medals I missed.

Uncharted was developed by Naughty Dog exclusively for the PS3. This company rounds out the holy trinity of Sony’s top-tier American developers, the others being Insomniac Games and Sucker Punch Productions. All three companies had big franchises on the PS2 and show no signs of stumbling. What’s better the three are known to enjoy a good business relationship and have even assisted each other’s productions. These are the kinds of arrangements and biographies you want to hear about as a game player; original intellectual property used in a slew of quality titles. Notice the absence of endorsement titles or licensed products? Had they been there I would have mentioned them. This is why I always look back to company history and their track record; it does a good job foretelling the future. So far the only of the above companies we haven’t heard from this generation is Sucker Punch, who is working on a superhero title called Infamous. I’m taking bets that game will kick ass as well.

Uncharted takes all the great things in adventuring and mixes them up into a flawless confection. At its core it’s a pulp-action tale in the spirit of Indiana Jones. It’s a treasure hunting thriller that has you exploring a lush tropical rain forest, ancient Mayan ruins, and deserted Spanish colonies. When things get rough it turns into an exciting third-person shooter that’s as simple to play as it is satisfying. Best of all, the story is compelling, the characters are engaging, the dialogue sounds natural, and there are a couple of plot twists that really take you by surprise.

Visually this game can compete with anything put out on a console; everything is absolutely gorgeous and runs very smooth. Playability-wise you have a character that climbs about like the Prince of Persia and fights like Gears of War. What that means is you are having fun every minute you play no matter what you’re doing. What’s more, Nathan Drake; wise-cracking descendant of Sir Francis and the game’s hero is a supremely likable and believable guy. The sound is wonderful and the musical score is fantastic. From beginning to end this whole game is an exercise in high production values and polish.

The game awards medals and rewards for a wide variety of accomplishments like finding treasures, effective fighting techniques and other interesting challenges. It thickens up the competitive aspects of the game and provides a nice assortment of bells and whistles. With Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Ratchet & Clank Future, and Call of Duty 4 all earning top marks it seems the age of the PS3 has finally come... and it's about time.

The great game that wasn't.

For more video game reading here’s Wired Magazine’s take on Assassin’s Creed. Thanks to Marc for passing it on. It’s a pretty scathing review that echoes the talk I heard about it throughout production.

You see that nasty alien zit that begs to be popped? That's IMMERSION!!!

Getting much higher critical success is Mass Effect; a science fiction RPG. The focus of Mass Effect doesn’t seem to be the fighting or exploring – which I’m told is done well enough – but the interaction and conversations to be had with other characters. I’m going to be picking this one and turning on my X-Box 360 for the first time in over a month so I’ll be chiming in on this one.

The fat, middle aged plumber that just won't go away.

Meanwhile all of you Wiitards out there have what looks to be an A+ game to play as well. Super Mario Galaxy is getting stellar reviews and appears to be making good use of everyone's favourite waggle-box.

Duelling Fake Guitars... Still not as gay as the lead singer of Judas Priest...

Meanwhile in mainstream gaming Guitar Hero seems to have some competition in the form of Rock Band. I see this to be a non-issue. The only complaint lovers of Guitar Hero have ever had is that there aren't enough songs. I don't even understand why these games are sold on disk with only thirty songs a pop or so. They should just set up an iPod Store-like website, have coders do nothing but pump out playable song after song until there is a library of thousands, and sell them individually for a couple bucks a pop. Guitar Hero isn't so much a video game but a new form of digital entertainment; interactive music appreciation.

Notice how many video game articles there are in the mainstream papers? Holiday shopping season must have started.

Can you imagine the orgies to have occurred in a place like this?

In an attempt to eschew any mention of current events I’ll put up this really exceptional story. This is what people who don’t waste their time playing video games do with their lives. It’s an impressive achievement to say the least.

On the other hand...

Of course, if you devote your life to Jesus and elect to never learn anything of worth for the entirety of your life, you are liable to fritter away your days building sets for the Creation Museum. The one with primative man feeding the animals while a dinosaur looks passively on is my favourite.

For a picture it was a toss-up between Condi and this troop transport... I picked the prettier of the two...

2007-11-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

I have found the past couple weeks to be somewhat slow on the news front. When I mentioned this over the weekend to my semi-automated news-tracker friend Nima at http://www.positivity.ca/ he concurred. Things were still happening in the world; cyclones in Bangladesh killed over 3,000, there was anti-petrodollar rhetoric at OPEC meetings in Saudi Arabia, a Polish visitor arrived in Vancouver B.C. only to be executed by airport security, and the trial of an Atlanta wrestler who enslaved nine women was underway. It was the usual run of events but there seemed to be a restrained air to the monkey knife fight that is world events. There seemed to be an absence of the frantic and frothing.

Finally I thought I put my finger on it; a shortfall of concrete Iraq stories. For years now the Iraq war and occupation has been the linchpin of the daily news cycle, especially in America. Papers, news programs, and websites build their product around what Iraq items they are going to showcase on any given day. It’s become the frame and focus of their product. When the load is lightened it seems to alter the whole structure itself. That’s when I focused on Iraq in particular to see if there was any merit to my notion.

I want to be clear that this news topography I claim to have prescience over is entirely speculative if not subjective as well. I thought I saw an interesting question and then in gathering news items I constructed myself an answer. At the very least it’s a deductive exercise wrapped up in your friendly Iraq up-date...

This is when things started to go quiet…

At the end of October, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was threatening to essentially draft State Department employees into diplomatic duty in Baghdad because there weren’t enough volunteers to fill the posts. This forced relocation caused an uproar as many employees thought the conditions were unsafe and the work futile. This incident created something of a breach in public relations. The solution for Iraq has always been placed in the political and it takes diplomats, not soldiers, to facilitate those kinds of improvements. If the Foreign Service workers weren’t going to be there then Iraq’s rise from a sectarian hellhole wouldn’t happen. I speculate that this is where a clamp on the media started and I then attempted to qualify my hunch. I put ‘Iraq’ in the search engines of both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and then scanned through over 300 articles each in each publication over a timespan of just over three weeks.

Two year old weapon story, printed this month

Release of prisoners caught in neighbourhood dragnets

The first article goes over weapons handed out to Iraqi forces without proper tracking measures and thus there are tons of missing weapons. The subject matter isn’t new and the article itself is concerning itself with action occurring in 2004 and 2005 with no new information surfacing to justify printing this article in 2007. The second article reports that 500 Iraqi prisoners have been released from U.S. custody which must be considered good news because most of those people had no business rotting in jail in the first place.

Both of these articles are typical of the first two weeks in November. Iraq is either given a clinical and retrospective treatment or the stories are domestically based; things like the Blackwater civilian hard-on hearing or Mukasey’s non-opinion on torture. The ‘good news’ story is reaching but printed nonetheless while Iraq as it is on the ground is no where to be found with the exception of soldier death announcements.

Dissent in the State Department you say? How convenient!

Security money for the State Department you say? How reassuring!

Meanwhile two stories give the State Department a whole new coat of paint. The first talks about employees in Iraq chastising the position of Foreign Service agents back home. The article points to an inter-department blog as a source for these cracks in their solidarity. I am suspicious as to what the true point of this article really is. I think it’s a given that a workplace with hundreds of employees is going to have differences in opinion, newspapers don’t need to inform me of this fact. I cannot help but think however that it undermines those diplomats who roundly spoke as one when they declared” “hell no, we won’t go.”

The second article talks about the significant security budget increase the State Department requested. How else would this be taken by the employees other than: “worry not, we’ll take good care of you.”

Travel restrictions starting to lift in Baghdad

Violence in a downward trend

Some Iraqis return to their homes

We’re coming to it now. Starting last week and rolling into this one are stories like the above. Stability in the capital is said to be up and attacks down so there are plans to remove roadblocks and permit easier travel throughout the city. Add to that reports that some Iraqis feel secure back on their home street if not in their neighbourhood (and certainly not in their city entire.) Still, its progress as the media chooses to measure it and must come as a relief to those faced with travelling there.

Success! An embarrassment averted! On with your scheduled programming...

All of this may or may not have culminated in the State Department filling its roster without issuing strong orders. Who knows what incentives or pressures were employed in the end. Perhaps the muted arc of the news cycle was merely serendipitous. What I find remarkable is that people who were justifiably in fear for their lives at the thought of being shipped to the most dangerous place on earth had a change of heart in about three short weeks and I myself believing that it took a whole lot more than the hit-and-miss diplomatic capabilities of Condoleeza Rice.

I am not stating that Condoleeza Rice or any other person has power over the news but if Canada is any indication then I will assert that the news gets a lot of material from government sources. If the government turned the spigot of information off with regards to the Iraq war or Afghanistan or any other issue then there is nothing for the news service to report and we the citizenry would assume that there is nothing to report at this time. Ours is a society of open government at best, propaganda at worst, and the Sunday Edition tends to sit somewhere inbetween.

In going over all this news I see the occupation entering a new phase and it isn’t Iraq returning to normalcy, even if you consider normalcy to include sectarian enclaves and no-go zones in what was once a civilized country. I see acceptance sinking in on both sides; Iraqis and Americans are starting to wearily come to grips with their new reality and make the necessary accommodations to live with their fate. The shock doctrine is in full effect right now and U.S. over-lordship might be something that everyone at home and abroad accepts provided the news doesn’t get too ugly and everyone is allowed to cook in their own kitchens, bullet-riddled as they may be. I think the U.S. military knows that America’s long-term strategic plans in the region involve keeping a message ephemeral yet clear: “Sure it sucks now but it could go back to being much, much worse. Get used to us hanging around.”

One last article, the one they didn’t want you to see...

Thanks to Marc for sending this piece. It’s a startling statistic that I didn’t find anywhere in my search of those two big American papers. British troops were holding Basra and getting attacked constantly so they withdrew with the result being a 90% drop in violence. They were bringing it on themselves and thus removed the problem.

The U.S. will not follow this course of action, not their diplomats and not their soldiers. The British were interested in keeping the peace; the Americans have a different set of priorities in mind.

UPDATE: The rash of 'good news' from Iraq created quite a response among readers of the New York Times and a question/answer blog was set up. It goes over some of the articles I've posted including the Basra situation.

New York Times Q&A article

Listen up ya scurvy bastards! We're gonna help some kids and for once in yer miserable lives yer gonna do some good in this world...

2007-11-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

Last Christmas I implemented a “No Gifts to Adults” policy amongst my family and my in-laws. I wasn’t going to buy for them and I hoped that they wouldn’t buy for me. I instead wanted people to focus strictly on the growing number of children in the clan and to double-gift them if they couldn’t restrain their capitalistic urges. This gift giving amongst thirty-plus year olds is wasteful to me; we do it more out of habit than anything else, shopping consumes a vast amount of time that could be better spent with family, and children go crazy when they receive a gift while older folk must often feint gratitude and receive similar awkward praise for their own trouble.

Unfortunately it was a middling success at best. Some followed it in half-measures and some ignored it completely. Hopefully the mild shock I saw in their eyes at my failure to reciprocate will have remained with them but this year I’m upping the ante just to be sure. I’m going to promote a charity and have them choose between helping needy kids and giving to a thankless bastard.

Child’s Play – It’s where I’d like your spare holiday dollars to go…

I found a charity that speaks to me, that represents my passion and views on life. Child’s Play is an officially recognized non-profit charity that gives toys to children stuck in hospitals. So far they have donated over a quarter-million dollars since they began in 2003. They focus primarily on video games because these items are in low supply but high demand amongst ailing youngsters. So what I’m going to do amongst friends, family, and you, gentle reader, is put out the good word so that some tykes spending the holidays at Toronto Sick Kids get some really cool toys this year.

Why this charity in particular? First because I want to do something nice for kids; it’s their time of year above all. Being in a hospital must suck and I want to help them have fun while they are there. Second is this is a charity organized by gamers for gamers. This charity shows that people who enjoy video games are decent, generous people.

This is the Sick Kids hospital Wish List. You can Amazon a Gift in no time…

There are a couple ways to go about this. If you want to do something on your own then hit the link above and pick out something you want to give. A game for thirty or forty bucks is a great gift on its own. I think however that collectively we can do even better. Kids need to play on something and getting a portable console like the Nintendo DS would knock a kid’s socks off. Seeing as they run nearly $150.00 I don’t expect everyone to pony up but if we collect our funds then a single purchase can be made for as many units as we can buy. Optimally a nice mix of games and handhelds would really make the day for some bed-ridden children.

This charity is tax-deductable.

If you read this, then chances are I know you. If you want to add to the console fund I’m starting then just say so in the Comments section and I’ll get in touch with you. I will set up a Pay-Pal thing or if you tell me how much you’re in for I’ll cover you until I release Scar-Bee on a collection run. If you decide to donate something on your own then let me know in the Comments section with your confirmation number so that I can track the donation and tally it up at the end. If you’re digging this idea then get the word out and collectively let’s generate some significant numbers. If you have any other ideas or suggestions then get in touch and let’s work on something.

I will be coming back to this topic and updating you all throughout December.

You get to play an assassin who may have been touched by a hot chick!!!

2007-11-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

Assassin’s Creed has hit the shelves to mixed reviews. Now remember what I’ve outlined about video game critiquing. By mixed I mean a crop of 7’s which in turn means sub-par; go run and get one with someone else's money. The hype for this game may have exceeded its true merit and I have found it interesting to follow this particular story.

Game publishers in general have a few tools at their disposal to ensure their advertising of a less than decent product eclipses journalistic – and I use that term loosely – impressions. Ad revenue can be pulled from a magazine or a website and this may motivate an editor to practice a spot of self-censorship. Review embargoes are not unheard of, whereby unfavourable reviews are requested – and I’m using that term loosely too – to be held back and published only when the game is in the stores. Swag, perks, and the free stuff that is so beloved to nerdlinger-kind can be withheld. Prior to Halo 3's release some privileged reviewers received an army duffle bag containing a militarized X-Box 360 complete with controllers, headset and the so-called Legendary Edition of the game that comes in a Master Chief's helmet to be worn by your cat! I’ve read things, questionable things from unreliable sources, we’re talking the very detritus of wannabe journalism; blogs, message boards, group emails... Places just like My Time. More than one has claimed that Assassin’s Creed has unleashed the fucking fury in this regard. These baseless rumours should be ignored by any person of reason, of course. I however do not count myself in that group.

Disgruntled Employee or Beacon of the Hidden Truth?

Look to the lovely young lady above. This is Ms. Jade Raymond and she is the producer for Assassin’s Creed. Ms. Raymond received her computer science degree at McGill and has previously worked for Sony and EA before moving to Ubisoft. Her charisma landed her a gig as a host on the Electric Playground video game review show. I want to make a couple things clear at this point. I am not stalking Jade Raymond, that job seems to be taken by whoever's running her fan website. Also, my journalistic fact-finding skills are bush-league at best. How then do I know so much about Jade? How do I know more about Jade Raymond than video game developers that I have personally interviewed? Understand this; In the two year-plus long run-up to the release of Assassin's Creed, if I were to select a word describing Jade Raymond's entrance into my life it would be UNAVOIDABLE. Put her name in google and there you will find a teeth-whitening shit-ton of pictures and print. At first I thought this was because she has appeared on somewhat obscure cable television but her relationship with Assassin’s Creed; one of the most anticipated titles of this console generation thus far, is what is mentioned over and over again.

I’m going to assume that Ms. Raymond is fantastic at her job as are all the other women who work in video game entertainment. That’s not what this is about at all. I would however question the integrity of any company who pushes their game with the good looks of an employee and this seems to be the case with Assassin’s Creed. I’ve listened to lengthy narrations from the likes of Ken Levine of the phenomenal Bioshock or Gabe Newell’s ruminations on the flawless Half-Life, but I have no idea what they look like and if I google their images I don’t get the thousands of sunny snapshots that greet me when I do the same with Jade.

Hey I get it, she’s a great looking girl and gamers are… well… you know what they say. Why wouldn’t Ubisoft take the initiative and thrust her into the spotlight, to become the face of the game? No, shut up, I'll answer; perhaps because it takes the focus off the game, it takes it way off and when you marry this with a multi-million dollar advertisement campaign, an anti-journalistic psy-op, and no playable demo you get what this release looks to have become; the disingenuous foisting of a so-so product on a bamboozled customer base. Maybe it's not fair that Jade can't hype her game without drawing these kinds of analysis whereas guys like Cliffy B. of Gears of War or Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear don't, but (aside from the fact both Cliff and Kojima are associated with wicked games and success trumphs all) the SECOND fact of the matter is we live in a world where chicks in bathing suits sell beer. Do you know what sells beer to me? IT'S BEER! Marketing people however leave no stone unturned. If there's a fucking idiot out there who needs a chick in a bathing suit to remind him that beer in Lakota means awesome-sauce they'll make a commerical. Let us join hands and universally agree that the masters of Ubisoft, they know this too. They're french! They practically invented kissing!

Ubisoft needs to do some soul searching between the torrent of Tomless, Clancyless, Tom Clancy titles they crank out; do they want to provide a quality product to valued customers or do they want to make half-assed games and then work hard to deceive people? Ubisoft has been both kinds of companies but every time they eschew Jeckle in favour of Hyde they further corrupt their own corporate culture. Developers of lacklustre games only learn to make more lacklustre games. A marketing department with a penchant for deception and punitive action is only going to get more detached from the truth as the games go by. We are creatures of habit and we tend to fall into familiar, previously-established patterns.
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Scroll down and look at the picture. It says at least a thousand words...
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This picture disturbs me. She’s on display for fuck sakes! What the hell kind of a team photo is that? The shot has a Gwen Stefani/No Doubt vibe. Ms. Raymond works with these people and I cannot understand what would make a person of good judgement and character agree to be captured like this. With regards to this whole topic that picture is the only blame I lay at Ms. Raymond's feet. It's understandable that some of this episode may have gone to her head. It's barely a sin and if I haven't been clear in my writing the focus of my distain is the crafty exploitation that Ubisoft enacted. This is me being telepathic; there was once an Ubisoft boardroom meeting and Jade's good genetics was mentioned, professionally.

So I guess I'm not alone in not trusting Ubisoft on this one.

The plot, it thickens. The good people at Something Awful posted some photoshopped pornography and a comic crafted by the esteemed Chugworth Academy. I wasn't fast enough to catch the nudey stuff but the comic involved Ms. Raymond performing fellatio on young boys who between moaning and groaning promised to purchase the game. Lovely. These images were predictably considered internet polonium and they are no longer to be found... for now. I sincerely hope Jade doesn't feel too banged up by this should she have seen the material in question. The punchline for photoshop porn is always the pan-drippings who waste time doing such things. The comic was well drawn but not especially cutting or witty. It's not like she got her ass reamed by the boys at Penny Arcade, which if you're not into internet comics means it's not like Jade was targeted by the likes of Matt Stone and Trey Parker from South Park... If you don't get THAT reference then I have to ask you what you think you're doing reading my blog? Seriously, I'm sure I wouldn't like you very much and so you should just fuck away before I put a page counter on this thing and find out where you live... Page counters can do that, right?

What the Chugworth (such a great name) comic was in all its blunt obviousness was a pretty succinct social commentary on how Ubisoft is attempting to pimp their property, breathing and otherwise. Naturally Ubisoft's lawyers sent the webmaster at Something Awful a publicly released 'cease and desist - slash - free P.R. stunt' type letter . Trust me it's lawyer-speak and thus not worth your time. The Something Awful response however is another matter and I'll leave you with that. So long as Ubisoft believes this geek-strength shit-storm might sell Assassin's Creeds it won't go away so I might give an update if the comment section tells me there is a person or two who cares. Seriously people, I'm lonely and getting a little self-conscious. Say hello... Say anything. Say you, say me, say it together... That's the way it should be.
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From: Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (webmaster@somethingawful.com)
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 9:06 PM
To: 'Anderson, David'
Cc: A BUNCH OF FRENCHIES
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Subject: RE: NOTICE: Infringement of ASSASSIN'S CREED Mark and Jade Raymond's Personal, Privacy, and Publicity Rights
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Please let it be known that hereforth I have read the express mail and email sent thereforth by Famous Lawyer David Anderson of the Famous Lawyer Law Business of Nixon Peabody LLP, and furthermore a declaration shall be expressed on the part of Internet User Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka that thatforth herethrough I have conducted rigorous tests implemented through a vigorous barrage of legal studies, and furthermore hitherthrough these rigorous tests have therefore proven Famous Lawyer David Anderson of the Famous Lawyer Law Business of Nixon Peabody LLP shall be recognized as a man of the fag persuasion.
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Pursuant to the United Dairy Council
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Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka
Internet

Yes it's a murder simulator but George W. Bush would totally approve...

2007-11-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

The time has never been better to become obsessed with video games. Top drawer digital entertainment is literally coming out faster than I can play it. I recently finished the single player in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and feel compelled to do justice to the online multiplayer PLUS complete the wondrous looking Ratchet and Clank Future BEFORE next week when the double-barrelled deluge of Mass Effect and Uncharted: Drakes Fortune hits the street. In leaner times I would be thankful to subsist on a third helping of Bioshock, more movie making in Halo 3, and a do-over of the Half-Life 2 series but these are the heady days of a Henry the 8th calibre gorging. Thankfully I’m not into PC gaming because then I would have to add Crysis and the new FEAR title to the list. When child-rearing and bathroom breaks become something of a distraction it’s a sign that you are on the receiving end of too much of a good thing.

So I’m going to express what I thought about while playing Call of Duty 4. With so many glowing critiques of the game already printed I don’t feel the need to go over that ground and will instead focus on deeper themes and more ephemeral aspects of this fantastic game.

Infinity Ward developed this modern military shooter and these game purists work on a higher level that is only gained by making two back-to-back award winning, million-plus selling titles. They are not only brimming with success-fuelled confidence but possess the smug superiority of having one of their properties farmed out to another company who could only cook up mediocre results. So it's not just their product, you see, but what they can do with it that makes the real money. This may be something only a true fan-boy cares to follow but what it explains is that this company can do whatever the fuck it pleases, publishers be damned, which is a rare exception in this medium. We benefit from this, greatly.

Boiled down that is really why this game is worth playing, to see what unbridled game makers can do with their art. It’s not just that the game is bloody beautiful and fun as all hell to play; it’s the psychological needling that gets you the day after; the telling of little stories that you didn’t expect to be told.

The Call of Duty series stands out as some of the best military games you can play because with each game they try to give you the whole war experience as they see it. You don’t play a single character following a linear story; they pop you into different bodies and battles throughout the conflict. This allows for a big story with many small parts to be told and they really ran with it this time around. You get to play people who die, not die and re-spawn like every other game you’ve played but die and that’s it, their story is done and you will play another person henceforth. It’s so simple and subtle but it’s the kind of storytelling masterstroke that only a fearless company would pull off.

World War II shooters are at their core romantic, uphill battles. I wind up dumping the Thompson for an MP 32 every time which makes for righteous, guilt-free killing of Germans. It's their high-end machine gun after all, using it on them is poetic. This is not the case in Modern Warfare and the people at Infinity Ward were shrewd enough to pick out a very relevant theme; that today’s battles tend to be horribly one-sided affairs. Weapons like the M4 or the G36C or the P90 are science-fiction-like in their ability to locate and penetrate third-world militia-men. There is no fictitious space marine weapon that compares with the present-day Javelin anti-tank missile. Once you’re locked on and fire a ballistic shoots straight up a few hundred feet in the air before coming down hard. Even firing one for the third time is something of a ‘whoa’ moment.

Mix it all together and you create a game with a lot of ethical quandaries. This is war as Donald Rumsfeld had wet dreams about and the designers not only confronts you with it, but force you to act on it. In one scene you have night vision and have to take out soldiers in a dark house. If you do it right then they don’t even know you’re there. The last man standing is pointing his gun in every direction, clearly frightened out of his mind. In one scene you operate the three guns on an AC 130 flying at 30,000 feet. The enemy can’t even see you, never mind strike back. You complete the scene by killing them and not striking any of the nearby structures. It’s a level that has made visitors to my living room uncomfortable. It’s quite a trick to make a game challenging all the while crushing any notion of fair play.

The online multiplayer matches give this game its true legs of longevity. I’ve been throwing myself into free-for-all death matches, eschewing all concepts of teamwork or flag capturing in favour of killing every motherfucker I see. It is savagely unforgiving; you take a couple in the chest and you’re done. Sneaking around and playing smart is mandatory. By the same token killing someone is deeply satisfying because it only comes about as a result of you playing well. One amazing new feature is the death-cam. Bang, you’re dead. It will take the computer five seconds to re-spawn you, but while you wait why not look through the eyes of your killer as he killed you? You get to see where he was, how he scoped in on you, and how he did the dirty deed. There is no arguing, griping, whining, pissing, or moaning when you see how they did it; there is only grudging respect and a vow to do better. You get shown your error; that your ass was hanging out or that you were looking the wrong way. Every failure is a learning experience. I am finding it to be an immensely valuable tool.

Seeing as this game is out on PC, the 360, and the PS3 there is no reason why you should miss it. There are sure to be a whole slew of games that allow you to kill Middle Eastern people but this one sets the bar very high right out of the gate.

You can see by our stockings and pantaloons that we are gentlemen engaged in gentlemanly pursuits...

2007-11-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

Torture is in the news once again this week. It pops up every so often due to some legal wrangle or another, causing but a cigarette burn on our collective psyche only to scab over when the ill practice retreats back to the out-of-sight black sites where it rightly belongs. This time was because when Attorney General To-Be Michael Mukasey went through the confirmation process he was asked point-blank if he thought waterboarding was torture. In true greasy Gonzales style Mukasey tap-danced around the issue while Bush backed up his choice with a little soft-shoe of his own. The reasons of course are tap water transparent; Mukasey would be responsible for laying charges on anyone up to and including the President in the event of an illegal act. The Bush Administration secretly endorsed torture and torture has indeed been carried out. There is no way Bush is going to elevate someone who will make his life even more miserable than it already is.

By rights this should be a huge deal because George W. Bush is on record stating the United States does not torture people. Therein lies the battle congress has had with the Administration, they wish to test the validity of the statement. They have made formal requests for documentation, Bush has refused citing such work is classified, they have subpoenaed advisors, Bush has claimed Executive Privilege, they have asked for clarity when it comes to techniques employed, Bush has said that such information will be of value to the enemy. Everywhere congress turns for information they find the President trying to cover his ass and bury his mistakes.

Many times it has been repeated by the supposed experts that torture does not produce worthwhile intelligence. By the same token those same experts claim that a person tortured will say anything to save themselves from further abuse. Perhaps that is the point! Would a steady stream of fictional confession be of use to this Administration? Not only would these desperate falsehoods cover the tracks of the witch hunt by producing those who are guilty but it also has the beneficial side-effect supplying bogus terrorist plots to keep people in fear and make some feel even grateful for the protection they receive.

At any rate waterboarding or controlled (simulated) drowning is at the heart of this issue because it is the one thing that is known with evidence to have been endorsed and performed. It is therefore the gateway to congressional hearings. Waterboarding was not considered torture by the likes of Alberto Gonzales and was merely designated an Enhanced Interrogation Technique. Now the obvious truth is finally being spoken; of course waterboarding is full-on torture. The Japanese were condemned for doing it during World War II and it was first mentioned being employed way back in the easy-breezy days of the Spanish Inquisition! If Mukasey admitted that it is torture then a case can be made, special prosecutors demanded, and the Democrats would get another opportunity to take a run at the Bush Administration in hopes of bringing the whole house of cards down.

Hey I'll try I mean how bad can it be blub-blub-blub OH MY FUCKING FUCK MAKE IT STOP!

Daniel Levin was the Acting Assistant Attorney General when he submitted himself to waterboarding in order to learn what the fuss was about. Sure as shit he came back wet-haired and with no doubt in his mind that this was the real deal. As soon as Alberto Gonzales secured the nomination for Attorney General he fired this guy’s ass.

World War II Veterans: Pussies... There, I've said it. Now I'll never get advertising.

By comparison some of the old WWII interrogators reminisce about some of the hard-core methods they employed to make Gerry talk. If you have a sensitive stomach you shouldn’t read this; games of chess, steak dinners, long talks and moonlit walks. They befriended their prisoners and eventually the Germans spilled the beans on military strategy, submarines, rocketry projects; treasure troves of intelligence by any modern standard. How did later generations become so fucking stupid?

It's every civilization's dream to beat the shit out of lawyers but not like this, never like this!

Pakistan is still descending into bad times. Those feisty lawyers took to the streets again where they were beaten up and carted off by the hundreds. In diverting police and intelligence resources towards domestic security Musharraf will have no choice but to shift focus away from fighting the terrorists. Though he claimed that they were a serious threat to Pakistan’s stability it seems he’s primarily moving against political rivals and those in support of the democratic process. Good call, Pervez and good luck with that. Take your eye off the guys who killed over 150 people in a single attack just a couple weeks ago. You know what I call that? Good Leadership… Of course I’ve been known only to care about sensational headlines and blood-soaked fodder for the digital grist.

Saddam had a chemical plant... on a train I tell you... run by robots with rockets - no - lazers!

Introducing the one and only Curveball; this is the Iraqi guy who supposedly convinced The White House that Saddam Hussein had a chemical weapons program. It was all lies of course and the man who spun them did so thinking it would improve his chances for asylum, which it did. I don’t think this guy changed history much. The Iraq War was going to happen and the Administration was, in the Pentagon lingo of the times; fixing the facts around the agenda. I’m sure Rafid Alwan didn’t convince Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld of anything; he was preaching to the converted. His fabrications may have helped convince other nations though, and fool Colin Powell whose participation lend a lacquer of integrity to the whole enterprise.

Our quant island of coconuts would like to thank the white man for giving us guns.

This is what I call a very future-earth-today situation. The nation of Fiji has established itself as a mercenary contractor. They maintain a large military which they shop out around the world, especially to the United Nations. Unlike Blackwater they are government soldiers who have to abide by a code of conduct because they reflect the nation itself. They are said to be very well trained and seem well regarded. All in all it seems a very interesting way to bring a human product to the world market when you are a resource poor country.

"They didn't owe me but $100, but I took $400 and set the whole damned place on fire."

Finally for something completely different THIS is a truly interesting article. It’s coming out on the heels of that intense looking American Gangster movie. The flick was based off a real person; one Frank Lucas, the Harlem Heroin kingpin. If half of what this guy says is true then his life reads something like a modern day Conan the Barbarian. Sure he was a killer and a drug lord but he also has a larger-than-life outlaw streak to him that’s hard not to admire. Great movie makers have realised that gangster stories are American Dream tales just as viable as the law-abiding ones and Frank Lucas is no exception.

Between Democracy and Religious Extremism a Military Dictator Takes His Place in History...

2007-11-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

It was June of 1979 and this debonair gent to my left; one Zbigniew Brzezinski by name, was National Security Advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Following Zbigniew’s advice President Carter ordered the C.I.A. to start secretly funding the Mujahadeen and prepare them to repel Soviet aggression. The pro-Soviet Afghan government was losing control of the nation and it was thought that they would request military support from the U.S.S.R. Brzezinski rightly believed that American covert involvement in Afghanistan would further incite the Soviets to make their move and in doing so draw them into a Vietnam-like quagmire. It worked with the Soviet military entering Afghanistan in December of 1979 and staying for over nine years before retreating in defeat. The U.S.S.R. fell shortly thereafter and while experts argue whether the campaign in Afghanistan was the death-knell for the Soviet Empire it certainly couldn’t have helped.

With the U.S.S.R. no more many European nations gained their independence and the threat for a nuclear end to the Cold War was finally averted. It is considered to be one of the greatest victories of the 21st century, a victory that heralded a new era of western power and influence. There was however a trade-off; something that Brzezinski dismissed back then as he dismisses today. What would become a radical Muslim movement gained an equally momentous victory against a superpower and this would not only embolden them but validate their cause.

Brzezinski is a brilliant strategist who played no small role in helping the U.S. achieve an even greater supremacy in the world. What you might find interesting is that he studied at McGill University in Montreal and was planning a diplomatic career in Canada before the winds of fate brought him to Harvard and from there American citizenship. I wonder how Canada would have changed with the likes of him in a similar position counselling the Prime Ministers. The prescience of Brzezinski’s genius seemed to have served him well as far as the Soviet entrapment went but beyond that it is difficult to say. Radical Islam has continued to gain strength and spread over the years. Propaganda aside the Jihad may not be a global threat to equal the Soviets but we have no way of knowing what the future truly holds in this regard, the history is of course still in the works.

This weekend however a major milestone in this unfolding drama took place.

State of Emergency Declared in Pakistan

Pakistan has basically been put under martial law. General Musharraf suspended the Constitution and fired the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This move seems to be an attempt to maintain control in the face of the growing pro-democracy opposition to his government and to fight the spreading radical Islamist influence.

White House Left Holding Their Dicks

For the Bush Administration this has resulted in a very serious situation. One of their major allies in the War on Terror has left the democratic scene despite their protests. Their influence on one of the war’s fronts may be severely diminished and the support they have given may wind up being a bad investment.

Arrests, No News, Tear Gas... The Usual

The day after a state of emergency was declared the lock-down began. Hundreds of political rivals, lawyers, and human rights activists have been detained. Television stations and international news feeds have been shut down. There is zero tolerance on the streets for protests or demonstrations. Democratic elections scheduled for this January have been indefinitely delayed.

We Love Democracy Just Not In "That Way"

Meanwhile the Bush Administration has refrained from condemning the move as they did against Myanmar last month. They have expressed disappointment but the billions of dollars in military aid that Pakistan receives will not be suspended. Unless Musharraf gets much worse it seems that a clamped down dictatorship makes for just as good an ally as an unstable democracy. At this stage it looks like they don’t have any better choice.

Pakistan has a mild and secular middle class that has permeated all levels of thought and government through the years. Perhaps that will help pull this nation back from the brink and prevent extreme action but right now this has all the necessary components to turn a nuclear power into a country consumed by chaos.

This post has no title because there is no definitive theme... You shouldn't bother looking at this part anymore... Seriously, cut it out...

2007-11-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

This picture comes from Ubisoft’s upcoming big-budget game. In it you play the pictured Altair. He’s a medieval assassin whose skills involve killing people and disappearing into crowds. Looking at him you can tell that he is not a person to be trifled with and therein lies a problem I have with videogame storytelling.

Imagine you're a guard and there are clues that a deadly assassin is afoot! Your crossbow is loaded but who is there to fire at? Who in the sea of peasantry could be the dreaded assassin? Worry not friend because sussing out the killer has become quite easy in the video game world. See that guy over there who looks really, really cool? Shoot him. Don't ask questions; just put one in his back. There is no way a normal, everyday, unthreatening person winds up looking that cool. Check the peasants around him, not nearly as cool looking, are they? No, in fact they look rather lame when put up next to this guy so really there should be no doubt. Kill the really fucking cool guy because that will be your assassin each and every time. If I was an evil tyrant in a video game I would simply execute anyone wearing metal-as-fuck armbands and crazy belts, and in doing so I would live to be a ripe old age.

Consider Mungo; he who herds sheep in the video game world. I have no picture of Mungo to show you because he is undeserving but worry not, your imagination will suffice. You can tell worthless Mungo is harmless because his serf’s rags are lame and he wears boots made out of burlap. His belt is but a piece of knotted twine and there are no daggers tucked within. If he was designed by a Japanese person he might be wearing a pot on his head and be prone to breaking out in dance. Hiding behind Mungo, however, is this impressive looking fucker who's sporting some insane leatherwork and looks as if he’s never danced or known happiness in his life. How in the video game world does a guy come to own such finery? Really there is only one answer...

He looks that bad-assed because he can kill a lot of people easily. The toughness of a person is in direct proportion to the crazy gear they sport. See the detailed embellishments on his bracers? Translated that means he can kill like ten guys in a row, so shoot him.

Shoot him in the back.

If only real life bad guys were so easy to spot.

A number of Donald Rumsfeld’s memos have been leaked. Chances are his former employees stopped being afraid of him and are cleaning out his desk if only to show the world what kind of insane fucking goober they had to work under. It seems this guy was completely consumed with image and how to manipulate it. He was a pre-internet dinosaur who vainly thought that he could still control the message despite the avalanche of facts at our disposal. The delusion of this man stems from the fact that he thought the States could be run as it was thirty years ago. The real shame is that he was allowed to do so.

Can you even say weapon of mass destruction using clicks and whistles?

Civilized nations around the world are moving to ban the use of cluster bombs. What a bunch of pussies! Most of the countries who want them banned have to import fire so of course they’re against them. I think that if you can’t invent it then you shouldn’t even have a say. Settle down there Swasiland, adults are talking, it’s big boy time. Tell me what’s so wrong with a weapon that releases a thousand other indiscriminate weapons that lay dormant until a child finds them? These things are better than land mines because you don’t have to bury them; they do all the maiming and require none of the shovel work. Israel dropped cluster bombs on the Lebanese last year so if you don’t like these horrible weapons then an argument can be made that you are in fact an Anti-Semite. You’re not an Anti-Semite are you? America loves their cluster bombs and their Jews so thankfully I don’t see these rocket propelled amputee factories going anywhere soon.

It will be just like the bible only with no god.

You know what Iraq needs, a flood! Did I say need? What I meant is gonna get. The Mosul dam is shoddy and the money that was going to go into fixing it is gone. If it breaks the city of Mosul will fall into the jurisdiction of Aquaman and parts of Baghdad will be under a dozen feet of water. Can you image some guy with flippers and a suicide vest paddling towards you? That would be pretty interesting.

Freedom and Democracy - It's super-effective!

Apparently a few hundred of them there Taliban were spotted poking around the Afghan city of Kandahar. That’s bad because Kandahar is where all the Canadian hotel journalists hang out and wait for the military to give them news on the war. When the Taliban move into a village the residents are forced to flee, not because they fear the radical Islamists but because they want to avoid getting caught in the customary NATO bombardment. Nothing like fighting the good fight eh? In other news from Kandahar the war is going super well and we are all totally awesome.

This is a totally bragible statistic...

This is Parade’s annual 20 Worst Dictators in the World list. There are some truly diabolical assholes on this list but let me break it down to you in the way you really want; 6 black dudes, 7 brown dudes, 4 yellow dudes, and 3 white dudes though one of them is named Islam so there is no fucking way he’s on my team. Not one woman tyrant was able to break the barb-wire ceiling. It’s like I always say, vagina and human suffering just don’t mix.

I'm Robert Frikken Goulet! I AM LAS VEGAS!

Robert Goulet died this week, he was 73. Mr. Goulet had a French-Canadian dad and spent some time growing up in Canada so we can lay claim to him in that desperate way that Canadians lay claim to American celebrities. His later commercial work was pretty hilarious as was Will Ferrell’s belligerent rapping impression. When he was young he looked totally different then when he was old too. I hate that about old people.

Consumption and Bowel Movements: The building blocks of the universe.

I’ve gone from vaginas to the elderly so my next logical stop will be Black Holes! These aren’t just any Black Holes either but the super-serious ones that eat suns and can fart out a planet! Check the gallery to see some beautiful pictures of space. If looking at things that are not beautiful is more your thing then the article also provides a picture of an astronomer.

Scarbee Says: First you get the pollen, then you get the nectar, then you get the women...

2007-10-30T12:40:00.000-07:00

I love extremism and so do you! Centrist philosophy and moderation is probably the key to stability and sustainability but once most humans achieve this cozy nook they tend to test the boundaries, then leap over them, and then snort whatever it is they find on the other side. Extremism is where the adventure begins, where humans discover their flaws and where the all the great dramas come to a crashing, fiery end.

Though parenting has rendered me for the most part dormant my appetite for extremism, my deep-seated belief in hedonism as a viable and worthwhile lifestyle is well-documented but of a garden-variety sort. There is a whole other domain of extremism that I dare not go lest the light of dawn find me before I’ve dragged my weary ass back over the aforementioned line. I know I'm missing something even if it's only diminishing returns. For this reason retirement is going to be something special with me for all the six or so months that I'm liable to last. Anything that gives me the fear now is going to be what my Freedom 55 is all about. My children aren't likely to receive much inheritance what with the high cost of infant pituitary glands. They'll have to find their own way like I did which is fine by me, it builds character.

I often ponder if its common sense or cowardice that causes me to pull the rip-cord with the ground still a full mile away. Whether it’s the party life or politics or insane ideologies there are levels of extremism that creates impact craters out of people’s lives and I’ll admit to being honoured when I get to bear witness. I find this kind of extreme consequence for extreme belief fascinating if only for the pendulum’s arc; the predictable path of what some have called karma. Mostly the inevitable outcome, the hammer strike of reckoning is merely the reinforcement of long-established rules but I still walk away humbled and strangely illuminated. Imagining Elvis straining on the toilet will always be my Rodin’s Thinker; it just tells me the stories that I'm always willing to hear.

The Power of Nightmares: perfect Halloween viewing!

If you’ve never watched The Power of Nightmares I highly recommend hitting the torrents. You may not agree with everything this three-part BBC documentary says but it attempts to provide the cause to many of the modern effects we feel today. I recall it now because it describes life in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union retreated; how the various mujahideen cells were prone to turn on each other and then eventually, themselves. Their extreme view of Islam would brook no variation with the end results being that groups of hardened religious warriors would annihilate their own brothers-in-arms upon the aftermath of their victory against the communist superpower.

Al Qaeda here, Al Qaeda there, Al Qaeda - Al Qaeda everywhere!

Meanwhile Pakistan is enjoying the poisonous fruits of their own brand of extremism. Whatever you think the threat of radical Islam is to western nations it pales to the blight they have become where they have been given shelter. Al Qaeda isn’t just in the remote Peshwar region of Pakistan anymore, they’ve insinuated themselves into city and suburb while they raise resources to mount increasingly larger attacks. Something like a thousand Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives fighting this menace since this War on Terror started and they have been left demoralized because a portion of the officers in power seem to condone their supposed enemies. They do so because they go way back, back to when they were allies against the Soviets. They fought the same enemy in their youth and those bonds do not easily break. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Pervez Musharraf has allowed Benazir Bhutto to return; to rally the seculars and repel the rising jihadist tide.

Guess who's coming to my big, fat gay dinner?

An extreme point of view should always be held in suspect because black and white views have through the course of history mobilized those who easily submit to authority. Is the extremist a true-believer or are they manipulating the masses for personal gain? I've always suspected that Republican mouthpiece Ann Coulter was more of a clown than a true neo-conservative. She rarely fails to vilify the purveyors of opposing views as closeted homosexuals. Imagine her embarrassment when she got caught on camera enjoying the viands at a hip gay restaurant in the heart of the West Hollywood village? Busted you might say, much like the ostrich carcass her bigoted soul is bound to. I shouldn't make fun, it must be tough having a body where the part with the widest circumference is your asshole.

Sure the ammenities suck but think about all that free intolerance!

The extremism present in Iraq’s current sectarian fault-lines is an easy example to present when running with this theme. This article goes over the transformation of a declining Baghdad burg over a period of time and the bitterness it engendered among the American troops stationed there. The picture painted is bleak indeed.

When I can afford to wire my mud hut with Alarm Force I promise to lose the rifle.

Check it out, something somewhat related to Canada! Much to no one’s shock it has been discovered that Afghans in the north are stockpiling weapons in case the Taliban return. What isn’t said is that Afghanistan has been a wild frontier for hundreds if not thousands of years and who can begrudge these people their home defence? This is where the illusions of the west collide with the realities of life over there. Any gain made by NATO forces is overshadowed by a restless enemy in the south. There are officially not enough troops to stabilize many significant regions of Afghanistan and so the Taliban operate in this area with impunity. The mission is grinding to a stall of irregular movement and sweet opium still flows from that nation unabated. This situation has all the makings of bad news waiting to happen.

Said with a Tony Montana accent: My queen bee's hive is so fucking polluted she can't have any larva.

Did the extremist trends in our society have an effect on bee population? How’s that for a half-assed tie-in? Anyway a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder is sweeping our continent and killing the bees off in droves. This might potentially have devastating effects on our agriculture. I’m not a big science fan most of the time but this article has sufficient doomy-gloomy goodness to satisfy. Plus this article made me come up with Scarbee, and he's staying. Any last words Scarbee? "Chu got a fucking problem with bee man?" HA! Good one Scarbee!

Newsflash! Religion is still a joke, believers last to get punchline.

This dense article warms my hell-bound heart. The Religious Right movement has run aground due to a marvellously failing President, the disillusionment of their flock, and the death of certain brimstone-farting blowhards. The politically-charged holy trinity of same-sex marriage, abortion, and teaching creationism as a legitimate science has begun to lose its lustre as a form of national debate and none of the current crop of Republican vote-panderers passes muster anymore. Certain heads of the American secular state are calling for the formation of a new party; a traditionalist organisation which focuses on the religious roots of America’s colonial infancy. From a strategic point of view I think the timing is certainly right. The secular big-business libertarians of the G.O.P have always been uneasy partners with the holy rollers. What with the reputation of the former being in the toilet and the latter now voting in record numbers a timely schism may change the face of American politics. This is a long-shot but if you follow these things you can see how Republican candidates have had to embrace religion and change their stance on their core issues. The likes of Guiliani and Romney are running scared and changing tack, you can see it. Who knows, maybe they’ve done the math and are trying to divert a disaster?

A full-on religious party within the U.S. would be like mana from heaven to me. A dynasty of Reverend Presidents is just what the history books need to make this epoch even crazier than it already is. A boy can dream.

Yet another video game post... Yadda yadda like having sex with my grandmother...

2007-10-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

First off I would like to thank my erstwhile editor and literary sherpa-boy Mark for improving this blog, in this particular case sussing out how to wrap news links in hypertext. As the post below clearly displays it makes for a nicer overall package, yes? Look at it from the side as well and you’ll agree the package is shaping up.

This weekend I finished playing Half-Life 2 and Episode One of the same franchise. These games and others can be found on Valve Corporation’s anthology titled The Orange Box. For the first time console gamers can experience these award-winning titles on their own terms and I highly recommend doing so. If you own a 360 or a PC then pick it up today, if you run the PS3 you’ll have to wait a bit before it’s released. Half-Life 2 has been extensively reviewed so there is no need to do so, but I will add a few quick personal impressions. In terms of design and immersion I would describe the story as flawless. Visually it’s a gorgeous game that is comparable with this year’s top titles; an impressive feat given the game was first released three years ago! Value-wise it’s a good choice as there is lots of content on this single disc.

What I like best about this series is that you play a scientist thrown into an extra-ordinary set of circumstances and the game never forgets this. Sure as in all shooter games you wind up with assault rifles and rocket launchers but the game rewards you for playing smart above all. As a brainy protagonist the game encourages you to use the environment and come up with clever ways to dispatch enemies while remaining safe. The game trains you to pick up on these environmental clues by pitting you against a number of wonderfully subtle puzzles. These involve you being presented with road-blocks or obstacles that you wind up instinctively trying to circumvent. It hits you later with an ‘oh yeah’ feeling that this is a puzzle you need to figure out in order to further advance through the game. It’s your knowledge of simple physics and where you can apply them more than your skills in gun play that will ensure your success.

I’ve gone on longer than I thought gushing about an excellent game, but maybe this can serve as a counter-point to the review I wanted to do on a demo last week. I am compelled to review this particular demo because the subject matter is near and dear to my heart. Conan the Barbarian was created by Robert E. Howard throughout the 1920’s. To me Howard was one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time. His stories were captivating, authentic, savage, decedent, and strange. He is one of the pioneers of the genre and just about everybody stole from him with good reason.

I would figure that if your game company earned the rights to make a Conan game then you basically have a license to make money if you know what you are doing. Not only do you have a stable of great characters, locations, plot-lines, and dialogue to plumb, but you can look back at all of the previous Conan-related materials (comics, movies, TV shows, more books) to see what worked and what didn’t. Robert E. Howard was above all a short-story writer. There are literally dozens of stories that you could stretch into fantastic ten or twelve hour games. There is so much time-tested creative work already done for you that a game company simply has to pick what they feel is the brightest apple from the basket and devote their time to the mechanics; to make sure Howard’s vision displays well and plays nicely. It’s not necessarily a cake-walk but it is way easier than starting from scratch and developing your own intellectual property. If you can’t make a Conan game work then simply put you suck hard and really have no business in the industry. You need to set your sites lower and slum it making convert-trawling Christian games or maybe budget math tutoring programs for worthless inner-city kids who are going to wind up selling drugs anyway.

It was Nihilistic Software who received what I see as the honour to make a Conan game. Checking their history I learned that the heads of this development team once worked for Lucas Arts dome-fucking R2D2 until the poor guy spat out code for Star Wars titles. They struck out on their own to make a White Wolf Vampire game, then an aborted Star Craft game, and finally a Marvel Superhero game. In short, these guys are parasites in that they gain the rights to use other people’s material rather than create their own. I don’t think they wooed Conan estate holders to make this game out of love or passion for the material but just saw the potential to exploit the marketability of the brand. See? This is how a shit game gets birthed and you can usually predict it by seeing the pattern in developers history. Go internet!

The demo started off with a cut scene; with piss-poor CGI and an exchange between Conan and some random sword-slut. “Would you serve a woman?” She asks. “Service a woman,” Conan replies like the spiritually dead voice actor he is, “and gladly.” She’s outraged by this cheesy tripe and yet counts the barbarian as an ally. She has to otherwise we won’t get to play the actual game but in retrospect she should have scored a point in the battle against misogyny and feathered the fucking creep with a couple arrows.

In short; Conan is absolute garbage on all fronts. Think of God of War except for one important thing, it’s not. It’s a wannabe piece of clunky and cliché-ridden trash that somehow requires a system twice as powerful to play. In fighting the generic enemies I immediately came to realize that one of my attacks would unerringly kill while preventing me from taking damage. For the rest of the ten minute demo I therefore hit that button over and over to the ruination of all. What’s even better is that the more I pressed it the more gruesome and overblown the death scenes became. There was no need for combinations or special techniques, no need to learn or become more engaged. The game rewards monotony the same as when I use to pound grandma’s vag for quarters to play Ms. Pac Man. All of this repetitious slaying is done on a preposterous two-story wooden structure that serves no purpose other than to facilitate elevators that take you from one level to the next. Elevators! Conan of Cimmeria sacked the walls of Venarium at the age of sixteen and let me tell you, he didn’t use a fucking elevator.

There is nothing in this retarded game that is intrinsically Conan or utilizes the strength of Howard’s writing. What’s more it’s a blatant and lackadaisical rip-off of successful games with none of the graphical beauty and graceful flow. Hopefully it will bomb big enough for the corporate lawyers running Nihilistic to ‘diversify their investments’ and get the fuck off my lawn with their committee-made games. Demos are to be commended because you can avoid purchases just like this one. The game just came out so we can take a look at what a mainstream reviewer had to say. Here is the closing paragraph and the rating. If you hear a munching sound while reading that is the author trying to soften up a hard turd he's been forced to swallow.

IGN: Although they say you should never judge a book by its cover, in the case of Conan you can. The box art features a gruff, six-pack-toting barbarian wielding two bloody swords, surrounded by half naked nubile women. All that's missing is a decapitated head at his feet and it would be perfect. Ultimately, Conan is game that revels in the ridiculous and it’s all the more fun because of it. There are plenty of tongue-in-cheek moments, ludicrous cartoon violence and a rather suspect plot. Thankfully, the in-depth combat system, while not as tight as God of War’s offering - is strong enough to carry you through your adventure. Throw in some great boss battles and an array of over-the-top weapons and you've a compelling package. Admittedly, Conan’s violent charms certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes but, if you’re looking for a brainless but enjoyable romp, you could do far worse than pick up this. Rating: 7.5/10

I love how couched the language is, how the game is praised with the most suspect of accolades; shit like reveling in the ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek, ludicrous, brainless as a good thing even. This paragraph is an internal battle in the writer’s mind, a battle between telling the truth and doing what he’s told. He (and I assume it’s a he) wants to tell us what he really thinks but the frontal lobe forbids it, the rent is due and meat lover’s pizza never, ever pays for itself. Seven-point-fucking-five. HA! Even the rating translations I gave last post didn't account for the sheer quantity of bullshit on this one. These people are not to be trusted.

Aliens vs. My Little Pony... One sided yes... But just think of the tie-in toys!

2007-10-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

I don’t think it will be possible for me to review a video game poorly. This is not because I give all things related to the medium a free pass but because in order to review a game properly one must play through the game, and playing poor games is quite simply unnecessary in this day and age.

Reviewers cannot be trusted. These writers are corrupted hacks, industry whores who have thoroughly skewed the system with their secret allegiance to a product provider. I should know; I’ve done the deed and cashed the cheques. You know something isn’t right just by looking at the numbers. Sevens, eights, and nines dominate the review space and nothing wrought by human hand achieves such success on a sustained basis. Ours is a species of momentary, accidental greatness.

Reviews when taken as a whole can be used as a metric. Many game sites now collect all the reviews to create an average. This is more helpful but not without knowing how to mine the data. The system is simple and I can spell it out for you briefly. The system assumes the rankings are from 1 to 10.

Six or Less: This game is an unrepentant piece of shit and you should feel no guilt in stealing it or vandalizing copies when in the store. If you are given a six-rated game by a friend then they are no longer to be trusted because this gift constitutes a serious lack of judgment. If a girlfriend or significant other gives you this game you are within your rights to find someone who looks exactly like them, fuck them mercilessly, take pictures of the event, and then hand them over to the girlfriend while thanking them for last night because it was bloody amazing, and I do mean bloody. Your mother will buy you this game.

Seven: This game has glaring flaws and/or lacks innovation but isn’t broken. It is the video game equivalent of channel-surfing and you will play it only to stave off boredom. There is a whole retail industry devoted to seven-rated games and in English we pronounce it RENTALS. It is possible to fall in love with a seven-rated game if the subject matter just happens to intersect with a topic or task that you are intensely interested in. For example, my favourite seven-rated game is “The Suffering: Prison Is Hell.” In this game you can shoot little girls in the head. They’re supposed to be the evil ghosts of little girls but the graphics are spotty and so they just look like little girls… Little girls that you get to shoot… In the head. I borrowed this game from my gamer-wife Mike years ago and I’m not returning it because mooching off my friend enhances the whole illicit experience.

Eight: This is the true passing grade for a video game. Fucked eh? Eight-rated games are the low-water mark not for excellence but mere acceptability. Little Chinese girls must score an eight in gymnastics school or else they are drowned in dark wells of ice-cold water. I wish the video game industry employed similar motivational tactics. Buying an eight-rated game at full price is a necessary evil to feed the industry.

Nine: This is your standard great fucking game. You will play this game right through two times minimum and you may even do it back to back. This is the heady cream on the top of Belgium beer. Radical Islam flourishes in the Middle East because nine-rated games are unknown to their angry and sexually frustrated youth. Wives should not speak or move ungracefully when a nine-rated game is slotted into the machine. The game would often enjoy a sandwich while running and the wife should feel free to make herself useful in that regard.

Ten: This is a nine-rated game that is being reviewed by one of the above mentioned bribe-taking hacks. The review is worth reading because within you will find reams of bullshit laid out in the most glowing of terms. Reading the lies of others does improve your own skills and so you should approach it as an educational endeavour. Ten-rated games are reviewed by the used car salesmen of the video game industry. They operate in a Glen Gary Glen Ross fog of desperation, and their fawning while pathetic, serves to expose the misery that is their celibate lives. Still this is one good fucking game and you should pick it up.

Reviews are however losing even more status than they already have because downloadable content in the form of demos is sweeping the industry. You get to play a slice of the game and form your own opinion. To that end I have currently played four-and-a-half metric shit-tons of garbage game demos and I could review one of them. I will in fact do so in my next post but right now I’m going to throw out the news items that closed off my week.

Iran defiant over US Sanctions

Sanctions Are Meant to Prevent War

Sanctions against Iran are official. Banks and business interests have been targeted, though these measures are seen as mainly symbolic given that the Iranians do little business with the U.S. This is how a run-up to an attack goes though. You get congressmen into a voting pattern so you can go back later on and coerce them to remain consistent.

U.S. considers Kurdish air strikes

The Kurds may wind up face to face with the business end of the 21st century. In order to keep Turkish forces out of Iraq the U.S. is considering the use of air strikes on the independence-seeking guerrillas. Right or wrong mean nothing in the face of air power.

Modern Ideas in the Desert

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is building a more secular university of technology with his own money because he believes the Arab world is falling behind in that regard.

$240 Million from Microsoft for Facebook

I know you kids love the Facebook. Microsoft bought a very small stake in the business for a quarter of a billion bucks. I’m amazed that advertising dollars alone can generate this kind of megalith.

Pit bulls, Miniature Horse and Cancer Boy

Finally I’m going to tell you the saddest story you’ve ever heard. One day a little boy was stricken with brain cancer. Now I’m going to tell you the nicest story you’ve ever heard. The Make-A-Wish-Foundation found the little cancer boy and gave him a miniature horse named Anniversary which made the boy very happy. Now I’m going to tell you the most terrible story you’ve ever heard. Anniversary was ripped to pieces by a pair of pit bulls! Unfortunately there was no picture accompanying this story so instead I put up a picture of the Predalien to be featured in the upcoming Aliens vs. Predator movie because that is probably what those dogs looked like to poor Anniversary as he met his gory doom. In closing I only have one more thing to say. Where is your baby Jesus now, cancer boy? He’s not in your head fixing your dying brain and he wasn’t protecting your teeny-tiny horse, so where is he?

Kids have to learn. That’s what I’m here for.

Shock the monkey at your own peril my friends... Theirs is an ideology of hate and they are now emboldened by success...

2007-10-24T10:47:00.001-07:00

My lovely wife has become Queen of the Torrents and if I can find a suitable tiara I will present it to her and further officiate the title in hopes she wears it while at the computer. She knows all the good sites and has become most proficient with all the troubleshooting required by this crooked, user-based emergent enterprise. She’s become so good that I’ve felt little impetus to learn the ins and outs myself and thus I’ve become digitally lazy. I salve my sense of guilt by convincing myself I do equal work in sussing out and bringing home all the best video games. Marriage seems to float on these day-to-day accommodations, these partitioning of tasks, with the end result being we become specialized creatures when it comes to running our own lives. My grandfather stopped eating salad after my grandmother died because he didn’t know how to make it and he couldn’t recognize the ingredients in their whole form at the supermarket. We’ve come a long way but the essence of our ignorance stemming from convenient and comfortable co-habitation still remains.

We have stolen Dora and Diego episodes for our two year old and in case you can’t gauge my mood on this I relish the misdemeanour. Fuck these two Latino overachievers who engage our youngsters with wholesome messages all while seeking to bombard them with toy and cereal advertisements. It is a grievous misuse of trust, like if you become friends with an Avon Lady and the bitch won’t keep her pink suitcase at home. With great pride I mention that thanks to piracy and the odd DVD purchase my children will never be forced to sit through a commercial. I am counting on this exclusion to result in the formation of an evolved human off-shoot, a super-being who will tear down the billboards of our forefathers and create free head space so that we may once again daydream spontaneously without having to Head On: Apply Directly to the Forehead. I would shit directly into the mouth of any person involved in those commercials before shipping them off to Nuremburg to answer for Crimes Against Humanity.

We finished watching the first season of Dexter which was perversely pleasant enough to lure me back to the cop-thriller, a genre of programming that I swore off fifteen years ago. The titular character is played by Micheal C. Hall. He carries the show easily and entertains throughout, which allows the cliché-ridden support cast to simply phone it in without thankfully breaking my concentration. They could all die and hopefully they will once they start whining for a bigger paycheque. All of them except for Masuka; Dexter’s Asian lab assistant anyway. Any guy in a shiny shirt, drink in hand, who yells out “She is going to fuck me SILLY!” is bound to appeal to the lug nuts that anchor my soul to its earthly frame. Bad-Assed African American Sergeant Doakes is worth mentioning because he’s the worst of the bunch, so bad he’s good. His constant, rapid intonation of the word ‘motherfucker’ is the antithesis of Samuel Jackson’s cool and iconic use of the explicative. Plus he flashes the Black Steel like a muscle-bound fairy; the result of Zoolander and Mr. T. having a butt-baby. My wife has taken to mock him through imitation, much to my amusement.

Okay, okay… I can’t stretch out the mediocrity of my home-bound life any longer. Here’s what I’ve been reading the past few days…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html?th&emc=th

The fires in California are out of control and half a million people have evacuated their homes. The smoke is blotting out the sun in that part of the world. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (still sounds weird) has been all over this and seeing as there are a lot of white people involved President Bush looks to be preparing a proper emergency response. In some far-away, solar-powered bank vault, naked but for his Nobel Prize, a dollar-drenched and cum-stained Al Gore (doesn’t sound weird) is laughing his ass off. Good for him I say! He’s been preaching this stuff for twenty years while the tranquil Santa Ana has transformed into Trogdor the Burninator.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100172.html?wpisrc=newsletter

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/middleeast/23kurds.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

The world is officially on crazy-pills when the Kurds are making front page news for days running. Mountain-dwelling Kurdish guerrillas are raiding both Turkey and Iran in their bid for independence. Sadly their would-be nation is utterly landlocked and they are deeply resented by those who would lose ground in the process. All of this has happened before and the Kurds wind up getting their cracks kicked every time so this might not end well.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html

This article is one of those “Iraq is about the oil” arguments but it comes with compelling numbers, as in the estimated oil reserves are worth about 30 trillion dollars! So what’s trillion here or there to get it, right? The author also goes over the enduring bases being built for long-term American troops. It makes sense to me. The Green Zone is a huge target and once the oil deals are done they don’t need to pretend to centralize the government anymore. Iraq will remain shattered and reeling for years and the U.S. need only to respond to resource-based threats from their far-off strongholds. The Deputy Minister of Iraq gave a public and absolute answer of ‘NO’ when it came to the question of permanent American bases but these guys couldn’t even get Blackwater out of their own country so I don’t think they’re going to have much better luck with the U.S. Army.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm

Monkeys are responsible for killing the Deputy Mayor of Delhi! They attacked him in force and he fell one story, later dying from his head injuries. The monkey terrorists are thought to be Hindu radicals who are calling for a return to the worship and obeisance of Hanuman; the vanaran hero of Ramayana who came to the aide of Rama by rescuing the goddess Sita and battling the Rakshasa king Ravana. (I’m not making this stuff up, some ancient priest already did!) Hanuman teaches that feces, not cricket balls should be hurled by the faithful and that simian actors get their own trailers and top billing in Bollywood. The last sighting of Hanuman was made by Guru Sathya Sai Baba back in the 1940’s so we’re about due. If you’re interested in the good guru then I’ll put up his Wikipedia link. The man’s biography reads like my 19th Level Cleric/Rogue character from a Dungeons & Dragons game I played a couple years back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Sathya_Sai_Baba

I'm the fat man at the Buffet Table of World Events...

2007-10-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

The previous rant was supposed to be my usual attempt to segue into a variety of somewhat relevant news items but in the end I didn’t bother to land the plane. I’m rather surprised that it wound up being one of my longest posts and that I had twenty times as much to say on the issue than President Bush said himself. At the end of it I was all spent and satisfied but then remembered I had a dozen news links that I originally intended to put in. I’m like that guy who buys four pornos anticipating a musky night of sexual self-exploration only to blow myself empty watching the previews. I see that porno guy a lot, every time I go to the porno shop in fact. (Editors note: He’s looking into a mirror.)

So I’m going to throw up some more links and I have to tell you it’s been a very eventful week in the world. Babies have been born, autumnal corn is all but harvested, somewhere the gentle rain soothes the brow of a weary man who has learned to love himself and in doing so, love the world… But I know you check up on me for all the bat-shit insane crazy stuff, to remind you that we are going straight to hell. So let’s go!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/world/asia/19pakistan.html?th&emc=th

Okay this is fucking horrific. Massive twin explosions turned Benazir Bhutto’s triumphant return to Pakistan after eight years of exile into a tragedy. The explosions spared the obviously-targeted former Prime Minister but killed a whopping 134 people at the time of writing and wounded around 400! If I had known that Pakistanis were so bloody hardcore I would have made way less fun of them back in public school. Do you think Pakistan’s covert agency (the I.S.I.) was behind it? Bhutto’s husband seems to think so. It seems a by-gone conclusion that Bhutto will sweep the upcoming elections and do everything in her power to turn Pakistan once again into a democracy. President - slash - General Pervez Musharraf stands to lose a lot of power and authority if the country changes direction so the motive is certainly there. All in all this was a truly epic event. Check the slideshow in the article, the pictures are something else.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101700967.html?wpisrc=newsletter

The Turkish government authorized its military to move into Iraq and deal with Kurdish separatists who have been targeting their soldiers and civilians. Really they had no choice; something strong had to be done in order to save face. Consider that last summer Israel had just two soldiers kidnapped and they replied by killing around 1,000 Lebanese. The Kurds stoned one of their own kind - a young girl no less - just for getting engaged to a Sunni, and how did the Sunnis respond? They killed around 500 people with truck bombs just for disrespecting them like that. Turkey has lost something like 31 people in the last two weeks including 13 servicemen. They have to come back hard or look weak. The Turks have crossed into northern Iraq many times in the past but never while the U.S. was minding the store. The military’s authorization will last for a full year so they might take their time on enacting their payback.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/washington/14weapons.html?th&emc=th

It appears that Israel’s target in the Syrian strike was indeed a nuclear plant being constructed. I’ve heard from other sources that the Syrians have abandoned the construction site and that North Korean consultants were killed in the attack. Contrary to the Iran situation I can’t blame Israel for striking a clandestine nuclear project that the I.A.E.A. knew nothing about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/world/asia/14china.html?th&emc=th

In environmental news China has a lake that’s green and gross. There was a guy saying “Excuse me, but our lakes are becoming green and gross,” so they tossed him in jail. This is why I think China’s new rise to power is a paper dragon. The people who are passionate about sustainability and preventing long-term disaster are silenced so in the end every possible bad thing that can happen to them, will happen to them.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency

Here’s what might happen to us though. This is a projection of what our lives might be reduced to with the disappearance of cheap oil. It’s very compelling but extremely bleak as well. Black gold hit 90 dollars a barrel today. I’ve already started wringing my hair out for fuel.

http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071017/FOREIGN/110170057/1003

This is just a quick update on the Iraq/Blackwater incident. C.E.O. Erik Price said that he will not allow his mercenaries to be tried in Iraqi courts. Remember that Iraq is supposed to be a sovereign nation and this fucker is nothing but a greasy businessman. He says that Iraq lacks the capability to provide fair courts but I think that might have something to do with the fact that Blackwater has ensured Iraq remain lawless by constantly barreling down the streets shooting and killing civilians. It’s sickening how these war-profiteers never realise that they are part of the problem.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/15/AR2007101500841.html

Similar in tone to the soldiers writing about the Iraq War, here is another one penned by a large number of officers. Again compare their thoughts with those of General Petraeus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/world/middleeast/17iran.html?th&emc=th

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702241.html?wpisrc=newsletter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802456.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Finally I have a trio of articles on Russian President Vladimir Putin. This guy, he’s fucking golden. Sure he’s a shadowy, former K.G.B. autocratic with blood on his hands but you can’t help but admire how FUCKING EFFECTIVE he is. This man hasn’t made a misstep in years. His detractors are winding up dead all over the world, one of them by nuclear-frikken-poison! He seized Russia’s oil interests from the oligarchs at the perfect time to fill the nation’s coffers. He bitch slaps Condoleeza Rice anytime he feels like it because the poor half-orc just can’t keep up – the last time was to derail U.S. backed missile defense programs in Europe. Now he’s siding with Iran and is telling the U.S. they should back off. Best of all however is he adopted Franklin Delano Roosevelt of all people as an ideological role model. Brilliant! Beloved President Roosevelt served beyond his two terms you see, and America at the time endorsed it. Putin looks to do the same thing. Talk is that he will become Prime Minister and control the country from there, sighting his love for an American hero while doing it. I’m getting both misty and moist! Bush was so wrong on this guy. Way back he claimed to “look him in the eye” and see his soul and all that bullshit. Now he’s claiming that democracy might not be in “Russian’s D.N.A.” which not only sounds ridiculous but is contrary to his previous talking point that people the world over crave democracy and that America is the tube of Pringles that is sure to satisfy.

Hulk Smash!!! Oh wait, car not paid for, insurance go up? Hulk put down, please excuse Hulk...

2007-10-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

Like all great swear words the age-old term asshole has more than one grammatical usage. Using asshole as an adjective is a household favourite and speaking from experience I can tell you it will alter the dynamic of any encounter. The actual meaning of the word in this context is something that has never been demanded of me. You call someone an asshole and you are not likely to be questioned on whether your choice of wordage is apt, rather you’re going to take shit for having the temerity to point out the obvious. This is telling. Random House explains that an asshole in the adjective sense is a person who is stupid, mean, and contemptible. Perfect! I mean it just fits, doesn’t it? As soon as I looked it up it felt like I was slipping into my favourite pair of underwear and I didn’t even need to adjust my balls because they dropped into completely snug positioning on their own. It’s also the reason why you never get called on the veracity of vilifying someone as an asshole, it always fits snugly too. We’ve all been stupid, mean, and contemptible in our lives and chances are you’ve just come back from a meeting with some asshole or are reading this before you engage in yet another merry, assholic foray.

Our capacity to become assholes stems from the fact that we can become thoughtless and inconsiderate, usually when we are tired and cranky. I would argue that many of our flaws stem from our energy levels and therefore the inherit limits of our biology. Of course I’m talking about normal, thoughtful, considerate people who slide into assholism after a bad day or series of unfortunate events. There are those among us who are both stupid and mean by disposition but you can identify and thus avoid them based on their proficiency with a banjo. The third kind of asshole is the conscious one and I’ll admit to having worn this ass-hat on occasion. Sometimes people require that special kind of motivation that is fuelled by shame and sometimes people need to be confronted with their fear of suddenly finding themselves in a volatile situation. Being an asshole in public creates a ripple effect; it re-aligns those caught in the ass-water wake. One time long ago at a party a buddy of mine fell for this blonde but didn’t know how to approach her. I stepped up and started acting like an asshole. She became offended of course but within ten minutes she and my friend were chatting about the incident and they wound up dating all summer. See? I use my powers for good when they're not already sold to highest bidder!

This George W. Bush, I’ve had my eye on him and I’m sorry to report that this guy is a total fucking asshole. What he did this time was basically warn the world at large that if we want to avoid World War III then we should prevent Iran from obtaining the knowledge to make nuclear weapons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/washington/17cnd-prexy.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1192680918-ICentOgbRzijzoDGGZGR4A&oref=slogin

What’s left to ponder is how he came to this assholic state? Is he tired and cranky and prone to slips in the autumn of his second term because of how unpopular he’s become? I don’t think so. When you stand before the press to take questions you need to bring out your A Game, you make sure you’re rested and focused because any gaffs are going to make front page news (case in point.) Did George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara sire a little asshole? Again I don’t think so. Dubya makes friends easily and has a history of disarming his critics. I don’t think you can become the President of the United States as a full-blown asshole, that’s the kind of guy Canadians tend to elect. In America a sunny and charismatic attitude is not just necessary but it’s really all you need. That leaves my third option; this guy chooses to be an asshole. Now incidentally the term dickhead is described as a person who is foolish, inept, and again contemptible. That’s Bush II to a fucking tee! He’s a bone-deep dickhead who chooses to be an asshole when he thinks it suits him. That’s were it gets funny, because he’s stupid he often miscalculates so he winds up being an asshole for no good reason.

I’m going to bang out some quick facts and then we’ll get back to this asshole. First is that Iran has no nuclear weapons, not one. Second is the I.A.E.A., who monitors Iran’s nuclear operations on behalf of the U.N., have found no evidence of a weapons program. Third is that as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is legally entitled to engage in civilian nuclear power programs. Fourth is that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, for all his assholic and bellicose behaviour, has no control over Iran’s military and does not possess the authority to call in a military strike, nuclear or otherwise. His is a civilian position.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/10/19/bush_iran/

Every sane person out there is calling for dialogue, for talks and for diplomacy. If you’re going to engage North Korea and if you’re going to call Pakistan an ally then there is no reason why Iran - warts and all - cannot receive overtures of statesmanship. Oh but wait, there is one reason; the States is being lead by an asshole. The facts mean nothing to this man and he is once again invoking the spectre of weapons that don’t exist and pointing to a powerless boogieman to justify a future military campaign.

You can bandy about that World War III wise-crack any way you like but in the end it still comes out as a political piece of shit. Bush apologists are claiming that George is being merely prophetic; that Israel won’t allow Iran to go nuclear. Let us remember that Israel’s military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, owe their life to the U.S. Do you not think that if you help a country develop weapons then you are obligated to use your leverage to ensure they are only used as a deterrent, for defensive purposes only? We see that even ethically challenged governments like China pull back on the reigns of their subordinate North Korea when things get a little too heated. If Israel is indeed going to bomb Iran then what Bush is actually saying is that they are willing to let their dog off the leash and they won’t be held responsible. Only a true asshole would do that, an asshole with a pit bull, and honestly the pit bull is the Official Canine of the Asshole so I am batting a thousand with my allegories on this one.

Another talking point is that a nuclear Iran will destabilize the region and THAT is what will cause World War III… somehow. This is a conniving notion. Listen, if war breaks out in the Middle East over this issue then only Israel will be the one to start it. You think Turkey or Saudi Arabia thinks this is worth fighting over? If Iran retaliates against Israel then America is jumping right the fuck in. Once Iran (and more particularly its precious oil infrastructure) starts catching fire then Russia and China will quickly move into a protective posture around their energy ally. That is what would classify the campaign as World War III. If you run the country that is most likely to expand a regional conflict into World War III and in a press conference you warn people about the potential for the End of the Trilogy if things don’t go your way, then what the fuck else is that other than a veiled threat? And who makes veiled threats? That’s right, assholes and my dad. Hey! My dad is no asshole but its true his warnings did sound like veiled threats. He was right though, they didn’t like it once they made him angry. Nobody likes it when he gets angry.

It’s evident that President Bush is ideologically corrupt and intellectually bereft when he shoots off his mouth like this. What’s sad is that political experts are saying that nothing can really be done, that both America and the world have to wait out the term before there is a change in policy. What's worse is that Congress and the Senate cannot stop an order to bomb even if they wanted to. Until then we just have to hope that this asshole doesn’t start another war in the next year. To me that is a definition of insanity itself.

It is the DOOM of men that they forget...

2007-10-16T09:37:00.001-07:00

The above title is a quote from the 1981 movie ‘Excalibur’ as delivered by Nicol Williamson in his off-beat but effective portrayal of Merlin the Magician. Ironically it stuck with me and I have never forgotten it, nor have I failed to use it when I wish to sound both wise and ominous. Memory is one of those universal subjects of fascination among humans which explains why it not only figures heavily in psychology and studies of the brain but in our art and entertainment as well. Gaining, losing, or viewing memory is a plot device used with such common frequency in storytelling that we barely recognize when we’re exposed to it. Our minds have been trained to transition through time and space seamlessly when following the thread of a particular story.

Memory is of course instrumental when conceiving the passage of time and taken to a further extent, reality itself. If we have forgotten something then how real was the experience in the first place? How many moments have we lived through that wind up having a minimal or negligible effect on us because we lack the ability to store everything we may or may not have done? Do we actually forget more than we remember? If that is the case and if you believe that our subconscious somehow accounts for our unremembered events then might we not be a species formed more from our forgetfulness than our remembrance? What then of a made-up memory? Can remembering a lie have a deeper effect on our development than forgetting the truth?

Hmm… Marijuana…

Myanmar has probably slipped from memory though its mere mention might reactivate and recall what has recently gone on there. It hasn’t stopped, though it being out of front page news might cause one to think that there is stasis or inactivity in that beautiful but benighted part of the world. I’ll admit to feeling that way at least. Sadly it isn’t so.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=484903

This report claims that around 200 people have been killed and 6,000 detained. Let’s be clear however, those 6,000 detained are basically at death’s door what with horrid prison conditions, forced labour camps, and the tender mercies of an enforcement establishment with a penchant for firing into crowds in broad daylight. Monk corpses are being found in the surrounding jungles.

http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSN28447581

A science organization with access to satellite imagery has tracked not only the eradication of several Burmese villages but what seems to be the forced relocation of even more people. Bush clearing on a mass scale indicates that camps may be being created to accommodate a large migration of people.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,511710,00.html

There is no question that the ruling junta is unpopular, so how can they carry on? It stands to reason that so long as they are swimming in cash they may act with impunity. And so we learn that 90% of the world’s rubies hail from Myanmar. “Fiery Gems from a Fairytale World!” so the advertisements go. Lovely.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/10/16/armenian_genocide/index2.html

Here’s a few more stories for the memory books. I for one am really, really tired of the “Inconvenient Truth” slogan being used to describe everything from Hillary Clinton potentially winning the Democratic nomination to my eventual dependence on bladder control undergarments but that aside this is a very good article on that whole Armenian genocide thing. The motive as to why the Ottomans would have wiped out up to 1.5 million Christians is explained. What's not is the motive of congress to vote on this.

Pure speculation but this might be a way for the Democratic congress to undermine the war in Iraq rather than take the more politically dangerous route of cutting funding. If Turkey wouldn't allow the U.S. to move supplies through their ports then the war effort would have a serious logistical challenge on their hands. Furthermore if Turkey is emboldened by a shaky alliance to move into Kurdish Iraq as they want to then there would be another outbreak of violence. I wouldn't be surprised if the Democratic party desired and even pursued an agenda that would ensure bad news to continue pouring out of Iraq up until the 2008 election. Cynical? Yes. Tinfoil hat crazy even? Yes. I'm just throwing it out there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/15/AR2007101501494.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Steve Rogers; the original Captain America died not too long ago in a very politically-charged story, gunned down on the steps of a courthouse where he was prepared to submit his secret identity. His death was as much of a statement regarding the modern American identity as it was a money grab to sell ultra-collectible comics. He will be replaced – by whom in the Marvel universe is a closely guarded secret – but the new/old costume has been revealed. The re-addition of a handgun has lowered the jaws of some but again I think this to be another spot of social commentary couched in a bit of “Malibu Stacy with a New Hat” style of marketing. Let’s hope it’s a super gun that gives bullets the ability to change course mid-shot. Then maybe the Captain can go back in time and unwittingly fire on John F. Kennedy, thus confirming the Magic Bullet theory. Ooh! Good thing I have Stan Lee on speed-dial!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/science/16dig.html?th&emc=th

Finally in something more archaeological than political there is a massive dig going on right now in Hanoi to fully uncover the thousand year old palaces of the Great Viet; Bronze Age founders of North Viet Nam! Their symbols were both the dragon AND the phoenix which in ancient times stood for Twice the Awesome!