Hopelessly Outdated Video Game Review - Star Wars: Force Unleashed

As a die-hard fan of the Star Wars Universe, the recent prequels/Clone Wars installments are rather tricky grounds for me. And by tricky, I mean: I hates them. I'll freely admit that way back in 1999 I stood in line not once but twice to see Episode I, and I'll maintain to this day that the Jedi-Jedi-Sith lightsaber threesome at the climax of that movie is one of the best-choreographed pieces of filmed combat in recent history, if not ever. But in general the newer Star Wars related material has ranged from forgettable to downright awful, and I don't have to expound on how sadly George Lucas has let his legacy slip through his fingers.

My feelings towards the new trilogy have surprisingly not left me cold towards anything not related to the original trilogy. I still think Shadows of the Empire has its merits: it's the only one of the six extra-trilogy related novels I've read (five traditional, one graphic) that I can still remember anything about - although that's probably mostly thanks to the revolutionary N64 video game. And I have little to no problem with material whose subject matter falls squarely between the trilogies. Such is the case with Star Wars: Force Unleashed.


I happened upon Force Unleashed purely by accident. I had been unable to locate a necessary piece for my Halloween costume at my local Toys R Us Express, and decided to console myself with a bargain-bin video game. I knew almost nothing about the game at the time of purchase: I hadn't even heard of it, and some quick smartphone research showed that it was only the fastest selling Star Wars video game of all time and that it had won some kind of award for its compelling story. So I scuttled out from the rock under which I had been living for the past 3-5 years, and bought a copy for my Wii.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Now That’s What I Call Surfing Edition

With every holiday (or consumerist fabrication of one), comes one of Steam’s heralded sales.  The digital distributor is famous for its “Everything Must Go (Even Though We Have Infinite Storage Space So It Doesn’t Really Matter)” mentality during sale season, so it’s not uncommon to find large bundles of games at prices low enough for Price Is Right victory.  Ever wanted more copies of Half-Life 2 than you’ll ever need for less than twenty bucks?  Tune into last Friday.

Indie games generally do extremely well, especially community favorites like Audiosurf.  Thanks to last weekend’s Indie Music pack, there’s bound to be a slew of new players.  Welcome to anyone who might be reading for the first time!

To get this week’s new players acclimated, Radio features four of the past year’s best rides, curated for their quality and variety.  Somniaferum, King Richard’s Sunday Best, Viy, and Aleksey Chistilin all return with a track each. 

I’ve gone back through the “This Week…” archives and pulled my thoughts on each song.  Two of them even earned song of the week honors!  Hit the jump to find out just what kinds of music Audiosurf is capable of making fun.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 84 - Black Sabbath

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

I spent last week being thankful for all sorts of things. Thankful for the ability to listen to my entire music library even while flying at 30,000 feet. Thankful for Amazon extending Black Friday for an entire week, and selling music at ridiculously low prices. Thankful for the public library to offer me lots of music for free (well, I guess I do pay taxes, but at my income they're marginal at most), and thankful for Grooveshark and Youtube being there to fill in what my iTunes and the library don't have.

I was so busy being thankful that my post is a little late this week. But thankfully, I've finally found time to get it done. Am I thankful for Black Sabbath? Keep reading to find out.

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A Decade of Dreck #36: Thr3e

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

Hey! Remember "7even" (pronounced "seven-even")? Wasn't that a good movie?

Serial killers: they're overdone. There are way too many serial killer movies out there. They're hackneyed, played out, cliched, et cetera. I would wager to guess that there have been more films about serial killers than there have been victims of serial killers, and keep in mind that a serial killer by definition has killed multiple people.

A central plot point of the amazing film Adaptation was that Charlie Kaufman's (Nicolas Cage) twin brother Donald (Nicolas Cage) was writing a screenplay of his own, a by-the-numbers thriller about a serial killer who is actually the split-personality of the detective trying to stop him. I can't believe it but that fake film-within-the-film exists and it is called Thr3e.

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After the Jump: Sensual Feedback

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!

We’re back with another podcast! Craig, Rob and myself all finally managed to get our schedules to align, and so the lineup is back to “normal” for the first time in several weeks. I could look up the exact number of weeks but I won’t.

This week, our ever-rambling conversation covers Disney princesses, virtual therapy, Black Friday, TSA security-flouting undies, and way more!

Enjoy! See you next week.

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Sunday Reading: The Dancing Plague of 1518

Do you like dancing?  I do, and I bet even perennial wallflowers bop their heads to “Single Ladies” in the car. 

But what if you couldn’t stop?  And what if your dancing caused other people to dance, one by one, until your entire town was swept up in some sort of Fossy-like hell, condemned to death by rhythmic gyration?

Almost five hundred years ago, such an affliction struck the French town of Strasbourg.  Reports suggest nearly 400 people succumbed to the “disease,” with many dying from heart attack or exhaustion.  The cause remains unknown, though John Waller , in his 2008 book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, argues that a mass psychogenic illness is the most likely candidate.  This MPI could have been brought on by preceding years of intense hardship and distress, which manifested as spiritual despair strong enough to move hundreds of people to involuntary bumping and grinding.

Spontaneous, irrepressible dancing is not the only form of mass hysteria.  A Discovery News piece run just in time for Waller’s book explains koro – “an irrational male fear that one's genitals have been stolen or are fatally shrinking into the body” – as well as the freaky Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962:

“Triggered by a joke among students at a Tanzania boarding school, young girls began to laugh uncontrollably. At first there were spurts of laughter, which extended to hours and then days.

The victims, virtually all female, suffered pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes and crying attacks, all related to the hysterical laughter. Proving the old adage that laughter can be contagious, the epidemic spread to the parents of the students as well as to other schools and surrounding villages.

Eighteen months passed before the laughter epidemic ended.”

Laughing to death?  Uncontrollable dancing?  How am I ever to have good times again with the knowledge that enjoying myself can kill me?

Thanks to Jim Rossignol over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun for sharing this.

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Saturday Morning TV: Cookie Monster’s SNL Bid

The Monster Gaga gag is blowing my mind.

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Special Black Friday Post: The Joys of SkyMall

By the time you're reading this, the chance to capitalize on those elusive Black Friday sales has already gone. Assuming that you haven't been trampled to death in the mad dash of consumerism, you might still be wondering what you're going to get your loved ones for the holidays. Christmas is less than a month away, after all.

Thankfully, while flying to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, I had plenty of time to peruse possible gifts. If you'll be flying over the holidays, there's a good chance that you'll be doing the same thing. I'm referring, of course, to SkyMall, that publication stuffed in the back of every seat on the plane. It's guaranteed to be better written and more interesting than the in-flight magazine, and there's plenty of possible gifts that you won't find anywhere else. 

With nothing else to do on the flight north, I took it upon myself to construct the official Charge Shot!!! SkyMall gift guide for the holidays. Sure, you could get your loved one a Kindle for cheap, but why select such a cliched, thoughtless gift when a real sextant is available for only a few dollars more?

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Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, or Oh Dear God The Ghosts!

As video game characters go, few are older and more recognizable than Pac-Man.  The yellow pellet-eater’s predates Mario, Sonic, Mega Man and more.  At 30, he’s old enough to be Call of Duty’s father (assuming he and the missus settled down a little early).  He’s been the perennial pursuit of world-record seekers, and knowing the story of his almost-offensive name is an easy way for nerds to establish arcade cred.

It’s unfortunate, then, that this living legacy’s name was tarnished by unfortunate forays into the third dimension.  As so many developers do, Namco lost track of what made Pac-Man great: his hunger.  He’s not a platforming hero.  He’s a pizza-shaped thing out to consume dots whilst avoiding the perilous touch of nearby ghosts.  That hunger for dots merges seamlessly with the player’s desire for points.  It’s kismet. 

Thankfully for Pac-Man, the age of the high score is back.  Achievements renewed our latent obsession with points.  Online connectivity and integrated friends lists has replaced the cabinet-specific leaderboards of arcades past.  The downloadable market is rife with small titles developed around such score-based competition.

Namco helped usher in this retro trend with 2005’s Pac-Man Championship Edition.  Their newest incarnation of Pac, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, flips the formula on its head while still keeping the action focused on the only thing that ever mattered in the first place: eating ghosts.

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Apple's iOS 4.2, In Brief

That updates to Apple's iOS, the software that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, are becoming both more frequent and more interesting than updates to its Mac OS is unsurprising. The company's core Mac business remains steady, but mobile devices are where the real money is.

To that end, Apple released iOS 4.2 earlier this week, an update responsible most notably for bringing iOS 4 features to the still-popular (and still-peerless, in the most literal sense of the word) iPad. For more information on what this entails, read my write-up on iOS 4 and its first major patch.

iPhone and iPod users, there's simply not much here to get excited about. Two major new features come with this release, neither of which should drastically alter how you use the device: the first, AirPlay, is an extension of iTunes' music sharing feature that allows your iThing to stream video or audio to your Apple TV, or to AirPlay-enabled speakers.

The second, AirPrint, was supposed to bring printing support to your device, but it was inexplicably crippled in the eleventh hour for as-yet-unexplained reasons. Instead of allowing printing to any printer connected to a computer on your wireless network, AirPrint as shipped can only print to a dinky list of recent HP printers with the feature built-in. We can only hope that the non-sucky version of this feature is revived and built back into the OS soon.

Notably, iPhone 3G users are missing most of these features. In exchange, they should see some modest speed improvements, Apple's latest effort to remedy what some would deem a lawsuit-worthy problem with the original iOS 4 release. Myself, I think that while Apple certainly wants you to buy a new phone, the iPhone 3G-iOS 4 fiasco was less the product of malicious intent and more the result of poor optimization and Apple's historic lack of interest in yesterday's products.

For iPad users, the software is more exciting - the ability to have multiple programs running at once makes the tablet a much more plausible replacement for a traditional computer, and the new Mail app is the only email program on Earth that I actually sometimes prefer to the regular Gmail interface. To say that iOS 4.2 makes the iPad feel like an entirely different device is stretching it a little bit, but it's not far from the truth.

So! Fire up iTunes and download the latest software update for your thingy! And then tell us how it makes you feel in the Comments section. And also happy Thanksgiving. (For those of you outside the US, happy regular day). Continue...

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is a special holiday to me.  I find it to be an excellent opportunity to, in addition to giving thanks, focus on self reflection and contemplation (The post-dinner sluggishness lends itself particularly well to deep thought...one cannot think on an empty stomach).  It is a time, unlike the winter holidays, where the only "present" we receive is spending time with family and friends.

In the spirit of the holiday, I would like to continue to preach an idea I have been discussing recently on this blog: technological moderation.  Thanksgiving is indeed a perfect time for us to try and take a little vacation from our technological tethers.

To be clear, I am not talking about rejecting all modern convenience.  As far as I can tell, it is the internet, and in particular the social internet, which fetters and restrains us.  Some may get nervous without their cell phones for too long (I have been keeping mine on-my-person but switched off more and more lately), but too many people seem to compulsively check and re-recheck email, Facebook and other social networking sites  - on phones, lap-tops, video game consoles, tablets...etc.

A friend of mine recently attended an event wherein Arianna Huffington (editor in chief of the Huffington Post) spoke about how we can use technology and the social internet to address important issues of social rights.  On a side-note, she asked if people in the audience sleep next to their phones and computers (guilty).  She recommended that people strongly consider allowing themselves the nightly break from the seemingly endless stimuli that flows freely through smart-phones and lap-tops.

Although I would find it incredibly difficult to follow her advice, I appreciate the noble sentiment.  Huffington's recommendation may be a bit extreme, nevertheless we can give ourselves holidays from technology.  We can turn our phones and computers off on Thursday (or longer throughout the weekend if you want!?!), allowing us to actually give thanks for everything in the real world.

As it happens, I think we (collectively as passionate internet users) need this "vacation," and many more like it.  We have to remind ourselves of the feeling of real social interaction, the wonder of the real world, and most importantly, the appreciation that the social internet is a tool that does not rule our lives.

And, as the old adage goes, "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Indeed our vacations from the social internet will only make us love and want it more.

So please, have a happy and fulfilling Thanksgiving...eat, drink, talk, and celebrate too much, and give yourself a much needed break from your iPhone. Continue...

Music Review: Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

You wouldn't hesitate to call Kanye West a narcissist, an egomaniac, a douchebag, or just stone-cold crazy. But would you call him a bad guy? I don't mean "bad guy" as in "villain"; that's a role Kanye's been more than willing to play, time and again. He revels in it all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ("I thought I was the asshole") and on a number of his G.O.O.D. Friday tracks: "I figured out I'm not a nice guy/Shook hands, kissed babies/Gave it a nice try." But to call him a truly "bad man," an amoral rock star in the vein of Ginger Baker or Lemmy Kilmister? That's a different question altogether.

Kanye's new album is an expansive, galaxy-conquering masterpiece, a feat of wild musical and lyrical experimentation that is without precedent in Kanye's own catalog or, indeed, rap's entire canon. It is his best album since Late Registration and maybe of his whole career. And, I think, it's pretty convincing evidence that his heart, if not his mouth, is in the right place.

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Iraq TV: Watching the YouTube War

I remember watching an iridescent string of pearls lace across a deep, velvety night sky. This is war? I thought. War is pretty.

It was 1990, I was 5 years old, and American bombers were pounding Baghdad with smart bombs in the concussive opening of Operation: Desert Storm. The American public watched it all unfold on CNN.

During the Gulf War, nearly all photos and videos came from the national media. When Americans returned to Iraq in 2003, more than a decade of breakneck technological development had passed. Soldiers now rode into battle with digital cameras the size of cigarette packs, each capable of taking high-resolution stills and full-motion videos. Boots-on-the-ground access to the Iraq War can be achieved with a few keystrokes: youtube.com.

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A Wallet is a Wallet is a Wallet...

Last week, while traveling for work, I lost my wallet. It must have happened while getting out of a taxi cab - something I've done many dozens of time for work and/or pleasure - because the next morning I noticed that my wallet was nowhere to be found. If there's a silver lining, it's that I literally took the last remaining bills out of my wallet to pay the taximan, so I didn't lose any cash in the affair. But, as you can imagine, the hassle and anxiety are ongoing.

How could I have failed so epically at such a simple every day task as keeping track of perhaps my most important possession? Some might argue there are cosmic reasons. Last week, on this website, I talked bad about a good thing. That Wikipedia Guy is a total genius and a national treasure, so what business do I have voicing my opinion on the way he chooses to fund his enterprise? Sure he looks like a goof in those banners, but everybody needs bandwidth, do you know what I am saying?

So let this post act as an humble supplication to the Great Awesome Power of the Internet and an apology for publishing harsh words against one of its favorite sons. As will be evident, my contrition is genuine, although the punishment was just and fair in thine eyes. And who knows: if some of my fortune was somehow mystically reversed, I might find it in my heart to make a donation.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – French Cherub Edition

Audiosurf is keeping it light this week with only two songs.  No need to gorge yourself on visualized song rollercoasters what with Turkey Day right around the corner, I suppose.

Kicking things off is Josh Woodward, an Ohio-born indie rocker whom I’ve written about twice before.  His style is eclectic and ranged, dubbing yourself an “acoustic rocker” means almost anything falls under your purview.  Woodward’s new album “Ashes” came out recently, and he’s offering it for free at his website.  Should you prefer your music a little more physical, you can, of course, purchase one of those CD-things your older siblings keep talking about. 

Chriss Onac is a contemporary French composer whose work I’ve also covered before on Radio.  It’s all strings this time, so the traffic could either be amazing or amazingly bland. 

Let’s see what happens after the jump.

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A Decade of Dreck #35- Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

As a doughy intellectual, I make it my business to have at least a basic understanding of and appreciation for the working class. Call it middle class liberal guilt but I've always believed myself to share a common bond with the American working man; for instance, I listen to Bruce Springsteen! However my knowledge of the activities and pastimes of Joe Sixpack remain limited; all I've been able to glean so far is that they enjoy drinking Victory Gin, digging foundation pits, and partaking in the comedic exploits of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

This of course brings me to today's feature, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. Even out-of-touch ivory tower types such as myself know of funnyman Daniel Lawrence Whitney's eponymous alter-ego, a sleeveless good ol' boy with a disdain for the manners of polite society, as the flagship act of the Blue Collar Comedy phenomenon. Like his comrades-in-arms, Larry's comedy is based around the worldview of the down home redneck, the type who drinks PBR, says what's on his mind, and drives a big ol' truck. I was sincerely hoping my years of liberal arts prejudice would have ended with some sort of realization that the comedic stylings of Larry the Cable Guy were in fact some sort of beautiful reflection of the life of the working man.

Boy, were my hopes ever dashed.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 83: Devo

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

At the risk of pointing out something that everyone else figured out decades ago, Devo is weird. 

I mean, their music is strange enough, with the piercing electronic instruments and the jerky vocals. But this week I also started watching a bunch of the band's old music videos, where things get really trippy. The video that launched the group to success - The Truth About Devolution - features two men in gorilla masks hitting a woman's butt with ping-pong paddles, and a strange sequence where Mark Mothersbaugh sings "Jocko Homo" to a riotous college classroom. It's not uncommon for members of the band to be wearing weird masks - the eerie "Booji Boy" is the most famous, but there are others, masks that are melting, masks with one eye, masks that help the band assume their "Mongoloid" appearance.

These early videos don't make a whole lot of sense, but somehow they feel fresh. Devo started with a bunch of art students in Ohio getting mad at the Kent State shootings, and they put together music, videos and costumes to mock the "devolution" of mankind. I won't pretend that their art is ideologically coherent in any sense, but there's the general feeling that the band is satirizing the mechanization and dumbing-down of human society. 

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After the Jump: The Good Gatsby

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!

There’s a new podcast up! Surely you people know what that means by now.

This week, we talk about Facebook email, Abraham Lincoln, The Great Gatsby, the OnLive Microconsole, and more!

Enjoy, and see you next week!

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Sunday Reading: The Hipster in the Mirror

The hipster.  Is there a more universally-derided yet barely definable term? It’s easy to say, “Oh you wear oversized glasses and skinny jeans, so you’re a hipster” or “Get your six-pack of PBR and your Sufjan vinyls off my porch, hipster!”  But are these people automatically hipsters?  Or is it a self-fulfilling thing?  Are hipsters only hipsters because we dub them so?

And why do we take the time and effort to label them as such?  Why do we scoff at their style, their music, their beards?  It’s their taste versus yours.  Should it really provoke such ire?

Mark Greif recently posed these questions in a New York Times essay entitled “The Hipster in the Mirror.”  What excited Greif more than the actual responses to a survey conducted about hipster was the trepidation and anxiety with which people participated at all:

“When we announced a public debate on hipsterism, I received e-mail messages both furious and plaintive. Normally inquisitive people protested that there could be no answer and no definition. Maybe hipsters didn’t exist! The responses were more impassioned than those we’d had in our discussions on health care, young conservatives and feminism. And perfectly blameless individuals began flagellating themselves: ‘Am I a hipster?’”

He sees the hipster rage as a sort of territorial battle, flamed by various socioeconomic conditions and perceptions similar to those outlined in Pierre Bourdieu’s 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.  Greif claims that “Bourdieu’s innovation, applicable here, was to look beyond the traditional trappings of rich or poor to see battles of symbols (like [hipster] boots and hats) traversing all society, reinforcing the class structure just as money did.”

Bourdieu’s deconstruction of twentieth-century French tastes and stereotypes aligns pretty well with the current “What’s the deal with hipsters?” conversation.  But why does the conversation exist at all?  Writes Greif: “The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff.”

I hate it when people force me to confront flaws in my worldview.  I hate it because they’re usually right.

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Saturday Morning TV: English 50 Cent is In Da Club

“I am completely equipped to provide you with pepper.”

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Book Review: Bill Carter - The War For Late Night

Last February, back when the Leno-O'Brien late night wars had reached their vitriolic peak, I reviewed Bill Carter's 1995 book The Late Shift, which chronicled the feud between Jay Leno and David Letterman over The Tonight Show. Many television critics cited this book as a seminal work of late-night television history during the 2010 Tonight Show debacle, so it makes complete sense that Bill Carter has returned with what amounts to a sequel: The War for Late Night. 

Like all good sequels, there's a returning cast of central characters as well as some new faces. Leno, Letterman and O'Brien are back, but the late night time slots have since been crowded with characters like Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Fallon - and those two guys on Comedy Central. In some respects, Carter's book is about the battle between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien for the privilege of hosting The Tonight Show, but in a larger sense it tackles the changing world of late night television, and the radically different tastes of the younger generation of television viewers. 

The Late Shift chronicled Conan's awkward rise from a nerdy, pale-skinned comedy writer to the host of Late Night, a meteoric ascent that surprised even those who supported him. The War for Late Night finds Conan far more popular, far more confident in his comedic abilities, and far more demanding. 

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Sonic Adventure, or Racing to the Bottom

I’ve never owned a Sega console.  My cousins had a Genesis, so most of my exposure to Sonic and his friends was rationed out across occasional holiday visits.  The blue rat hedgehog entered my life as a cartoon character first and foremost – first as a manic goofball voiced by Jaleel White and then as some sort of Blade Runner-esque hero. 

Suffice to say, I grew up without the reverence for Sonic that seems to pervade large swaths of the gaming community.  So when Sonic Adventure cropped up on Xbox Live Arcade, I was intrigued. 

Originally released in 1998 for the Sega Dreamcast, Sonic Adventure was Sega’s retort to the monstrous success of Super Mario 64 (released two years earlier).  Team Sonic (much like Nintendo before them) took their beloved mascot and thrust him into a fully three-dimensional environment – theoretically ushering in a whole new era for the franchise.  It even became the bestselling game on Dreamcast (a fact which dumbfounds me – more on that later).

Cut to twelve years later: Sonic’s legacy isn’t looking too great.  Sega’s taking a buckshot approach to the development of new Sonic titles.  Sonic Colors (a 2D/3D platforming hybrid) is out for the Wii.  Sonic Free Riders (some sort of hoverboard racing thing) is a Kinect title.  The first episode of Sonic 4 (a “return to form” for the series) is a downloadable release. 

With each new Sonic game, Sega claims they’ve recaptured what made Sonic great.  After playing through Sonic Adventure, I’m wondering if there’s anything worth recapturing.

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Steph’s Science Corner: A Filler On The Appreciation of Scale

For topic requests and suggestions, email me at science@chargeshot.com. I promise I’m friendly.

Welcome back, favorite readers. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you’re looking at it), I returned from a wonderful, week-long tropical vacation very late last night, and today I’m back  in my windowless office with only the comfort of duct noise to soothe me. While the plaster walls are certainly taking my mind off the rain and the cold that describes today’s weather forecast back in Portland, my mind is quite irretrievably still on a Hawaiian beach, a fact which my boss is not particularly pleased with given the notebook full of work he tossed on my desk this morning.

What this means is that my grand plans for this week’s topic have sputtered and failed. I was hoping to focus on the world’s favorite childhood question: “Why is the sky blue?” The answer has a direct relation to the photograph on the right (taken on the last night of my trip), which displays a scene of recurring natural beauty that has caught the breath of human beings throughout history. While it might seem like an excuse to show off pictures from my vacation -- which it is -- it happens to be one of my all-time favorite topics in physics, and it has contemporary relevance  regarding the ramifications of a dramatic spike in airborne pollutants that follows technological advancement and societal growth. However, it requires a full week’s worth of dedicated time and effort to truly do justice to, and I hate short-changing pieces that I’m passionate about. For that reason, I have chosen to forego it, so look ahead to an exciting Thursday next week!

If that isn’t enough to draw you in, then I will also include a brief spoiler as a replacement for this week’s full post. Upcoming in my topic queue is a discussion on the speed of light, and what its constant value suggests about time-travel, relativity, and planetary physics. Having paid homage to the world of the small, it seems only right to introduce you to the opposite end of the spectrum. However, before I delve into it, I wanted to give you an appropriate respect for scale, since it is necessary in order to appreciate one of the greatest challenges of modern scientific understanding.

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Facebook's New Email Service

Since starting this post, I've read and written and deleted some three dozen emails without even really thinking about it. I've got a smartphone and I'm tethered to my computer on a more or less permanent basis, so checking and dealing with email is as natural as breathing for me. I've got three different inboxes, and they all habitually sit at zero unread messages (okay, so maybe I'm boasting a little).

So I took notice earlier this week when Facebook announced an it's-not-email-but-actually-it's-email-or-is-it email service. It's really hard to determine whether or not it's email in the traditional sense, but what's clear is the fact that it's a Big Deal. When a service with 500 million registered users introduces anything like this, it's a Big Deal whether you like it or not.

In talking with friends and acquaintances, a common thread I'm picking up is the fact that people aren't really sure just what this Facebook announcement means, or what they're trying to do. To that end, I thought I'd whip up a quick post explaining Facebook's announcement in clear language, along with a little bit of editorializing and analysis to spice things up.

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Music Review: Girl Talk - "All Day"

Anyone who's listened to me complain for long enough can tell you I hate mashups. You hear a brilliant fusion of the street poetry of Shawn Carter and the ephemeral orchestration of the Verve, and I hear a way for suburban white kids to ignore all that boring rapping until the chorus they all know kicks in. Being a suburban white kid, I can of course sympathize, and much of my disdain arises from good ol' self-hatred.

Still, I see the mash-up as a supposedly clever melding of two genres that usually misses the appeal of both. Hip-hop is about rhythm and flow, its beats serving to complement, not overshadow, the talents of its lyricists. But slather a thick layer of guitar rock on top, and you end up diminishing the pleasures of the rock and rap bits. The rock instrumentation, without the variety of the sung verses, ends up sounding repetitive; and the raps, robbed of their original context, lose much of their percussive urgency.

It is, then, with much trepidation that I approach the evaluation of a Girl Talk record. Greg Gillis is so gifted, his combinations so frequently inspired that it's hard to not forget about your anti-mash-up prejudices and just dance yrself clean. But I must do my sacred duty, and critique. After all, it's what I'm not paid for.

So does Girl Talk's latest, released out of the wild blue yonder on Monday (and for free, no less), rise above the mashed-up gunk? Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but you'd have to be that critic from Ratatouille (before he ate the ratatouille) to hate Girl Talk's All Day.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops Review: Seventh Verse, Same As The Sixth

Okay, Activision, enough already. Call of Duty: Black Ops, the seventh installment in the long-toothed First Person Shooter series, is a lot of fun, but it’s getting old.

Sure, you bust down doors, crash through glass windows and shoot through enough slow-motion sequences to sate your lizard-brain, but don’t expect anything intellectually challenging.  In fact, the most thought-provoking moments in Black Ops were when I paused to wonder why, exactly, I still bothered playing shooters: if Black Ops were taken as a specimen, the genre is little more than a railroad ride from point A to B, a hand-held, high-explosive tour of stock locales staffed by stock characters.

You fight through Cuba. You fight through Vietnam. You fight through a well-executed, if not totally predictable, conspiracy-thriller plot. You consume scripted moment after scripted moment, and for all the adrenaline, you’ll be struggling to keep your eyes open. For all its successes, Black Ops shows just how tired the Call of Duty formula has become.

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I'm Getting Awful Sick of These "Personal Appeals"

Have you visited Wikipedia lately? Chances are, if you're a college student searching for infallible information to cite on your term paper, a concerned citizen looking to beef up on world news, or just a curious American interested in reading up on Frank Zappa's favorite rock guitarist, your answer to my first question is a resounding "Yes!"

And if you answered "Yes!" to the above question, you're sure to have noticed a rather unsightly and intrusive banner link across the top of ANY Wikipedia page you might have visited. It's a link to an impassioned plea from some anonymous dude to donate money to his crackpot enterprise.

When we encounter a similar request from someone on a street corner, we refer to that person as a "bum" or a "pandhandler" or someone recently disenfranchised by San Francisco's Proposition L. When we encounter this request from someone on the internet, we refer to that person as an entrepreneur. Discuss...

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – Chicken à la Mode Edition

I am no stranger to genre mash-ups.  I’ve listened to my fair share of acoustic covers of upbeat pop songs.  I’ve watched my zombie comedy movies.  Hell, I even cracked the spine on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

In music, of course, mash-ups mainly exist in the worlds of parody or sampling.  But there’s a way to crossbreed genres and still create a wholly new product.  I mean, how often have you heard that a hip new band “sounds like X had a baby with Y after they smoked a lot of Z”? 

Electronic music is particularly suited for this kind of smorgasbord approach.  Once a particular musical style’s been introduced, you can play around with it, add in its cousins – sort of like how all bets are off once hearts are broken.

Ben Drake combines genres like that friend everyone has who throws parties and then invites people from five different social circles, hoping they all link together like the Olympic rings.  Head on over to Ben’s page to check out his experiments or read about what made the Audiosurf cut after the jump.

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A Decade of Dreck #34: Basic Instinct 2

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

I can go on the record for actually liking 1992's Basic Instinct. For all it's over-the-top ridiculous "eroticism" that movie was goddamn hot (sure, it also had a great cast and was directed by Paul Verhoeven but that's besides the point, hot). So when I had to watch the ill-thought-out sequel from 2006, I came, that is to say I approached it, with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Seductive novelist Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone: she's still got it, kids!) is living in London and is still up to her (maybe?) murderous ways fourteen years after the events of the first film. After being pulled out of the Thames after a car accident that killed her boyfriend, Tramell is the prime suspect in his murder. Psychologist Michael Glass (David Morrissey, Liam Neeson's Non-Union Mexican Equivalent) is brought in to profile her, but she ends up dragging him into her web of manipulation and all things lurid. Would you believe that Glass is a fairly button-down guy with a dark past? Yeah, it's kind of like how Michael Douglas was in the original. Do you see what they're doing there?

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 82 - Nine Inch Nails

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

When I was in high school, there were kids who used to walk around with "NIИ" stickers on their binders. They wore dark clothes and whatever accessories they could pick up at Hot Topic and (back when I was younger) their tastes seemed far too cool for me. This was particularly true concerning their allegiance to the Nine Inch Nails, a band which seemed to represent something very mature and adult and deep and important. I knew nothing about their music, but I knew so little about any popular music that I simply assumed these things about Nine Inch Nails were true.

Now that I'm older and finally listening to the music I thought I wasn't cool enough to be into before, I'm struck with how much the Nine Inch Nails relies on embarrassingly melodramatic bombast. It caters toward the worst aesthetic propensities of the high school goth, including the wallowing self-pity, the noisy drone of rage at some unspecified target, and the vague inclination toward some sort of nihilism. 

It's strange to look at Nine Inch Nails now and see a large amount of emotional immaturity in the music. Once upon a time, these buzzing guitars and tortured-soul lyrics seemed too "adult" for my youthful ears, something large and frightening and best left alone. Now I listen to this music and it seems too childish (or at least the lyrics do). Shock value has lost a lot of credibility as I grow older. 

Was there a magical window in which Nine Inch Nails would have been the perfect music for me? I don't think so. This was one of my least favorite weeks in a long time; I have no qualms with saying that this isn't my type of scene at all. I'll leave Nine Inch Nails where they belong - back in high school. 

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After the Jump: Nervous Slinky All The Time

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!

Yet again we employ members of our expanded cast.  Earlier this week, Pizza Hut tried to kill Andrew, so the inimitable Jordasch hops on board.

Amidst a torrent of tangents, you’ll hear us discuss the (ir)relevance of Garfield the Cat, uncomfortable technological advances involving STDs and e-Tombs, LimeWire’s pirate revival, Steam’s PC monopoly, and more.

If you desperately need to listen to our dulcet tones, feel free to use the embedded player below.  Otherwise, we’ll see you on your mp3 player of choice.  Until next week!

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Sunday Reading: Are You Ready for Some Football Commentary?

I’m a baseball man.  I played the sport as a kid, watched my home team get crushed by some Canucks, then watched them turn it around fifteen years later.  Were it not for my participation in grade-school music programs, I like to think I might’ve at least tried to make the baseball team.

But now that baseball’s over, I’m turning my eyes to America’s newer pastime, thanks in no small part to my interest in fantasy sports.  There’s nothing like a good-natured office rivalry to drive you to weighing the pros and cons of various backup running backs.  

It appears I’ve picked a good year to start watching people toss around the old pigskin.  Each season brings its own storylines (I wonder if Brett Favre’s hired someone to help write his perennial sagas), but the craziness seems to be boiling over this season: Brett Favre may be the first zombie ever to play professional football (or to text someone pictures of his junk); people are more worried about Michael Vick’s ability to run the ball than his time served for dogfighting (with animals not planes); and Pittsburgh’s proven their willing to turn the other cheek with regard to Ben Roethlisberger’s “indiscretions” – as long as he gives them a third championship. 

Unfortunately, these are just the tips of this multi-pronged iceberg.  Slate’s NFL Halftime Report addresses many of these issues and more in a lengthy discussion between a handful of writers/football fans.  Two of the major themes they return to consistently are bad refereeing and the seemingly overwhelming number of injuries.  Slate blogger and author Tom Scocca sees the two colliding in one of this year’s most devastating plays:

“For a concise summary of the NFL in 2010, it's hard to surpass the play that knocked Colts receiver Austin Collie out of Sunday's game against the Eagles…From the Colts' point of view, here was yet another key player lost to the senseless and still uncontrolled brutality of the game. From the Eagles' point of view, here was a play where they got totally jobbed by the refs.”

Of course what happened to Collie was a tragedy, Scocca says, but it’s also one of the clearest examples of referee incompetence.  Plenty of sports are struggling to integrate increasingly powerful and precise technology into their outdated, flaw-ridden officiating systems, and football is no exception.  How the league chooses to handle this and the rising tide of injuries will shape the game over the coming years.

Casual and hardcore (see: tailgating) fans of the sport should give this one a read.  Nothing goes better with a few beers than a healthy dose of critical thinking about your Sunday ritual.

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Saturday Morning TV: Photo Booth Boschian Nightmare

Nightmares, people.  This thing is giving me nightmares.

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Sufjan Stevens: Concert Review and a Meditation on the Audience

Last Sunday, I saw Sufjan Stevens in concert in Asheville, North Carolina. It was a capstone to my week of Sufjan, though unfortunately it came too late for me to feature it in my write-up. The concert did, however, leave me with a lot to think about, both in terms of Stevens' new album, and in terms of his audience. 

Our friend Colleen recently wrote about the affinity that hipsters have for Sufjan. Well, Asheville is some sort of mountain-hipster-Mecca, resplendent with pretentious coffee shops, second-hand bookstores, and scores of the most unkempt beards that I have ever seen. The air smelt of incense and unfiltered cigarettes. When my Concert Companion and I stopped a resident to ask about a good place to get some food, he automatically assumed that we were vegetarians. In short, the hipster to non-hipster ratio was higher than I've ever seen, and dense enough to be somewhat frightening. 

We waded through the sea of plaid-shirts and knit caps to find our seats. Despite the fact that Stevens wore those stupid fairy wings while playing the opening number ("Seven Swans"), the concert got off to a good start. The material was mostly from his new album, The Age of Adz, but the large accompanying band up on stage helped make the arrangements a lot of fun.

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The Prize-Winning Play Played Out As Oscar Bait

Most plays are people in motion (with some exceptions).  Most movies are pictures in motion (with some exceptions, I guess).  There’s a natural shared vocabulary between the two forms.  Shakespeare, Beckett, Williams, Miller: they’ve all had their work translated to the silver screen.

Currently, my Charge Shot!!! inbox is stuffed with notices about the upcoming film adaptation of David Lindsey-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Rabbit Hole.  According to press releases, it is a “portrait of a family searching for what remains possible in the most impossible of all situations” – that situation being, of course, the tragic loss of a child.

Not long ago I wrote about the intersection of the written word and the film reel, expressing my skepticism about yet another still-gestating adaptation of On the Road. 

But my skepticism can’t keep Rabbit Hole at bay, and the movie’s Oscar aspirations mean we’ll be hearing a lot about it in the coming months.

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Steph’s Science Corner: Space Elevators, Part 2 of 2 – What We Can Accomplish Now

Welcome back! This week will be a continuation of last week’s exciting segment, click here to review it. Please keep the topic suggestions coming by emailing me at science@chargeshot.com!

Here comes the hard part. Last week I gave a brief overview of the theoretical Space Elevator, focusing most of my attention on the massive obstacle presented by the tether, and the practical wall that stands between where we are now and the tantalizing future of carbon nanotubes. This week, despite a pessimistic tendency that I like to call “realism,” I will delve into the parts of this transporter that are technologically feasible with what is accessible today. It will be a stretch for me. While I normally enjoy images of bearded, lab-coat-wearing physicists in hard hats, building robots powered by lasers (I’m a huge nerd, so it’s a comforting picture), I just can’t overlook the silliness of the rampant enthusiasm:

“While the initial Space Elevator will be used mostly for cargo (to build the space hotels that will become the destinations of space tourism), second generation Space Elevators will most certainly carry passengers.” – Spaceward.org

I just can’t help it, phrases like “space hotels” and “space tourism” evoke images of overweight, costume-wearing Star Trek enthusiasts discussing the construction details of the newly upgrade warp core on the starship Enterprise. “If the tether were to be struck by space-debris or targeted by a space-terrorists, manned climbers will naturally have the ability to soft-land,” they would say, full of conviction.

In the current economic climate, interest in the space elevator projects is primarily held by hobbyists and tinkerers, and the last three years of the space elevator games have been met with plenty of failures and waning optimism. Nevertheless, I made you all a promise to be positive, and what kind of scientist would I be if I was dishonest?

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Book Review: The Wheel of Time - Towers of Midnight

In a genre that is not known for its brevity to begin with, The Wheel of Time is perhaps most notoriously ambitious of all epic fantasy projects. Author Robert Jordan cranked out eleven books since the first volume was published in 1990, all of which span at least 600 pages. The story is epic in the truest sense of the word, featuring a continent-spanning conflict with evil forces, and a cast of (literally) thousands.

The general consensus is that the first five or six Wheel of Time books are great reading. But as things got more complex, Jordan began to falter, and by the tenth book, the formerly fast-paced series had succumbed to a narrative slump. His last book, Knife of Dreams, hinted at a return to form, and fans hoped that Jordan had found his stride once again. But unfortunately, Robert Jordan was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis in 2006, and he passed away the following year at the age of 57, his magnum opus unfinished. Burgeoning fantasy author Brandon Sanderson was chosen by Jordan's widow/editor to wade through the mountains of notes and outlines that Jordan had left behind, and salvage what he could. Towers of Midnight is the second of the final three books in the series. The book combines scenes Jordan had written before his death with chapters by Sanderson based on Jordan's notes.

Charge Shot!!! writers Andrew Cunningham and Chris Holden have been reading the Wheel of Time since well before blogs existed. Now they're collaborating to provide their thoughts on the latest installment of the series. Be warned: mild spoilers within!

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Why I Love The Internet

 

I've spent my last few posts furiously ranting about some of the ways the mass adoption and development of the social internet frustrates me. Indeed I get particularly fumed when discussing the seemingly universal deterioration of social morays.

I'm not going to do that today. I am not going to complain about when people check their Facebook or Twitter pages in the middle of a conversation. I will not discuss how when people pause a conversation to look something up, they sometimes rudely decide to peruse the celebrity snuff on the Huffington Post (speaking of which, why is there so much frivolous celebrity news on the front page of the Huff Post? It seems oddly out of place for them...).

In reality, all of those little things that bother me, all of the self-centered activity and, let's be frank, discourteous side-effects really chock up to nothing in comparison with how much I love how the internet has changed my life.

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The Blessing/Curse Of My New Smartphone

Ten years ago, I stopped being unreachable.

My first cell phone was an old Kyocera, made of hard, black plastic with a green-backlit screen. It had an extendable antenna. Talking into it was kind of like talking into a tin cup – I was kind of amazed to hear a voice on the other end, no matter how distant or scratchy. Call me at home, in the car or between AP U.S. History and Pre-Calculus; if I didn’t pick up, you could leave a message. On my voicemail.

It’s 2010. My new phone has three different microphones to filter out background noise. It has a touch screen keyboard – really, who calls people anymore? – that can predict what I’m writing as I’m writing it. It synthesizes global news, social networking and email into a single data-slurry splashed all over a 4.3” screen, all ready for me the moment my alarm goes off.

It’s nothing short of a miracle. I often wonder if I was happier without it.

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The Bears and The Bulls

Remember when your mother or father sat you down and gave you the talk about "the birds and the bees?" It's probably less common now in the days of the Internet and health class in school; and I doubt if anyone has seriously used the phrase "the birds and the bees" since about 1962. But the cliche is well-established and the sentiment is well-recognized - it's an awkward coming-of-age talk about a subject that is both exciting and necessary for our society.

We have reached a point in our society where coming of age requires a talk about a different set of animals - ones that represent a subject just as necessary for survival, but not nearly as exciting or rewarding. I'm not talking about the Donkey and the Elephant; we've covered enough politics in the past month, even given that we just recently emerged from election season. No, like the birds and the bees, this pair of animals also begins with a B. And if you can't tell by now what they are, I'll give you a hint: they're the animals from the title of this post.

You've probably heard the terms "Bearish" and "Bullish" in reference to the economy. But to the non-financially minded, those two terms generally refer to trends in the stock market. Put simply, a bear market is one characterized by cautious investing and downward trending prices, whereas a bullish market includes high returns and upward trends. But I don't mean that parents should educate their kids on the intricacies of trading stocks. I'm using the bear and the bull as metaphorical tropes to represent the institution of money.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio: Pinch-Hitting Edition

Craig’s tubes have been tied this week, meaning that you stoic Audiosurfers are going to have to put up with a shortish post by me instead of tracking his slow descent into techno-induced madness. Don’t worry – he’ll be back next week.

Because we haven’t in awhile, let me recap Audiosurf for all of the non-gamers and gamers-who-haven’t-ever-heard-of-Audiosurf-for-some-reason in our audience: Audiosurf will take any song on your computer and turn it into a shiny rollercoaster track– this track has physical peaks and valleys based on the way your song sounds, its tempo, where the instruments are in the mix, and so on.

Along this track are myriad colored blocks, each worth a different number of points based on their rarity – blue and purple blocks are worth fewer points but are more plentiful, while yellow and red blocks are more scarce but net larger payoffs. You steer your vehicle over the blocks as the song plays, and the more blocks of the same color you pick up and match, the more points you get. For the casual player, Audiosurf serves as a trippy interactive equalizer. For the die-hard, it can be a breakneck ride that leaves your vision blurred and your palms sweaty. It’s whatever you make of it, really.

Each week, the game’s purveyors hand-pick three or four tracks to serve up to players via the game’s built-in “Audiosurf Radio” – hence, this feature, where we dissect each song to tell you where to find the best rides. Still with me? Good! Onward!

This week’s three Radio tracks all come courtesy of trance artist Jonathan Araldi, who has a super-French Jamendo page you can check out if you’re into it.

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A Decade of Dreck #33: Testosterone

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

I've been pretty fortunate with Decade of Dreck so far: most of the films I've been forced asked to cover have been fairly large releases, interesting public failures, some with expectations higher than others that I've been for the most part intrigued to discover what went wrong. But what happens to bad movies that nobody ever heard about? The ones that stay undiscovered like they should? Enter Testosterone.

Why Testosterone is called "Testosterone" I could never tell you. By the sound of it, you might think it a nuanced study of masculinity. Well, it's not. As far as I can tell, the title was decided on solely because this is a "gay" movie, i.e. the main character is a homosexual.

Producer 1: "Hey, I've got a gay movie and I need a title. What's something that only men have and women don't?"

Producer 2: "Penises?"

Producer 1: "Nah, 'Penises' is already in production over at Warner Bros."

(Joke's on you guys, chicks have it too! Testosterone, not penises. Well, maybe some do, but that's not to say they're any less of a woman, shit, slippery slope...)

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 81 - Sufjan Stevens

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.


Reading any one of the contemporary reviews of Sufjan Stevens' 2005 album Illinois, its remarkable to see how much space the critics spent talking about his long-vaunted "50 States Project." After this album and the earlier Michigan, Stevens was a whopping four percent of the way to his ambitious goal of releasing an album centered around each of the fifty states in the Union. It's a gimmick, but a gimmick that worked, because critics and writers got really excited about this, leading to all sorts of jokes about the double-album California and the EP Rhode Island. "Let's just hope he doesn't stop when he gets to number 50," wrote Tim Jonze in NME Magazine, lending hope to all residents of the District of Columbia and American Samoa.

But the next geographically-oriented album never arrived, and when Stevens finally admitted in 2009 that the whole thing was simply a "promotional gimmick," there was a lot of righteous indignation around the Internet. (How dare Stevens propose an insanely gigantic project that anyone with common sense could see was never going to be completed?!?). A lot of Stevens' music since the abandonment of the 50 States Project has veered into a very different style, trading simple banjo music and refined strings for apocalyptic synthesizers and weird vocal effects.

But I, for one, am delighted as to Stevens' change of course. Not only because I find his electronic stuff interesting (possibly even better than his "state" albums), but because it retroactively redeems him from the conceptual gimmick he was hiding behind. The 50 States conceit is clever, the song titles humorous in a bemused, self-aware sort of manner. But Stevens' music, even on the state albums, is intensely personal, and framing the whole thing as a cartographic project helped people forget about this.

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After the Jump: Judgment Window

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!

We didn’t podcast last week! We are really, truly sorry about that. So sorry, in fact, that we’ve brought on our own Boivin as a ringer this week to help us stumble through our topic list.

This week: a Happy Meal ban, the death of both the Walkman and Limewire, frivolous lawsuits against Apple, Machine of Death, and the Microsoft Kinect.

If you don’t want to subscribe to our feed (you really should), check out the embedded player below. See you next week!

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Ghosts from Charge Shot!!!’s Past: Do Games Know How To End?

Charge Shot!!! has been around for two years now - amazing, we know! - and in that time we've amassed a lot of posts. Much of our writing is in an editorial vein, simply because we don't have the time or resources to report on every news item that flies across the Interwebs. Therefore, we feel that our output has a better shelf-life than you might expect from some run-of-the-mill news blog.

This feature, Ghosts From Charge Shot!!!'s Past, aims to bring some of this stuff - both good and embarrassing - to the eyeballs of our newer readers, while taking long-time constituents on a trip down memory lane. Enjoy!

This week’s post dates back to our gaming-only days, when the blog was more like a dank pit than a Web site. Even though we cast a wider net now than once we did, we still occasionally made some good points back in those days.

Case in point, take this post by Craig, which muses on game endings. How many times have you played a game to completion only to have it end in an underwhelming boss fight?

Part of the problem may be the terminology we attach to finishing a game.  More general terms aside, books are read and movies are seen.  Games are “beaten.”  This comes, of course, from gaming’s preteen years, when most titles were primarily challenges of skill.  Some, designed to ravenously consume your quarters, didn’t even allow you to complete the game – limited hardware prompted games to commit seppuku lest they carry on indefinitely.  The challenge-based design aesthetic still pervades an industry characterized by Achievements, High Scores, and Time Trials. 

On your to-do list for today: set your clock back an hour, and read this post.

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