Life-ification of Games: Facial Recognition in L.A. Noire

In the recent past we've seen a rise in the "Gamification" of various aspects of our digital life. Developers of websites, mobile apps, and computer programs have begun appealing to our natural inclination to accomplish objectives in pursuit of some goal or achievement in an attempt to make mundane tasks, such as filling out a list or completing a survey, more enjoyable. The idea is to make people associate certain products with gameplay rather than tedious work, so that people return to said products with more frequency and with a better attitude.

Foursquare lets you earn achievements and titles. LinkedIn provides you with a progress bar, tracking the completion of your profile. All over the Internet, we're seeing creative applications of every gaming mechanic except the boss fight. But how have games themselves reacted to the gamification craze? Some games have further gamified themselves, turning the mirror inward onto additional mini-games and rewards (such as Mortal Kombat's system of virtual currency). Others, like L.A. Noire, have taken the completely opposite path and decided to "life-ify" their game.

In order to progress through the story of L.A. Noire, your character (an LAPD detective in 1947) has to interrogate suspects and determine whether they are lying or telling the truth based only on their responses and subtle facial cues. The game is able to accomplish this feat with absolutely stunning and state-of-the-art software created by Australian company Depth Analysis, and put to use by game developer Team Bondi. But what this technology does is make your success in the game contingent not upon your gaming skills, but on your real-life conversation skills.

A novel idea, to be sure. But what does it mean for the gaming community when Gamification and Life-ification start to converge to a single point?

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The E3 2011 Press Conferences: What To Expect

E3 is a week away. Let me repeat that: this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo is a week away.

It seems like only a few months ago that Microsoft was unveiling Kinect, Sony was being sweet-talked by Valve, and Nintendo was promising all sorts of first-party fun.

E3 is a lot of things: closed-door meetings, smelly show floors, cosplay competitions. It’s biggest hallmark, however, are the overblown press conferences. Replete with Powerpoint presentations, painfully awkward demos, and even more awkward guests, these hour-long lectures on The Future provide skewed perspectives on what the next year or two will hold for the gaming industry.

The current generation of hardware is roughly five years old. Sales of the Nintendo Wii are slowing, and Sony and Microsoft are attempting to buoy sales with motion controllers. Apple’s siphoning off market share with budget games on sexy new pieces of hardware. PC games on top-shelf hardware are looking to blow consoles out of the way technically.

What will gaming’s Big Three have to say about all this? My predictions await.

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After the Jump: Meat Carpet

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, find us in the iTunes store, or download the MP3 directly!

Memorial Day Weekend wreaked havoc on our schedules, delaying the podcast by a day and forcing Andrew and I to tackle the week’s events as a duo.

We do the best we can with a variety of topics including Candwiches, Food Mascots, 3D movies, the always-amusing Steve Ballmer, and more.

You know the drill: tell your friends, tell your enemies, and enjoy! Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week!

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I Climbed The Holy Mountain And All I Got Was This Stupid Blog Post

Growing up I had a friend, let's call him "Max Y." No, too obvious: "M. Yue". M. Yue and I formed what could probably only be described as some sort of buddy comedy, Odd Couple set up: I was the button-down, mild-mannered, all-American good kid and he the wild child, the guy who listened to punk rock and went to Perkins at midnight on weekdays. The kid who got himself and his friends into trouble but never Got In Trouble.

Besides the time I almost got into a fight with a guy at a college hockey game, M. Yue was probably responsible for introducing me to most of the cool things I've ever experienced. It was he who put Kyuss on a mixtape for me (probably the most romantic thing another human being has ever done for me), it was at his house that I first saw Akira. So basically, I take M. Yue's recommendations pretty highly.

He was also the one who forced me to watch Cannibal Holocaust.

This Memorial Day weekend, M. Yue was back in town on leave from the Army, and he asked me, nay he challenged me to watch a film in anticipation of his return. His challenge? The first class mindfuck that is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain.

Seriously, watch the trailer.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 108 - Sly and the Family Stone

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.

Listening to Stand! and There's A Riot Goin' On, the two most popular albums by Sly and the Family Stone, is like following a narrative of the decline of the 1960s counterculture. What starts as an emphatic call for change ends in a mire of drugs and disillusionment. 

Stand!, released in 1969, is brimming with optimism and vitality. Nearly all the songs are calls to action, and they're all upbeat and very dance-able. Just look at the titles, such as "You Can Make It If You Try," and "I Want to Take You Higher." It's a happy, hopeful album, and one that embraces the ever-elusive idea of "music that changes the world."

Yet by 1971, There's A Riot Goin' On had taken all of this and shattered it. Riot reads like the hangover to the party that was Stand! The songs are all slower and fuzzier. The liveliness that marked Stand! has been replaced with a worldweary attitude; the songs still have a sense of groove, but instead of one you can dance to, this groove sounds like it's been left out in the sun too long. The music slowly slinks along, and the anthems for social change have been replaced with songs like "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle,'" where the lyrics ask "Why live for dying?" and the chorus sings "Timber! All fall down!"

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Sunday Reading: Another Night at the Opera

One of the joys of writing for this site is the variety. We cover everything from food crimes (a regular on the podcast) to tech news, arthouse films to awful films, videogames to bestselling Literature. Although it’s ultimately up to you if we succeed in doing so, we do strive to maintain this scope without feeling scattershot.

In our globalized culture, everything is connected. Every other movie is based on something that started as a book, a game, or a news story. The movers and shakers in the tech world have increasing control over how we consume and create art and entertainment. To ignore media other than the one you work in is to deny yourself a potential font of inspiration.

This is the message of Bill Roorbach’s “Another Night at the Opera”. Writing for the blog Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, writer and professor Roorbach recalls the time an opera singer visited his creative writing workshop at Ohio State University. He was dismayed to discover that the bulk of class claimed to detest opera and quickly assigned the Columbus production of Madame Butterfly to his students.

To prepare them, the visiting tenor took on the role of guest speaker. After remarking on the nomadic lifestyle of the professional opera singer, he finally relented to Roorbach’s requests that he sing. Roorbach writes:

“"Well," said our guest. "That one starts very quietly. And I’ve been talking so much that perhaps I’m warm enough. Hm-hm. A few bars, maybe. ….But we’ll have to open the windows."

Frosty night.  No matter, one of the kids opened the windows wide. Humor the neurotic singer, all that.

"It’s going to be loud," he said. "There’s no way to sing it halfway."

What follows is a moving account of one workshop’s realization that there are, in fact, other disciplines worth studying, other arts worth experiencing. Go read it. It’s a reminder that, no matter the tool or instrument, the creative impulse is a universal one.

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Saturday Morning TV: Japanese Horse Racing

I’m still not sure what this is. Just look at those horses.

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Book Review - Carsten Jensen, "We, The Drowned"

Quick, name a famous Danish author!

Well, you get two bonus points if you somehow came up with Søren Kierkegaard, one point for Hans Christian Andersen. But most likely, the names of renowned Danish wordsmiths aren't exactly rolling off your tongue. That's okay; Denmark isn't necessarily regarded as a literary powerhouse. 

So when a book like Carsten Jensen's We, The Drowned comes along, winner of every major Danish award, lauded as the best Danish novel of the past twenty-five years, et cetera, et cetera, one can't help but take this praise with a grain of salt. But one can see why the book has received so many accolades in its native country; it feels like the great Danish novel, the summation of a national identity. It's ambitious, wide-ranging, and has already been accepted by the Danes as a modern classic. 

The novel is sort of a Patrick O'Brian meets One Hundred Years of Solitude; it focuses on the small coastal village of Marstal, whose only resource is the sea, and whose only business is the shipping industry. It follows Marstal from the First Schleswig War in 1848 (I had to look it up too) to World War II. Packed into this century are more wars, economic booms and busts, prosperity and depression, and side trips around the globe to Samoa, Newfoundland, and Portugal. There's a few recurring motifs and a loose strand of connections tying the novel together, but for the most part, We, The Drowned takes delight in avoiding an overarching narrative, preferring thematic unity to a contained plot. 

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On Putting Fantasy Above Reality In Baseball

On May 29, 2010, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim first baseman Kendrys Morales won a game against the Seattle Mariners with a grand slam home run – the first ever in his young career. Few things in baseball are more exciting than a grand slam, so to win a game with one guarantees the play airtime on SportsCenter.

Unfortunately, Morales received SportsCenter coverage for more than his home run. Brimming with pride upon winning the game, Morales rounded the bases and leapt onto home plate in exultation. A bone in his left leg broke on impact. Surrounded by his teammates, he fell to the ground in pain. Celebration turned to tragedy in a heartbeat.

Morales has not played a big-league game since. He was expected to play this season, but complications in his rehabilitation will prevent him from taking the field in 2011.

Why does this matter to me, an obnoxiously dedicated Philadelphia Phillies fan? Morales was on my fantasy team.

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Minecraft 1.6: Game Development 2.0

When you go out and buy a Call of Duty or a Bioshock game, what you're buying is typically the result of two or three years of work done by dozens of people for millions of dollars. The early parts of the game development process are often completely masked from the general game-playing public, and with the exception of tightly-controlled demos at expos or made available to download, We the Consumers (and the gaming press, to boot) don't know everything there is to know about a game until it's finished and on store shelves (patches and downloadable content notwithstanding).

Now, thanks to the Magic of the Internet and the proliferation of much smaller independent game developers, that's not always the case. Indie games are often developed on a shoestring budget by just a few people in a matter of weeks, and gamers are often given a taste games sporting solid game mechanics that lack the layer of polish given to released software.

I see this post as an opportunity to look at this phenomenon through the lens of my still-going-strong Minecraft obsession, made all the more relevant by the fact that Minecraft 1.6, the game's latest revision goes live sometime today.

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Album Review: Bon Iver - "Bon Iver, Bon Iver"

I'm midway through Neil Gaiman's American Gods right now, and I just finished a chapter involving a mysterious stranger in a charcoal gray suit. The man's not invisible, but anyone who looks at him immediately forgets anything about him - what he looks like, his name, what he's just said - the moment they look away. Paradoxically, though, he has the ability to implant an idea deep within peoples' subconscious, one that they'll be urged inexorably by even if they can't remember its precise nature.

I kept thinking of him as I listened to Bon Iver's new "semi-eponymous" album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver: the album manages to be utterly elusive and yet completely indelible. Songwriter Justin Vernon writes songs that twist and turn, piling on melodies, harmonies, and unexpected instrumental textures until you can barely remember where the song began.

It also sounds like nothing I've ever heard before, including For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver's first wildly successful record. It is, however, a completely worthy successor.

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Is The Office Lost Without Michael Scott?

These final episodes of the seventh season of The Office gave us a long goodbye to Steve Carell's character Michael Scott. If you still keep up with the show regularly you may have felt as if you were being "let down easy." If you're a bit lost on why Steve Carell's character left the offices of Dunder Mifflin then stay with me, it will only take a second to catch you up. Then we'll talk about what this all means for the show.

Basically, Scott still loved his ex-girlfriend Holly. After some classic The Office emotional ping-pong (she's engaged, she's not engaged, he likes her, he's scared) he finally proposes to her and she says yes, so he's off to Colorado to live with her and take care of her elderly parents. It's a nice, realistic reason for him to leave and it shows growth of character while still implementing a bit of tension. He didn't just resign for no reason, but it's not as exciting as Michael Scott dying. So what does this mean for the future of The Office? Will the show be able to survive without its hapless leader?

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What If I Was A Twitter Celebrity? #whatifIwasaTwittercelebrity

I travel a lot for work. In fact, I was in the midst of a ludicrous string of flights last Tuesday, which is why I didn't get a chance to post anything - but enough with the lame excuses. Anyway, when you go through airport security nowadays, they generally direct you through some pretty intimidating imaging technology called Backscatter X-Rays. Use of this technology is optional, they always say, and if you don't want to be exposed to the little extra burst of potentially harmful radiation, you can "opt out" and select a full-body pat-down instead. I always opt out, despite the supposedly low dose, because when you average 4-6 trips to the airport a week, those mrems start to add up, you know what I'm sayin'?

The concept of "opting out" of a commonplace, accepted practice that people have long since taken for granted came up to me recently regarding Facebook. Sure there was a time when I made the conscious decision (much later than most) to sign up for the service, yet as the years went by and I became gradually more and more dissatisfied with the product, I simply put up with it. I was on Facebook, and that was that. Until recently, when I decided I didn't want to put up with the hassle of maintaining a digital profile, and I successfully "opted out" of Facebook.

Just to set the records straight, I don't have a problem with Social Media as such, or with anyone who uses Facebook. I just think it should be separate and distinct from our regular lives, in the way that mobile uploads and status updates can never allow Facebook to be again. I think Social Media should be something for which you have to consciously and actively "opt in", rather than the unspoken norm that acts as an alternative reality/massive time-suck. I think Social Media should have a purpose and be directly to the point. Which is why I've recently gotten involved with Twitter. And why I'm currently fantasizing about what it would be like to be a Twitter Celebrity. I even created a hashtag, which asks the musical question: #whatifIwasaTwittercelebrity?

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Acting Unnatural – Technological Changes to an Old Art Form

I work in theatre. Yes, that’s r-e not e-r. I often spend time inside of theaters, but when I’m talking about the craft/industry as a whole I use the r-e spelling.

I’m primarily a director, though I’ve done my share of collegiate acting. Even in my young career, I’ve worked with a lot of actors. I like them (for the most part). Whenever I’m pondering my career choice or plotting out my approach to a given play, I hold one truth as my organizing principle: theatre needs actors.

That sounds a little too intuitive to warrant mantra-like repetition, so let me explain. Theatre does not exist without the actor. A beautifully painted, cleverly designed, artfully constructed set is a failure if it does not support the actor, his character, and his conflict with the other players onstage. The relationship between the audience and the performer is integral to a play’s success.

In other media, the actor’s role is often defined by the technology used. It often feels like film brings the audience remarkably close to the actors, but there’s no denying that there’s a lens, a machine, a cinematographer, an editor, and a director between us and the performer. Then there’s animation – be it for movies, TV, or videogames – which cherry picks the tools of the actor most salient to the project, often valuing the voice above all others.

Advances in technology are changing the way storytellers use actors, as well as how audiences appreciate them. There’s a parallel to be made with the advent of gas and electric lighting, the invention of motion pictures, etc. But the changes here are so drastic they bear investigation.

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A Decade of Dreck #53: Good Luck Chuck

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 information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

Dane Cook: the Karate of stand-up comedians?

In the mid aughts, Dane Cook exploded. I remember seeing his 2000 Comedy Central Presents special and loving it, though keep in mind that at the time I was a thirteen-year-old boy. I remember waking up one morning only to discover that seemingly everybody loved Dane Cook. Even people who never listened to stand-up seemed to worship the guy, in fact, only people who never listened to stand-up seemed to worship the guy. He has a sort of sometimes spasmatic, usually smarmy, and always assholish quality to his onstage persona, which of course made him the preferred comic of smarmy assholes everywhere.

Cook was a definite crossover success, the Next Big Thing, the new stand-up who was going to become a big mainstream comedy star. So of course when he began selling multi-platinum albums and selling out shows at Madison Square Garden, he was given a series of movie deals, one of which stands before you and I today: Good Luck Chuck.

Despite my aversion to Dane Cook's brand of comedy (I've always preferred my comedians in the "comic as disturbed outsider" mode as opposed to the "comic as rockstar" mode), I was determined to give Chuck an honest shake. What was beyond strange though was that my biggest problems with the film had little to do with Cook's performance. Baffling, I know!

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 107 - The Jam

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.

The Jam come from the punk movement, but they aren't necessarily of the punk movement. Rather, while the Clash and the Sex Pistols were tearing down everything that came before and declaring a new beginning to musical history, the Jam were consciously looking back to the past, both musically and historically. In fact, they did a lot to prove that they weren't your average punks, from dressing nicer to voting for the Conservative Party (though the band is on record stating that this was a marketing gimmick cooked up by their record label, and they didn't mean it). 

The Jam are also thoroughly British, and not the anti-establishment disaffected, angry British of the other punk groups. They're more of the mild-mannered, well-spoken classic British stereotype, and their music reflects less of an anger at the current state of Britain and more of a melancholy at the whole state of things. "What ever happened to the British empire?" Paul Weller asks in "Time for Truth," a question that sounds sincere and a question that, say, the Sex Pistols wouldn't be caught dead asking. 

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After the Jump: Slims Jim

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, find us in the iTunes store, or download the MP3 directly!


Boivin joins us for a slightly shortened, slightly more offensive than usual podcast this week!


Up for discussion this week: Macho Man Randy Savage's sad passing, Jesus of Nazareth's recent no-show, bad game names, and more!


As always, enjoy, tell your friends, and see you next week! Continue...

Sunday Reading: I Was a Star Wars Fan

Most of us saw The Phantom Menace and left adequately entertained, blindly excited that Star Wars was back in our lives. We saw Attack of the Clones and tried our best to convince ourselves it was cool because of chibi Boba Fett and Oh Man When Yoda Did That Thing! Then Revenge of the Sith happened. George Lucas had caused a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million fans suddenly cried “Nooooo!” and were suddenly silenced.

Except they weren’t silenced. For years, Star Wars fans (myself included) have decried the prequels and Lucas’s other perversions of canon. We’ve all gone through – or are still going through – The Five Stages of Star Wars Fandom Grief.

In his article for Slate “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…I Was a Star Wars Fan,” Will Carlough outlines the five stages, as well as his journey through them. His description for Stage Four is my favorite:

“The fourth stage, depression, is pretty easy to picture when you think of a 30-year-old man watching 150 episodes of Pokémon.”

You can track the evolution of Carlough’s fandom by looking at its start and end points. He went from making his own award-winning fan film about Grand Moff Tarkin (just knowing who that is requires an above-average nerd quotient) to basically ignoring the 2008 animated feature The Clone Wars.

Such is the story for many a Star Wars fan. If Lucas keeps making movies, we’re going to need support groups.

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Saturday Afternoon TV: 25 Years of Oprah Yelling

Oprah just taped her final episode. Good thing we have videos like this to remember her by.

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Saturday Morning TV: The Worst Videogame Voice Acting Brought to Face-Acting Life

I don’t know what’s more awkward: the voice-acting or this guy’s super expressive face.

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A Novel Theory: Why Isn't Fiction Culturally Relevant?

The obituaries for various facets of the publishing world have been coming out for years. Reading is dead. No, not reading, just bookstores. Or maybe print books are dead, but e-readers will keep reading alive. No, just kidding, the novel is dead. Or maybe novels will survive while newspapers wither away and die. 

Yet despite all the doom and gloom, there's always a few books that seem to slip through the cracks and become cultural phenomena. David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel, the difficult The Pale King, garnered a lot of media attention and managed to place on the New York Times bestseller list, and last year Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the first writer to do so in almost a decade. There's a lot of literati dancing around the edges of our cultural periphery, even if fiction writers don't necessarily occupy a central position anymore. 

But why not? Why don't novelists command the cultural clout that they used to? People still read, sure, but even the popular fiction writers of the 21st century seem to be cult figures lurking on the edges, rather than offering an authoritative commanding voice. Perhaps society has changed, and literature, like music, has become fragmented to such a degree that no one figure appeals to everybody. Or perhaps the writing has changed, and it no longer reflects society in quite the same way.

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Funny Twitter Accounts Worth Preserving

Twitter is so strange. I think we can all agree on that.

It’s a bizarre hybrid of text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook status updates, and self/commercial advertising. Its character constraints encourage both tiresome Internet lingo (“c u l8r”, “lets go to 5 guys b4 the movie”, &c) and creative sentence structure (a good vocabulary helps you express complex ideas in 140 characters). Twitter’s infrastructure is so simple it’s wormed its way onto every web-connected device as well as “ordinary” SMS-enabled cell phones.

Perhaps it is deceptively simple – at least when it comes to entertainment. CBS’s recent cancellation of $#*! My Dad Says (discussed on this week’s podcast) is a reminder that Twitter functions best on its own terms.  It may be funny to read aloud Sarah Palin’s serpentine mangling of the English language to your friends, but her tweets would swiftly fall flat if propped up as anything other than one woman’s (or her publicist’s) inane chatter.

Hollywood and the various TV networks are blind to this. Chasing their audiences like deranged teenage exes, they bottle up any intellectual property the public might possibly like even a tiny bit in hopes of catching lightning.

Today, I’d like to speak up for the humorous Twitter accounts that should be left alone by TV.

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Streaming Music is the Next Big Thing

Time has nearly forgotten the Old Days when you'd buy recorded music on a flat, round platter and stick it in your Victrola to get your fix. These days, the kids are all about putting together N3P mix tapes, putting them on their iPods, and dancing all around. You know, unless you're one of those Vinyl-Has-A-Richer-Sound assholes.

Just as we'd gotten used to hitting up iTunes instead of the Virgin Megastore, along comes an even newer new: streaming music. I'm not talking about Pandora, though it and other Internet radio stations certainly should have a place in any music-listener's diet - I'm talking about on-demand audio streaming, the kind that replaces the storage capacity of your iPod with storage capacity on someone's server somewhere.

The theory is that online music stores will now keep track of the songs you've purchased online and allow you to listen to any of it, anywhere, from any device. This gadget-agnostic idea is another blow for fans of media that is in some way tangible, but it makes a lot of sense for users of Internet-enabled devices where extra storage capacity comes at a premium.

There are three major players in this field at present (well, more or less, keeping in mind that it's still early days): Google with their Music Beta, Amazon with their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, and Apple, with vague rumors of a product that hasn't actually been announced yet but is probably real and probably called iCloud.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #13: Black Orpheus

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

It had to happen sometime. I knew at a certain point in my journey through the annals of foreign movie history, I'd have to find a movie that I genuinely disliked.

Not that I haven't struggled to make it through certain weeks. Fires on the Plain was trying (and I can't see myself ever wanting to sit through it again), but I admired its gut-punch effectiveness. A war movie, after all, shouldn't be "endlessly watchable."

And Floating Weeds was perhaps the slowest movie I've ever seen, but I came to truly appreciate it (and actually enjoy it) by the end.

I wasn't confident enough at the time to declare that I couldn't stand The Seventh Seal, but I'll say it now: what a bloated, pretentious piece of poop. It had its moments (the parade of the flagellants was great, and I'll admit the danse macabre was truly poetic), but mostly it was formless and in love with the sound of its own insights.

But the time has come, visitors to the Art House. I'm finally ready to say it: I couldn't stand Black Orpheus.

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Kind Music: John Vanderslice Live

Last night I caught one of my favorite musicians playing one of my favorite venues in Philadelphia. John Vanderslice played a late night set at the bar Johnny Brenda's and I couldn't help but be touched by the kindness of the music and the kindness of the performers.

I should preface this article/review with the fact that I almost didn't get to see this show. As such, I was in great spirits from the moment I walked in the door. I've been trying to see Vanderslice perform live for the past five years but there was always something in the way. Last night seemed to be another case of missed opportunity. I already had a ticket for a live taping of Doug Benson's Doug Loves Movies podcast and I hate to throw a good ticket away. So I went to the taping (which was hilarious, but that's a different story for a different post) and was walking past the bar John Vanderslice was playing at around 10:10pm. I decided to pop in and just catch the last song or two, and there in all its glory was a sheet saying "John Vanderslice: 10:15pm." Now I don't want to paint some unrealistic picture of Philadelphia here. It's not a magical city where every night is so jam packed with fun you don't know what to do with yourself. Last night was a fun-fluke.

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Same-Sex Romance and Mass Effect’s Iterative Fiction

Few game studios can go pound for pound with RPG developer BioWare when it comes to designing rich, immersive game worlds. The best of BioWare’s work lovingly swaddles adequate gameplay in elaborate fiction, and despite their upcoming foray into the MMO space, they’ve demonstrated that they needn’t rely on established properties to do so.

With its two most recent franchises – Mass Effect and Dragon Age – BioWare’s banked heavily on gamer choice carrying over from one entry to the next. The relationship between Dragon Age and Dragon Age II exists but is quite loose when compared to the galaxy-shifting decisions that connect the two Mass Effect games.

Characters importing from one game to the next is not an entirely new idea. BioWare did it in the Baldur’s Gate series and other games before then have certainly included the feature, but the complexity of the Mass Effect universe and its tangled web of choices make for one hell of an import.

One choice that’s gotten Mass Effect a lot of humorously negative coverage has been its portrayal of sex. Remember the whole “Sexbox” thing? Yeah, that was the fault of Mass Effect’s whole “have sex with an asexual blue alien” thing. Strictly speaking though – despite its sexual smorgasbord – Mass Effect (unlike Dragon Age) has never allowed for same-sex relationships.

Until now.

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A Decade of Dreck #52: Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie

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 information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far.

I played trading card games in the younger days. Kid Boivin can confess to an out-and-out mastery of Magic: The Gathering, the Star Wars CCG, and Pokémon. Going along with these three games was what I suppose separated them from the standard card games of Poker, Blackjack, and the like: a story. Magic had it's players play the role of dueling wizards ("planeswalkers") and had it's post-Tolkien fantasy story played out through the art and "flavor text" of the cards; each expansion set was an advancement of the story with an accompanying novel, many of which I read. Star Wars and Pokémon of course were both based on pre-existing properties, allowing players to re-enact the events of their favorite stories how they saw fit ("I'm going to train Lando as a Jedi...a dark Jedi!").

I, of course, loved Star Wars to death and watched a whole lot of the Pokémon cartoon as well. So basically, I'm well versed in the sometimes goofy realm of the kids' card game cash-in. I was, however, not prepared for Yu-Gi-Oh!.

My brothers watched Yu-Gi-Oh! after I had outgrown the card game fad and when I was probably older than the anime's target audience so my memories of it consist of the weekly bellows of "BLUE EYES WHITE DRAGON!" emanating from my living room on Saturday mornings. I was expecting a simple tween-centered movie for the show's cinematic debut; I have nostalgia for Pokémon after all, maybe this would register with me in a way it didn't connect with the critics.

Wrong. So very, very wrong.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 106 - Soundgarden

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.

Apparently Soundgarden was supposed to be the big breakout act from the late-80s Seattle grunge scene. The band had the talent, had the ambition, and even started building up the proper CV to impress hard rock enthusiasts (opening for Guns'n'Roses on a couple of tours, as well as spurring a religious controversy with the "Jesus Christ Pose" video). Such is the capricious nature of history that Soundgarden is now considered the bronze medal winner in the race (or even fourth, depending on how much you like Alice in Chains). 

Because of the popularity and cultural monopoly Nirvana and Pearl Jam have over the scene, I had always considered Soundgarden a kind of second rate imitator. But I was surprised to discover this week that not only are they pretty good, but they also made a significantly different kind of music, skewing closer to Led Zeppelin and heavy metal. Soundgarden was less likely to tap into the melancholic moodiness of the alternative kids, and more likely to scream about the coming apocalypse or something wild like that. 

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After the Jump: Bleep My Dad Says

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For every Arrested Development or Firefly, those shows of quality which people can't bear to see go, there are dozens of $h*! My Dad Sayses and Cavemens, shows that shouldn't have been made in the first place that get cut down before they have a chance to find their stupid, stupid audiences.

This week, we talk about TV, The Terminator, Oreos, more TV, Batman's arrest, Ashton Kutcher's upcoming stint on Two and a Half Men, and more!

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Sunday Reading: Cool Story, Bro

At the risk of eliciting a hearty “tl;dr” in the comments, I will be brief in relaying this Slate article to you.

If you’re up on your memes, you may be familiar with this picture:

“Cool story, bro” has breathed new life into this unnerving depiction of Hercules by Clayton Henry. Long article, completely straight-faced stories in desperate need of undercutting, statements so obvious as to warrant mockery: all are subject to the sarcastic dismissal that accompanies this cheery Herc.

Slate’s Michael Agger did some Internet digging to uncover this meme’s origin. He cites Know Your Meme, which credits “Cool story, bro” to either the “Youtube poop community” (!) or 4chan. I suppose you can this up yourself, but what’s worth reading is Agger’s analysis of the meme’s mutations.

Like most memes, it began life as an offshoot of something else – the aforementioned “tl;dr” – which is Internet slang for “Get to the point!”  It then morphed into a formidable weapon for troll-slaying. Nothing hurts an incendiary commenter more than being dismissed. What’s funniest to me, however, is how the meme has since folded back in on itself. Agger writes:

“Lately, yet another meaning has become attached to "Cool story, bro:" a nonironic acknowledgement that someone in fact has written a cool story.”

In our current age of planned, conformist irony, what’s more ironic than being sincere?

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Saturday Morning TV: Social Security…in SPACE

I can’t believe our government spent money on this.

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A Disorganized Rant About a Somewhat Organized Rant About Videogame Criticism

Stop writing that article on videogames right now. Daniel Cook doesn’t want to read your thoughts on immersion in Dead Space. He doesn’t want to hear about that time you fell asleep playing Final Fantasy VII and how it still reminds you of some of your now-lost middle-school friendships. He’d also appreciate it if you stopped writing about the past and only focused on the future.

If you absolutely have to write something, you had better be a game developer.

Cook (or “Danc”), the Chief Creative Officer at Spryfox, writes about game design at Lost Garden. He recently took the site Critical Distance (in which we’ve had the pleasure of being featured) to task for promoting pieces of game criticism that he deems not useful. He’s also annoyed at the volume of it. Does he realize this is the Internet? There’s too much of everything.

It appears the Games as Art thing has folded in on itself. Now people are criticizing how we critique games. To complete the M.C. Escher painting, I will now critique that critique of critique.

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Growing Up with the "Up Series"

There's an old Jesuit maxim that says, "Give me a child until seven, and I will show you the man." It's pithy, glib, and may or may not be rooted in reality. How many of us are the same person we were at seven years old? Is it even possible to make this sort of comparison? 

For the past five decades, a documentary series has been exploring this idea. The "Up Series" follows a group of British children as they age and enter the adult world, checking in on them every seven years. The original film, Seven Up, was broadcast in 1964, and its successors have been as regular as the passage of time. 49 Up premiered in 2005, and 56 Up will be filmed later this year. 

When most Americans hear the term "documentary," they probably associate it with a hyper-political manifesto ala Michael Moore, or a series of images of sealife narrated by Morgan Freedman. But the Up Series is neither political nor pedagogical; it simply broadcasts the lives of these fourteen individuals free of spectacle or melodrama. Michael Apted, who has directed the series since the participants were 14 years old, simply asks these people a series of questions: Do you like your job? What is your family life like? Do you worry about money? Are you happy? 

If this doesn't sound immediately gripping, that's part of the appeal; I started watching the series maybe three years ago, and I just watched 35 Up last week. They're not films that immediately draw you in, but with each installment, I've found myself more and more hooked. In the age of reality television, we're used to seeing characters live out some sort of pre-determined narrative, fulfilling the role they've been cast as "the bitch" or "the good guy." But the Up Series doesn't do this; their lives unfold, sometimes predictably, sometimes in strange and unexpected ways. The fact that Apted doesn't reach to make conclusions based on his work is what makes the films the most compelling.

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Everything's Coming Up Google: Android and Chrome at Google I/O

There's been quite a bit of new coming out of Google I/O (Google's developer conference) this week, and a lot of it is pretty damn noteworthy, whether or not you're a user of the Android operating system or the Chrome web browser.

With some simple hardware and software, Google is planning on fighting both Apple and Microsoft on multiple fronts: the company's Chrome OS is targeted toward light-use Windows machines, Android continues to poke iOS with a pretty big stick, and Google is very much knocking on the doors of businesses (who like Microsoft products) and educational institutions (who like Apple products). Let's check out some of the stuff they're selling.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #12: Floating Weeds

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

I won't lie to you: Floating Weeds took some doing to get through. Here's a list of things I did while watching Yasujiro Ozu's deliberative drama, in no particular order. And in case you're wondering, yes I did pause the movie. I'm not a total prole:

1. Reheated some ribs.
2. Pulled up the chords to a song I had stuck in my head all day.
3. Tried to play said song.
4. Failed.
5. Changed into my customary at-home getup (oversized t-shirt, no pants).
6. Realized my roommate was coming home and put on pants.
7. Ate an embarrassing amount of off-brand Fig Newtons.
8. Exchanged 10-15 public Twitter messages with fan-of-the-blog Andrew Woods, who I swear has seen every movie ever made by anyone ever.

This was all in an attempt to stave off the boredom that I, uncultured sonofabitch that I am, felt washing over me as I watched Floating Weeds. I've sat through some pretty slow movies; hell, I managed to make it through Barry Lyndon with only a short nap midway through. But it took just about all my strength to make it through this one.

Was it worth it?

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Workaholics: Capturing the Post-College Malaise

Earlier this month I stumbled upon a new show on Comedy Central called Workaholics. It's not the type of show I would normally watch more than once. Full of bong hits, practical jokes and frat boy antics, Workaholics seemed at first glance a bit "young" for me. The show follows three friends (term used loosely) Blake, Anders, and Adam, recent college graduates and roommates, who work in cubicles in a big telemarketing conglomeration. Much of the humor rests on their debauchery, drug use, and misfortune in love and friendship.

No matter how I felt at the premise of this show by the end of the first episode I realized: I'm hooked. This show isn't just about throwing parties and taking shrooms, it hints at something deeper and speaks to the current situation of the twenty something. Workaholics isn't just getting a laugh from its target audience. It's also eviscerating us.

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Mortal Kombat: Legacy - A Fan's Take

Since my last post about the new Mortal Kombat video game, very little else has occupied my thoughts. I've cruised through more than 2/3 of the Story Mode, beat the Arcade Ladder twice, and am slowly but surely climbing my way up the Challenge Tower. I know, it doesn't seem like much, but I'm currently in the midst of a stretch where I'll be on the road 12 out of 16 days.

Seeing as I'm away from my PS3 so much (oh yes, and my girlfriend, friends, and family), I've had to find other ways to get my Mortal Kombat fix. I bought the strategy guide so I could commit all the special moves, combos, and Fatalities to memory. I made the Mortal Kombat Wiki my homepage. And I started watching the new Warner Bros. funded webseries Mortal Kombat: Legacy, presented by machinima.com.

I remember nearly a year ago when the "trailer" for this project first appeared on the Internet. I even posted my thoughts on the subject right here on this blog. Turns out I was pretty much right in my assumption of its purpose: the 8-minute short, directed by Kevin Tancharoen, was in fact a proof of concept for a film his fresh new take on the Mortal Kombat universe.

When Warners execs saw the project, they denied funding for his movie (as if they were gonna give the 27-year-old another shot at a feature directly following Fame), but they did give him some money for a webseries. After getting personal approval from Ed Boon, Mortal Kombat: Legacy was born. It's hard to tell how it will measure up to the original games after just four episodes, but I can always give it a shot...

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The Sound and the Terror – Aural Horror in Dead Space 2

My high school history teacher had a flair for the dramatic. I entered European History one morning to find the desks – usually a neat evenly-spaced grid – arranged in pods of five or six. Our previous seating arrangements now moot, we each cautiously selected a seat, assessing our squads as we awaited the inevitable explanation. This was a man who once walked us outside on a cold December morning to illustrate Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia.

He handed each group a few gridded pieces of paper and explained that we’d collaborate by coloring in one square and passing it on to the next in our pod. The goal was to color as many as possible. Easy enough, we thought.

Just as we got started, he shut off all the lights and cranked a station-less radio to full volume. As the static roared, he prowled through the classroom, rapping on our desks with a yardstick. The sounds were annoying, frightening, deafening. Coloring a simple grid became an exercise in extreme concentration. Not only was I distracted, I feared for what my teacher might do next.

After ten minutes of hellish kindergarten-like labor, he relented and explained his scheme to simulate early working conditions in the Industrial Revolution. Funny how I remember this with more clarity than anything he taught me about the Thirty Years War.

I was reminded of this aural nightmare by a level in Dead Space 2. Confused yet?

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Movie Review: Thor

Almost exactly a year ago today I was reviewing Iron Man 2, Marvel's follow-up to the ridiculously successful Iron Man of 2008 and the second (or third, I guess, if you count The Incredible Hulk) step in their planned Avengers megafranchise. Iron Man seemingly came out of nowhere; it starred a washed-up middle aged actor and was directed by a filmmaker known more for being Vince Vaughn's fat friend than anything else by the general public. Also, it was based on a superhero that the general public could not be counted on to recognize.

Flash forward to the present. Robert Downey Jr. is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet and everybody is excited for a movie about the Norse god of thunder that promises to be tangentially related to Iron Man.

I truly never thought I'd see the day when a Thor movie is number one at the box office anywhere outside of tenth-century Scandinavia; Thor is just too weird a superhero. What's are Thor's superpowers? His powers are that he is Thor. He is literally a Viking deity. He flies by throwing his mighty hammer and just holding on as it propels him wherever he wants to go. This is a real thing and now it's a summer blockbuster. How far we've come...

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Summer Road Trip Edition

For all of you die-hard Soundgarden fans who showed up this week hoping for a detailed exposition on the band's strengths and weaknesses, I have to apologize. Trips and Plans and Events meant that I didn't have a lot of time this week, and I idiotically forgot to stock up on Soundgarden before I left for a road trip last Wednesday. So I completely failed on my Soundgarden homework, and I'm pushing that back to next week. I hope you'll forgive me.

However, the road trip did give me (and my exceedingly patient Travel Buddy) a lot of time to listen to music. In lieu of a standard Music Snob write-up, I present to you four condensed reviews of albums that I listened to during the drive. And, as all seasoned drivers know, some music works better on the road than at home (and vice-versa), and I've certainly taken that into effect. Hopefully this will help with planning the soundtrack to your own summer vacations. Enjoy!

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After the Jump: Jason Rohrer’s Chain World

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We’ve got a non-canon podcast for you this week! (Yes, that means no food silliness.)

As promised in Tuesday’s article, here is the audio from my chat with indie game designer Jason Rohrer.

Jason’s extremely generous with his time and his ideas, so I ended up with more than could fit in the write-up. Give it a listen to hear an atheist’s approach to religion, a designer’s Minecraft fanaticism, and an artist’s rejection of gameification.

Tune in next week for your regularly scheduled shenanigans.

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Sunday Reading: Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day!

It may be one of the biggest Hallmark holidays of the year – one that surely has its creator “spinning her grave” – but that shouldn’t stop you from taking the time to celebrate one’s mom.

For you nerds who need convincing that moms are great, Wired’s GeekDad blog is ringing in this maternal Sunday with the “Top Ten Mothers in Science-Fiction and Fantasy.” Everything from Dune to the Battlestar reimagining is represented. It’s not a bad list, though I’m pretty sure Queen Amidala (Luke Skywalker’s mom) is a better mom in concept than in actual film history (see: this).

If you need any further guidance as to what you should do today, I refer you to the foremost expert on mom treatment.

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Saturday Morning TV: Japanese Ghost Prank

I think Japanese hidden camera shows are the best hidden camera shows.

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Mass Effect 3 Delayed - This Is A Good Thing

“Today we have confirmed that Mass Effect 3 will be released in the first three months of 2012. The development team is laser focused on making sure Mass Effect 3 is the biggest, boldest and best game in the series, ensuring that it exceeds everyone’s expectations.” – Casey Hudson, Mass Effect Executive Producer, writing on BioWare’s Facebook page.

Nobody wanted to hear this. The videogame industry being so dependent on hype, videogame delays are perhaps the biggest bummer possible – and the bigger the game, the bigger the sigh of disappointment when the press release hits the wire.

Mass Effect fans – and fans of good games, in general – do not fret. This will be a good thing in the long run. Even if that run is three months longer than you expected.

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Yellowed Pages: The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner

Buried under piles of pulpy, yellowed copies of sci-fi and fantasy lit. Giaco reads and waits. The first Thursday of every month he’ll attempt to review an ancient relic from an ancient time (aka crappy genre fiction from the 70’s and 80’s). Stay with him as you journey into space, caves, voids and dungeons. Unfortunate side effect: from this point on you’ll smell of old books.

Origin Story
 
I found The Atlantic Abomination at one of my favorite used book stores in Philadelphia. Germ Books, now closed for business (travesty), stocked its shelves full of weird, smelly, crappy science fiction. There's something really special about going in to a specialty book shop and picking up a book based solely on its cover.

Now, look at this cover, I doubt any one of us could have passed on this gem. What we see is the Abomination himself, looking a bit like a fat blue crab/bird while terrified humans look off to the distance. This, in essence, is the whole story of The Atlantic Abomination, published in 1960. Join me as we talk cold war, aliens, mind control, and bad editing!

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Big, Loud, Dumb Fun: Fast 5 Review

Before yesterday, I'd only really seen one movie from the cars-go-vroom The Fast and the Furious franchise, the ill-remembered Tokyo Drift. I'm only telling you this so that you know how little I have invested in the rich fictional tapestry that serves as a backdrop to Fast Five, a big dumb movie that brought a touch of summer to this rainy, dreary spring.

Fast Five is a shining example of the Summer Action Movie, a film that has characters that you're nominally supposed to care about but you don't because it's not all that important, really, and the scenes where they're talking to each other are only there to give you room to breathe in between all the explosions and noise. Sure, it's bad, objectively, but if you sit there the whole time thinking about how bad it is, you're doing it wrong - you go to a movie like Fast Five because your brain has been working too hard lately and you'd like to give it a chance to shut off for exactly two hours and ten minutes. 

What follows is everything I remember about this fucking movie.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #11: Beauty and the Beast

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

As my quest to become the Watson of film knowledge grinds towards its inevitably disappointing conclusion, I've come to learn that French film isn't as easy to pin down as I first thought. The first French film I definitely remember seeing was Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in a film class during my freshman year of college. (I never dated a girl cool enough to drag me to see Amelie in high school.) And, not to sound cliche, the movie just seemed so damn French to me. In its absolute commitment to cool detachment, Breathless seemed to embody everything I thought I knew about French cinema.

Viewed from a slightly wider angle, though, even the French New Wave didn't seem as homogeneous as I'd first thought. The films of Francois Truffaut were far sweeter and, though cutting-edge in their own way, much less experimental than Godard's films, which grew even more daring as his career progressed. Taking the so-called "Left Bank" filmmakers into account distorts the picture even further. From the hallucinatory slideshow of Chris Marker's La jetée to the sweet fancifulness of Agnès Varda to the steely-eyed grimness of Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, France's nouvelle vague defied easy categorization.

Toss in the poetic realism of the Jeans, Vigo and Renoir, and the pioneering silent films of Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers, and my ability to arbitrarily pigeonhole an entire country comes into even further doubt. Let's not even mention Luc Besson, who might cause me to forfeit my very ability to be glib.

Oh Jean Cocteau. What am I going to do with you, and your magnificent, rapturous Beauty and the Beast? Stop generalizing? Maybe.

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