Burnout

I'm not a big fan of racing games, but I like to put in time with my favorite series when the newest iteration hits. This year, it's Burnout Paradise, and it's pretty darned good.

It's Burnout, but it's not the Burnout you remember. In fact, it's completely different. The GUI, the menus, the linear races, they're all out the window. As are the beloved Crash races, which is an unfortunate oversight on the part of the creators, but I digress. This is a different approach to game design, one that requires a bit of accommodation to allow yourself to become familiarized with.

Once you have your permit, you're released into an open city to do as you please. There are cars to unlock (which you unlock by crashing into), there are ramps to test (see: fly over a winding ravine to your death), and there are crashes a plenty. It wouldn't be Burnout without the signature crash sequences, and they look better than ever on the next generation of consoles.

Then there's the online functionality, perfect in its execution. The d-pad is your guide to the online, allowing you to at any time during game play, connect to a friend and begin smashing, crashing, flying, and barrel rolling in unison. Up to eight players(!!), and new challenges that open up for each additional guy you bring in, the online is where it's at.

Let us also not forget, that at any point during the game, you have been afforded the ability to turn your car into a traffic missile with a simple button press. Upon depressing the bumpers, your car swerves, flips, and becomes a controllable car missile. You surf traffic, using helpless drivers as launch points and buses as multipliers. This is supposed to replace the missing "Crash Events" from previous Burnout games. It's a fun diversion, but it serves little purpose beyond that, and it's a little disappointing when you compare it with the old days of crashing, when the game actually rewarded the highest level of destruction at an intersection with actual progression. Also, the lack of a retry button on single player races is extremely frustrating later in the game. Having to navigate the roads with a map that can only be accessed by tearing yourself out of the game is sort of against everything they were trying to do by completely getting rid of the UI. It's more realistic, forcing the driver to plot his route ahead of time rather than risk doing so on the fly and screwing up in the process, but it's also annoying in the late game.

Still, this is a stupidly fun game. Online, the experience can't be matched. It's hard to describe, but it ends up playing like a speed induced version of GTA without the on foot parts to bother with. Speed is the weapon, and your car is the blunt object. The city is your playground to race, or crash as you please, and there is plenty to see and do.

What are you waiting for? Go buy it.

Best of 2007

I listened to a lot of music this year, but the albums I kept coming back to numbered in the single digits. There's a lot of great stuff out there, and I think I made my way through most of the highlights unscathed.

The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder

Listen to: "Same Old Drag", "Energy", "7 Stars",

These guys deserve some praise for creating one of the happiest, most energetic albums of all time. This thing is filled to the brim with good feelings and warm sounds, and it plays out like something familiar, but catchy all the same. It's definitely heavily produced, but the sound doesn't suffer for it, in fact, it elevates most of their songs into something electronic sounding, which I find myself more attracted to as of late. Which leads me to my next favorite..

Daft Punk - Alive 2007

Listen to: The whole thing. From start to finish. Do it.

This might be the best album from last year. From the moment it begins, you know it's going to rock harder than anything you've heard before. These guys already knew how to write great electronic funk rock, and this album is the culmination of ten years of perfect songs. Every song that you loved before is remixed with another in this titanic, speaker crushing, live robot fest. Unlike other collaborative efforts (and because it's their stuff), it comes off perfectly blended, there is no wasted noise here. They bring back every great moment from their albums and it hits you hard and doesn't stop for the duration.

Calvin Harris - I Created Disco

Listen to: "Acceptable in the 80's", "Vegas", "I Created Disco", "Merrymaking At My Place", "Colours", "Disco Heat"

This guy surprised me completely. I heard a track of his on OpenPandora, and it didn't really catch my ear. In fact, it kind of annoyed me. A few days later, I discovered myself humming it, and realized that what I initially thought of as an annoyance was actually one of the catchiest beats I'd ever had the pleasure of hearing. This guy is a wizard and the album title, while not modest in any way, is correct. This man, too young to have been alive when Disco graced this green earth, has done with the genre what few other people could. He's created a clever, catchy, up beat disco album for the 21st Century, and it is fantastic. There are a few throw away tracks toward the end, but as funky electric disco goes, this guy has the shit down to a science.

The Killers - Sam's Town

Listen to: "Bling Confessions of a King", "Sam's Town", "For Reasons Unknown", "Uncle Johnny", "When You Were Young"

I know, I know, it came out last year. That doesn't change the fact that it took me this long to give it a thorough listen myself, and I couldn't believe it took me so long to get here. There are some tracks I don't care for, and their sound has taken on a brighter, more arena-rock oriented focus, but I like it. It took me some time to get on board with a few tracks, but this is a great album that deserves every bit as much praise as the first. Sure, every track isn't phenomenal, as on their debut album, but that's to be expected. If this is any indication of where things are going, I can't wait for their third offering.

Radiohead - In Rainbows

Listen to: "Reckoner", "Videotape", "House of Cards", "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi"

One of the greatest bands of all time releases an album for free and it's some of their best work? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Indeed, Radiohead put out a rock solid offering here, and it's worth your money more than any album you've paid for this year. They've come off five albums of heavy experimentation and the results haven't always been great, but this is where it comes together. The sound is softer, it's lighter, it's focused, and it's a pleasure to listen. This is clearly an album crafted by some of the greatest song writers on the planet, and it shows. It's great the whole way through, and is best taken in with some degree of substance abuse before hand. Just saying.

One Billion is a Lot

What would I do with one billion dollars? The possibilities are endless. If only I'd had the foresight to invent a product like Guitar Hero.

That's how much money they've made on the sale of the product itself. It does not include the vast revenue garnered from downloadable content. This is a hulking beast of a thing now. It will be exploited to the darkest point of no return, and its iterations will exist, in some form, for many years, I suspect.

Of course, I love the series. It is as close perhaps as I'll ever get to an actual guitar without ever really coming anywhere close to being one. It's fun to play, that's all there is to say about it. But how did a game where a 3/4 size plastic guitar controller become mainstream? How did it become wildly popular? I remember when the first Guitar Hero came out, it was incredible fun. It brought the sort of joy to the home game console that I hadn't felt since the old days. It was arcade-like almost, but one felt the urge to rock the fuck out. I always felt it was a niche product, partially because of the price, but also because you look stupid when you play it. There's no getting around it, it's hard to look cool with a tiny little guitar controller that has buttons representing all of the primary colors.

Now it's a hulking juggernaut in the game industry. The competition is fierce, with Rock Band in tow (or perhaps in the lead?). It will be interesting to see where we go from here. Do we get more instruments and updates via Xbox Live for Rock Band, or will we get nickeled and dimed? They already know they can charge us anything for the downloads, because people will still pay for them, regardless of the price. It's that point system, furiously insisting that a few more points aren't going to hurt your bank statement at the end of the month. It's also the offerings. There are some great tracks out for Rock Band. The Police? Queens of the Stone Age? Yes. I'll take it.

<---- Has contributed over 300 of his hard earned dollars to the Guitar Hero franchise.

Many Things

Lots of stuff has happened and I haven't been writing or commenting unnecessarily on it.

The Format War

Things look grim for HDDVD right now, as Blu-Ray now currently has 70% of the studios under exclusivity contracts. What does this mean for the average consumer? Absolutely nothing. Both of these formats were created in order to cash in on a minor upgrade in performance and quality and neither matter much in the long run. In five years, there will be something better, with more storage, and it will look even prettier. I'd also be willing to bet that if you look at sales, DVDs are still outselling both of the HD formats hands down.

Movies

I've taken in quite a few films in the last couple of weeks. The top of the list is easily No Country For Old Men, based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, it's one of those films that every man in America should go see. It's violent, it's graphic, and it's bloody, but it also seems to have every good actor they could find in it. The writing is nothing short of brilliant, and the antagonist is easily one of the greatest movie villains in history. He's sadistic, unpredictable, and always on edge, which makes for some truly remarkable scenes of ritual blood bath.

I Am Legend was pretty good, I thought. The ending was a little weak, but as post apocalyptic movies go, it was well filmed and well acted. It's interesting, because for about 80% of the movie, Will Smith only talks to his dog, and yet the movie is still watchable. It's too bad that I won't be able to see any of his movies anymore. Having recently announced his connection with the Church of Scientology (see: crazy fuckers who believe that malevolent alien spirits cause all our problems), I must now add Will Smith's films to a list of those I can't go see. It's too bad, because I really like his movies. Oh well.

I saw some other movies, Alien vs. Predator Requiem being one of them. It only bears mentioning because it was so bad, which is to say, in many ways, it was a worthy sequel to the first film. Though the two have absolutely no connection, and the story is completely different, this is the sequel. There are Aliens. Oh, and some Predators. They fight, but not much. Also, there is an Alien that somehow looks sort of like a Predator. It is a PredAlien, I guess. I played with the toys when I was 9, so I vaguely remember that being one of them. The Aliens and Predators on which the crux of the film is based don't really do a whole lot of interacting, save pounding the crap out of each other in ludicrously dark rooms where the action takes a back seat to the gore, which has been turned up to eleven.

In making this grotesque film, it seems the creators went back to each previous Alien and Predator film and made a list of all the "alien bursting out of a chest" situations they never got to explore in the past films. Father and his 10 year old son? Chest bursted. Homeless people in a sewer? Chest bursted. Hospital wing full of pregnant women? You know they chest bursted those fat bitches.

It seems they have forgotten what made the first Alien and Predator films so great in the first place. It was all about the hunt and the suspense leading up to it. Now, it's a game of "who can we chest burst next, and how violent can this one be?" I can only imagine the conversation that went on before this movie got the green light:

Studio Exec: So, the script looks pretty good, but we just have a couple things we want to ask you about.
Writer: Sure, go for it.
Studio Exec: Why are there so many people with aliens shooting out of their chests?
Writer: I wanted to really explore the medium of chest bursting with this film, really try to get inside the mentality of an alien's motivation to chest burst the shit out of everything it sees.
Studio Exec: But the movie is about humans.
Writer: Well there has to be something for the aliens to chest burst.
Studio Exec: What if they chest bursted cars?
Writer: That could work.

As much as I hate on the film, I will also say this: I would leap at the opportunity to be one of the guys that gets chest bursted in an Alien movie. I feel it would make a perfect addition to my bulging resume.

More later.

Bioshocked

Having finally completed Bioshock in its entirety, and with enough time passed now to afford others the same chance, I feel it's safe to talk at great length about the experience.

Bioshock is without a doubt, one of the most important video games that has ever come out. It proves that the gaming industry is not entirely lost to the churning gears of uncreative sequels, and emphatically shows players what a game can be like when design and execution come together with utter precision. This is a game with tight game play, an engaging plot, and iconic moments that will forever adorn the halls of video game history.

From the moment the player first comes in contact with a formidable Big Daddy, there is a sense that the city of Rapture is alive. Even if the game is slightly more linear than advertised, the city never ceases to feel alive as its denizens and genetic monstrosities wander the broken halls searching for the game's most important form of currency: Adam. The inclusion of a resource collecting system in a shooter such as this one creates an interesting dichotomy in the game play and also helps the pacing a great deal. Intense gun fights are broken up by hacking sections, item creation, and even vending machines where the player can change his genetic load out. Even so, the pacing is nigh perfect as the player progress deeper into the city and goes more in depth into Rapture's horrifying past.

Each new discovery in the sinking city is provided via audiotapes, left for the most part by ghosts of Rapture's past. Thousands died as a result of the civil war which occurred long before the player arrives, and only in the aftermath do the cause and the key players become clear. As the story unfolded further, and the plot twisted and turned through Rapture's sinking corridors, I continually became more engrossed in the experience.

Perhaps the most interesting addition to the game's dynamic is the moral choice that is provided each time you defeat a Big Daddy. Either harvest or rescue the little girls and the ending changes based upon your choices during the course of the game, but the most interesting addition is not the system itself. Rather, it is the emotional connection that the game forces the player to feel with the Little Sisters. Would you kill something that used to be a sweet little girl in order to survive? Will you be a monster, or their savior? The choice is yours, and the ultimate outcome will likely chill you to your emotional core.

I could talk about how unbelievable the graphics and art direction are, and I could probably go on for days about the sound design and music, but I don't need to. Bioshock speaks for itself as one of the most complete gaming experiences to date, and even if it is relatively short, it is ultimately uniquely satisfying and compelling like few other games before it.

Bioshock

Occasionally, a video game comes along and changes the way that people perceive games, both from an industry and player perspective. The famed developer of the critically acclaimed System Shock 2, Irrational Games, has created a truly mind blowing experience with their latest shooter, Bioshock. Morality, intellect, and skill are all factors in their latest foray into the survival/horror genre, and to put it simply, they've succeeded in creating an atmospheric experience unlike any before it.

Having only played the twenty minute demo available on Xbox Live, these might seem like lofty claims, but I think I can safely make them. If the game stays on the same track it is on in the demo, it will be the herald of a new golden age of video games.

The demo begins with a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. A short cinematic shows, in painful detail, what it would be like to almost drown from a first person perspective. After pulling his head up out of the water, the reigns are handed over to the player, and the game begins. Burning fuel cascades across the water on either side of you, and the tail end of the plane is seen ahead in the distance sinking slowly beneath the waves. More curious, a strange stone lighthouse is jutting up out of the water near where the plane is sinking, and as your only option for survival, it appears as though you must swim for the artificial island. As you get closer, the plain descends further until it is gone completely beneath the surf, leaving only the oil fires and some small wreckage floating on the surface. Not knowing what else to do, you follow the path on the tiny island to a door which leads into a human built stairwell. Playing in the background as you walk, Bobby Darin's Beyond the Sea perfectly juxtaposes a sense of foreboding, and causes your first steps into this new world to be very cautious. Following it down, the architecture is oddly familiar to the time period (1960s) but also unfamiliar in many ways as well. A strange looking elevator is waiting, door open, at the bottom of the long stairwell, and after studying it for a moment, you enter and pull the lever in front of you.

Thus begins your journey into Rapture, an underwater city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the great would not be constrained by the small, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, and where everything went horribly wrong.

I won't talk more about Bioshock now, because it must be experienced on its own.

More later.

Current Listening

Right now: Cicatriz E.S.P. by The Mars Volta.

An interesting band to say the least. Progressive, experimental rock with a touch of insanity thrown in for good measure. I'd say that brings them a few steps closer to my taste.

One of my new favorite bands which I discovered via Pandora, a wonderful little music application, is called The Gabe Dixon Band. I'd go as far as to say that if you like good music, you will like Gabe Dixon. He's got an ear for song writing that seems to be missing from most of the stuff that comes out these days. I'd be curious to know if he's had classical training or not, because his arrangements, while tight in harmony, are so fluid in motion, that it creates a really strange jazzy dichotomy, and in doing so, an extremely unique sound. He only has two albums, but I cannot stress enough how important it is that they be purchased forthwith. I haven't actually purchased an album from a store in a long time, and I went out and bought both of them after hearing two of his songs. I was not disappointed.

Another recent favorite is the new Dream Theater album. Now, Dream Theater is a beastly band that has been around for, I believe, twenty years now. They still have a fresh sound, and it still works well with their need to release anthemic, epicly poetic albums. It's a bit heavy on the electronic, and most of it has extremely dark overtones, but it's so well arranged, that any fan of hard rock or metal can get into it easily. The dark parts contrast the lighter parts as they should, and in true Dream Theater fashion, most of the songs are pretty long, but well worth the time spent listening. They draw heavy inspiration from Metallica, and it's easy to hear in their music, but make no mistake--Metallica they are not. They are a better band, and a more accessible one at that.

Now, I got my hands on the new Linkin Park album this week as well, and I must say, it is truly horrendous. It's so bad, in fact, that I actually felt as though listening to it was a complete waste of my time. Here is a band that does one thing, and one thing well: they create over the top catchy guitar riffs with overly emotional dark lyrics and then scream them at you. It worked for two albums before, so why doesn't it work here? Linkin Park now apparently wishes to be taken seriously as a band, which, to put it simply, isn't going to happen. They were never great, and they have never even really been good either. So, what does the new album sound like? Well, let's just say that I'd rather listen to white noise from a television channel that isn't working than listen to it through another time. To be frank, the songs are unoriginal, bland, and lacking in substance. This seems odd to me, seeing as how there is one song on the album that does sound like the old LP. In fact, they felt the need to add swearing into the mix, because they weren't hardcore enough before.

I'm so sick of the emo-punk rock movement happening in this country. It seems that for every good band that comes along, fifteen more shitty emo bands will arrive with a number one hit single that sounds EXACTLY the same as the one before it. But, that is the nature of music I suppose. When it's so easily accessible these days(at least to play music), everyone thinks they're a musician. I'm just shocked that people show up to those concerts.

On Sleep, Sleeping, and Sleeper

I love to sleep. The only thing about it I don't like is that it takes time out of the day to actually get some sleep. Otherwise, you could say, I'm addicted to sleep. Having procured new, softer, more sleeplier sheets for Christmas this year, I now look forward even more to dive bombing onto my place of rest each night. Of course, my patterns of sleep are extremely erratic, and I never seem to go to bed at the same time on any given night. Indeed, much of my sleep must be forced on with heavy drinking or a heroin binge.

The title of this post has nothing at all to do with the post itself, I just wanted to make that the title. As I'm the one making the decisions here, I'll stand by them as long as I remain sentient enough to do so. Onward.

I started paying for a new service this month called Gamez n' Flix. As the name would suggest, it is an alternative to Gamefly and Netflix which rents both games and films. This sounded wonderful to my pallet, as I did not wish to pay for both, but I felt that both services should be offered. Indeed, I even had a dream once that I had started a similar business, but I had spent the acquired business loan money on mass quantities of cheese-its instead of leasing out a building and starting a website. As such, it is perhaps, in better hands. I began the service a week ago, and set up to receive 1 movie and 1 game at the same time. The service, while not offering a cheaper start up fee, is actually a better deal than the other two services, and it offers both in one convenient package. As I alluded to previously, there was, what you might call, a snow storm here in Oklahoma, so I'm unsure if that had any effect on my receiving the two items later, but the arrived a couple days ago. My first two choices were 1) The Descent (DVD) and 2) Viva Pinata (360). So, on their nifty little queue system, I made my selections and logged off, with those two items at one and two on my list.

The next day, I received an email saying that The Descent had shipped, and so had Sonic the Hedgehog (360). For a moment, I was flabbergasted. Sonic was about tenth on my list on the queue, and I wasn't planning on renting that one until I had pretty much exhausted all my other options. According to their site, the other stuff I had in queue should have been available, but I guess it wasn't. Anyway, I'm not particularly angry, as I did want to eventually play Sonic, but I'm sort of wondering if the list I made will have any actual baring when it comes down to it. I know Gamefly and Netflix function, because I have friends who use the two services frequently. The main complaint with Gamefly is that its only distribution center is supposedly somewhere in California, meaning that those of us not on the West Coast have to wait a little longer than we should for our rentals to come in.

Another oddity about Gamez n' Flix is that it features thousands of movies and games, but there are some pretty big name releases completely missing from the site. I was unable to find Crank (which just came out on DVD) and The Thing (not a new release, but my personal favorite Sci Fi masterpiece) were both missing action. Some other searches turned up empty with a few other big name releases. I'm hoping maybe they just haven't gotten a full library up yet as the service is new. They do have plenty of 360 games for me to choose from, and enough movies to keep me using the service for at least another month or two. If things don't get better, I'll probably switch over to one of the other two. Still, this is a cheaper alternative to buying, and it saves me from having to deal with blockbuster's bullshit.

The Descent
I feel I should write about the Descent because it is worth at the very least, some recognition of existence. It is a reasonable horror film marred by an almost useless first half. There are no male characters, save the one that is impaled at the start of the film. Don't ask me to explain that, as it really is quite pointless to the whole movie, but it happens, and it's gross. Maybe if people in England didn't drive on the wrong side of the road, it never would have happened, but they all suffer from a form of acute retardation when it comes to things like that, so they do, and it did. Anyway, the film finally picks up when a group of empowered women go spelunking. No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not the good kind of spelunking, but the kind where you crawl through caves on your belly and sometimes have to fight off demons. Or something. Yeah, there are demons I think. At least, I guess they might have been. The empowered girls deduce via some crappy paintings on the wall, that there were people in this cave before them, and that instead of dying, those people must have evolved into cave creatures that see by hearing and hunt stuff above ground at night and then return to their cave. Yeah. That's the story. So, I'm going to pretend they didn't offer an explanation, because that makes the demons that much cooler.

Bottom Line
If you like horror films, it's worth a rental at the very least, so you can either a) laugh at the terrible writing or b) watch some of the goriest shit you will ever see in a film. There are some pretty sick moments, and some of the movie is even very well shot (if you're into that kind of thing), so I guess it has that going for it. It's also slightly scary. I guess.


Sonic the Hedgehog
Oh Sonic, what happened to thee? You used to be a blue hedgehog that we could all identify with. Running around at light speed in flashy red shoes picking up golden rings and then dropping all of them if you ran into a robot created by an evil doctor shaped like an egg. You broke societal bonds and let us know that you were just like us, that we too could lead a normal life. Then, Sega decided to make this game.

There are two words I think that surmise what Sega has done to Sonic over the last ten or so years, and they are the following: Butt and Fuck

Imagine a game that already has the perfect formula. It's already fun to play, it looks great, and it has likable characters without any real story to speak of. Not even Mario could move as fast as this guy, and he looked cool doing it. Now, fast forward. Twenty bad games later, Sega is still unable to capture what made Sonic so great in the first place, and I just can't understand why. I guess the most plausible explanation is that somewhere along the way, they forgot what makes a game fun. The first level of Sonic 360 is a pretty awesome throwback to the original done in 3D. There are minor annoyances, but otherwise, it's pretty cool. It goes down hill from there.

The game tries to offer the illusion of a GTA like city (albeit an extremely tiny one) that ends up looking more like a direct copy of Mario Sunshine with a far more linear attitude toward game play. Add in the fact that Sonic and friends are existing in a world with humans, a dash of absolutely horrendous voice acting, and load times that occur more often than the number of times the kids swear on Southpark, and you've got a terrible video game. Don't forget the terrible cut scenes (you can skip them, praise the flying spaghetti monster) that take 30 seconds to load and when they're over, another 30 seconds to load the game back up. I'm not sure where all the loading comes from, as the game doesn't even really look that great. It has moments, sure, but nothing that can even come close to comparing to a similarly styled game (Viva Pinata). Oh yeah, and you have impossibly stupid boss fights where the game is so hopelessly bugged, you'll probably get so frustrated being killed unfairly over and over that you'll fly to Sega headquarters and pee on their front door.

Bottom Line
I essentially want to drop trow and let loose on this game. Or leave it out in the street while it rains and cars run over it. Or drop it out of an airplane. Unfortunately, it's not even worth any of the above effort. Don't play it, don't rent it, and above all, please don't buy it. You will not be happy with the purchase.