I’ve probably played a dozen or two Xbox 360 games in my limited time of having one (a little over a year at this point), but I’m pretty sure that Crackdown is my favorite of those games, if not that, definitely top three (I really liked Arkham Asylum and Portal). One of the reasons I liked it so much is that it reminds me of my definite all-time favorite PS2 games Spider-Man 2. I loved that game’s free range map with all kinds of mini trophies that kept me exploring the New York City landscape in order to track them down and beat up criminals. Unlike Spidey 2, though, Crackdown doesn’t bother with more complicated boss battles. Yes, there are bosses that you’re going after, but there aren’t any puzzle-based attack systems or changes in game play. You’re just running through a strange area with tons of dudes shooting at you while trying to get to the bossman. This turned out to be a long one, so hit the jump if you want my full thoughts on one of my new favorite games. read more…
Wow, busy day today. I spent my day working on some freelance and it looks like a lot of other people were too as there were some great posts online.
My buddy Jim McCann’s working on a Dazzler comic, which he talked to CBR about. I’m both really excited for him and jealous of his success. I also know Brian Warmoth has to be really jazzed about this.
Meanwhile Topless Robot hit me up with two great pieces today. First up, they said that Neil Gaiman is writing an episode of Doctor Who. We’re almost done with David Tennant’s run as The Doctor, but this has got me looking forward to the future.
TR also ran a list of 7 reasons people are still watching Heroes. The first season of Heroes was a rollercoaster for me. I wanted to like it and it started off boring, then I missed several weeks only to get caught up in one huge marathon right before the finale, which got me really jazzed. Then the finale hit and it was just stupid. I was out. Em watched for a little bit longer, but I couldn’t even be in the room with that idea swiping show. I’m shocked any self respecting geek still watches it.
/Film collected some videos of Quentin Tarantino speaking at the Directors on Directing panel from this weekend. The above clip is about how Avatar would have influenced Kill Bill had they come out in a different order. I could listen to this dude talk all day, so these videos are right up my alley.
Lucy Knisley, who I briefly interviewed for this piece about Marvel’s Girl Comics, did a rad strip on her site called Field Guide To People-Watching At A Late-Night, Adults-Only Skate At A Roller Rink In The Chicago Suburbs, 2010. The above is my second favorite page, you should definitely click the link to watch the whole thing. She really makes me wish I could draw better. I’d love to do things like this, but I’ve got zero skillz. 
Speaking of rad art, check out Chris Samnee’s GI Robot sketch which kicks of yet another week of fun over on ComicTwart.
And for one more piece of art, I just saw this piece by Jim McHugh portraying early Jim and Pam from The Office over on his McIllustrator Blog. It’s a good one I recommend for your bloglines or RSS feeds.
Tonight’s episode was another good one. It revolved around Leonard having to choose between taking Penny and Sheldon to Sweden to check out the Large Hadron Collider. The dynamics between Leonard, Sheldon and Penny were all spot on and hilarious. Meanwhile Raj groused about not having any Valentine’s Day plans and Howard…hung out at lunch. I’m hoping that the writers are just focusing in on stories and not pushing Raj out to the side where he’ll just end up being a one note joke every now and then. I did like the end of the episode though. Hit the jump for the full live blog. read more…
After watching Sneakers and The Net last week I decided to add a few more movies to the top of my Netflix account including WarGames, which I had never seen before. I got it and watched it today and it’s a great little movie. Matthew Broderick stars as a kid who accidentally hacks into NORAD’s system and plays their war games simulator which somehow makes the system think it’s happening for real. The government goes after Broderick to find out what he’s up to, but he escapes and finds the system’s creator who eventually shows up to help convince the government guys to listen to the kid. Ally Sheedy plays his love interest pre-Breakfast Club, Dabney Coleman plays a guy working for the government who runs the system, Michael Madsen has a brief role in the beginning as a guy with his hand on the proverbial button and the guy who played Eugene in Grease (Eddie Deezen) plays a super-annoying hacker friend of Broderick’s.
Overall, the movie paces itself well and seems authentic enough. Unlike the 90s movies I watched, this stuff was all WAY before my time (it came out the year I was born) so I have no idea how accurate it was on the technology side of things, but the IMDb trivia said the screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes (who also wrote Sneakers!) hung out with some hackers to get some of the tech specs right. Gotta love that level of commitment to the source material, but I’m guessing the hackers didn’t appreciate being portrayed by the super annoying kid from Grease. Man, I’m glad I never had to actually take my phone off the hook and put it on my modem to get it to work. Or if I almost accidentally created a global nuclear war just because I was really excited about playing a new video game.
As you might expect, watching the original lead me directly to checking out the WarGames sequel Death Code which I liked much more than I expected to. When it comes to straight to DVD sequels to 80s movies, I think I’ve only ever seen Road House 2 and Lost Boys: The Tribe, one of which was okay and the other I couldn’t even get through. I guess Death Code stands as the best of the bunch as it’s not just a rehash of the original (which would have been excruciating after JUST watching the original). In fact, Joshua, the computer program from the first film shows up as kind of a hero in this one, taking center stage for the last 10 or so minutes of the movie.
This time, the story revolves around a kid named Will who plays an online game which is really a government trap to hunt down terrorists. I’m still not exactly sure how that works, but whatever, I bought it enough. This time he’s on the run with his lady friend and actually gets helped out by the scientist who created the program in the first movie. The only really interesting casting note is that Nicolas Wright plays his friend and Wright plays a guy named Davis on Accidentally On Purpose which was just on. Overall the acting is alright, the lines are all delivered well, but sometimes the reactions seem a little wooden. I would say that it’s not a necesarry movie to watch, but it’s fun enough if you want a thematic follow-up to the original flick.
It’s kind of interesting that even after 25 years we have the same fears regarding computers. Both movies feature computers taking control of systems that have the potential to lead to mass destruction. In the first movie the computer system made the military think the Soviets were going to bomb. Had they trusted the system, they would have retaliated which would have made the Soviets actually fire missiles at the US. In the sequel, the computer system basically gains autonomy and decides to do the same thing, but it goes further in that it sees the people trying to stop is as being a threat and orders a spy plane to bomb them. As much as we want machines to do our work for us (especially the dirty variety), our fiction keeps laying out the problems that could result, even though some of those problems rely on some pretty far off problems like advanced artificial intelligence. Well, I hope it’s far off…
Do you guys remember a few years back when Doritos decided to take the gimmick approach with their mystery X-13D chips? They even made a big contest of who could figure out and name the new flavor. One day while driving to work in the morning I stopped off at a bagel place, saw a bag and picked them up. It took me a few chips, but soon enough I realized that I was eating cheeseburger chips with additional ketchup and mustard flavorings in there. It was a fun little mystery especially because most of the people I knew hadn’t tried them or seen the mystery chips around, but soon enough they disappeared from the bagel shop and I forgot about them. Until tonight that is. The missus and I ran out to the grocery store before the Super Bowl to grab a few snacks and some beer and lo and behold, sitting there on the shelves were the (I’m guessing) brand new Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger chips.
From what I remember, they’re the same chips and I still like them. Unlike the Enchilada and Sour Cream chips, which I kept hoping were a different flavor, I enjoyed how different the Cheeseburger chips are. If I had to make a choice to only eat one kind of Dorito for the rest of my life, I’d still have to go with Cool Ranch, but as I don’t see that snack apocalypse happening anytime soon, there’s plenty of room for different chips in my life, I’ll keep these in semi regular rotation.
A few days ago, I posted the sneak peak clips of Kia’s Sorento Super Bowl ad featuring a series of toys including Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba. It looked pretty cool and I was excited for it to come around in the 3rd quarter in a game that I ended up dozing off during only to wake up to see the Colts (who I was rooting for) turn it over to give the Saints a two touchdown lead with a few minutes left.
Seeing as how I wasn’t emotionally invested in the game (I’m a Steelers fan), I found myself watching the game like I did when I was younger and didn’t care about football: waiting for the commercials. Overall I liked the Bud Light, Coke and Doritos commercials the best. The missus commented that she didn’t think they were that good this year, but I have a theory on that: commercials in general are much better nowadays than they used to be. Ten to fifteen years ago it doesn’t seem like commercials were trying to make us laugh unless they were on during a football game, but in the last decade the balance has shifted towards better and funnier ads. So, on the whole I’d say the quality of our commercials is just a lot better, we don’t have to wait for the Super Bowl anymore to give us the goodness. But, people still expect better and crazier commercials which means expectations are much much higher because the basic standard of commercials are better. What do you guys think?
Hey gang, you might have noticed a serious dip in posting over the weekend. That was because yesterday (Saturday) was my birthday. My folks came out from Toledo on Friday and spent the weekend with the missus and me. It was the first time in years that we saw each other on my actual birthday which was pretty cool. We got lunch at a great place in New Paltz, NY called The Gilded Otter. In addition to being a great little restaurant, the place is also a brewery where, instead of getting a beer, you can get what they call the Beer Garden which is eight shot-sized samples of their beers with a list explaining which was which. I’m pretty sure they were mislabeled, but it was still a lot of fun. We got a growler of one of them for later in the evening when some friends came over and we had a good old time hanging out, talking and playing electronic catchphrase. Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy b-day on Facebook, email and sent cards, like this one from my buddy Chad who’s in Japan right now.
Super extra double thanks to everyone and anyone who hooked me up with one of these lovely gifts. Thanks to the Lost Season 5 DVDs, all the Nightmare On Elm Street movies and Modern Warfare 2, I’ll have plenty to watch and do. The Beatles CDs will keep my ears buzzing and I’ll look sick as hell wearing the Superman shirt while drinking out of the Green Lantern mug and playing with my 3 3/4-inch Freddy Krueger figure. Thanks again to everyone!
I’m not sure what it is about this pulpy noir pocket universe that DC’s got brewing with First Wave, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. It started with the Brian Azzarello-written, Phil Noto-drawn Batman/Doc Savage Special 1-shot which was both beautiful and a ton of fun to read. I’m no fan of Doc Savage, not because I dislike the character, but because I haven’t been exposed to him. I tried reading Tom Strong who takes more than a few plays from the Savage playbook and never got into it, but I did really like the pulpy stories in the Lobster Johnson mini series from Dark Horse and the Orson Randall stories in Immortal Iron Fist which were also inspired Savage. The aspects of those two stories that I really dug were the heroes’ network of helpers and of course, that’s something Savage brought to the table and show up in the special.
See, the idea is to take badass, powerless characters like Batman, Doc, Black Canary, The Spirit, the Blackhawks, Justice Inc. and Rima The Jungle Girl and tossing them up against some crazy villains while keeping the books and characters securely rooted in the pulp/noir/crime playground. And don’t think of this as your regular Batman, this is some pure Golden Age Batman goodness with him packing heat and firing on anyone who messes with him. If the list of characters above left you scratching your head, check out this link which has scans of character sketches and descriptions from Batman/Doc Savage. 
After the 1-shot kicks things off, we’ll be getting into the First Wave miniseries in March which will be written by Azz and drawn by Rags Morales who hasn’t done much of interest or real quality lately, but the pages they’ve been posting over on DC’s The Source have looked pretty fantastic, just check out this page starring a giant robot. 
Then in March the empire expands with two ongoings: Doc Savage written by Paul Malmont with Howard Porter art and The Spirit by Jason Starr and Scott Hampton with Justice Inc. backup stories. Now, I don’t know anything about these writers other than the fact that they’re crime novelists, but I’m hoping they’re good at this whole comics thing. 
I’m sure some people don’t want another universe to keep track of, but at least this way it’ll be easy to ignore them if you don’t like the books or just don’t care. Frankly, I prefer this course of action to shoehorning outside characters into the established comic universe like DC did with the Red Circle and Milestone characters. I’m looking forward to seeing Azzarello doing what he’s really good at, telling complex, fast paced and absorbing stories with badass characters. 100 Bullets is one of my favorite comics of all time, but his other superhero stuff hasn’t been so great (except Doctor 13, which is amazing), so I’m hoping he’ll be able to play to his real strong suit with First Wave. After that? Who knows? I don’t know much about the characters, but something about this project has me really really intrigued and excited for some hopefully great comics.
I’ve been seeing this video from Sade a lot on VH1 and think the same thing every single time “Did Andy Samberg direct this thing?” It’s so full of 90s music video ridiculousness that it just seems like a joke. Sada, however, does not seem to be in on the joke.
If you’re like me and go to IMDb several times a day, then you’ve probably seen this collection of toys hanging out in front of a Kia Sorento. The missus informed me that the tall, bumpy red guy is Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba. You’ve also got a sock monkey, an old fashioned-looking robot that was apparently at the Detroit Auto Show, a teddy bear and what looks like an old timey dreadlocked coconut jail bird. Kia has brought this eclectic crew together to rock out in their very first Super Bowl commercial. In a strange move, Kia is actually advertising their commercial on various websites and in these two teasers…for a commercial. I’m not sure what the rationale is here, but I totally want to hang out and drink with these toys. Hardcore.
