The new series from David Simon (The Wire) is good stuff for people looking for something out there in TV with some actual meat on the bone. If you’re expecting “The Wire: New Orleans Edition” (as Dick Wolf would have titled it) you’ll be a bit disappointed. The Wire was an exploration of crime, corruption, the nature of life in an American city, and the institutions we ally ourselves with (be they the police, unions, gangs, schools, etc.), Treme is almost a love story about New Orleans and music.

Set three month after Katrina you can be sure Simon will include plenty of swipes at FEMA and Bush-era politicians, but Treme seeks to tell a story not of institutional failures, but of the lives of several musicians living in the New Orleans neighborhood of Treme. Given that most of the major character are musicians, music unsurprisingly plays a major role in Treme, and even a musically illiterate person such as myself can enjoy what they offer the viewer. In some ways Treme lacks some of the punch of the Wire, whereas Simon burned with a love/hate relationship with Baltimore, it almost feels like he might not be much more than a New Orleans fanboy. On the other hand, I find some of the of the storytelling is much richer and more interesting. Many of the stories focus on the lives of the characters and their families, a motif that was pretty lacking in The Wire except for examples of failed families. I also enjoy that the over arching story is still interesting without the tension and conflict of the active case from each season of The Wire.

So, I’d watch anything David Simon puts his name on, but I’d recommend Treme as being more accessible and closer to The Wire than his other post-Wire piece: Generation Kill.

The Old West! Or at least the end of the old west! (1911 according to back of the game box.) Dan had me really worried when he said there was a car is the opening cut scene, but rest assured that it was an appropriately old timey car and not the Honda Civic I envisioned. Also as far as I can tell you don’t ever have to chance to steal said car.

Red Dead Redemption is lots of fun. I went right from playing the GTA4 DLC “Ballad of Gay Tony” into starting this so it was hard for me not to feel at first that this was basically GTA4 with a better cover system, and you know, horseys instead of cars. As I started putting several hours into RRD, it quickly grew on me. My first reaction was how weird it was that a game set in a desolate, sparsely populated dessert, could feel so rich and engrossing compared to Rockstar’s previous metropolis based games. There is just a ton to do: strangers to help out, animals to hunt, bounties to collect, poker to play, bandit hideouts to decimate, and of course the story missions. The variety of experiences and different ways situations can play out results in some unique experiences; friends I talked to who’d only played the first hour of the game described experiences and adventures I had yet to encounter hours into it. Every night I played the game would leave me with a story about some act of virtual heroism, botched rescue mission, or case of mistaken identity that resulted in a gunfight (some of the sheriffs are dressed rather nondescriptly.) The story is surprisingly better than Rockstar’s previous fare: John Marston’s tale of vengeance (or “Redemption”) is good by video game standards with the details revealed very slowly over the course of many conversations. Your first mission does a good job of setting up the rest of the story. Whereas previous Rockstar main characters have either been silent protagonists, unredeeming psychopaths, or just unbelievable, Marston’s bloody path of murder seems to work a lot better. Part of this may be the setting (murder being slightly more acceptable in the old West than on the streets of New York), the other part of it may be that Marston simply seems more than willing to admit his many faults and misdeeds (compared to GTA4′s Nico Bellic who will murder 50 cops on his way to having tea with a Russian Mafia widow to talk about the plight of immigrants.) I even like how Marston seems to rather quickly get frustrated with the assorted creeps and losers he must run errands for to advance the story whereas previous protagonists seemed willing to commit acts of terrorism on behalf of people they just met before stopping to consider their intentions.

Red Dead Redemption is fun, though it is far from free of faults. Penny Arcade’s Tycho is spot on with the failures of the multiplayer in terms of how empty the multiplayer world feels and that one quickly runs out of things to do. Other will critique how much time you spend riding horses from place to place. This is certainly true, I’m about 20 hours in and you ride horses a lot in the old west. The scenery and music do make for an ok experience (this game does landscapes, skies, and sunsets like no other game), plus there are “random encounter” style interaction with wild animals and various people in need of help (or out to get you) that one can either engage in, or just keep riding.

So far Red Dead Redemption is a great game, and a strong contender for game of the year. We should ride horses together sometime, particularly now that the co-op mission pack (Free!) was released on yesterday.

In our continued charge of giving you the most up to date news on the availability of Hoverboards we thought it important to share with you this video of a working Hoverboard created by French artist Nils Guadagnin. The device uses an electromagnetic system (in the board and the pedestal it is on) combined with a laser system for stabilization.

HOVERBOARD – NILS GUADAGNIN from nils guadagnin on Vimeo.

I thought about writing a short review for this 2009 PS3 game, but I figure you can just reread what I wrote about Spider-man: Web of Shadows, a 2008 Xbox 360 game, replacing any references to “webs” with “electricity,” and any references to “Spider-man” with “guy with electricity powers.” It even has pretty much the exact same shortcomings. Handy! I will say, however, that while InFamous‘s detailed buildings and cityscape are much more impressive (if smaller in scope) than Web of Shadows‘s cookie-cutter New York, I’m pretty sure web-slinging is still more fun than sliding along power lines. Overall, though, definitely worth the “classics” discount price tag.

Heavy Rain is an “interactive drama” about several people trying to track down a serial killer. “Interactive drama” basically means that it’s pretty much like a movie with occasional prompts to do things. Many or most of these prompts are extremely mundane and simple (“press joystick this way to open the fridge”), meant to encourage greater emotional engagement and to act as practice for when you get a bunch of quick prompts to fight for your life (“QUICK HIT THIS BUTTON OR BE ELECTROCUTED AAAAAAAH”).

I was impressed that someone finally designed a game that is meant to be played straight through, and that takes some risks in genre (well, for a video game), rather than the usual repetitive action/sci-fi shooter. I hope we see more games like it, and I encourage you to give it a try. I don’t think we’ll look back on it as a classic, though, if for no other reason than that the story has so many plot holes you can practically feel a draft—and for a game like this, plot is actually a big part the whole point. Still, I look forward to the day when games that follow in this legacy do away with the common statement, “It has a pretty good story (for a video game).”

But really, can you trust him? The man’s a trained actor, people.

This game is notorious for being very hard, and rightly so. The problem with it is that the difficulty is more boring than frustrating after a while. There’s a lot of repetition and little variety for a long time. Once I resigned myself to the fact that grinding until you memorize it all and level your character to being unstoppable is actually the entire point of the game, it almost ceased to be frustrating—but shortly thereafter, I discovered that any other player can invade your game and anonymously kill you. It’s a fascinating feature for a single-player game. I would’ve appreciated if there were as many players anonymously volunteering to join your game to help you as there are joining games to kill you, but I’m picking this up late, so probably everybody did their good-guy playthrough first and is now on their jerkhole playthrough. Ah well.

Anyway, if you find yourself addicted by point allocation, limited inventory management, and repetitive grinding with occasional flashes of interesting material, Demon’s Souls is definitely for you. By the time I reached the end, I was sort of enjoying the strategy of it, but the enjoyable part of the game for me turned out to be very brief compared to the part of the game killing the same few enemies and collecting items that weren’t as good as the items I already had.

I love Scrabble dearly, but I recognize that it has its faults. At a certain level of play, it ceases to be about coming up with fascinating words, and becomes something about knowing as many valid combinations of tiles as possible so as to maximize the chances of getting 7-letter “bingo” scores. That’s fine if your friends play that way too, but if they don’t, it isn’t long before people refuse to play with you because you beat them on the challenge for “gar” and followed up by playing “agar,” hooking the A for your seven-letter word off a word they were pretty sure didn’t exist to make two more words they’re pretty sure don’t exist.

On and off, I have mused about a sensible way to do the rules to Scrabble that would allow more interaction between players, and actually prioritize spelling interesting words over killer combos. The best I’ve come up with so far is a hypothetical computer-based variant that would allow you to swap letters and would award points to words based on how uncommonly they appear in web searches. It’d be hard to keep track of word score values in an actual board game version, though.

So, I am looking forward to trying out these alternate Scrabble rules someday. Basically, instead of each person drawing letters randomly, you bid competitively for letters after everyone’s made a play, and then subtract the bid from your score. It sounds like it would make the game longer, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with a little more Scrabble in our lives.

I can’t think about Whiteout without remembering how I had to buy the graphic novel twice because my original copy was stolen when Dan’s car got broken into many years back. (Also stolen: my graphing calculator, a frisbee, and a ridiculously clunky pre-ipod CD player that could handle MP3 CDs.)

So, Whiteout is the film based on Grek Rucka’s graphic novel about a U.S. Marshal solving a murder mystery in Antarctica(!) I enjoyed the comic but I passed on seeing this in the theatre due the weak reviews it received from critics. Unfortunately I should probably have passed on Netflixing it. It’s that lame.

Rucka’s underlying story is still mostly there, but the pacing of the film is so awful that it’s just crippled in the adaptation. All of the character that seemed quirky or mysterious in the comics come across as bland and uninteresting in the film. It also suffers from a glut of Hollywood/committee style dumbing down with elements like flashbacks (because the audience couldn’t possibly remember what we showed them 25 minutes ago), complete removal of any discussion of the history/politics of Antarcita (that are critical to why solving the murder is so hard in the comic), and the gender switch out of a major character, I guess to serve as possible love interest where that didn’t exist before? (Also we wouldn’t want to market a movie with two strong female leads, right?) Also sad: the comic ends with a cool Mexican standoff that resolves unexpectedly, the film has a silly extended fight sequence that didn’t quite make sense.

So yeah, really not worth your time even if you like the source material. Antarctica is a pretty sweet setting for a story though, go reread the comic, or if you want to see a movie set there rewatch John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing.

I felt a little guilty starting a discount western shooter when I haven’t finished the Fallout DLC, or even started Mass Effect, but I’ll be honest: when I want to unwind, point allocation and managing inventories don’t immediately jump to mind, in fact that seems too much like work. (See also my critique of the Wii, sure it has fun party games, but who wants to relax by waving their arms around wildly? I mean that basically sounds like my job.) That’s right, when I want to relax I want to shoot at bad guys. With guns. Maybe as a cowboy. And possibly ride a horsey.

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