With the end of June comes the height of summer, and with the height of summer comes podcast adventure nine, a meandering tale of glory, villainy, the epic fight between good and evil, and the downfall of modern society, vis-a-vis the Internet. Join us in our mental perambulations as we consider:

• ye olde podcastinge
• Mad Mel Beyond Northampton
• Law of the Boy Scouts
• matters scientifically humorous

And for you lucky blog-post readers, enjoy your special bonus content, a pair of outtakes from this episode.

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [17m 16s]

Subscribe via iTunes

From: Alec Justice Subject: the peace with thy grim castanet! on the bared rocks around me lie,–

the peace with thy grim castanet! all the time sprung from corruption. & the air was full of them, & seemd

[For what it's worth, the first line seems to be from a poem about rattlesnakes by an American named Bret Harte. But I still thing there's something wonderfully lyrical about the whole construction.]

A while back I made this video about my trip to Philadelphia. Folks seemed to enjoy it so I figured I would make another at some point. During the spring I ventured to Phoenix Arizona and shot an assortment of video on my Flip camera. Last night I finally had the chance to piece some of it together, resulting in this video. I hope you enjoy it.

I hear tell that the Xbox Dashboard is going to be getting an update later this year, and it will make things faster. That is good! Hopefully that means I will no longer get stuck in a frozen guide when I try to rate players between Gears 2 matches. But here are some other things I think we need to see.

Notification options. Currently, you can turn notifications on or off. As Microsoft starts integrating Twitter and Facebook into its dashboard interface, it should take a page from social networking protocol and give users more control over how we want to be contacted. Personally, I’d turn off achievement notifications and announcements of friends logging on, but leave on direct messages and invitations. I dislike being distracted during an immersive game by anything besides an invitation to play some other game (and if I don’t want even that, I’ll make myself appear offline). I know that some players are similarly distracted by achievements, but might still want to see the comings and goings of their friends. It can’t imagine it would take much to offer more robust user control over this.

Sensible navigation. I once wrote a very long critique of the New Xbox Experience’s confusing, disorganized, and bloated interface, and have since commented on how the Web Marketplace demonstrates that more sensible navigation is indeed possible. My comments still stand. And I don’t imagine that Microsoft is interested in taking the focus off advertising, but considering that we are paying $50 a year for access to this service already, is it too much to ask that they not drop us in the Spotlight channel every time we go to the Dashboard?

Customizable sounds. I don’t actually care about this feature, really. I just thought it would be cool if I could change the sound for when you get an achievement to the “extra life” music from the old Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d turn off achievement notifications for most games, but for something like Geometry Wars, that would really get me pumped.

This is simultaneously one of the most innovative and worst executed games I have ever played. The pitch: amnesiac MacGyver versus inflammable zombies. The controls are complex and ungainly, with different configurations representing a staggering array of actions: driving vs. walking, carrying a fire extinguisher vs. a chair, aiming a gun and/or a flashlight while walking vs. climbing vs. dragging a corpse, etc. You’ll use analog sticks to hot wire a car (if you couldn’t find keys under the visor), to close your eyes and blink, to pull a power cable out of the water with a pipe. You’ll hold a lighter in one hand and mosquito spray in the other for a flamethrower, and put cloth into a bottle of gasoline covered in double-sided tape so your molotov cocktail doesn’t roll back when you throw it. Your gun isn’t even worth using unless you pour fuel into each clip to set the bullets on fire.

After I replayed the same escape-in-a-car scene so many times that I got an achievement for having driven 10 miles, I was almost ready to dismiss this as an abysmal failure and move on. Eventually, though, I started finding something rich beneath the unforgiving deaths and bollocksed interface. I actually want to know what happens next in the story, and finding creative solutions to problems (often with fire) is pretty gratifying. Lacking explosives to take down a door, for instance, I drove a car up to it, walked a short distance, and shot the gas tank. It takes awhile to get the hang of the variety of ways you can interact with this environment, but I’m not sure if it’s Alone in the Dark’s fault for offering too many options, or every other game’s fault for not offering enough.

It’s not that podcast adventure eight couldn’t have been longer: it’s merely that we didn’t want to tarnish what we had with any extraneous information. This is concentrated podcasting at its finest, condensed from unadulterated rays of sunshine into the purest audio gold.

• cards, and the greetings that adorn them
• matters of salutatory placards
• a full discussion of the socio-economic impact of capitalism in today’s uncertain financial markets, with particular regard to the writings of Smith, Marx, and Keynes CANCELLED
• Bonus Content: more on greeting cards

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [11m 28s]

Subscribe via iTunes

The arrival of June brings with it another dose of Doom:

Animal Kingdom

• Genetically modified monkeys that glow green and pass the trait on to their offspring could aid the fight against human disease. Also scientists just really like to make animals glow in the dark.
• A Chinese cat has grown wings! Once again, humans lose another step in our attempt to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve. Curse Darwin for ever inventing evolution!
• Animals can tell right from wrong. Scientists studying animal behavior believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans. Further proof that sharks are assholes. 

• Step 1: Acclimate yourself to eating the flesh of the walking dead with this Zombie Gelatin Mold from ThinkGeek!
• Step 2: Make sure your 10 month old baby has a gun permit—offer only valid in Illinois. 
• Step 3: Hunt down and destroy these 6 modern day robots that are itching for an uprising. 

• Wikipedia bans the Church of Scientology. In a high level meeting attended by only the top dungeon masters in the world, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee—or ArbCom—voted to ban Church of Scientology members from editing Wikipedia. Now without an Internet home, Tom Cruise is left to personally—personally—wander IRC channels spreading the good word.  

• Marvel Comics hopes to appeal to young girls, not part of their traditional fan base, with a new series of comics in which the main character are models who solve crime!  The covers of the issues will be modeled after the covers of fashion magazines and generally serve to alienate the few female readers Marvel already has. Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada promises that no matter what, Marvel will not resort to hiring an actual female employee in its attempts to understand the demographic. 

This looks like a charming fairy tale about a cute mouse, and you may enjoy it more if you just approach it that way. You may be tempted to ask yourself various troubling questions, such as: Why are the bloodthirsty and uncivilized rats portrayed with somewhat Middle-Eastern-sounding accents and background music? What on earth is the convoluted moral the writers are trying to illustrate—on top of the simple platitudes about the virtues of honesty, honor, and bravery—about the nature of pain and forgiveness? What is the deal with the genie made of vegetables with the vaguely Italian accent? Allow yourself to ignore these questions, however, and instead you should have a good time watching cute animals and picking out which celebrities did the voices.

I’d been very much looking forward to this game in the hopes of some kind of “Grand Theft Webshooter,” and I was (mostly) not disappointed. It does have plenty to complain about—for starters, a weak morality system, occasionally dizzying camera changes, and oblivious New Yorkers who will calmly walk away from a car that’s just been flipped by a giant robot. Worst of all, the entire third act of the game is drawn out and repetitive after some really nice variety earlier on. Still, I’ll take Manhattan as an open-ended web-slinging playground over an open-ended driving course any day, and I’m willing to forgive a lot for such excellently done aerial combat and a great autosave system with minimal load times. It would have been the perfect Spider-man game if they had made the main plot a few hours shorter, bothered to develop interesting and varied side missions, and let you keep slinging and somersaulting past the end of the game.

This game was kind of kicked around by reviewers, but, as others point out, it was for pretty silly or inconsistent reasons. Personally, I think the gameplay itself was fine, but the game overall felt like a big case of “close, but not quite.” Combat felt slow and dangerous, but in a way that usually felt appropriate and realistically horrifying (to the extent that fighting naked people with blades for heads has its own standards for realism). There were some nice environmental graphics and voice acting, but terrible facial modeling/animation, and a ridiculously retrograde saving system. The story started out leaving me wanting to know more, but the big reveals end up being bland and not very shocking. Having not played other Silent Hill games, I felt like I was missing something, like I was supposed to recognize the enemies, or realize that Silent Hill wasn’t in the protagonist’s mind, but the next town over. I suspect it would’ve been more interesting if the enemies were developed from scratch, the atmospheric mechanics were rethought for a generation of consoles that don’t need foggy streets due to technical limitations, and the whole thing took place in Shepherd’s Glen, a new town with its own creepy history … but then again, I guess that just means I didn’t really want to be playing Silent Hill after all.