Forming a review in my mind early into playing, I was tempted to call this “Grand Theft Rhino” and just leave it at that. That’s more than a little unfair. The comparison to Grand Theft Auto IV is obvious, as it’s squarely in the same gameplay and thematic genre of “open-world game of doing errands for horrifically evil people,” but Far Cry 2 is its own game. You play as a man sent to kill a notorious arms dealer, sidetracked by malaria and playing off two sides of a war in some unnamed African nation. Nearly everything you do is calculated to make you feel both exhilarated and guilty.

The graphics, physics, and attention to detail are simply incredible: watching plants bend over before you as you sneak through the jungle; seeing a zebra running alongside your jeep; standing stock still as a flaming canister spins past you, barely missing you before it explodes. It does certainly prioritize stories of the moment rather than an overarching narrative, though, which is good and bad. I did indeed find it affecting to have to anesthetize a dying man who had repeatedly dragged me out of gunfights to save my life. I rarely ever had any sense what the hell I was doing at any given time or why, though, other than “go to this place and kill some more guys.” The game is purposefully brutal, and I’m hoping they explore that sense of purpose a bit more in depth in the upcoming sequel.

Topless Robot directs our attention to a trailer for Slingers, a sci-fi/heist TV show that does not exist.

SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.

They’re hoping to make a pilot soon.

I think the commenters at Topless Robot sum up the show’s options pretty aptly:

1. “Fox will buy it, It will be great, it will get cancelled.”
2. “This show belongs on Sy Fy, at least they’d give it three seasons or so before canceling it at the top of its ratings for being too expensive to make.”
3. “Just leave Hollywood out of it, I say. Let the Brits make it and we’ll get it a few months later via BBC America.”
4. “But to be realistic; here’s why it will fail; it looks to be a smart, well-written sci-fi show with cult-like appeal while hitting the right main-stream demographics. And we all know, in a world of injustice (Jon & Kate plus 8, Wife Swap, and every Law & Order spin off) that does not bode well for smart-TV (Arrested Development, Firefly, Futurama).”

This reminds me of the campaign to save Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse before the show even aired. Maybe someone should start a two-pronged campaign to get this made into a show and then not cancel it.

Well. That’s over with then.

It’s December 2nd, and if you’ve ever met me, you know what that means: I’m in the throes of the post-National Novel Writing Month hangover, trying to find something to fill the now gaping void previously occupied by furiously concocting new ways to torture my characters.

In the preceding thirty days of November, I produced a 50,000 word piece of fiction which, I’m going to be honest, nobody will ever likely see. That’s by choice though; like a dented can of soup past its expiration date, I would not wish it on my next-to-worst enemy. Worst enemy? Totally.

I also think this will be my last year of NaNoWriMo.*
Read More…

I waited to borrow Batman Arkham Asylum from a friend rather than buying it myself, but I was only barely into it when it became clear that purchasing this would have been well justified. Arkham Asylum is a really solid game that combines platforming, combat, and light puzzle solving in ways that remind me of how awesome Prince of Persia was on the original xbox. Strong gameplay elements combined with a near fetishistic obsession with Batman trivia and voice acting by many of the folks who made the Batman Animated series make this an absolute joy for any Batman enthusiast. Countless hours into it and the combat is still fun, the pacing is solid, and the side quest style content still hold my attention. My one gripe is that the character designs are a little over the top; the attempts to make an “adult” Batman game with even-more gruesome villains and over-sexed vilenesses makes me feel like I’m playing “Todd McFarlane presents Batman.” Arkham Asylum is a fun game and one of the few non-co-op games I keep feeling motivated to come back to.

Borderlands has been out for four weeks now and I can only  assume that the reason neither myself, Jason, Dan, or Kai has written anything about it is because we’ve been too busy playing it. I don’t follow previews and game development news as much I used to, so Borderlands kind of came out of nowhere as a surprise hit for me. Usually I only buy games on release day if it is something I’ve been anticipating for months (Left 4 Dead, Halo ODST, etc.) but many of my friends were set on getting it when it came out and I made what turned out to be a wise decision to follow them.

The most efficient description I’ve heard of Borderlands is that it is Diablo meets Fallout 3. In longer form: Borderlands is a first person shooter meshed with a loot-and-level-style RPG set on a post apocalyptic alien world where you’ll enjoy shooting things, taking on quests, managing an inventory, and allocating points on a skill tree (every nerd loves point allocation!) Consistently fun game play, near endless weapon permutations, amusing dialogue, and a novel art style combine for an extremely solid game playing experience. I’ve played through roughly the first half of the game with each of the four character types and even playing through a battle for the forth time is still fun because of the neat environments and the variety of weapons and skills you can employ. The story feels a little thin, but so few games that allow co-op even consider the other players in the storytelling that I’m willing to be pretty forgiving (I’m looking at you Halo ODST, Rainbow Six, and HAWX.)

I’m not sure what Borderlands is like single player as I’ve been exclusively playing it with 1-3 other people. The drop-in-drop-out systems for multiplayer works well and even with players having some range in their levels or duplicate classes is still fun. I personally like playing the Solider and the Hunter the best, but my partners in crime seem to get plenty of enjoyment from the the Brick and the Siren.

Is there anything bad to say about Borderland? Well it might serve as a dangerous gate way drug that will subvert console gamers into addicted MMORPGers, but it is probably worth the chance.

I didn’t have high expectations for 2012 and was generally fearful that it might be pretty similar to the rather dreadful The Day After Tomorrow (notable for an extended sequence of characters being chased by a cold front.) I was pleasantly surprised to find it much closer to a movie close to my heart, The Core (notable for being awesome.)

2012 features your pretty standard disaster movie requirements: an array of scientific nonsense, depictions of your favorite landmarks dying fiery deaths, and more people-escaping-in-the-nick-of-time sequences than is worth counting. There are three separate scenes with airplanes taking off from runways being consumed by fire! Three! I was actually somewhat surprised at the array of characters they chose to follow throughout the movie and none of them particularly grated on me in that way most one dimensional action movie characters tend to. 2012 is generally fun and has some unexpected twists in the story toward the end, so if you haven’t seen a movie with lots of explosions and not much thinking this may fit the bill. Expect nothing intelligent about this movie and you’ll be fine.

I had the pleasure of being in the third row for this talk Lessig gave on copyright and culture last week. If you’ve read his books you’ll enjoy this, if you haven’t read any of his books yet you probably owe him the 60 minutes:

Someday when I’m free of certain professional entanglements I’ll write my book about my lifelong career in media piracy and how it provided me with key job skills I have today.

After the lackluster ratings of our first season (despite the thrilling cliffhanger season finale), it’s understandable that the network was touch-and-go about greenlighting an entire second season. In order to get the go-ahead, Tony had to agree to some…unorthodox changes to our format—changes that required him to take the editing reins, a task he undertook with aplomb and verve. And so we’ve returned from hiatus refreshed and ready to discuss the pressing topics of the fall season, to wit:

• matters administrative
• youthful indiscretions
• the dangers of vagrancy
• falsification for fun and profit

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [17m 39s]

Subscribe via iTunes

For an action movie Punisher War Zone is pretty disappointing: it is certainly not good, but it is also not bad in any interesting ways like say The Spirit or Shoot ‘Em Up. I wanted to like this if only for Dominic West playing the villain Jigsaw; we know he’s capable of a solid American accent but as a villain he sounds like a mishmash Italian/Russian generic mobster. My experience  here was similar to the Max Payne movie: some interest in the source material led me to what would end up being an unsatisfying movie experience.

Is there anything particularly notable about Punisher War Zone? We’ll there’s an obsession with colored lighting that makes it feel like the movie is set more in Joel Schumacher’s Gotham than New York City. You’ve also got an almost fetishistic enthusiasm for depicting not just people getting shot, but stabbed, decapitated, impaled, and exploded. This dedication to gruesome depictions of murder at times make me feel like I’ve been tricked into watching a slasher movie set in the Marvel universe. I’m all for a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, but War Zone just feels gross at time.

So yeah, if you’re really into the Punisher I’m guessing you’ve already checked it out when it was in the theatres, everyone else can probably pass.

After much delay, here is the next installment in your increasingly un-daily Daily Doom:

DOOM

• Want to feel great about life? Then don’t read this amazing report from Wired about the still active Soviet nuclear countermeasure system Perimeter—or, as it was more often known, Dead Hand. (The name choice once again reminds us that the Soviet military’s main failure was one of branding.) Perimeter is designed to launch an automatic nuclear attack on the US should the USSR be hit with a surprise attack. Of course the creators of Perimeter fell victim to a common blunder suffered by many who control doomsday devices: they’re only really effective as preventative weapons if you tell all your enemies about them. Secret doomsday devices, on the other hand, are just fucking terrifying.
• “Let pandas die out,” says naturalist Chris Packham. He argues the resources we are dedicating to save pandas would be better spent on less adorable creatures that have some chance at survival without constant human intervention. Packham happens to be president of Britain’s Bat Conservation Trust, where he is dedicated to preserving only the ugliest of bats.

Exotic New Products from our Corporate Overlords:

• Kentucky Fried Chicken introduces the new “double down” sandwich, a creation which abandons the traditional sandwich approach of using bread for, uh, bread, in favor of placing bacon and cheese between two pieces of fried chicken. Somewhere the Earl of Sandwich is rolling over in his grave as a result of a massive coronary.
• Raytheon has long been developing Silent Guardian, a pain ray intended for military use in crowd control situation, but as of last month they’ve made their first commercial sale to a private customer. For now the several million dollar price tag will keep this out of the hands of most crazies, because it’s not like private contractors would ever misuse military-grade hardware. 

NASA’s Latest Research

• NASA may fall short on its goal to track 90% of potential doomsday asteroids by 2020, citing a need for additional funding. This goal was set by a 2005 directive from congress that all near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater in diameter be cataloged. The report on what exactly NASA would do if we found a world-threatening object hurtling in our direction has yet to be released, but sources say Bruce Willis is on speed dial.
• While NASA’s end-of-the-world-scenario-detection research isn’t doing so great, they have made bold steps forward in hoverboard technology by creating a magnetic field strong enough to levitate lab mice. Man, lab mice get to have all the fun.

Crimes Foreign and Domestic

• Italian Police have seized a crocodile from a mafia boss who allegedly used it for purposes of intimidation in protection rackets. No weapons were found in the search of the Mafioso’s villa, but how many weapons do you need on hand when you’ve got a crocodile living on your terrace? 
• A recent study has shown that 90% of US bills have traces of cocaine on them, with 100% of bills in major cities testing positive for the drug. Compared to other foreign currencies, the US shows the highest amount of drug traces on our money, but in our defense it isn’t that everyone in the US is snorting cocaine through their money, just enough so that those people’s money has enough cocaine on it to rub off on everyone else’s money…