Boing Boing brings word that the Library of America is offering a slip-cased, two-volume set of Lynd Ward’s Depression-era woodcut novels, edited by Art Spiegelman. The whole set is $70, but is a total steal at Amazon for over $30 as of now (for pre-orders).

I have a couple of the books collected in this series, and I can attest that they are stunning and excellent. I have been waiting for years for a collection like this, to see the images on fine paper and in a lovingly curated collection. Perhaps there’s something more “authentic” about seeing Depression-era stories told on the cheap, used, newsprinty-paper copies I have, but honestly, Ward’s work deserves the premium treatment.

These works were really influential for a lot of comic book artists (including Spiegelman, I’m guessing), and to me while I was first getting into my studies of visual storytelling and design. I had been counting the years until this material goes into the public domain (in a good long time), hoping that I’d be able to put together my own collection sometime, but I’m very happy that much more qualified people beat me to it years in advance.

Mostly dull. Leads me to question whether the first one was actually as clever and self-aware as I had thought it was. Don’t bother.

An introductory note: I forgot to post this several months ago, then I found it again. I guess I’ll post it now, even though it’s pretty late to be posting roundups from 2000–2009. Whatever.

I thought about doing a “best games of 2009 list,” but I realize I didn’t really play that many games this year that actually came out this year. So, instead, I’m going to take advantage of the end of the decade to reach further back. I can’t remember whether we do “Top 10″ lists around here or whether they’re more like “Top n” lists, where n = however many we think we’re going to need to include. I’m not sure I can think of 10 games that I thought were way better than everybody else seemed to think from the last decade, so here you get a list of arbitrary length, peppered with games from the last several years that I mostly wanted to rant about. Enjoy!

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They nailed precisely half of the equation that made this one of the best comics ever: the juvenile playfulness. Too bad the other half—the humorously, painfully familiar emotional realism—couldn’t fit in a Hollywood movie. Good soundtrack, though, and definitely recommended if you enjoy seeing people burst into spare change when killed.

If Splinter Cell had knocked up Mass Effect after the prom, Alpha Protocol would be their baby. Mind you, this is before those series grew up into more games they are today—we’re talking 2005′s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the first Mass Effect, circa 2007. That’s only an insult, though, if you wouldn’t love to go back and play those all over again for the first time, awkwardness and all.

Admittedly, Alpha Protocol has a visual style that looked outdated before the game even hit shelves, combat that feels clunky if you’re using anything but a pistol, boss fights that are literally impossible if you don’t build your character properly (I did, fortunately, entirely by accident), and a convoluted plot of secret agencies and double-double-crosses so numerous that not even the writers can keep track of what your character already knows, deflating some of their intended “A-HA!” moments. Still, sneaking around and punching bad guys in the throat is pretty fun, the dialog system is arguably an improvement upon Mass Effect‘s, and the game keeps track of more of your choices (adjusting plot and dialog accordingly!) than any other game I’ve seen. All in all, I’m sad it won’t be getting a sequel, but I’m glad I got it for only forty bucks.

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).”

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 watched this movie today because I was feeling sick. It did not help. It is the worst game-to-movie adaptation I have seen since Mortal Kombat Annihilation. I might have forgiven it if only there had been an ezoghoul, but there was not. I don’t know which is funnier: that I actually finished it, or that the end implies that they actually thought this might get a sequel.