I Hope This Helps

This post contains spoilers  In the game Dead Space you are the ONLY competent member of a repair crew tasked to fix a mining ship called the Ishimura, which bears more than a passing resemblance to a rib cage. Strike one. Within five minutes of arriving on the ship, a warped mutant thing with scythes for hands that moves like a member of the Cirque de Soleil on a Meth bender drops out of the ceiling and wastes all but two of your repair crew. This is part where I'd leave, I don't mind saying. Most people who write about video games say "Because in real life, I'm a coward." Well, I'm just not about believing I'm a coward when the undead shit hits the space-ship fan. However, quite apart from the how brave I am as the sole member of this team who is actually useful, it's actually the hard fact that our computer technician, welder and probably our equipment guy are now dead. If that happened to a real life construction crew that I was working on, I wou

The year is 1951 and Humanity is getting an ass-kicking from beyond the stars by a race of leather pants wearing humanoids called Chimera. Generally, they are very slimy. You take on the role of Nathan Hale, the only survivor of America's push into England against the Chimera. Hale is a generically handsome Bruce Willis look alike with a dash of grizzled and a touch of glam rock. Hale only survived the first attack due a fluke in his genes that allows him to harness a disease that has turned most everyone else into the alien nemesis. Turns out, Hale isn't alone either, as several other stereo-types from throughout the armed forces have the same genetic trait including the Mini-Gun Toting Italian From Philly, The Smooth Voiced Black Sniper From Baltimore and The Stocky Rifleman from South Bend. The game gets off the cracker-jack start with the skies of San Francisco filled with alien fleet bearing down upon earth with near biblical might. After nearly being eaten by a Kraken at

"Once this city used to pulse with energy; dirty and dangerous but alive and wonderful. Now it is something else. The changes came slowly at first. Most did not realize or did not care, and accepted them. They chose a comfortable life. Some didn't. . . . they became our first clients." Video games become more cinematic each day. Mirror's Edge, by Electronic Arts and Dice, is a truly astonishing narrative achievement. The voice work is outstanding, the story is inventive and the plot twists happen in such a way as to be consistently shocking and entertaining. As a matter of fact, the story is so good that you'll barely notice a lot glitches and errors through out the game, because if your standing still in this game you're doing it wrong. You take on the role of Faith, a young lady of prodigious agility, and little else. In the dystopian world the story is set in, the only secure way to communicate is to have a person physically carry correspondence. These peo

This past weekend I watched Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem. It's one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve ever seen this side of American Psycho. Giger’s Alien is a pretty horrid creature with it’s perverse use of the human body as an incubator after an oral sexual assault from the infamous face hugger, the beast that dehumanizes everything around it. AVP:R was more violent and disturbing than I remember from what I caught in the theater since this time, I watched the director's cut. The first time I tried to see this in the theater one of my friends was and is a staunch opponent of violence against children, pregnant women, animals and men with equal weight given to tall.   Now they just hate all violence in movies.  The first time I tried to see this movie, he cried out with his signature, “Aw, heelll-naw!” as one of the creatures prepared to assault a pregnant woman and we left before the true nastiness could begin. We left and went to get ice cream instead.  Through comp

The story of the war waged by the Empire the final (first released) chapters of the Star Wars trilogy is an insurgency speculated on a galactic scale. The enemies come from within, rather than from without, and in fact are the unknown children of a major player within the regime. The first figure we are introduced to in the large terrorist cell in Star Wars is the Princess Leia Organa. Raised by Bale Organa, a major player in the old regime, rendered mute over the years by the new power structure, Organa apparently raised a fierce and single minded young woman whose only goal is restore the old regime at potentially great cost to herself. She did so boldly, using nearly anyone loyal to her to strike a blow against the Empire. She employs spies and eventually, with the help of a member of the Imperial Navy, secured the plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon. The Death Star was a costly endeavor, no doubt, judging from it’s size the amount of personnel required to run it. Damagin

. . . Not fucking 1774. T-shirt companies tend to market the most obscenely jingoist shirts to the most ignorant members of the military. They used to say something on "U.S. Army Est. 1776" but now say something stupid like "1774." 1774, as we know, was the year people just began to think that rebellion against the English might be a good idea, after the Boston Tea Party, but before the English decided to the send in their regulars to violate what would have been known today as "civil rights," but what were known at the time as "ridiculous demands of precocious entitlement." At that time, the Declaration of Independence hadn't even been written. In fact, the first battle of revolution, (Lexington and Concord) didn't happen until 1775. That battle was, as is often the case, merely the beginning of a long, hard war in which starvation gripped the native population to such an extent that the Empire wondered why the hell they were fighting at