My Five Best 2010 Games: Red Dead Redemption

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. Now that the last day has come, it's time for Red Dead Redemption.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. Now, we go with Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Heavy Rain

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. On this day, it is Heavy Rain.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Mass Effect 2

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. Today, it's Mass Effect 2.

My Five Best 2010 Games: God of War III

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. Up first: God of War III.

Compliment Case 7: The X-Files

I was a pretty precocious kid, but I don’t think in 1990, at the age of 11, I would have really appreciated a soap opera/50’s teen movie parody about an unconventional FBI agent investigating the murder of a prom queen/teen prostitute, and becoming increasingly enmeshed in her town’s gothic mythos. I’m sure I’d have said I liked it, and would have believed I did, but I don’t think I would have gotten it. Three years later, though, at 14, when a sci-fi show about an unconventional FBI agent and his smart, capable, super hot red-head partner investigating strange events covered up by shadowy government men connected to the highest levels of power, well, I got that immediately.

Case 7: Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks turned 20 earlier this year. What does it have to offer me today?

Counter Cases to #6: Chuck/24

A case of epic failure on the scale of Heroes demands not a compliment, but an alternative. In this case, two of them. The scenario is this: You have a story to tell, and you tell it, and tell it well. Your show isn’t done, however. So what do you do?

Case 6: Heroes

The first show to try for Lost's crown, and fail. Did it fail for just or unjust reasons?

Compliment Case 5: Terriers

A whip-smart, cleverly written SoCal noir about plucky low-rent PIs, that has struggled with low ratings. Yeah, obvious.

Case 5: Veronica Mars

When teen soap meets crime drama, which side carries the day? Or does it matter?

Compliment Case 4: The Venture Bros.

The current crown of the adult swim line-up, the world of Hank and Dean Venture, and their father, Dr. Thaddeus S. Venture, provides a stark warning to Avatar Aang.

Case 4: Avatar: The Last Airbender

I love my cartoons, but I hate the current crop—all trading cards, no love. It would take something pretty special to impress me.

Compliment Case 3: Community

Though not a ratings success, Arrested Development was part of a beachhead of single camera comedies, and Community is one of its successors.

Case 3: Arrested Development

This? Really?

Compliment Case 2: The Shield

We all love a good bad-ass, don’t we? Sure we do. Someone capable, always on top of things, unflappable, supremely confident. Dexter fits this mold in a very uncomfortable way—we like him for his bad-assness, but we shouldn’t. He’s part of an anti-hero wave that Tony Soprano began. Vic Mackey of The Shield is another.

Case 2: Dexter

Police procedurals. YAWN! But if you make the cop super-scientist a murderous psycho, will that spark my interest?

Compliment Case 1: Fringe

It seemed like, if I were going to go on about new experiences, it might be wise to go over something old, something complimentary. In this case, we might as well just follow creators from Lost on to Fringe.

Case 1: Lost

Lost is the most successful sci-fi show since The X-Files, but notorious for it's dragged out, inconclusive mysteries with answers that may not satisfy. How'd it go?

The "You'll Love This" Project

“You don’t watch Show X?” I hear it often, and not necessarily in connection to something I obviously won’t like. Usually, it’s something I would like, or even, dare I say, love. I understand the impulse and the shock completely—the desire to share, the hope of finding a kindred spirit—and I’m a well-established, indeed even infamous prophet of my favorites, The Wire, Deadwood, Futurama, Farscape, and so on. But I’m only human, I couldn’t keep with everything. At least until Netflix brought streaming to my PS3.

Enwanderment: Neil Gaiman

One doesn’t just pack up and visit Tuscaloosa on a whim, I went with a purpose. And perhaps the legendary South loomed so heavily on me because of my purpose. I went to see Neil Gaiman, and just as it was my first time in Alabama, it was apparently his too, which is a shame. The monumental temple that is the Paul Bryant Stadium, the enshrined bronze statues of coaches past, the feverish cult to the Crimson Tide, or the great statue of Vulcan overlooking the city of Birmingham (complete with the Vulcan Mini-Mart) seem like natural sorts things to pop up in American Gods. Alas.

Enwanderment: Alabama

I’ve never been to the Deep South before. Layovers in Atlanta’s monstrous airport hardly count—the airport is virtually a city unto itself. The furthest in I’d been before was Mt. Vernon, Virginia. The South, for sure, but still three or four stone’s throws from Washington D.C. So, no, I’ve never experienced the proper South, but being an American, the notion and the legend of it rests deep in my bones, just like the notion and the legend of the West rests deep in the bones of friends who’ve never actually been there.

First and Third

Oh, immersion, you coy bitch. So hard are you to make, so easy are you to break. I’ve seen it argued that Half-Life 2 represents the pinnacle of immersion, by never taking control from the player, never moving from their perspective, and never giving voice to the player character, giving the story over entirely to NPC conversations and environmental cues, and doing away with the many narrative crutches games rely upon, most of them taken from film. But it feels to me that the crutches grant greater agility. Hopefully, ripping a few examples apart should show what I mean.

Catcher in the Scrub Oak

Catcher in the Rye was an important book in my development as a student, thinker, writer, and a person. I read it at exactly the right time and place. Yes, reading it as an intelligent, angry 16 year old male, slightly alienated from most of his peers, you’ve heard that story before, I’m sure. I empathized with Holden Caulfield right? Of course I did. Let’s not scoff at that, though. Much of what makes Catcher in the Rye such a highly regarded classic comes from the profound way it captures and comments on that particular mindset. But, for me, Catcher in the Rye did more than  mirror my malformed adolescent angst back at me.

I Have No Dialogue Option, But I Must Scream

Like a great many other game-playing people, I’ve spent a good deal of time playing Dragon Age recently. In fact, like a great many other game-playing people, I’ve played it more than once. With all the different story paths to explore, it seems like a waste to not play Dragon Age more than once, with big, dialectic choices to be made, and tiny little grace note choices, all coming together, though me and my experience, in interesting ways. It’s a kaleidoscope sort of experience—the beads in the tube remain the same, but when I tumble them around, different edges catch on the mirrors and prisms, giving my eye a different experience with just a subtle shift of the hand. Most of those shifts are very obvious, but some, one in particular, actually, hit in unexpected ways. I submit the obligatory spoiler warning….now!

Relevance of Wrath

Star Trek has been on my mind some lately. For no good reason, really. I was never a true Star Trek fan, you see. A viewer, for certain, and appreciator, indeed, but it never spoke to me the way it did to many of my friends. But they quite enjoyed it, so I did too, though my strongest early memory of Next Generation is when Levar Burton devoted an entire Reading Rainbow to its production. I’ve watched reruns and the like, sampled the various spin-offs—they have their charms, I understand the appeal, they just don’t hold appeal for me.

Statement of Purposelessness

So I have found myself here, and it seems like a good idea to justify that fact, and explain what I intend to do here. Here I intend to give an outlet for my critical mind, directed any direction that strikes my fancy, examining whichever works I feel like examining—works which for the sake of convenience, I’m just going to lump into the category of “the arts”. Often that direction might seem unworthy, it might seem that I’m over-thinking things, and perhaps I will be, but I’ll get back to that. Often my tastes will seem insufficiently varied, woefully uninformed, or out-dated, and often I’ll likely be blathering about things only I notice or seem to care about. Often I’ll seem pretentious or very deranged. And I’ll at times show a callous disregard for proper written English and the conventions of sentence structure.

But I have a love, a love of the narrative experience in its myriad of forms. I love to pull them apart, look at the pieces, see how they fit together, and contemplate how they work, or how they don’t, and my hope shall be that this will be a proper outlet for that drive. Here, I intend to pick apart and study the media I enjoy, the films, books, shows, and games in which I partake, perhaps coming to an insight, perhaps not. Either way, I get to share, and hope some of you out there will come and do the same.

Yes, I am likely to write often about The Wire.