Brütal Legend is a game where yoü wander aroünd exploring a world torn straight from the cover of Dio's Holy Diver and pay homage to the Trüe Metal.

Büt more on the game in a moment.

I have, in my possession, a jean jacket. It has an old-school Iron Maiden backpatch (poorly sewn in places, held on with safety pins, natch). The jacket provides me with a strange level of internal comfort and pleasüre. Not becaüse it's cool or rockin' or whatever (it is) - büt becaüse it says to me, "roots."

"This is my history."

I was a metalhead growing üp. My Roots gain noürishment from the dark potted soil that is Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Ronnie James, and the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy. Smoking cigarettes and listening to Judas Priest, getting stoned and thrashing to Metallica, playing Dungeons and Dragons while listening to Slayer. Camping oüt all night for Mötley Crüe tickets.

We üsed to watch Headbanger's Ball jüst for the faint hope that they might play the video for The Last in Line. I decided to learn Latin jüst to translate the writing on the borders of Sacred Heart.

Did yoü know that the rünes on Ozzy's Speak of the Devil albüm are actüally written in the Dwarvish langüage from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? I fückin' did. Me and my coüsin spent all night one day translating them. They talk shit aboüt Sabbath kicking Ozzy oüt of the band.

So, I say to yoü, dear readers, that this game. . . I wish I had written it.

Brütal Legend (and we have to üse the ümlaüts) is a tribüte to everything that is fine and good aboüt the genre of Heavy Metal. Tim Shafer and Double Fine are sending a message: "We ünderstand yoü."

The game takes every goofy heavy metal fantasy that has ever appeared anywhere and türns it into reality. Smokey, apocalyptic landscapes? Check. Hot chicks in leather? Check. Giant fücking axes? Check. Melting people's faces off with güitar solos? Check. Driving aroünd in a soüped üp Deuce-Coupe listening to Diamond Head's original Am I Evil? Check.

It's so fücking cheesy büt that's what makes it so fücking wonderfül. I'm going to try to explain the in-jokes throügh the üse of hyperlinks.

What's to say aboüt the gameplay? Yoü play the part of Eddie Riggs, the world's greatest roadie (voiced by Jack Black, who for all he irritates me from time to time, knows the Trüe Metal).

Eddie can büild anything, repair anything. He has the Trüe Metal in his heart, büt he's stück working for a "nü-metal" boy-band and it's crüshing him.

Literally, it türns oüt, becaüse aboüt 1 minüte into the opening cüt-scene he gets killed by a falling beam from the stage. Büt it so happens that he has a magical belt bückle, and when blood reaches it, he is transported to, well, the Land of Dio.

There, we qüickly find Eddie embroiled in a power strüggle between the good, oppressed people of Trüe Metal. They are led by Lars Halford (who looks süspicioüsly like Robert Plant). Also in this motley crew are his sister, Lita, The Kill Master (voiced by Lemmy, natch), and a hot-badass chick named Ophelia.

Together, they fight against the evil glam rock army of General Lionwhyte (who is voiced by Judas Priest's Rob Halford).

Yoü have a variety of weapons, the most powerfül of which is Clementine, yoür magical güitar. With the right güitar solo, yoü can melt people's faces off, or sümmon creatüres to help yoü, or raise relics from the groünd.

It's an "open world" büt picking üp missions is üsüally pretty linear. It's mostly "drive aroünd and fück shit üp" büt then from time to time there are elements of "real time strategy" and command. The first several missions are aboüt büilding an army of headbangers and metal chicks. Yoü'll control them, and yoü have additional abilities that yoü can üse with each "ünit type".

For example, go near a ünit of headbangers, and yoü can enter "Mosh Mode". They form üp aroünd yoü and jüst bang heads, which yoü can then üse to protect yoü and jüst walk throügh large groüps of goons, knocking them down.

To be honest, the game isn't aboüt the gameplay. It's got pretty müch yoür standard tropes foünd in sandbox games now (side missions, collectibles, üpgrades). They have a different paint scheme, one that was made from The Trüe Metal.

And that's what this game really is: it's a love letter to the Trüe Metal.

And those of üs who have heard the siren call of distorted drop d and felt something break forever inside. . . it's a love letter to üs, too.

On Wednesday, The Beatles Rockband dropped and so I picked up a copy because A) I like Rock Band and B) I love the Beatles.

Everyone likes playing these types of games; the challenge is usually getting a group of people together at the same time. However, this weekend, Maynard's kids are staying over, so we have a full band. And this afternoon, we played (and finished) it.

The game is fab-nominal and thoroughly enjoyable from shrink-wrap to disk ejection.

As far the gameplay goes, it's frickin' Rock Band. If you don't know how this works I can't help you. With the exception of vocal harmonics, the gameplay is exactly the same as that from previous versions.

But that's now why we play Beatles Rock Band. We play it because of John, Paul, George, and Ringo; because of the powerful history the band had; because of their journey; because of the music.

Given that Activision decided to include versions of Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash in their next version of Guitar Hero, and seem to be doing so entirely devoid of respect or concern for those artists and what they represented, I was apprehensive about the treatment that Harmonix would apply to my favorite musical band.

I am exceptionally happy to say that the subject matter was handled with respect and reverence. Each song has it's own background video, and they are tailor made for the specific songs. There's a lot of fan-service involved in this. WARNING: it is entirely possible to fuck up your song because you accidentally pay too much attention to the backgound video.

We slotted the game and blew through the entire story mode in about three hours. I did vocals the entire way (being the only person in the group who can [or was willing] to sing).

There was an interesting thing that happened to us as a group as we progressed: everyone started out on medium difficulty (or easy, for our drummer), and then, as the song difficulties ramped up (got harder), we ended up increasing our own difficulties. By the time we were performing on the roof of Apple headquarters, Maynard (bass) and I (vocals) were playing on Expert, Cailean (guitar) on Hard, and Hailey (drums) on Medium.

(Just, you know, FYI: the game is rather. . . unforgiving . . . on expert vocals. I've been singing "Sgt. Pepper" in the car for 20 years now and yet I failed the intro almost instantly. Octopus' Garden? 100%. Taxman, which is perfectly in my range? Failed. So who knows.)

The end of the game (which is, of course, "The End") is handled in such a way that I got chills up and down my arms.

This game isn't a "party" game like Rock Band 1 or 2. Those games have a very broad appeal based on the breadth of their songlist. I'm not sure Beatles Rockband would hold up on that level - but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best version of Metroid: Prime that you will play that includes the Goddamned Batman.

Fer realz, dog.

Have you ever said to yourself, "Self, I sure do wish there was a third-person stealth game where I played the goddamned Batman, trapped on Arkham island, fighting all of the major baddies like Bane and the Scarecrow, where I could hang upside fucking down from the rafters, watching thugs and seeing their fear levels, only to swoop down on top of them, grab them, punch them in the nose, and leave them hanging, trussed up like a thuggy pig?"

If you ever asked that question, prepare for an orgasm, baby, because this game is the answer to your . . . needs.

I cannot begin to describe the visceral thrill that engaged my spine as I took out a room of ten thugs without any of them ever seeing me. You know that scene at the docks in Batman Begins where he takes out all the goons in darkness? One of them shouts, "Where are you?" and Batman just whispers, "here." Bam.

It's like that. YOU GET TO DO THESE THINGS.

But hey, say you're not so into the creepifying ninja type stuff. That's cool, too. You can just swoop into a crowd of goons and go to fucking town. You're the fucking Batman, right? So you can do this, and do it well. Combat is both absurdly simply and absurdly complex. If you do it right, it's a fluid, bone-crunching ballet of broken noses, busted ribs, and cape-swirl induced stuns. If you do it wrong, there's still a lot of bone-crunching.

As you progress in the game you get more . . . bad-ass (I was going to say "more lethal" but the Bat is never about killing). Your initial equipment load is "just" unlimited batarangs and the grapple gun (which, by the way, never gets old). As you progress, you'll unlock new abilities (throw multiple batarangs, better combos, armor, etc.) and abilities (grappleclaw, detonation gels).

These ability increases are where the "Metroid" bits come in: you'll see areas you can't quite get to. Yet. Once you have the grappleclaw, you'll back track to where you saw that grate up high on the wall and pop it open, which opens new areas to explore and be a predator in.

But all that shit seriously fucking pales in comparison to "Detective Mode". Detective mode is a switch, like one of Metroid's visors. Flip it on and all of a sudden your perceptions of the world change. You have better night vision, for one. But you know, that thug lurking in the darkness over there? Now you see him bright as day (though in a skeletal form). Further, you get a read out of his emotional state, whether or not he has a weapon, etc. Grates, doors, other special things start standing out.

Previous Batman games had focused entirely on fighting, which, you know, makes sense given that Bruce is a fucking ninja. But the most important bit to Batman - the thing that makes him the Baddest Dude Walking - is the fact that he's the world's greatest detective. And that's hard to put into a game and make "fun." But Arkham Asylum pulls it off, and does it well.

For example, early in the game, you'll have to track down a guard. You cordon off a "Crime Scene" area and do some investigation. Eventually you find his hip flask, sample the booze, and then, using the bad-ass detective mode visor, can follow the scent of the whiskey in the air to find him.

And then there's a whole series of Riddler-based sidequests. These run from hidden-package collectibles to real "riddles". Find the solution, take a photo, bam, XP. Hunting down Riddler quests alone is half the fun for me.

The boss fights are hella good, too. I mean, like, fighting Bane is pretty typical (dodge his charges, jump on his back and fuck up his venom injectors, etc.) but he's kind of a super-strong thug. The Scarecrow boss fight is clever as all fuck. I haven't run into the Joker yet but I shiver in anticipation.

The voice acting is gold-star all the way. They got Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin to reprise their roles from the old Batman: The Animated Series. Since each of them have played those characters longer than anyone else in history, they're kind of definitive. I love me some Heath Ledger, but Mark Hamill's Joker is a different breed, and Kevin Conroy is the best Batman.

(It also doesn't hurt that the story was written by Paul Dini, who masterminded the DC Animated Universe.)

What I hate: Nothing. This is one of the best games I've played in many moons. You will love it.

Plus: The Goddamned Batman.

So, against my better judgment, I purchased a copy of The Sims 3. Since I am a servant of My Dark Masters, I get copies of the game for ten bones. So why would I not? If it sucks, I'm out the equivalent of two beers.

I think I suck at the Sims.

There's a lot that's confusing to me. This may be because I'm not a Sims expert, and really only played the first version in such a manner as to wall my children into small rooms and let them die (c.f., The Cask of Amontillado). I managed to play it for about five hours before kicking in the cheat codes: I wanted a better house.

And I got one! I spent about four hours building some crazy-town style version of the Winchester Mystery House. Multiple floors that shouldn't actually be viable according to the laws of physics. This was a lot of fun: my Sim (named "Evilla McBadass") has the craziest house in town. And that's cool.

The best part of the game is just allowing the Sims to do their own thing. At character creation, you define a bunch of traits and this says how they behave. I picked "genius", "evil", "flirty," "athletic," and something else I don't care about. There's an "Autonomy" scale in the options; set that to full. Watch what happens. Seriously: don't do shit. The Sim will do all sorts of crazy stuff.

For example, because Ms. McBadass is "evil", she wanders around town and knocks over trash cans. Since she's flirty, she picks up on everyone within visible distance. I went to go take a leak and discovered that a) not only was Evilla a lesbian, but that b) she'd chatted up another woman and c) they were making out.

A few hours later and they were gonna get married. Hooray, Sims 3 for being totally down with gay marriage.

(Of course, the first wedding party totally flopped and people didn't show up. I opted for a second, smaller party and that worked out okay. Then, as luck would have it, some other, unknown woman showed up and totally chatted up both brides, and they were both into it. So who knows. Maybe they're all gay Mormons.)

(Also, during the wedding party, one of the guests stole one of Evilla's guitars. /shake fist. If I find out who did that, there will be pain.)

Here's what I hate:

Man, shit. The time spent "sleeping" and "working" just fucking blows. The game seems to be about 4 minutes of interesting gameplay punctuated by 5 minute periods where I have to sleep and/or go to work. I would like to be able to spend more time "doing shit" rather than sleeping or working.

Maybe that will change now that my Sim is married and I have two of them to play with.

Holyfuck this game is brutal to my machine. Aside from how slow it is during play, my bad-ass laptop turns into liquid puke for fully 20 minutes after I quit the fucking game. This is not a baby computer, either.

It's stupidly addictive. I absolutely do not recommend it to normal humans for that reason alone.

Last week I picked up a copy of Prototype and I've gotten maybe 15 or so hours into it (about half the storyline missions and a lot of exploring and minigames), so I figure I can talk about it.

Prototype is a sandbox game where you are a guy with superpowers in Manhattan Island. The game is about the following things:

1) Crazy, super-human parkour stuff. Like Crackdown only turned up to eleven
2) Searching NYC for about ten different kinds of collectibles
3) Butchering people and zombies with a bunch of crazy-ass powers

You earn and unlock new abilities and powers by spending "Evolution Points." You get those by killifying things, completing missions, and finding all the "landmark points" and "hints" and whatever else.

Your character is not a nice guy. One of your most important abilities is to grab people and absorb them. You then take on their appearance - shape-shifting. They are, of course, deadified in the process.

(There's a whole problem with conservation of mass in this little bit, too. You just absorb 180 pounds of human flesh and somehow don't get any larger? At this point, I've eaten maybe 200 people. I should be the size of King Kong by now.)

Maynard was watching me play it and he commented "dude, you're the bad guy here," and he's right. There's really no way you cannot be morally reprehensible in the game because in order to progress you have to absorb people. In theory, I suppose you could play through only absorbing soldiers, but they're still, you know, innocent dudes just doing a job.

But you won't do that, because absorbing people is how you get back health.

So, let's run down the numbers here: Regenerates? Check. Gains health by eating people? Check. Superhumanly fast? Check. Can jump really high? Check. Can climb walls? Check. Can glide far distances? Check. Can shape-shift? Check.

Okay, I get it. We're playing a vampire. Only I can run around in the day time.

There's supposedly a plot in the game but I honestly gave up caring about it after, oh, the first or second cut-scene. It's your standard cliche: you're the angsty, brooding super-human product of a top-secret military experiment who lost his memories and now wants revenge on the people who created him. Yadda yadda yadda.

Oh, yeah. The virus that infected him has gotten out in a different strain, and it's infecting the city, and turning everyone into zombies.

(I have decided to ignore the plot and focus on the idea that this is a sandbox game where I am a vampire in New York City.)

The game has many interesting ideas. They are mostly small touches, but they serve it well. These little ideas are stronger than the game's plot.

For example, inside "infected zones" sometimes you'll see a bunch of crows circling a water tower. If you get near it, the virus in your system (which you're constantly shedding) will trigger the virus in the water tower, and it will burst open and unleash a monster at you. The military has sensors that can detect your virus as it sheds, so after a while the city is filled with automated drones that can detect you, no matter who you look like.

There is a neat gimmick (and on of the collectibles) where you "absorb" of certain people, and that unlocks parts of this "memory web". The more bits you unlock, the more you learn about the backstory: you're feeding on the memories of the soldiers and scientists who were involved in the experiment. Finding these people to absorb is one of the game's collectible sub-games.

The map is good bordering on excellent. It's not as vibrant and detailed as Liberty City, but it's definitely not a "cut and paste" version of Manhattan. That's where the game's strength lies: exploring New York City with super powers. The developers managed to get a lot of characters in the screen at all times. I'm pretty sure they did this by cutting down on the polygons used per person (no one has flowing hair, for instance).

My biggest beef with the game, other than the plot, is the fact that the main character dresses like a douchebag, wearing a popped collar underneath a hoodie that is never taken off his head. He's like Altair only less charismatic.

Off the top of my head, I can name several other games that do the "superhero exploring a city" schtick (Crackdown, Infamous, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Superman Returns, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction). I expect that there will soon be more (which I'm cool with; they're fun). The game has so far helped to pass the time until the release of Crackdown 2.

Anyways. I don't know if it's worth 60 bones, so rent it first and decide for yourself.

This is going to be spoilerriffic. Stop reading now if you don't want anything spoiled.

Seriously, not fucking around.

Tonight I went to see Star Trek with Maynard and KBK. I'd wanted to see it earlier, but the universe kept throwing new things at me. Anyways, while we were busy tearing apart a pig yesterday, KBK suggested we go to the movie tonight.

I loved it.

I grew up watching the original Star Trek series. I was never a big "Trekkie", but one of my fondest memories is being eight years old and watching episodes with my father. I remember that I didn't really understand exactly what was going on, but these dudes had a space ship and frickin' lazers.

The show didn't air very often. I would see episodes from time to time in syndication, but I never really "got" Star Trek until the Next Generation (a premiere that I watched with my father, also). So, for me (and I'm gonna lose some geek cred here, maybe), the characters of Kirk and Spock and Bones didn't really resonate with me in the way that Picard and Riker and Data did.

Until now.

I'm not sure if this is because I have a knowledge of the original series, or remember the characters and how they act, or what they are supposed to become.

Star Trek is an origin film. By and large, I enjoy well-made origin films. With many iconic characters - from film, television, comics, books, what have you - there are usually only three stories that are the most important: their origin story, a major event or quest (usually the story that can be considered the "defining moment"), and then the last story (usually the death of the character).

So Star Trek is the origin story of Kirk and crew.

(Arguably, the "defining story" with the original characters is Wrath of Khan and the "final" story is The Undiscovered Country; Generations was a punk-out bullshit story and unsatisfying.)

And yet, it is also not an origin story. The fact that it is "in canon" with the previous films and shows pleases me. The way they inserted it into the canon while still "rebooting" the franchise was, in my opinion, very well handled.

( Stuff I Really Liked )
( Stuff I was Meh About )

Anyways. Go check it out.

Okay, I lied about taking a nap. Doesn't mean I didn't try to, but several mental, physical, and situational gremlins conspired to prevent this.

Watchmen.

This was one of the more surreal experiences I have had in a theater in a long, long time. Partly, this is due to the nature of the film's topic. Partly, this is due to the nature of my twenty year relationship with the original work. Partly, this is due to it being a midnight showing - and the film is long.

But mostly it had to do with the cocktail of chemicals that were vibrating through my spinal cord.

I've been fighting off a pretty heavy chest cold for the past couple of days. Respiratory infections are, for me, a terrifying thing. A history of spontaneous pneumothorax means that every cough is examined thrice: is there pain that shouldn't be? am i feeling a bubble along the lung wall? is that translocated pain along my shoulder?.

Deep coughing sessions can (and do) initiate asthma attacks. These then lead to panic attacks, which is a hellish cycle. Panic introduces the fight-or-flight response; this increases the heart rate, which increases blood oxygenation demand, which increases respiratory demand, which can't happen since we're having an asthma attack. So I end up feeling like a goldfish flopping around on the floor after a five year old knocked over its bowl.

This evening was a perfect storm for many of these things. I had been having panic attacks all day long. Just before we left the house, I took a heavy dose of Dextromethorphan, a cough suppressant that has side effects that include dissociative hallucinations.

Charity gave me a Xanax to combat the panic attacks. I had never taken one before.

Turns out, not a fan of the Xanax. It performed as advertised: the panic attacks subsided. Instead, I was filled with a cohesive, dripping, existential anxiety. All of the mental filters which are in place to protect me from my hyper-active perception vanished, leaving every tiny moment more brilliantly important than the last, all things fightingformyattentionatONCE HEYLOOKAT THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT NO THAT...

Then someone has grabbed my hand and created something for me to focus on and I'm able to think.

It was in this mental state that I was audience to the film made from one of Time Magazine's top 100 novels of all time.

Hollywood in general has a really bad habit of fucking up Alan Moore's work. So I was apprehensive that this, the magnus opus, once called "unfilmable" by Terry Gilliam, would be castrated, butchered, and sanitized.

I am happy to say that my fears were unwarranted. Zack managed to pull it off. It was shot with a great deal of love and respect for the source material. In fact, most scenes were obviously storyboarded using the panels from the comic.

Some material from the comic - beloved material, for me - did not make the cut. We have a generous two and a half hours to look in on this alternate version of 1985. This requires some surgery in the story. Hollis Mason's death is given a lumpectomy. The Tales of the Black Freighter is amputated. The story of Rorshach's psychiatrist: an excised tumor.

Sadly, there is a depth to the comic that simply cannot be placed on screen. How exactly would one express excerpts from Under the Hood, or Dan's essay about owls, in the medium of film? We cannot. There are little things that I miss (Laurie's smoking out of the strange pipe, or the fact that cars are electric), but I forgive them.

There is a change to the story - one that has some fans of the comic freaking out. I am speaking of the removal of "The Squid." Take a deep breathe: It's okay. It works, and it works better than the Squid. The Squid is, honestly, a hokey product of the year 1985; today's audiences are a bit more sophisticated. The change doesn't alter the core plot in the slightest. In fact, it brings the story whole.

You may notice that this review is heavy on "experience of" and thin on "discussion of" the film. There is a reason for this: Watchmen is an experience - in any media. Each successive reading of the graphic novel has revealed to me new facets of its experience.

Likewise, I expect that successive viewings of the movie will show new things to me as well. I will definitely be seeing this movie again.

Probably this weekend.

It is late. I'm fried. I have a conference call in three hours.

So I'm going to nap.

I'll write more later, but know this: It Does Not Fail You.

As I mentioned earlier, finishing The Lost and Damned has made me enjoy Grand Theft Auto IV more than I did. I want to talk about this for una momenta, focusing on story and character within the zeitgeist of a game environment how that affects enjoyment of the game mechanics.

You may consider me rambling. This is unlikely to be coherent.

( cut for length and spoilage )

Short story:

When The Lost and the Damned the first downloadable expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV dropped on Tuesday, I dutifully threw twenty bones at Microsoft and downloaded it. It's a big download - 2 gigabytes - so I let it run on its own while I worked.

Later that evening, I went to play it - and I couldn't find my copy of GTA IV. The disc somehow evaporated and I have no idea where it went. Thus, I couldn't actually play the damned (literally) game until today, when I snagged a used copy for another twenty bucks. Essentially, I've now paid forty bucks for it.

Irritating. Especially since I just know that I'm going to find my original copy. Probably later tonight and probably in plain sight.

Anyways. The game.

The Lost and the Damned is a "side-story" to the epic tale that is Grand Theft Auto IV. In this game, you take control of Johnny "The Jew" Klebitz, a high-ranking member of the Lost Motorcycle Club (the GTA version of Hells Angels). Those of you who have played through GTA IV may remember Johnny, as he was a minor character in the first game: a guy whose deals just never went down clean.

Johnny Klebitz is an alright guy. He's rough and rude, to be sure, but he genuinely believes in the fellowship his motorcycle brotherhood and he loves and is intensely loyal to his soldiers. He is an interesting character and I like him more than I like our Slavic friend Niko Bellic from GTA IV. Johnny is a man who made some questionable choices in his life and is simply trying to do what is best for himself and, more importantly, those he loves.

(At one point in the game, Johnny gets an email from his biological brother, who is a soldier fighting in the "desert war". His brother writes to tell him how bad and bloody it is there, and then chastises him for "making poor choices." Johnny responds with "yeah, looks like we both made some bad choices and now people are shooting at us.")

As the story starts, Billy Grey, the current president of the Lost MC, is getting out of rehab and takes back control of the gang. This creates a lot of tension among the crew because, frankly, Billy is a bit of a psychopath with the leadership acumen and the self-control of a troubled fourth grader. While Billy was away, Johnny turned the Lost into a smooth running machine, making money, reducing gang violence, and generally looking out for his peeps.

Billy is having none of that. He's a violent hedonist and pretty much immediately starts a war with a rival motorcycle gang - much to the dismay of Johnny and many of the other riders.

Thus is set the stage for our tale of protecting those we love and taking revenge for those who have fallen. For engaging in the drug trade and watching those same chemicals destroy those around us. For believing in and supporting deep, familial camaraderie and the inevitable, crushing betrayals that are parcel to that kind of love.

It will not be possible to discuss Johnny Klebitz and The Lost and the Damned without also talking about Niko Bellic and Grand Theft Auto IV - if only because the Lost and the Damned made me like Grand Theft Auto IV more (I'm wanting to write more about this but I'll save it for later).

Both of the stories are emotionally powerful. However, Johnny's story ends on a more upbeat note than the one connected to our immigrant friend. Niko's story is an exercise in brutal nihilism: the center cannot hold, everything falls apart, and we are given a denouement comprised of despair. He is a doomed anti-Midas and everything he touches turns to lead and sinks beneath the water, forever out of reach.

Johnny, however, is more proactive. Everything is falling to shit, but, unlike Niko, he doesn't take the luxury of dwelling on the whys and wherefores of his lot. He doesn't blame himself and he doesn't question himself. Instead, he acts. He's angry - rightly so - and that anger gives him a focus.

But more: Johnny is not alone. He has a network of people that love him with a ferocity that is only matched by the love he feels in return. The game does a wonderful job of driving this home for you: the first time you ride on a chopper leading a formation of seven or eight other gang members you feel it.

It sounds stupid - that simply riding around the city with a crew can make you, the player, feel that you aren't alone - but it works, and it works well. If you sidle up next to another gang member while cruising around, they'll start talking to you - cracking jokes, busting balls.

Your gang members will come help you at a moment's notice, no matter where you are or what you are doing. Are you pinned down behind a wall taking gunfire from a pack of mafia hit men? Call one of your buddies. They'll either come a runnin' or (sometimes) set up ambushes and traps. They bring you guns and bikes and sometimes new missions.

Each gang member is unique in some way, with distinct personalities. They all have a "battle hardened" statistic that goes up after every fight they take part in. This means that it is to your advantage to bring them along all the time, further emphasizing that you are not alone in your fight in the grim and gritty underbelly of Liberty City.

Perhaps the best thing about your fellow gang members is that they don't bug you to go on dates with them. Niko didn't know anyone when he arrived in Liberty City so he had to develop friendships. Johnny already has them. You can hang out with them if you want to, of course, and the Lost and the Damned adds in several new "mini games" for this (air hockey, poker, arm wrestling, etc.), but it is by no means required.

The missions are standard Grand Theft Auto fare: go to point X; killify some dudes; pick up object Y; killify some more dudes; go to point Z. There is a new racing mode where you smack your opponents with bats and a fun series of "gang war" side missions that are fun but otherwise if you hated GTA IV's mission types you won't be doing yourself any favors with this.

There is one mission mechanic that LatD introduces that is simply the fucking bee's knees: in-mission checkpoints, which eliminates my biggest complaint about IV's mission cycle. If you get killed or otherwise fail in your goal, you no longer have to repeat everything from scratch. It's such a common thing in games these days that one wonders why Rockstar didn't include it in GTA IV in the first place. (Sadly, this mechanic is not retro-actively applied to IV).

Johnny's missions intertwine with Niko's at several points. You will "replay" some missions that Johnny was a part of (in GTA IV), only from his point of view. Remember that drug deal you went on with Playboy X that went bad because it was a sting and you escaped from the roof? Well, Johnny escaped from the ground - and you're playing it this time. The escape from the museum? Same deal.

There's even a fun little mission involving Roman Bellic. This was possibly the easiest mission in the entire game, and oddly the one I enjoyed the most - mostly because I love Roman as a character. He's just fun and jolly.

(I do not play these games for the missions; I play for the story, the soundtrack, and for exploration: three things that the GTA series excels at.)

Speaking of the soundtrack, they added a bunch of new songs (mostly death metal) to the mix and a lot of new radio chatter. One bonus for those who played the original GTA IV is that you will end up hearing news reports about Niko Bellic's exploits as you go, because LatD takes place in the same time frame.

The motorcycle physics have been . . . dramatically improved. This makes sense: Johnny is a biker, after all, while Niko is not. Conversely, Johnny can't drive cars (he calls them "cages") very well at all. As a result, you'll spend 90% of your time on a bike.

If you're used to GTA IV the visuals of LatD may seem a bit off. Grungier. Grittier. This is because there is "noise" filter that is being applied to the screen. It can be turned off in the settings but I'd recommend leaving it on: it does a great deal for setting the tone.

Also of note, and possibly important to some people: there's a cut scene that includes full frontal male nudity. If your mental bullet points for why or why not you will buy a game includes the phrase "contains a digital model of a middle-aged man's penis" you should be aware that it's there. Watching the cut scene, you think you're going to be able to escape being confronted by the dude's johnson but no - you're trapped. He even thrusts it at the camera.

All told, it looks like The Lost and the Damned can easily eat up 15 hours or so - far more if you attempt 100% completion - and is well worth the twenty dollars in Microsoft Points it takes to download.

I highly recommend it.

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Tonight I went to see the "reboot" of Friday the 13th, with what can only be described as predictable results - that is, the projector broke down after an hour into the film.

However, that first hour was wonderful, and exactly what you expect. It is a cornucopia of brutal stabbiness and cats being thrown from stage left.

There are stupid campers who have sex in tents with the lights on. There are college kids getting super excited about finding a secret pot garden. There is an ominous cut-and-pan over a woodchipper. There is the douchebag fratboy who you just know is going to get dropped into said woodchipper. There are plenty of artificial boobies on display. There are big machetes stabbed into people's skulls.

Also: people trussed up into sleeping bags and set to roast over campfires.

Also: Hockey masks.

Who cares about the plot? Or the acting? It's a slasher flick. Nay, it is the slasher flick.

We arrived late, having decided to get drinks before the film. There were no seats, which at first light seemed to bleed as a downer. However, we plunked down on the floor and made camp in the area reserved for wheelchairs, leaning against the wall, nomming on popcorn. It felt like a drive-in, which was ferpect.

To our left sat a gaggle of young girls - they could not have been older than 13 - and they screamed in terror at every dark moment, a gleeful orchestra of soprano fear. Easily, they were half of the entertainment value for me.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Had I been in lesser company, I might feel a different song, but I got my money's worth, I think.

This week I have been playing Prince of Persia, the latest game in the Prince of Persia series. It is a game where you run around, climbing walls, jumping around, and pretty much doing all sorts and kinds of gravity-defying parkour moves. It is a "platformer's platformer" game and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

I haven't finished it yet - I'm guessing I'm about 2/3rds to 3/4ths through - but I've gotten enough of what the game has to give me that I feel I can write about it.

You can skip this next bit if you've played a Prince of Persia game in the past decade.
( Some History )

So. Prince of Persia. This is a game series with a legacy. The name carries with it the memory of hours of amazing platforming gameplay. Let's get into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
( The Good )( The Bad )( The Ugly )

If you're a fan of exploring and platforming and jumping and wall running and such, this game is well worth your time and ducets. However, if you're looking for more combat and less jumping, then you should pick up last year's Assassin's Creed, which is the same engine but has about ten gallons more irritating combat, about five gallons less cool climbing and exploring, and about six gallons more impenetrable, pointless story.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere.

2008 was a year of defeats.

I don't really know what, if any, major accomplishments I managed to pull off last year. It seems that most of my time was spent being reactive rather than proactive: there was just so much shit rolling down the hill towards me and those I care about that I haven't been able to secure any footing and make forward progress.

(There is still stuff coming down the hill. I just can't talk about it yet.)

2009 will be better, I think. I actually have a resolution (sort of) which is mostly to sort of clean myself up and stop being such a mess.

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow.

I had a most excellent visit with my parents and family over the Christmas holidays. I had not been back to West Virginia in four years or so - and hadn't made the journey alone since 2001.

My time was mostly spent drinking, smoking cigars, and shooting the shit with my father. Our relationship - his and mine - has improved so much over the past fifteen years (pretty much since I moved out) that he has become one of my best friends. We talked about everything - including politics, which is a subject we tend to avoid (we agree to disagree, for the most part).

I managed to get in all the food I planned: Jim's Spaghetti House, Tudor's Biscuit World, Midway Hot Dogs, Chili Willi's, and my mom's fried chicken. I ate a lot. I think I've gained ten pounds.

While I was out there, I had hoped to find a decently-priced semi-acoustic guitar. In this I succeeded (I found one for four hundred dollars) but it was a peice of crap, so I did not purchase it. It felt kind of cheap, and I swear to $DEITY I think it had a plastic fretboard.

While at the pawn shop, I thought I had found the Holy Grail: a vintage 1957 Fender Stratocaster. However, upon doing some investigation and matching the serial numbers, I discovered that it sadly was not a fifty year old guitar but was instead probably made in 1986. Still a good guitar (and I really want a good Strat) but I couldn't justify the expense.

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad World
Mad world

I saw several movies.
( Details )

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen.

The return trip to San Francisco was much better than the outward journey. My luggage even followed me, which was a pleasant surprise.

The most surreal moment was when I was strolling through the central hub at Charlotte airport and I heard what I thought was a muzak version of Mad World. Not the Tears for Fears version, but the really sad, depressing one. Turns out it was a kid - maybe fourteen - playing it on a big grand piano.

I think I was the only other person there who knew the song.

(Riddle me this, Batman: why, if we are under "heightened alert", did they give me real, metal silverware - including a knife - with dinner on the flight? Do they somehow think that terrorists cannot afford first class tickets?)

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me.

This morning it felt like someone had opened my skull and replaced my brains with some kind of itchy cotton that had been soaked in pain.

That means for new year's eve I . . . well. I don't really remember what I did, to be honest. I'm pretty sure alcohol was involved. I know that I hadn't planned on partying or anything like that, but when I got home from the airport, I found myself instantly bored, so I went out.

Today I have been productive. I changed the litter box, restrung my guitar (slapping on some higher gauge strings), and did a bunch of work (I have a project due on the 5th and time is getting tighter and tighter on it).

Maynard has been staying with me for the past two weeks, and will likely be here for the next several. The reason why is his business, so I'll leave that quiet. However, having a roommate is a new experience. I haven't lived with someone I wasn't sleeping with in maybe fourteen years.

We are keeping different schedules and he's been very busy (and I've been out of town) so we haven't seen a lot of each other. He's camped out in the library right now on an air mattress but I expect that if this becomes a more permanent arrangement we'll move the books out of there and he can make the room his own.

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
Enlargen your world
Mad World.

Valve Software has an irritating habit of producing games that can quickly eat my time and soul: Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Counterstrike, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal. It would be difficult to count the number of hours I have put into Valve games.

This year's assault on my free time is Left 4 Dead. Aside from the delicious pun, the cover art also tells you how many players the game requires for maximum fun (much like Army of Two did).

Left 4 Dead is a "multiplayer, co-operative, first person zombie apocalypse survival simulator". Each word in that description is key to understanding the game and towards maximizing fun and killification. While the game can be played in single player mode, it is no where near as enjoyable, and was obviously designed for four (or more) players. In fact, the "Single Player" option on the main menu is the last option.

I'm going to go right ahead and say it:

If you don't plan on playing this game with other people, don't bother picking the game up.

The single player game probably only lasts 4 hours; 5 max. There are four "campaigns" (though I prefer to think of them as "movies" - they're kind of designed that way, and even have posters). Each campaign takes a little over an hour to complete.

While the four campaigns have different settings (city, forest, suburb, airport), they have common checkpoints and plots: there are five parts. The first four end with reaching a "safe house" and the last one involves summoning a rescue vehicle via radio and then holding out until it arrives. Along the way, there will likely be one or two points of "hold out against the horde" as well.

The game is thin on plot but thick on atmosphere. It encourages co-operation between players in subtle but important ways. You can always tell where your teammates are, for example. You have to watch each other's backs: some zombies can "pin" you, which requires another survivor to come to your aid. If a survivor is "incapacitated", the others come as fast as possible to help their downed comrade because, seriously, if you lose a member of your party, you're totally screwed.

Aside from the thousands of "horde" zombies, there are a few types of "Special Infected:"

• Hunter: These are fast, jumping zombies that can tackle and "pin" survivors while chopping them to ribbons.
• Smoker: These are slow zombies that can grab survivors with their extremely long, prehensile tongue. They then pull their prey in (also "pinning" the survivor).
• Boomer: Huge, fat, lumbering gasbags. They can vomit on survivors; doing so will summon the horde to attack those vomited upon.
• Tank: Huge, slow, extremely difficult to kill, and heavy damage. There will only be one per level (except the final hold-out period).
• Witch: Extremely powerful zombies, witches can typically kill with one blow. There is only one witch per level, and she sits, crying to herself. She is non-aggressive, and will only attack if startled (like, shining her flashlight in her eyes).

At first, I thought I might get bored with playing the same four campaigns. That they'd get predicatable and thus easy. This is not the case. For example, the location of the Tank and Witch spawns (hell, all spawns, including ammo and health) change every play through. This adds to a degree of uncertainty and ensures freshness.

In addition to multi-player co-op, there is a multi-player "versus" mode. In this game, there are eight players: four survivors and four infected. Each team takes turns playing a side. When in "survivor" mode, the game plays like normal, but playing infected is a different game entirely.

When playing as an infected, the game AI chooses which type of special infected you will play: smoker, boomer, hunter, usually; once per level one player is chosen as a tank (players never spawn as witches). As an infected, you're pretty much toast if someone shoots you even once (really, really low hit points), but you will continue to respawn until the survivors are all dead or in the safehouse.

Infected can go places players cannot (such as climbing to the tops of buildings). Since the infected team can communicate with one another, always know where the survivors are, and (when not 'spawned') move around the map freely, this allows for some awesome moments of co-ordination.

There is nothing more fun than a well-thought strike between a boomer, two smokers, and a hunter.

For those who are "Achievement" hunters, the game's achievements are very achievement-y. There isn't a lot of grinding for them. They are awarded for things like "headshot a hunter while he's jumping" or "killing a tank with no one taking damage." Hard things (there is one super-grind one, but it is more of an homage to Dead Rising: Zombie Genocidest requires that you kill a total of 53,595 zombies, one more than Dead Rising's Zombie Genocider achievement).

It is a weird game. I've picked up the controller with the intent to simply play for ten minutes or so and found myself in a good group and then two hours later I've completed two campaigns.

I highly recommend it, especially as it isn't going to be a "finish the story and be done" type of game. Unfortunately, I must say that playing it single player is an activity unworthy of your time (unless you want to learn the scenery).

On Wednesday I picked up a copy of Mirror's Edge while I was down at the EA campus. I didn't slot it until early Thursday evening, just in time for subtly_modded to come over and get queasy watching me fall to my death repeatedly.

Mirror's Edge is a "first person parkour" game. I would say "first person shooter" but honestly if you pick up a gun in this game you are an idiot. It's not designed for that. How the hell are you going to be jumping around and grabbing on to pipes and crap while holding a gun anyway?

Which is an awesome idea: Create a first person "shooter" where you don't engage in combat. At all.

I loved this idea, and that's what sold me on the game. A first person version of Prince of Persia without tedious fight sequences. A series of maps where you can experience the adrenaline thrill of leaping over 40 story chasms to grasp a small handhold on a pipe! Wall run over gaps, slide under railings, etc., etc.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.

No.

In many, many, dissapointing ways, Mirror's Edge becomes a "Death Avoidance Simulator." It is Paperboy at 40 stories.

The running, the jumping, all of the parkour controls, the level design? This is phenomenal. Brilliant.

And then they fuck it up. They add in a bunch of crap which I'm certain seemed like it was needed at the time: cops shooting at you. SWAT officers in your path. Arbitrary time limits. Pick it.

They made it Nintendo Hard in places for no goddamned good reason.

Consider: at one point, I have to pop over a rooftop. No biggie. But they drop three (count 'em, three) SWAT guys with submachine guns onto the area. My "handler" says "looks like you have to fight them."

"WTF?" I think. I have no weapons; my character is not designed for combat on any level. Eat a choad; I'll figure out a way to get past them without combat.

Well, I tried. For about 15 or 16 deaths and reloads at a checkpoint, I tried to find a way through. Then I tried fighting them - disarm the guy and beat him senseless (there is a button for this). I tried that for another 10 deaths and reloads at the checkpoint. Again: failure.

Then I dialed the difficulty down to "easy" and it still took me another 10 tries to get through the section.

Dude, WTF? That's not "fun". That's tedious.

The next level contained a "boss" who was able to instantly throw me off a building to my death unless I pressed the "Y" button at a specific, .25 second long point in a cut-scene. The number of reloads on that was fun, I'll tell you.

Maybe I just suck. But I don't think that's the case; I've got a bit of skill with games like this.

I am in the middle of level 5 (out of maybe 11?). I have paused the game because I got frustrated.

I'm not sure I will unpause it.

If you like crazy Mega-Man style difficulty in games, this may be for you. Personally, I just wanted to run around rooftops, Crackdown-style, in first-person mode. This game does not provide that.

Last Sunday, I ran out and picked up a copy of Fallout 3 and then proceeded to play it several hours every evening and then pretty much all day Saturday (I was sick as hell) and today, Sunday, when I completed the game's "main quest."

Which should tell you a lot. But it's is far from the complete story, and I'll get to that in a bit.

( The Overview )( The Good )( The Bad )( The Ugly )

All in all I have had a great deal of fun with it and it is absolutely worth the sixty clams. I will likely load an earlier save and finish off a bunch of sidequests that I was unable to do simply because I'm not sick of the game yet.

I am now perhaps half-way through the story line in Saints Row 2, with a completed percentage of around 40% and nine hours playing time.

In the sake of fairness, I should point out that the game and I are still in our "honeymoon phase." I ended up dreaming about it last night, even.

When the original Saints Row came out I picked it up and played it. It was a total clone of GTA III with a bunch of San Andreas-style activity enhancements. It was cartoony. It was buggy. It was a blatant, unapologetic rip-off. And that was fine: I bought it to get my "sandbox fix" until GTA IV came out. It was fun enough that when the sequal was announced I figured to pick it up.

Then GTA IV came out and I was totally, completely underwhelmed. I have said this before but I'll say it again: the "fun" bits that they left out of GTA IV made their way into Saint's Row 2. IV was too much of a "simulation" for me. That's great and all: it's what they were trying for, and they succeeded. But the game they made was not the game I wanted.

I wanted a game with goofy side activities where you blow everything up, douse people in raw sewage, or score points by throwing people into jet engines.

The initial ad campaigns for SR2 were focused not on how similar the game was to GTA IV, which one would think. Instead, they focused on how the game was different. And it is.

Here's what's great:
( cut for fun )
Here's what sucks:
( cut for bitching )

There is supposedly a huge multiplayer thing but I haven't tried that. From what I've read, it has the potential to be awesome (there's even the ability to play the entire game in "co-op" mode).

But to be honest, what sold it for me was that I ended up unlocking a freakin' UFO that I get to fly around in.

I am now perhaps four and a half hours into Dead Space, a "survivor horror" game writ by my dark masters and a dude who is too cool for school.

It has thus far been an excellent, excellent experience.

Let's take, oh, Half-Life 1 and mash it with System Shock 2. I would say that it's more SS2 than HL except that System Shock 2 was very much a complex "rpg" type of game, and Dead Space is not. It is by no means "stupid"; in fact, there appears to be a rather complex resource management game going on here - but it is not intricate on the level that System Shock 2 was.

Which is fine!

I remember once, many many moons ago, when I first played through the single player Half-Life game. I was dating a woman at the time (Zev/Reverie, to those who know) and she enjoyed simply watching me play the game. For her, it was a horror movie; for me, it was a horror experience. At one point I found myself crawling through a warehouse with exactly 1 (one) bullet in my gun and exactly 5 (five) hit points, and I could hear the. . . "purring" sound from one of the game's vampire chickens. It was a terrifying experience, and when the chicken finally attacked, both she and I literally jumped out of our chairs.

Dead Space is kind of like that. You do not walk through the corridors; you creep through them, knowing that any ventilation shaft may disgorge some mutated . . . thing. . . to eat your face.

Tension incarnate.

And these creatures that come at you? Shooting them isn't going to cut the mustard. Sorry, my friend: you have to frickin' dismember them. Aim for the knees or the arms with your plasma torch and cut them to ribbons - you have to slow them down before you can curb stomp them. There are even nerd skittles for chopping off limbs.

One of the best and most brilliant things about the game is that there is no heads up display. Well. There is, but there isn't. You'll have a HUD, but it is always generated by your dude's suit, and in a neat 3D way. There isn't a health meter: you watch a little "suit integrity" dial on the back of your character. Your guns have a HUD showing you how many rounds are left, but it is obvious that is generated by your computers. It is difficult to explain.

The lack of HUD aids in immersion something severe. This is important in a horror game: you feel more that you are directly involved in the scenario, rather than being an omnipotent, third-party observer.

Like in Half-Life, you are not a "space marine" or a "soldier." You are an engineer, which means that you aren't carrying around a bunch of weaponry. You have improvised tools as weapons: plasma cutters, welding devices, band saws. This encourages a mental position of "scrabbling" as well, which aids in the fear and the horror.

Unlike Half-Life 1 and System Shock 2, there are actual puzzles. In addition to your standard point-shoot-kill weaponry, you have two special tools: a "stasis" gun that slows things (and enemies) down (removing kinetic energy) and a "kinesis" gun (which is kind of a telekinesis weapon, ala' Half-Life 2's gravity gun). These help to enrich the overall experience.

In addition to that, we have other things (such as zero-gravity movement, which is awesome) and vacuum related puzzles (you have an air supply, and have to monitor it). The more intricate puzzles involve combinations of all four. There may yet be new axises to work with; I haven't yet encountered them.

I'm 4 hours or so into the game and only in the middle of chapter four. There are, apparently, 12 or 13 chapters. At about an hour each, that looks to be better than 12 hours of gameplay on an initial run through, which makes it well worth 60 clams (I paid 20 due to the employee discount). It should easily outrank Halo 3 in playability time.

Play it in the dark with the lights off. You'll thank me later.

So, I've had Lego Batman for a couple of days, and since I absolutely loved the previous Lego video games (Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones) it was inevitable that I pick up one about the Goddamned Batman, who is and shall be one of my favorite characters, forever and ever, amen.

I am enjoying the game immensely, though I find it has flaws.

( Click for Nerdity )

The other day I finished Anathem, the latest weighty tome written by Neal Stephenson, who hasn't written a novel shorter than 800 pages in a decade.

This is going to be as spoiler-free as possible. However, there. . . really isn't that much to spoil. More on that later. First, a story!

Many moons ago, when grunge was popular, before the Golden Age, I attended kolledge. I majored in philosophy - a widely misunderstood discipline that many people (including my parents) consider to be useless.

In my school, philosophy majors had to choose a focus: Ancient Track (which meant studying mostly Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, and other old dead Greeks) or Modern Track (which is mostly about post-Rennaissance philosophers, like Descartes, Kant, or even such modern marvels as Wittgenstein). I chose to read about Dead Greeks.

(You still had to take a ton of classes about the other track, mind you; this choice really only defined how the bulk of your 400-level classes were going to go.)

This was a fun time for me! For several hours a day I and my fellow students would sit around a table in a forgotten, musty room in one of the older buildings on campus and systematically destroy each other's brains. We were surrounded by books, most of which had suffered water damage. Someone had scratched into the surface of the table the following:

I think, therefore I am. I think not. . . and POOF! I vanish!

That joke has made me laugh for over ten years now. Remember it as you read the book. It carries extra weight.

Anyways. I read a lot of Plato.

Now, you may be asking yourself something right about now. "Self," you might be saying, "why does a book review begin with a bunch of crap about about majoring in philosophy?"

That's a very good question! The answer is because it supplies to you, the reader, a small but important context about me and my mindset as a I read a book that is, essentially, a dialog about metaphysics.

In many, many ways, Anathem is the bloated child of A Canticle for Liebowitz and Plato's Theaetetus.

I very specifically chose the Theaetetus (a somewhat obscure dialog) rather than something like, say, The Republic (which everyone has read some of) because of a couple reasons which will become clear.

Anathem is an alternate-world story told from the perspective of Fraa Erasmas. Erasmas is a theor, and theors are ascetic mathemetician philosophers. They live in these huge, stone monestaries and are divided into three groups: tenners, hundreders, and thousanders. The groups do not co-mingle (and are forbidden to do so) except for specific times.

Every ten years, the tenners can leave the monestary for ten days. Every hundred years, the hundreders can do so (and at that time their maths [the crap they work on] are published). Likewise, every thousand years the maths of the thousanders are published (note that thousanders do not live for thousands of years; they just get published, mostly).

Fully the first hundred or so pages is without meaningful plot. It serves to set the tone for the story, to introduce and immerse the reader into the history of this alternate world, and to allow Stephenson to circle-jerk about how much he has been reading Plato.

And I mean that, because, seriously, nearly every philosophic discussion is pretty much cribbed from Plato, and many of them are taken from the Theaetetus (which concerns itself with the nature of knowledge, fundamental truth, and the nature of perception). The theors even use the Socratic method to educate one another (though they don't call it that).

Like all of Stephenson's books in the past decade, Anathem feels like he (Stephenson) got excited about something and then spent a ridiculous amount of time researching it and was further compelled to splatter it out onto pages just to show us how much research he did do. Unlike the previous books in the decade (Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle), we are spared a lot of tedium.

(Well, that may not strictly be true. Again: I majored in philosophy, so it wasn't tedious to me; it may be for others.)

Even though the novel is a "sci-fi" book, it is remarkably thin on the "sci" part. There is some, but the primary plot point is almost lifted directly from an earlier work by a different author. However, where Heinlein's story was a fanciful whiz-bang actioner, Anathem is devotes itself more to the intellectual discussion of "alternate dimensions".

This brings us back to Platonic dialogs again.

For thousands of years, much philosophy was told through stories. That is, explained through the use of story and metaphor to enable the student to better grasp what was being discussed by relating it to something they already understood. Plato did it (obviously), but my library is filled with other examples (such as Candide or Reveries of a Solitary Walker). In more modern times, Ayn Rand used the method to explain Objectivism. Zen koans are often small anecdotes and analogies.

Anathem is a dialog that contains many smaller dialogs. It has a lot of lessons which are delivered in a story format and serves as a modern parable about the schism between science and religion. It is deliberately constructed that way. I do not know if Stephenson actually believes some of the ideas that are espoused or not but that is irrelevant to the lesson being discussed: it is more about teaching people to think in new ways.

Anathem is a very typical Stephenson novel. If you've read his other stuff, you know what you're in for. If you haven't, I would not suggest Anathem as your introduction: pick up The Diamond Age instead, and from there move to Cryptonomicon.

I think it could have been trimmed by a couple hundred pages - especially in the middle, where Erasmas goes on a little adventure that doesn't really advance the plot (I'm thinking of his time on the ice).

( Some Minor Spoiler Discussion )

I was extremely pleased to discover that he had acknowledged Plato in the afterword. I would have been irritated had he not.