Who Names Their Kid Adolf Hitler? These People...

I... I just don't know what to say about this... it utterly blows my mind.

Who the hell would name their son Adolf Hitler? Well, the Campbell family, Heath and Deborah did just that, as Internet news outlets are reporting in flurries this week. The family has TWO other kids named for Nazis or their beliefs:

Joycelynn Aryan Nation Campbell - named for the Aryan Nation, a group of neo-Nazi, white supremacists

Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell - named for Schutzstaffel head Heinrich Himmler

I am utterly disgusted. I'll allow the lehigvalleylive to explain:

"I just figured that they're just names," Deborah Campbell said. "They're just kids. They're not going to hurt anybody."

Heath Campbell said some people like the names but others are shocked to hear them. "They say, 'He (Hitler) killed all those people.' I say, 'You're living in the wrong decade. That Hitler's gone,'" he said.

"They're just names, you know," he said. "Yeah, they (Nazis) were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They're not going to grow up like that."

"Other kids get their cake. I get a hard time," he said. "It's not fair to my children.

"How can a name be offensive?" he asked.

'Why not call the kid Peace?'

Robert M. Gordon, a clinical psychologist in Allentown, said the names would hurt the children.

"Certainly society is going to be hostile towards those kids, especially when they go to school," Gordon said.

More than that, he said, the children would be harmed by their parents' views.

"By the time they get to school, they will already have been damaged," Gordon said. "Any parent that would impose such horrific names on their children is mentally ill, and they would be affecting their children from the day they were born. Only a crazy person would do that."

For the record, I agree with Gordon's last statement. The Campbell's say it's just a name. Really? So is a swastika just a meeting of lines? And if that's the case, why hang one in every room of your house? The Campbells said they just wanted their kids to have unique names. There is such a thing as being unique without resorting to this. For example, NFL player D'Brickshaw Ferguson has a very unique name, and he wasn't named after a man who slayed hundreds of thousands of people.

The Campbells go on and on about how it's just a name, nobody should be offended, but really, who's going to believe that? The man has swastikas all over his house; his kids are named for prominent Nazis, or, in the case of Joycelynn, a prominent neo-Nazi movement; he wears boots worn by a former Nazi; they've got a skull in their foyer with a swastika on the forehead. Pardon my french here, but "just a name" my fucking ass. 

Nevermind the father's jacked up view on things, what about his kids?

The Campbells, Morrison said, "might as well put a sign around their (the children's) neck that says bigot, racist, hatemonger. What's the difference? Why not call the kid Peace or Tranquility or Hope or Acceptance?

"It's doing them (the children) a tremendous disservice, and it's cruel that parents would place these names on children," he said. "It's a mark upon them. It sets them apart for ridicule, derision, attacks.

"The children at this age might not have an understanding of these names. But when they grow up, hopefully, they would want to distance themselves from them," he said. "If they come to identify with the ideology of Hitler, Himmler and the Aryan nations, their parents are launching them on a life of hatred."

I usually try to restrain myself from out-and-out judging people here, but this is just too much. These people are seriously messed up, and in all likelihood, should never have been allowed to have kids. 

Heath is asking for a little "tolerance" according to msnbc, and swears that he is teaching his kids not to hate. They're not racist, according to him, they just don't believe in the mixing of races.

Heath, let me explain this to you: Until you're willing to start practicing a little tolerance, you shouldn't start asking it of other poeple.

In a Surprising Move...

... the RIAA is going to stop suing individual P2Pers for sharing music. WHAT?

Here's the deal. The RIAA is in the process of switching to a European-style graduated response through ISPs. Pretty much, if the RIAA suspects you of sharing their cash cows, they'll log your IP address. They send your IP address to your Internet provider, who looks your account up through the IP adrress. They'll send you friendly warnings telling you to stop file sharing. After you have been notified several times, the ISP will suspend your service. Further penalties may still be forthcoming, though RIAA has reserved the right to sue people that ignore their ISP's notifications and/or service suspensions.

Of note here, the ISPs will not share your personal information with RIAA (you IP address by itself is not personally identifiable), until such a time as the RIAA sees fit to sue you for ignoring your ISPs warnings.

An ISP's participation in this program is supposed to be completely voluntary, without government enforcement. 

I find one of the more interesting notes here to be the simple benefit ISPs get from participating in this: freed up bandwidth. With Comcast's attempts to monitor and ban certain traffic across their networks and the net neutralty debates that have sprung up recently, ISPs have been introducing usage caps. Customers can do whatever they want over the network, but they can only do X amount of it. So, if there is in fact a drop in bandwidth usage as customers start to realize their activity is being tracked, does that mean ISPs will lift the bandwidth caps?

Small tangent to help me answer my own question. Over the past several years, airlines have started adding and increasing fees to "combat the rising cost of fuel." However, as fuel prices have plummeted over the last several months, we haven't seen any of these fees go away. As their underlying motives become clear: they wanted more money, plain and simple. Sicne bandwidth capping saves ISPs money, I doubt we'll see those go away.

Back to the RIAA, however, it will be interesting to see the long term effect of this action as it related to the heinous amounts of lawsuits they file. The idea here, of course, is that this is supposed to basically stop all future lawsuits. Yet, I have a feeling that they will continue to sue people, just because they can. Sure, it's a PR nightmare to sue people, but hey, why not? It's obviously an ineffective and costly measure of enforcement, and it's also very, well, public, but they reserved the right to continue doing it anyway.

If you're currently involved in one, you're still SOL. 

It will also be interesting to see what the file sharing community does in response to this. I predict more encryption and more useage of obscure protocols.

On the whole, I think that the RIAA is too primitive to the constantly evolving technologies and the shifts in consumer demand that they create. Nobody likes DRM, and nobody wants to rent music. People want to own what they buy. Until the RIAA can create a new system of licensing that actually meets the demands of the people buying music, people will continue file sharing.

Turbo Tax Debacle - Update

Well, the feedback is in at Amazon. As of the time of this writing, Turbo Tax has 311 reviews, and 282 of those are 1-star. As I wrote here, customer's are crying out against Turbo Tax's $9.95/additional return fee, mostly because the people that are manually printing these returns are being charged extra as though they were e-filing the return.

Intuit (the folks who own Turbo Tax), in a press release, announced that they are now allowing customer to e-file up to 5 total federal returns for no additional fee. This is the most returns the IRS allows to be e-filed. All returns beyond the 5th must be printed and mailed seperately, but Intuit has also removed the fee for doing this. Customers can print an unlimited number of tax returns for no additional fees.

Customers who have already paid the additional $9.95 will be refunded, and for those who've purchased the products already, you can update it to allow for the additional free returns.

This does not affect the pricing for e-filing state returns, which is still $17.95/return according to the small print on the Turbo Tax website. 

Good to see a company listening to customer feedback and offering a reasonable solution. The reason for offering this solution is debatable, as it always is with big companies, but it's nice to see a solution nonetheless.

Watchmen Trailers

Just so you don't have to look very far for your Watchmen fix:

Trailer 1

Trailer 2

Very Important...

...is Watchmen. Not since 1984 have I read a book so horrifying in its premise, and never have I read a book with more thoroughly realized characters or plot. Alan Moore's comic sucked me in from page 1 with its rich dialog, its subplot upon subplot, its mesmerizing style of prose that is so good it defies description. 

The comic book or graphic novel genre is often associated with cartoonish characters and childish themes - especially by outsiders looking in. Avid comic fans will talk for hours about the mature themes and characterizations to be found in the medium. The recent comic book movie fad has certainly shown the world a darker, more mature side of the graphic novel. Spider-Man has shown us what it means to be human in the face of rejection and it has shown us that we can take the characters behind the mask seriosuly. The Dark Knight is perhaps one of the darkest movies of our time, but it shows us how hard it can be to stay on the side of right in the face of nearly insurmountable evil. 

It was with this mindset that I set about reading some of the novels of Alan Moore, a man about whom I'd heard much, never a bad word. I started in the world of V, the masked vigilante that runs amok in facist Britain. How terrifying a premise, yet how elating it is when good prevails. I have read both the novel and seen the movie. I believe the movie accomplished what it was after far better than the novel, though the novel is appreciable in many more ways.

I moved from Britain to Gotham after seeing the Dark Knight. I have said many a time here on this blog that the Joker's psychology, or lack thereof, fascinates me. Moore's The Killing Joke goes boldly where no graphic novel had gone to that date: into the deranged mind of the psychopath, and what resides therein is at once engrossing and disturbing.

Yet, nothing prepared me for what awaited behind the yellow cover with a smile and a splotch of blood. Nothing prepared me to the journey on which I was about to embark, into this world rich in detail and depth, layered with plots and subplots, driven by characters who are almost more real than my hand in front of my face. It was a slow process, reading Watchmen. I found myself drawn to the page, exploring the art as I read the text, finding the nuances throughout. What is often overlooked, I believe, by the public at large, is the illustrativeness of the graphic novel. I certainly went through my days reading the kiddy comics, where the pictures were more filler than anything. But in Watchmen, every picture has a purpose beyond just illustrating a frame. The effect of absorbing both the written word and the illustrated picture is almost hypnotic. And yet, what it comes down to is the characters and how their actions define the story, and looking back on it, how those characters have influenced characters that came after (Saw's entire premise is based upon one scene in Watchmen, and that one scene, which took maybe a minute to read, is more appalling than the entire 2 hour movie experience).

It is on the backs of these characters that the story is driven. The deeply imagined characters come to life through the creative talents of Alan Moore. Each one is alive and has such a deeply realized psyche, it's hard not to imagine Nite Owl sitting right here next to me. Each character is a super hero, but at the same time, each is flawed and human and pained and real. 

The picture that this story paints is at once abhorrent and thought provoking. The end will leave you stunned, gasping for breath, your mind completely numbed. It will leave you questioning your morals, what is right and what is wrong. It will leave you asking: was it worth it? And the best part? Moore leaves it up to the reader to decide what's right and what's wrong. The door is wide open, and we are free to choose for ourselves. And, believe me, it's something that any reader will likely think about for a long, long time after turning the final page. 

The movie comes out soon, and I'm more excited than ever. I cannot wait to see what becomes of the characters when we see them on the big screen. I hear rumors that the ending is being tweaked, and that makes me truly nervous. I cannot imagine a more fitting end than the one penned by Mr. Moore.

In conclusion, I daresay that this might be in the top 5 most important fictional works ever written - a pretty big leap for one of those childish comics, eh? But in all seriousness, this book ranks easily among the best I've ever read, and I'd strongly recommend to anybody who hasn't already: read it now.

I. Can't. Wait.

Here's the trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, due out in May. It looks fantastic. Anybody else catch that Ryan Reynolds is playing Deadpool, according to a very short glimpse in the trailer? Oh, and how about Gambit finally in an X-Men movie, and looking completely badass to boot. Damn, this looks great. Anyway, enough blather from me. For your viewing pleasure:

On a Lighter Note (NSFW)

Presenting the cover of the January 2009 UK magazine Tatler.

Click image to view full size

Look closely, and you will see that there are appoximately 153 things wrong with this picture - including, but not limited to, missing legs, the magic leg-shrinking arm, amputated legs, physically impossible positions, and even a little beaver (think like a winner).

It hurs my eyes to look at this picture, but at the same time it's kind of amusing. I'd like to know what happened to actually taking pictures instead of Photoshopping random things (or people) together.

This amusing story was brought to you by PhotoshopDisasters.

Hooray, Common Sense Prevails...

... for now. The ridiculous bailout for the not-so-big 3 has failed in the Senate. It failed to pass in the Senate because the UAW refused to support a Republican-sponsored bill that cut union wages. I say just abolish it. I suppose I can't really call this bill not passing "common sense" because it didn't fail on the basis of people refusing to pass it, it failed on insignificant minutiae. There is NO reason that a bailout should pass through the Senate (why it passed the House is beyond me), and to me, it is infuriating that our elected officials are acting on their own whims as opposed to the pleadings of the folks they're supposed to support. Even if their constituents are split, the guiding hand in our country is (well, should be) the Constitution, which does not in any way give Congress power to decide to make taxpayers bail out large corporations (in fact, that's called socialism, which is why that power was never given to Congress).

Moving on, the Bush administration (in all their infinite wisdom) has made a statement saying that they will not allow the big 3 to fail, and have plans on using part of the $700B from the bank bailout to keep the auto industry from imploding until Congress reconvenes next month. Sad days ahead for us all. 

I've said it before, but it's the automakers' fault and it's the UAW's fault that this is happening. The automakers fought tougher fuel standards and continued to make sub-par models that drove consumers to more richly designed imports that came with the same features, better design, better fuel economy, and often a smaller price tag. The UAW strangled the auomakers, because they are bloated and overpowered and they could. Now they are both begging to a bailout, though the UAW is too dense to allow union wage cuts to be part of a bailout plan, which cost them today's bailout vote. Oops.

I'd like to say that eventually these companies will learn, but as long as we continue to throw money at them, they never will. In his mad dash to secure a legacy that he hopes will exonerate him in the eyes of historians (don't even get me started), Bush is insisting that we cannot allow the auto industry to fail. Save the American company - the sadly mismanaged company run by greedy SOBs - at the expense of the American taxpayers. 

More to the point, let's call this what it is: socializing this country. Anybody who does not now see this bailout crap for what it is is either completely naive or voluntarily ignorant. Part of the definition of capitalism is that companies that suck go out of business. The simple fact of the matter is that even without the current economic crisis, domestic automakers were well on their way to bankrupting themselves, because the imports were better. By the rules of capitalism, a free market, companies who cannot adapt to keep up with the times should die so that the companies who are more successful can take their place. This is not what's happeneing here with the bailouts (I'm also talking about the bank bailouts). We are very quickly moving away from a capitalist sort of economy, and we are barreling right down the throat of socialism, which advocates the government owning industry and forced spreading of wealth (as seen with taxpayers bailing out large corporations and banks). 

As our Congress sits back and indulges themselves with the feeling that they are doing the right thing, patting themselves on the back for such a hard effort, I can visualize the House floor as they received word of the bailout passing. I picture cheers and whoops, like something amazing and good was actually accomplished in that room. Yet the image sickeningly paralell to another, this out of Star Wars. The new Emperor announcing that he is taking over the government, turning it into a dictatorship, and everybody is applauding. And we see Padme Amidala, and she says, "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause." It rings so true right now, as we edge closer and closer to that precipitous drop, where the government owns it all and the idea of capitalism, of a free market, of the liberties on which we have prided ourselves on as Americans, blow away, nothing more than dust in the wind.

There is one person, though, who is fighting against the socialization of America, our own Padme, if you will. Ron Paul. At the moment, he's fighting a losing battle (as evidenced by the passing of both bailout packages through the House). I'd like to take a moment here to urge you to call your representatives when Congress reconvenes after the holidays. Your Congressmen are currently throwing your country away, so now is not the time to sit idly by and watch. Contact your Congressmen, tell them in no uncertain terms that you oppose this and all future bailouts. Equally imprtant, however, is that you hold them accountable. If they end up voting for these bailout plans, do not vote them back into office when they come up for re-election. The power of your vote is what holds sway over their votes, and if they won't listen to you, put somebody in office who will

You can find contact information for all Congressmen at campaignforliberty.org (it's on the "States" page). While you're there, check out some of the literature they have posted on the site. It's remarkably educational.

Auto Bailout Update

The news of last night saddens me a bit. The House passed the auto bailout plan yesterday evening 237-170. Dispicable. 

Now the campaign is on to convince the Senate to turn this thing away. There's no reason at all that the not-so-big 3 should ever be bailed out. Period. they are private companies that were mismanaged and overrun by an all-too-powerful union. They should go under, in my most humble opinion. 

Visit Congress.gov to find the contact information for your Senators to urge them to vote "no" on this bailout plan. 

Turbo Tax Debacle

All right! It's time for more fun with Amazon reviews. Next up on the chopping block is Turbo Tax. As of this writing, the newest version of Turbo Tax has garnered 153 1 star ratings. There are only 165 ratings curently posted, which gives the new version of Turbo Tax a 1 star rating overall. 

You can see the most current results here. The reasons for this are quite simple. First, the price of the software went up from $44.95 last year to $59.95 this year. Quite a jump. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the good folks at turbo Tax are now charging $9.95 for each additional return filed, be that e-filing or printing it out. Amazon users are furious and it's showing on the Amazon review boards.

Turbo Tax has been quick to respond with explanations, however, unlike EA with their stint on the Amazon customer review chopping block (which I wrote about here and here). The Turbo Tax VP, Bob Meighan, has offered the following explanations on the cnet forums:

• Turbo Tax costs $15 more this year because they are now including the first e-filing fee. This makes sense, because last year, they charged $17.95 to e-file your taxes. So, assuming you are e-filing, you save $2.95 over last year's version. If you are not e-filing, you are SOL.
• The $9.95 fee per additional return is actually cheaper than it was last year, again assuming that you are e-filing. Last year, e-filing was $17.95 per return, so this year you are saving $8.00 per extra return over last year's price. But, again, if you are old fashioned and prefer to send your taxes in via registered mail, you're screwed.

I think it's also important to note here that e-filing a state return still costs $17.95 for all returns, not just additional returns. From the small print found on Turbo Tax's website: 

³Cost of TurboTax CD/Download includes tax preparation, efile, and print for one federal return. Additional fees apply for preparing additional returns ($9.95) and for efiling state returns ($17.95). Prices are subject to change without notice.

He makes good points here, but a bigger part of the argument, much like it was with EA back in September, is consumer notification. According to Amazon reviews, there is only one notification of extra charges in very fine print (I have not actually seen the back of the box, so I can't attest to this). However, the box states "federal efile included" in a big banner. This phrasing is certainly open to interpretation.

For those consumers shopping online, they are also treated to a nice banner exalting the included federal efile, but on the feature comparison page, it specifically mentions that only one federal efile is included. 

I will refrain from judging Turbo Tax on this one. On one hand, there is notification of extra charges both on the box and on the website, and it is a customer's ultimate respponsibility to read these notifications prior to making a purchase. On the other hand, the prominent advertising is poorly worded and very much open to interpretation. The notifications are tiny. Turbo Tax could've done a better job in making this more prominent. I do feel bad for the folks that print their taxes, though, for they are paying a ton extra above what they paid last year. In his cnet comment, Meighan does mention getting your money back for those fees if you are not satisfied with the product, though. 

Me, I'll stick with letting my tax professional handle my taxes and efiling for a mere $30.00 per year. 

Fun with Bailouts

That title was meant more in an ironic sense...

So anyway, in brief bailut news:

The Big 3 (Ford, Chrysler, and GM) are still petitioning the g-man for a large sum of money to help get their businesses back on track. There is a problem with their proposed business models, however. Namely, it assumes people will buy their cars. As sales trends have shown over the past decade or so, people don't. They buy "imports". I quote imports because more of my Honda was built in the good ol' US of A than any car offered by the Big 3 (at least at the time of my purchase). More than 70% of my car was built and manufactured here. It has US-built parts and was assembled in a US factory. When I was shopping big 3, I was lucky to find a US-built percentage greater than 50%. It's sad, all things considered. 

I've been accused of being heartless by certain people who are supporting this idiotic bailout plan, but if you stop to think about it for a moment, these three companies have had years to fix themselves. I mean this at both the companies' execs and the overpaid union workers who are employed by them. The money-mongering executives rode on the SUV wave and failed miserably to put any money back into R&D to invest in a future where gas wasn't $0.99 a gallon. Gas prices have been trending upwards for at least 8 years, but instead on noticing, the car companies sat on their haunches while the import companies innovated and innovated again. 

The bloated and overpowered Union of Automotive Workers is also to blame though. The car companies have to pay exorbitantly to employ anybody because of the outrageous demands of the inflated union. I read somewhere that GM pay an average of $2400 per car above the cost of the employees' salaries for benefits and other union fees. I won't vouch for the validity of that particular statistic, but if it's true, it's outrageous. Unions have gone past their prime and should have faded out a long time ago. 

Nevermind the domestic vs. import dispute. People aren't buying cars at all. What part of that does a bailout fix? None. When (if) the economy stabilizes, we're still left with a trend of declining big 3 car sales. The collapse of the big 3 is completely inevitable, so I say let 'em burn.

Yet, Congress is still at it. Here's the draft of the bill proposing the bailout as posted by CNN today. Barack Obama, our oh so wonderful President-elect has said that he supports the bailout as well... so long as fuel economy improves. 

Anyway, I'm done ranting. Down with bailout proposals! They won't help anything (and they haven't yet, but more on that in another blog).

Michael Phelps and Eunice Kennedy Shriver Win Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year Awards

Congratulations to Michael Phelps for winning SI's Sportsman of the Year Award. He joins greats like Tiger Woods, Brett Favre, Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky, and Muhammad Ali (and 49 other greats) who've also won the award through its 55 year history. It's a monumental achievement, but so it what was accomplished this year during the Olympics. Consider the following stats from NBC:

• 215 million people in America tuned in to watch the Olympics (2008 US population estimates are close to 306 million... that's a staggering percentage)
  
• nbcolympics.com received 1.7 billion page views during the Olympic Games
• Video clips were viewed 75 million times on the site

Those are insane numbers, especially when compared to other Olympic broadcasts that drew rather dismal ratings. Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports says, "and it was almost entirely because of this wunderkind from Baltimore. What he accomplished transcended sport and became a cultural phenomenon." In more numbers, of the 10,000 Olympic athletes on nbcolympics.com, Phelps accounted for 20% of the traffic.

SI wrote a very long and heartfelt article about Phelps, which you can read in its entirety here. It's very good reading - interesting and heart-warming, for lack of a better term. I found myself smiling a little here and there as I read it. I'd recommend it to any who read this blog. Now that the Phelpsmania has kind of fallen by the wayside, I've talked to a few people who've questioned the decision, but the article explains why so much better than the above numbers could ever hope to. Sure, that's a part of it, but there's a lot more to the story.

Go, read. Be heart-warmed.

This year also marked the first time SI awarded the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year Legacy Award to celebrate lifetime achievement. The inaugural award was given, rightly, to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics.

The first Special Olympics games were held in Chicago in 1968, where about 1,000 athletes competed in front of an audience of roughly 100. Eunice opened the day with the oath that is still used to open every Special Olympics:

Let me win,
but if I cannot win,
let me be brave
in the attempt.

Since I cannot say it any better than SI did:

While skeptics shook their heads and most of the press ignored the unprecedented competition, Shriver boldly predicted that one million of the world's intellectually challenged would someday compete athletically. She was wrong. Today, three million Special Olympics athletes are training year-round in all 50 states and 181 countries. They run races, toss softballs, lift weights, ski moguls, volley tennis balls and pirouette on skates. There are World Winter Games, the next ones coming up in Boise, Idaho, in February, and World Summer Games, which will be staged next in Athens in 2011. Documentaries, Wide World of Sports presentations, after-school TV specials, feature films, cross-aisle congressional teamwork and relentlessly positive global word of mouth have educated the planet about Special Olympics and the capabilities of the sort of individuals who were once locked away in institutions. Schooling, medical treatment and athletic training have all changed for people with intellectual disabilities as a result of Shriver's vision; more important, so have attitudes and laws.

[...]

But to say that the lot of people with intellectual disabilities has improved because of Special Olympics would be a gross understatement. Shriver's movement did nothing less than release an entire population from a prison of ignorance and misunderstanding. It did something else, too—create a cathartic covenant between competitor and fan that is unlike anything else in sport. You watch and what you see is nothing less than a transformation, the passage of someone who has been labeled unfortunate, handicapped, disabled or challenged to something else: athlete.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver knew this could happen. Forty years ago she could see it all. For that, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED recognizes her as one of those revolutionaries who saw opportunity where others saw barriers, someone who started a movement and changed a world.

You can read the powerful and truly moving story here, and you can read about the origin of this award here.

Very Exciting

Music4Games.net is hosting a competition. The grand prize is rather cool: 1 Zune and a copy of the Gears of War 2 Soundtrack signed by composer Steve Jablonsky. 4 runners up will receive a signed copy of the soundtrack. You can find all the information about the contest here.

I have already entered the contest. To enter, you need to answer a question related to the soundtrack, the answer to which isn't very hard to find. You've got until 12/17.

And, go!

Edit: So it turns out that The Knight Shift is also hosting a contest to win signed copies of the Gears of War 2 soundtrack. Damn, this is exciting. You can get all the details right over here. You've got until 12/18 to enter this one.

Enter both, double your chances.

Okay, now go!

A few notes about the BCS

The arguments for an 8-team playoff system keep getting stronger.

I was going to write about this earlier, but it slipped my mind. The current BCS standings look a little like this:

1. Alabama .9713

2. Oklahoma .9351

3. Texas .9223

4. Florida .8851

5. USC .8076

Depending on what side of the Texas/Oklahoma fence you're on, your wither really happy with this decision, or really frustrated (or your one of the fans that just doesn't care). So the big debate is whether Oklahoma should be #2 or Texas. Why does it matter? It's simple. OK and TX have the same record (11-1 [7-1]) and both play in the Big 12 South. Every year, the Big 12 championship game features the Big 12 North's best team vs. the team from Big 12 South. Ordinarily, who plays in this game is determined by each team's record. When there is a tie for first place, it is determined by who has the best standing in the BCS polls the week of the championship games. This year, it's projected that the winner of this game will move on to the national title game. Big deal here.

What's the controversey? Since both teams have the same records, what tiebeakers are factored in?

• Strength of schedule
• Who beat who
• How big were the wins
• among other things

The two biggest here are strength of schedule and who beat who. Since who beat who is easier to demonstrate, I'll start there.

Texas beat Oklahoma.

Texas Tech beat Texas.

Oklahoma beat Texas Tech.

The argument has been made that since TT beat UT, and OK beat TT (schooled is really the word for it), OK must obviously be better than UT. I beg to differ. UT beat OK, that's only the important line there. There is no other fact you can give that says OK is a better team when they lost to the same folks they are now tied with. This one fact, in my mind at least, puts UT above OK. But, if you must delve further, let's look at some scores.

Texas beat Oklahoma: 45-35

Texas Tech beat Texas: 39-33

Oklahoma beat Texas Tech: 65-21

Notice that Texas only lost to TT by 6 points, and that was due to a last second touchdown. Yes, OK spanked the crap out of TT, but as long as we're judging OK by what their opponents did (not what they did themselves), a 6 point loss is smaller than a 10 point win, and the argument that Texas is a better team holds true.

And no, we cannot judge Oklahoma based on what they did, because they lost to Texas. End of argument.

Moving on to strength of schedule. This is usually determined by comparing the total win-loss record for all a team's opponents, so:

This shows that Texas' oppenents have a better record than Oklahoma's... meaning (from a purely numbers standpoint) Texas' strength of schedule is greater. Even if you only look at Big 12 opponents, Texas has a slight edge.

So, no conclusions that OK is better can be drawn from strength of schedule.

Which leaves us with the flawed "I beat the team that beat you" logic. It is only flawed because "I beat the team that beat you... but you still beat me."

Folks who know me personally know that I'm not much of a Longhorns fan, nor do I care much for the Sooners. I do, however, love watching college football as a whole. I love the sport. Love it. But the utterly retarded BCS system leaves me feeling absolutely insane. The fact that a team who is clearly better is being treated like second best kills me a little bit inside. Get rid of the BCS for crying out loud!! Stop allowing computers to determine the best teams and let them do it themselves. 8 team playoff, now.

It'll never happen of course, because eleventy billion bowl games make the head honchos at the BCS mega-bucks (read: $TEXAS).

Some More Reviews: Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2

OK, so I finally beat Fallout 3. That game is awesome, no two ways about it. I was quite hesitant to buy it at first, because I really, really didn't like Oblivion at all. The game bored me to tears and then some. I kept trying to like it. Everybody I knew was playing it, loving it even, so I had to be missing something. But no, I just never could get into it. Then everybody else started to think it was boring, so I was actually just ahead of the curve :)

Fallout 3 was also made by Bethesda, but with this game, they did a great job of improving the things I hated about Oblivion. So, let's go through those really quickly:

• Leveling up: God that was a pain in my ass in Oblivion. It worked thusly: At the beginning of the game, you pick X number of skills (x was equal to 5 or something like that. I can't recall). These skills became your primary skills. Anyway, you leveled up those skills by using them. When Y number of those skills had leveled up (Y=10 I think, and that could be 10 skills in any combination), your character gained a level. This was sometimes a long and tedious process, especially when you either don't pick primary skills that are easy to level up, or your easy-to-level primary skills have maxed out and you're left with the hard-to-level skills. Fallout 3 fixes this issue by going to the more traditional kill things and complete quests to earn experience model.
  
• Story: The story of Oblivion was boring, plain and simple. Not much happened, and even less of that was exciting. Fallout 3 has an engrossing storyline, because most of it is based on your character choices and your relationship with your father. Character-driven story is where it's at.
• Character diversity: In Oblivion, you gain a ton of levels. Each level gives you points to distribute into any of your skills. Gain enough levels and suddenly you're good at everything. Fallout 3 has the level cap. Your character can reach level 20, then you gain no more levels. This design decision has come under a lot of fire since the game's release, but I believe it was the correct decision. Because you can only gain 20 levels, you can only dump your skill points into so many skills (usually 3-4 main skills). This makes your character feel different from any other characters you may create, because the character is good at one general thing, and pretty much blows at everything else. That means if you make a sneaky guy who owns with pistols, he will feel different (in terms of how you approach each objective in the game) than if you created uber-chick who wanders the Wasteland wearing Power Armor and wielding a sledgehammer. This diversity adds a certain (large) amount of replayability, because you (or I at least) want to go back through the game and try a different type of character.
• The ending: No spoilers here, but I will tell you that the end of Fallout 3, particularly the last couple hours of the main story (starting with the first twist) and culminating with a decision that will likely leave you reeling, Fallout has one of the better endings I've played through this year. It was definitely satisfying. Unlike Oblivion's ending.
• Music: Ah, the music in Oblivion drove me nuts. Like most of the rest of the game, I found it boring. Because it lacked anything attention-grabbing, it didn't really feel like a score so much as ambient droning. Leave the droning to the bugs, and give me some music! Fallout 3, again, fixed that issue. The standard, wander around the map background music was soft, mostly beatless, bordering on droning in fact, but every so often it would take a hauntingly beautiful, attention-grabbing turn as if to say "Hey, I'm still here. Listen." It was refreshing. The battle music in the game is top notch, and I'd easily drop some money to buy the album just to hear the battle tunes. Some of the music, particularly in the subway systems, reminds me of Matt Uleman's Diablo 2 score, and so there was a bit of nostalgia mixed in with the experience as well.

As far as RPGs go, Fallout 3 ranks in as the 2nd best one I've played on the 360. It's only beaten by Mass Effect, which is still, overall, the best game I've played for the 360. Taken as a whole, Fallout 3 is an experience worth having at least once... though I'd be willing to bet you come back twice or more even.

Score: 9.0/10.0

Moving right along, Gears of War, in my opinion, didn't deserve the hype or recognition it recieved. It's beautiful, yes, but none of the rest of the game lived up to my expectations. The characters were about as deep as the puddle of water on my deck. The story was there sometimes and completely absent others. The combat system, particularly the cover mechanic, didn't jive with me - it was just missing that fun factor. Were I to have scored it on this blog, I would have given it a 2.0/10.0, only because it looked nice.

Suffice it to say I was skeptical of the second game.

I had the chance to sit down and play through the game this weekend (no, it's not very long). I was impressed, but only relative to the first game. The story is deeper, more like the slightly larger puddle of water under my deck. The characters are still flimsy, and the dialog is often stilted and, well, janky. The combat system remains almost completely untouched, though they fixed the cover mechanic a bit. I can see why they didn't do anything about that, though, because I was in the definite minority with my "I don't like this" comments.

Aside from these shortcomings, there were a couple of moments that I really felt the game would come together and be something truly spectacular, but it just never happened. And that is the biggest shortcoming of all.

What really did stand out in the experience, though, and I mean really stood out, was the score. There were times that the music was so entirely engrossing that I forgot I was playing the game and ended up as a smear of blood on the wall. Whoops! But seriously, the score is amazing. All I could think about after playing through that game was "When can I buy the score?" Must. Listen. Again.

After a small amount of digging, I discovered that the score was composed by Steve Jablonsky. The astute reader may notice that he is the same guy that composed the Transformers score that I am so madly in love with. That was another experience where I was more enthralled with the music than I was the medium it was scoring (and I love the Transformers movie). Transformers is still one of the most played soundtracks in my collection, and I have no doubt that Gears of War 2 will soon be joining it. Jablonsky writes music that is captivating (it's really hard to describe, to put into words just how good it is), and it fits with what is happening onscreen so well it's nigh indescribable. For me, the score to GoW2 is the game. It's the only part of that experience that I will take with me beyond this review.

So:

Score (game): 3.0/10.0
Score (score): 10.0/10.0

Yes, I can do that. :)

I managed to pick up Dead Space for $30 on Amazon's Black Friday sale (GO AMAZON!), so I'll be spending some quality time with that game tomorrow. I'm very interested to see what EA has done with its first entry into the survival/horror genre as I have seen mixed reviews from various outlets. I'm excited to sit down and play and see if it can scare me. ... I doubt that it will, but it should hopefully be an intense experience nonetheless. Also, I've got some friends who want to hook it up with Left 4 Dead, so I'm excited about that game as well. That may be a bit farther down the road, though, seeing as my budget is tight with Christmas expenses.

I also recently picked up the Too Human soundtrack off iTunes. God help me, that game was atrocious, but the soundtrack was good enough to catch my attention. I haven't had time to give it the listen it deserves, but I plan on doing that shortly. Also up on the "I want it" block is the score from Infinite Undiscovery... again, bad game as I discussed here, but damn fine soundtrack.

Also of note, I hate World of Warcraft the games, but damn do I love the soundtracks. Blizzard has a great tendency to make awesome music. The new Diablo III Overture is simply jaw-dropping.

Stay tuned, more to come.

Fun With Consumerist

My favorite Internet blog is having some fun with Black Friday this year. Were I the kind of person that woke up at the butt crack of dawn to go shopping (nothing motivates me to wake up that early... nothing), I would certainly see lots and lots of this.

But for some real fun, try playing Black Friday Bingo. Print out your cards here and make an otherwise hellish shopping trip that much more fun. 

Many thanks to Ben over at The Consumerist for adding some jollies to my day. 

New XBox Experience (NXE) - The Reveiw

I have almost beaten Fallout 3, in between slews of wrasslin' matches and downloading trailers, so the review is on the way. Right now, though, I would like to take a few moments to comment on the New XBox Experience (NXE). The massive Dashboard update did several things for the 360:

• Upgraded the interface
• Improved sound effects
• Added Avatars...
• Increased prices
• Added the ability to install games on the hard drive
  

Of those, one of them is really cool. Starting with the new interface... It reminds me a lot of navigating around the menus in my PSP. To be fair, this is an interface that is very similar to Windows Media Center as well as the PSP, but my first experience with such an interface was with Sony's portable system, so that's where my comparison will stay. It is much cleaner, faster, and it's easier to find things, especially on XBox Live. Gone are the days of sifting through pages of games in the Marketplace to find your game for which you'd like to download content. For games without a built-in game store (thank god Rock Band implemented one of these), this is a real time-saver.

The new sounds are aurally pleasing, but they are seriously exactly the same as the menu sounds from Sony's Gran Turismo series.

Avatars... where do I begin? Who here has played with a Wii? Show of hands. How many have made a Mii? You know the interface you use to make a Mii, complete with little squares used to show you the option you're selecting and quiet, cutesy music in the background? Well, port an interface that is eerily similar with comparable queit, cutesy music in the background to the 360, and BAM! you have XBox 360 Avatars. This feature annoys me to no end, because it utterly lacks originality. The Avatars are cartoonish (not quite as bad as Miis, but not nearly as mature as those found in the PS3s upcoming Home feature) and cheesy (I like that word today), which is a mistake as far as XBox 360's core audience is concerned. The 360's main audience is composed of people who like the more mature content (read: first- and third-person shooters, action/adventure) that the 360 offers in spades over the Wii. These folks, in my opinion, would prefer to have more mature Avatars. The next time my idiotic Avatar jumps up with a stupid grin on his face and waves at me, I'm going to boot him in the face. Or shoot him with some friggin lazers [(c) Jason Howell]. At least I don't have to use his goofy mug as my gamer picture...

Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, Wired has described Microsoft's plan to release more content to use when creating you Avatar (the current selection is, well, lacking). The problem with this? Extra create-an-avatar goodies will cost money!!! Given that I could seriously care less about my Avatar, you can count me out of that purchase.

On the money note, "premium" themes are now offered for your Dashboard. Really they're just themes designed to work specifically with NXE. Older themes seem to work just fine, as my The Dark Knight theme doesn't have any issues. However, these new themes (which will likely become the standard theme offering) have gone from 160MP ($2.00) to 250MP ($3.12). Note to Microsoft: now is probably not the best time to arbitrarily raise prices on optional content, even if you did take the time to add the word "Premium" in the title of said content. 

Finally, NXE gives users the option to install any game onto the hard drive. This is supposed to make the installed games run both faster and quieter. I can certainly attest to the fact that loaded games run quieter. Without having to query the DVD for every little thing, there's very little spinup and spindown. I can actually run a game at low volumes when my room mate is sleeping and still hear what is going on. As for faster... not so much. That can be attributed in many ways to lack of development for this feature. Once developers start coding for games installed on hard drives, load times will likely decrease sharply. In the meantime, a word of caution. Some games may actually run slower once installed. IGN is reporting that Halo 3 will run slower once installed than if it was running off the CD. 

Basically, Halo 3 uses a special partition of the Xbox 360 hard drive as scratch memory to quickly load maps. Because it's pulling data from one device (the DVD drive) and copying it to another (the HDD) the software can do both at once. But when the game is installed solely to the hard drive, it can't easily perform both operations simultaneously and thus the process is slowed down significantly.

Bungie has confirmed this and is "advising that Halo 3 players do not install the game to their HDD." The full rundown, complete with all the techspeak you can wrap your brain around, can be found on Bungie.net.

I personally like the feature, because I see lots of future value, and anything that helps the obnoxiously loud 360 run quieter is fine in my book.

As a whole, NXE is a good upgrade from the previous Dashboard. Avatars are underwhelming, and there's nothing particularly innovative about it, but it does add much-needed functionality, make things look and sound better, and make navigating the XBox Live Marketplace much easier.

Score: 7.0

NOW I'm excited about Star Trek

So, I'm not a Star Trek fan in any sense of the word. That fact kind of impugns my self-made geek image, but I just have never been able to bring myself to watch the cheesiness that has been Star Trek from its inception until now. Even news that J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot (the group behind one of my all-time favorite movies, Cloverfield) failed to excite me too much, yet I have been keeping tabs, just to see. So, I ended up downloading the new trailer on my 360, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Most notably, Zachary Quinto, the reason I watch Heroes, is Spock. Check it:

Photos Courtesy of IMDB

I'm sold. I'll be seeing it in IMAX for sure now. Also of note, check out the first portion of the trailer. Very un-Star-Trekkie. It gives me hope for a less cheesy future for the franchise. 

More awesome news: the best movie score of the year is getting the royal treatment. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard created a masterful and epic score for The Dark Knight (which I wrote about here and here), and now it is being released in its entirety... as in, not mixed for CD, but every track, as it appears (er... is heard) in the movie, spanning 2 CDs. It comes out December 9; check it out on Amazon.

In more movie news, Seven Pounds comes out soon, and by soon, I mean in about a month (Dec 19). I have become a huge fan of Will Smith recently. It seems that throughout his career, he's been in movies that have been different for the times in which they came out. Think back to Independence Day, which was ahead of the space creatures curve that soon followed; I, Robot (which was good or bad depending on your take); and more recently, I Am Legend (which was a remake, yes, but still, it stood out from everything else that came out around that time); Pursuit of Happyness; and now Seven Pounds. I'm quite excited to actually see the movie. The previews look phenomenal. 

Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 - The Review

Wrestling games are my favorite. Pro wrestling, in general, is a form of entertainment that I've enjoyed as long as I remember. Back from Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant straight up through to the current era of Triple H, Cena, and my current personal favorite, Orton.

It was actually odd, growing up as a fan of pro wrestling, because I didn't know a single person (no exaggeration here) who liked it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. It wasn't until I was 23 that I met somebody who liked wrestling. I went on a business trip with Damon, and we're sitting in the hotel room playing cards on Monday night, and he says, "I hope you don't mind, but Raw's coming on." I stared at him for a moment, a little slack-jawed, and he thought I was offended. I was hasty to correct the assumption, explaining that I too loved wrestling. We spent the rest of the night talking about old matches and storylines. That was a great night.

Of course, now we have things like the Internet and social websites, so it's easy for me to find places to discuss wrestling.

I say all that to get to my point: I've been playing wrestling games since the Nintendo. It's far and away my favorite game genre, and is perenially the game I sink most hours into. Since THQ has gone down to one yearly wrestling franchise, WWE games are the only ones that I can pick up once a year and will play consistently for the whole year. Prior to the whole one-title thing they do now, when THQ had competition from EA's WCW games, there would be several game releases in one year, which was very exciting for me, but I make do with only one per year.

Yes, for those of you that pay attention, up-and-comer TNA released a game a couple of months ago, but that was a really bad game. It's gameplay mechanics were around 10 years ago. Yes it had shiny graphics and surprisingly fluid animations, but it didn't have solid game play or AI to back it up. Maybe next year.

So today, I'll focus on the current champion of the virtual squared circle, WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009. The series started out as WWE Smackdown when it was a PS2 exclusive. THQ was then running 3 brands of sports games (Raw on XBox, and something-something on the GameCube). I am a loyal XBox owner, but the Raw games blew my ass. Towards the end of the XBox's life cycle, THQ released Wrestlemania 21, made by Studio Gigante who had made one whopping video game prior to WM21, and that was a terrible, terrible fighting game (the name of which escapes me). Suffice it to say that WM21 was the worst wrestling game I've ever played (and that includes the old 8-bit ones).

After a string of XBox failures, THQ finally decided to move the awesome Smackdown franchise over to the XBox 360, much to my delight. The renamed it Smackdown vs Raw and suddenly the 360 had an awesome wrestling title. Every year since then, the series has just improved, and this year is no exception.

The first thing most people will notice is the improved visuals. The wrestlers look more realistic than they ever have before. The arenas look great (though I'm disappointed they didn't recreate the Orange Bowl for the WM24 arena), the fireworks look awesome too. The crowd is still a low point though. I tend to care very little about this, however, as I'm usually too busy looking at the goings-on in the ring to notice.

The music selection has also improved, leaning more heavily towards superstars' themes rather than no-name licensed music. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of that, but hearing Motorhead when I'm creating my wrestler is far cooler than some stock rap track.

Which brings me to the create modes. The create-a-wrestler is still deep and fun to use. They've trimmed some of the options down a bit, which is slightly off-putting. I have a tendency to bring my created wrestlers over from previous versions, and when details of those go away, it tends to annoy me. There are some odd bugs this year, ones that it seems to me never should have made it through testing. One example of this is is with the wristband length. If you choose, say, wristband #1 and try to shrink it down to be just on the wrist instead of the whole arm, it will only go down to just below the elbow. This has never been an issue in previous versions, and it strikes me as weird that it is an issue now. Who broke it? Moving on... the textures for the outfits, hair, and skin have also been upgraded and now look far more realistic than they have before. Gone is the plastic-y look from previous years.

Create an Entrance is the same as ever, just updated with better visuals and newer effects to match those currently being used. On the Create a Moveset end of things, many moves have been reanimated and a plethora of new ones have been added. When you start, a good number of the moves are locked (something that has always bothered me to a degree), but you can unlock them in the Road to Wrestlemania mode (though you'll probably want to reference a guide for that).

The big new addition this year comes in the form of Create a Finisher. I know this is something that I've always wanted to do, and I'm sure most people who play these games have as well. I just love this idea, but in execution, it's readily apparent that more work is needed. It's fun going in there and exploring the plethora of options, and some of the moves are really cool. It does have it's plaws though. In order for me to explain what's wrong with it, I have to tell you how it works. There are 10 steps. On each step, you can assign a specific move peice. For example, you can do your steps like this:

1. Punch to head
   
2. Punch to gut
   
3. Kick in nuts
   
4. Powerbomb clutch
5. Powerbomb lift
6. 360 spin
7. Powerbomb drop
8. Powerbomb impact
9. Blank
10. Blank
    

The idea being, if you choose the "powerbomb clutch" in step 4, you will only have the option to select moves that can be done from that position in step 5. This makes sense, but it's not always the case. For instance, there are times when you can go from having a double-underhook Pedigree setup straight into a chokeslam clutch. There is no natural transition between these, so the transition is actually just glitching into a new position. I ran into this time and time again. It makes the act of creating a move frustrating. Once you know what to look for, however, the moves that you create can be quite awesome.

Once you have created your wrestler, complete with an entrance and moveset, you can't manually assign stats. You must take your superstar through Career Mode, which is where your superstar fights to acquire as many titles as possible. There are no cut scenes or stories, just match, match, match, number one contender match, title match. Wash, rinse, repeat. At the end of each match, your created dude gains stat points based on how many moves from each category you performed during the match. If you whack your opponent in the head with a steel chair over and over, your hardcore stat goes up. If you jump off the turnbuckle a lot, your speed goes up.

Last year, created superstars were assigned special abilities based on what kind of superstar they were. If you created a Showman, then your superstar could steal taunts and finishers. This year, special abilities are assigned based on meeting certain criteria in Career Mode. The criteria for each ability are not given to you until you earn it. Your created dude has 6 ability slots, and once your superstar earns an ability, you cannot remove it or change it.

Let me tell you why this whole mode is frustrating to me. First, I like to have a stable of created guys, and spending hours of play for each to increase stats is a lot to ask. Second, until you know how to unlock all the special abilities, you're stuck playing matches and hoping you don't end up with anything stupid. For example, one of my created guys is a face, yet he has a dirty pin as a special move. Given that faces never use dirty pins, this makes zero sense and the fact that I can't go back and change it is just plain idiotic. Not to mention, the stats go up very slowly. I'm 3/4 of the way done with career mode with one guy, and his overall is in the mid 50s. Given that he starts at a 32, this is insane.

IGN reports that THQ apparently realized their mistake and are working on a patch that will allow you to assign stats manually to every created character after you beat career mode once. There is no word on editing abilities, so I can only wait. That wait could potentially be a long one, though, as THQ has only said that it will be available sometime before January 31, 2009.

To be fair, that is my one major gripe with the game. But I love creating wrestlers, so it's a huge gripe.

Anyway, this year introduces the new Road to Wrestlemania mode, where you choose from 7 superstars and play through an actual storyline. Even given the limited wrestler choices you have, this mode is awesome. Not since WWF No Mercy have you been able to play through a really well-scripted story with branching paths and realistic characterizations. The play-by-play, which is annoying-at-best during regular matches, is actually entertaining in this mode, as they are always commenting on the goings-on in the story. My only real wish for this mode is that Orton had a playable story, but perhaps next year.

Overall, this is the best wrestling game I've played on any XBox system. Its great how far the series has come, and the directions its being taken make me want to drool in anticipation. Yes, I have some gripes (most of which should be fixed by 1/31/09), but overall, the game is immense fun, and a grand step up from previous iterations.

My score: 9.3/10

Still to come: Fallout 3, plus other rantings, ravings, and random thoughts. Woot!

Infinite Undiscovery - The Review

Yes, yes, I know, it's very late, but it took me a looooooooooooong time to motivate myself to play this game. I bought it because everybody I know told me how wonderful it was. It was hard not to believe, because it is a Tri-Ace game (can you say Star Ocean? That game still rocks my socks off), and generally, the stuff that Square Enix releases isn't crap (I blatantly ignore the fact that Dirge of Cerberus even exists). Yet, even from the opening moment, I was pretty sure the game was not to my liking (Read: crap).

The opening cinematic shows a bunch or people fighting a dude that sprouts red glowing chains. The music is epic, the cinematic graphics were shiny and artsy, and I started to feel that I wasn't going to regret this purchase. Then the mouths started moving... and there were no words. There was obviously a conversation being had between the good character (very knightly looking with ornate armor, red undergarments, red hair, and a very awkward head band) and the bad guy (gray hair, even more awkward headband, metal claws over his hand Vega-style, plus the aforementioned chains), but I could hear none of it. It turns out that only 40% or so of the dialog is voiced-over, everything else is subtitled. This opening cinematic, however, was startlingly devoid of both.

Fast forward a bit, the scene changes to a dank-looking prison with a cartoonish knight keeping guard. He is shot down by a chick with a bow and arrow, and she frees one of the inmates. This inmate - a young lad whose clothes look startlingly like the knights' undergarments from the opening scene, and whose face bears a strong resemblance to the other's as well - turns out to be our main character, Capell, The girl keeps calling him "Lord Sigmund". We find out rather quickly that Sigmund is actually the knight from the beginning and Capell is most certainly not Sigmund.

This is the premise of the story. Capell is a completely naive and innocent patsy. To put it simply, he is Luke Skywalker on Prozac. He looks exactly like this Lord Sigmund fellow, the knight-ish brute from the opening cinematic. Why do they look like each other? Why are there chains tethering the moon to the world? Those are the only two real story elements in the 35 hours of game play. By the way, the answer to the first question is given about halfway through the story if you're paying attention.

Anyway, shortly after being freed, Capell and Aya (the girl who freed him) are attacked by guards, and Capell complains that he doesn't know how to use a sword or defend himself. Yet, not 30 seconds later, he's dancing around people screaming "dancing rhapsody" and "spinning waltz" and what have you in his annoyingly high-pitched voice.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to characters. I don't know about you, but I play an RPG for two things, characters and storyline. All the gameplay elements are secondary to those two things. So, perhaps the most aggravating thing about Infinite Undiscovery was its piss-poor character development. To start off with, there is roughly 35 hours of gameplay total in the game. This includes side quests, wasting time on crafting and enchanting, etc, etc. Compare that to 18 (yes, eighteen) main characters, and it's readily apparent that character development is going to fall flat on its face. There is simply not enough time to develop 18 characters in 35 hours, just not possible. Infinite Undiscovery tries to build up all of them, but it fails.

Aside from lack of time, characters do things that otherwise seem completely out of character. Take, for instance, a scene where Capell is talking to Edward, who mentions the unblessed (the unlucky folks who are not blessed by the moon). Capell flips out, gets really, really angry, because, as it turns out, he is also unblessed. Mind you, comments similar to Edward's had been made many, many times throughout the game, and Capell doesn't say shit, doesn't hint at being angry. There is no buildup to him getting angry. Yet this one time we hear a comment about the unblessed, well, it's balls to the wall anger. It's out of place and made me feel awkward. There are moments like that sprinkled throughout the game, from the beginning all the way to the last scene.

The voice acting is abysmal. There is little emotional inflection in any of the dialog, and even then, what is there is sorely misplaced. This makes pretty much everything anyone says (assuming it's voiced over) very corny. It's so corny sometimes that it's just plain hard to sit through. Some of the animations are also out of place. One of the characters says something along the lines of "I hate him!" as she raises her arms above her head in victory(?).

All of these may seem nit-picky for those that are not quite as character-centric as I am, but for me, these things just killed the experience.

On the plus side, the combat is interesting at times. It's a fairly typical Star Ocean model, though range doesn't matter at all. Press a button for an attack, hold the button for another, stronger, MP-consuming attack (there is also no MP-kill in this game). It can get old, becasue there is very little difference in strategy when the enemies change. By the time Capell learned Grinn Valesti, I was able to do that non-stop and win every battle I was in, including the last boss... before side quests. RPGs are notorious for having pathetic final bosses, but they're only supposed to be pathetic after you've completed a ton of side quests, leveled up to a ridiculous degree, and uncovered everybody's ultimate weapons. I did none of those. I blitzed through the story, fought him, and owned his face by spamming one special move. Sad.

The music is certainly another upside to the game. It was epic where it needed to be, sad in the places that fit, and joyous at all the right moments. It's a true shame that there were times that the music felt out of place. For example, the music would be epic, and I felt the situation should be epic, but the characters sounded bored. Or sad. This has nothing to do with the music, but goes back to the inane voiceover work.

In the end, the storyline turns out to be decent, though there are enough loopholes to march the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade through, but that's beside the point. The point being that the story is actually the strong point of this game, shoddy as it may be sometimes, but that's not saying a whole hell of a lot.

Score: 4.0 / 10.0 (someday, I'll make a catchy graphic)

WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 coming up tomorrow, followed shortly by Fallout 3.