Rec Room

Crossword: ''No theme for you!''

MATT JONES — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:25:24 GMT

But some pretty sweet wordage anyway

Stepping-stone Sudoku XII

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:15:36 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

More bad news for the Mets

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:09:45 GMT

Sports blotter: "Very bad times" edition
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen.

Mets bullpen woes continue
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen. In fact, most of us decent folk should have watched the spectacle of the Mets trying to win a pennant with Luis “Kerosene Can” Ayala closing games down the stretch with horrified relief, with a There But for the Grace of God sort of attitude — it could have happened to anyone. Of course, a good team would have had at least two decent relievers on the roster at the start of the season, providing insurance against injury to its closer. In the case of the Mets, whose closer (Billy Wagner) is a very little left-handed guy who throws 98 by recklessly hurling his body at the plate 30 times a night, they probably should have wanted better insurance behind their top guy than, say, Scott Schoeneweis.

But the Mets didn’t nail down that insurance policy, and that’s why general manager Omar Minaya gets paid the big money. No one else wins 89 games a year and comes up two feet short of the goal line quite like Minaya. Once revered for his ability to deal away multiple future all-stars for aging quick-fixes — the Grady Sizemore/Brandon Phillips/Cliff Lee for Bartolo Colon deal was the signature Minaya (then with Montreal) move until recently — he has since rebounded and become best known for his ability to mismanage the massive budgets of big-market contenders. And he’s especially skilled in loading expensive and superfluous back-end years onto otherwise reasonable veteran free-agent deals. This year’s Mets, for instance, headed into this season with more than $26 million committed to three 89-year-old injury-prone washouts (Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou, and Orlando Hernandez), while letting their left-handed starter-with-upside, Oliver Perez, enter free-agency. That’s not just good business, it’s the Minaya way.

Anyway, one of the great Minaya deals of the past few years was something that at the time seemed like a small transaction: the 2006 trading of innings-eating young starter Brian Bannister to the Royals for unproven relief prospect Ambiorix Burgos. Burgos was sort of a souped-up version of Craig Hansen — he hit 99 on the gun but couldn’t find the plate with a map. Bannister slipped a little this year, but in the two years since the deal he’s pitched nearly 350 innings and won 21 games for the worst offense in the American League. Burgos has since pitched 23 innings, missed the 2008 season due to elbow surgery, and, now, allegedly killed two people. Suffice to say Kansas City is probably happy with the deal.

Blast from the past

MITCH KRPATA — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:36:37 GMT

Mega Man goes retro
Playing Mega Man 9 , you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand.

VIDEO: The trailer for Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 | For Wii Ware, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network | Rated E for Everyone | Developed by Inti Creates | Published by Capcom

Playing Mega Man 9, you feel you’ve stepped through a wormhole and emerged in 1988 with an NES controller in your hand. Although it’s an entirely new game, it’s been built to eight-bit specifications, even appearing to lift visual and audio assets directly from the earliest games in the series. If you were a child of the 1980s, as I was, Mega Man 9 isn’t just like reliving your childhood — it’s as though your childhood had never ended.

Capcom’s decision to go this route makes sense in light of the franchise’s spotty history over the past 15 years. Few games are canonized as Mega Man 2 and 3. The newest installment seems to take its cues mostly from the second game: Mega Man’s advanced moves, like the ability to charge his primary weapon or slide under enemy attacks, are absent here. He can jump and shoot — only two buttons required.

The gameplay is more complicated than that, however. You battle eight Robot Masters, one at a time, in any order you choose. Each Robot Master — they’re colorful characters with names like Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, and Magma Man — awaits you at the end of a short level filled with brutal environmental hazards, like moving platforms, bottomless pits, and, of course, rows of spikes that kill Mega Man on contact. Mega Man earns a new weapon from each boss he defeats, and each boss in turn is susceptible to one of those weapons.

This description applies to all eight previous Mega Man games, and if you were a fan of any of those, you’re likely salivating by this point. Indeed, the level design and the weapon balance in this ninth installment rank with the best the series has offered. No one weapon is overpowered, as was the Metal Blade in Mega Man 2. The platforming challenges vary between levels — there’s no blatant repetition of tricky sequences. The whole game fits together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

And yet, Mega Man 9 seems like a pocket watch in a wristwatch world. The nostalgia factor is hard to resist, but the gameplay often feels anachronistic. It’s an extremely difficult game, and difficult for reasons that aren’t always fair. Sequences in which Mega Man must cross a chasm by jumping onto blocks that appear and disappear in tricky patterns can’t be completed through reflex or strategy, only by rote memorization. Sure, this is how games were made in the 1980s. There’s a reason they’re not made that way now.

The good news

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:14:04 GMT

David Alan Grier fills "TV's black hole" with Chocolate News
When David Alan Grier promises that he’s “filling TV’s black hole” with his chocolate flavor, you know it’s gonna be good.

SPIT TAKE: Spot-on in his parodies, Grier also delivers the kind of shocker that so much other comedy merely promises.

When David Alan Grier promises that he’s “filling TV’s black hole” with his chocolate flavor, you know it’s gonna be good. Or at least provocative. Comedy Central’s Chocolate News (Wednesdays at 10 pm, debuting October 15), which features Grier (a former In Living Color cast member and perennial TV presence) as the host of a mock news-magazine series, aims to bring an African-American perspective to the media satire game, using a combination of prose, bro’s, and ho’s.

The show is part sketch comedy, part socio-political commentary, part awkward racial stereotyping, all served up in Grier’s signature crisp, theatrical delivery, as a series of archetypal character parodies that are unabashedly on point. For the debut episode, Grier offers thespian diatribes about current events and pop culture, asking, of the state of hip-hop, “When did ‘Fight the power’ become ‘Wait till you see my dick’?”

Of course, one can’t help but balance rhetoric like that with a series of hip-hop video pastiches. The sketch-comedy world doesn’t lack for these: thuggish rappers, ejaculating champagne bottles, juicy-assed B-girls in tiny skirts. Chocolate News energizes the tired concept with a series of over-the-top PSAs starring Grier as “Phat Man” — a grill-baring, Building-19-tracksuit-sporting, poor man’s Biggie Smalls who spits dirty rhymes about No Child Left Behind and suicide prevention. These segments are visual orgies with a message. A message that you shouldn’t leave the “mothafuckin’, ass-droppin’, booty-poppin’ child. The child. Don’tcha leave that child behind.”

Grier also reprises his spot-on Maya Angelou impression, as seen in 1997 on Saturday Night Live, with a resplendent Grier-as-Angelou hawking Butterfinger candy bars, Fruit Loops, and Pennzoil. Here, the “former poet laureate” delivers radiant spoken-word verse that illuminates Barack Obama (“You have a mocha choke hold on the American dream!”) and gives John McCain a well-deserved kick in his wooden Chiclet teeth.

The first episode even gives us what many “cutting-edge” comedy-related TV shows, films, and books only promise: shock. In the very last sketch, white people are negotiating the right to use “the N-word.” A sharply square Willie Garson (most recognizable from his Sex and the City stint as Stanford Blatch, the token gay dangling from Carrie Bradshaw’s social charm bracelet) punctuates the otherwise hoky and predictable sketch by calling the gentleman with whom he’s negotiating, well, a nigger. Without hatred, without irony, just affably naive, self-entitled, post-negotiated-agreement. I can’t recall the last time I did a legitimate spit take watching a TV-comedy bit.

Husker don't

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:57:42 GMT

Sports blotter: "Next Lawrence Phillips" edition
Details right now are still sketchy, but Thunder Collins, a former University of Nebraska running back who was once considered a sure-fire NFL star, has been charged with murder.

Thunderous news
Details right now are still sketchy, but Thunder Collins, a former University of Nebraska running back who was once considered a sure-fire NFL star, has been charged with murder.

Since his playing career ended in 2002, Collins has not-so-quietly been building a rep as the next Lawrence Phillips — a perpetually arrested once-great running back. He’s been busted for weed, numerous domestic assaults, and burglary. He was a suspect in a shooting in 2006. And now he has been charged with homicide — technically, murder-one, attempted murder-two, and felony weapons possession — in connection with a drug deal gone bad that left one man (Timothy Thomas) dead and another (Marshall Turner) mortally wounded by gunshots. Along with Collins, two other men (Karnell Burton and Ahmad Johnson, the latter of whom is still being sought by police) have been charged in connection with the incident.

More on this later, but first-degree murder is a straight-up 100 pointer, putting Collins on top of the list.

He wears court shorts
Sometimes franchises deserve their bad luck. It didn’t always seem that way with the Cincinnati Bengals. Sure, the team had an awful owner who let star players walk and waited far too long to start investing in his team. And yes, they made some bonehead decisions in taking a short-cut approach to close the talent gap with Baltimore and Pittsburgh by picking undervalued “character flags” in the draft several years in a row.

But it seemed like Cincy had turned a corner since this past year, when, following the arrests of rules-averse players like Chris Henry, Odell Thurman, A.J. Nicholson, Frostee Rucker, and others, the team became a national joke. The situation got so bad that quarterback Carson Palmer actually had to step in to the PR leadership void left by the team’s idiotic, sleepwalking owners, saying after the January 2007 weed arrest of corner Jonathan Joseph, “If this keeps up, we won’t have any fans left.”

Team administration officials finally caught on to their mistakes — or seemed to catch on, anyway — this past April, when they reluctantly released stud wideout Henry, who had been caught punching some guy in the face and shattering his windshield with a beer bottle. “We acknowledge those fans who had concerns about Chris,” team president Mike Brown said.

Mobile-home game

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:57:13 GMT

Cross the Mayor of Lansdowne Street at your peril, Sox fans: you might be jinxing your team in the process
The intersection of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street, in the hours before, during, and after a Red Sox game, is not unlike a trading floor on pre-crash Wall Street: it’s chaotic, teeming with people, and everyone’s trying to make a buck.

The intersection of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street, in the hours before, during, and after a Red Sox game, is not unlike a trading floor on pre-crash Wall Street: it’s chaotic, teeming with people, and everyone’s trying to make a buck. Scalpers aggressively push tickets; vendors hawk T-shirts, programs, and meat products. For a pedestrian weaving through swarms of such in-your-face salesmen and pulsating, beer-fueled Fenway faithful, it can be overwhelming.

Curious, then — suspicious, even — is the leprechaun-looking man approaching passers-by from his post (a beat-up, neon-green canvas chair placed in front of the Sausage Guy’s cart), saying he wants nothing but to take their photo. (He posts the shots on the multiple albums he keeps on his MySpace page.) On a chilly, gray Monday night outside Fenway, just before the Sox threw out the first pitch of a game against the Cleveland Indians — and the day before Boston clinched a playoff berth — the man waves his small, silver digital camera, and asks an approaching couple: “Can I take your picture?” They hesitate, as though considering his offer (perhaps they’re simply considering eating sausage). Eventually, the round, white-haired woman shakes her head firmly as they walk away. “We’re from Cleveland!” she protests.

The wandering photographer is David Allen Millette, a 52-year-old Middleboro native who calls himself “the Mayor of Lansdowne Street.” In 1995, Millette called it quits on Boston’s brutal winters and escaped to Florida to live in an RV near various beaches. For the past 13 years, however, he’s returned for Red Sox season. While he may be the very definition of a fair-weather friend to Boston, he’s thick-and-thin for its baseball team, and his vehicle — which also doubles as his living space — is a testament to that.

It’s a 1980 Dodge Xplorer RV, the fifth camper he’s owned, and the first that’s become a mobile artistic homage to Boston’s baseball nine. Stickers reading things like IS IT 7:05 YET? collide and overlap on its bumper. Inside, Red Sox flags and blankets are draped neatly across the couches and doorway, and a plastic packet hangs from the windshield, safely protecting tickets from every game Millette’s attended in the past three years (as well as a Ted Williams baseball card he’s had since he was a kid).

A friend helped Millette find the RV in a small town in rural New York in March. Impressed with its cyclopean size (“It’s like a spaceship, almost!”) and its only-used-for-the-occasional-road-trip condition, he bargained with the seller, and bought it for $4500 — a bargain at roughly the equivalent of one Manny Ramirez at bat.

Robot love

JON GARELICK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:32:44 GMT

Terminator ’s wonder years
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. It may be the best teen drama for adults on TV.

MILF FROM HELL: What’s a mother to do when her boy really is the savior of mankind?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, Mondays at 8 pm) is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. In fact, it plays as maybe the best teen drama for adults on TV.

As you’ll recall from the end of the second Terminator movie, Sarah (in a role created by Linda Hamilton) was on the run with her son John, the future leader of the resistance movement fighting the totalitarian Skynet computer and its army of cyborgs. She worked in the present to save the future through the agency of her son, with the help of a reformed Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sacrificed himself at the end of that chapter of the story — the “last” Terminator.

On The Sarah Connor Chronicles (the first season has come out on a Warner DVD), a new generation of Terminators is again in pursuit of the now-teenage John Connor, and there’s conflict over a new computer known as the Turk that contains the digital DNA that will make possible the eventual creation of Skynet. Sarah is in the middle of two struggles: to preserve the life of her son, and to prevent Skynet from being born.

All well and good — and who cares. Skynet, the Turk — a premise is a premise. What matters here is the story of a single mother trying to protect her son while the son tries to be a normal teenager. The beauty of The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that it gives this primal set-up a cosmic significance — and a cosmic irony. Every mother thinks her son is the savior of the world (God’s gift to mankind) — but for Sarah Connor, this fiction happens to be true.

Lena Headey as Sarah is dark, beautiful, drawn, tough, and scary, in a low-maintenance shag of black hair, eyes wary, unsmiling, as good with a 12-gauge as Hamilton was. Thomas Dekker as John could be an emo-boy-in-waiting — if mom and he didn’t have to keep fleeing every time their house explodes. The complication comes with the entrance of Cameron (Summer Glau), a “good” Terminator in the guise of a teenage girl sent from the future to protect John.

Headey and Glau are perfect foils — hot-blooded real woman versus . . . a robot. As for Glau and Dekker, well, what sexually inexperienced teenage boy doesn’t want his own beautiful robot-doll woman? If John Connor were 14 rather than 16, his character would be impossible — as all 14-year-old boys are.

Crossword: ''You can look it up''

MATT JONES — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:09:00 GMT

Eight entries from eight decades of the OED.

Band apart

MITCH KRPATA — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:56:17 GMT

Rock Band 2 keeps it rolling
No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original.

UNCANNY: Harmonix still has a mortal lock on fiendishly addictive gameplay.

No need to double-check your calendar — Rock Band 2 really is available only 10 months after the release of the original. (That’s for the Xbox 360 for now; a PlayStation 3 version will follow in October, with Wii and PS2 versions in November.) Given such a short time frame for its development, you might well wonder whether the sequel is more than a spit-and-polish of its predecessor. It’s true that the changes are incremental. Still, taking one of the most compelling rhythm games ever created and making it better results in a mandatory gaming experience.

The core gameplay has changed not a whit. As many as four players grab a microphone or the appropriate plastic instrument to play one part of a rock song — guitar, bass, drums, or vocals — and make music by following a scrolling note chart on screen, with adjustments for different difficulty levels. Since the first Guitar Hero, this has been the formula for fiendishly addictive gameplay, and that’s the case here. The folks at Harmonix — musicians all — have an uncanny ability to construct their note charts in such a way that every part makes you feel you’re playing actual music and not just pretending.

So what’s new? (Besides the 80 new songs available on the disc.) Mostly, there are new gameplay modes, and tweaks to familiar ones. Although much of Rock Band lives outside traditional video-game paradigms, what “game” there is comes from the World Tour mode. Here you start as a no-name band in humble Boston and work your way to global superstardom. You do so by earning money and attracting fans from your gigs; that in turn allows you to play bigger shows and hire staff to help out. All of which is not essential to the game’s main purpose of letting you rock out — earning fans, in particular, does nothing but score you on-line bragging rights — but it’s a decent enough way to go about unlocking tracks.

A more satisfying feature, and one that should have been in the original, is the inclusion of on-line play. I had my doubts about how well this would work. Most of the fun of playing Rock Band with your friends is watching everybody act like an idiot in the same room. That’s still the optimal way to play, but Xbox Live makes for a worthy substitute, particularly if everyone has constructed his or her own avatar.

Nerdoku

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:38:26 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Hello, old friend

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:18:25 GMT

Sports blotter: "Past Pats" edition
There was a recent arrest of a onetime member of the Patriots defensive backfield — old friend Lawyer Milloy.

Lawyer can’t pass bar
Quick memo to Pats fans who might have been worried about their team’s paper-thin secondary after seeing this past week’s headline, O’NEAL, SON, ARRESTED IN DRUG SWEEP AT HOME: that wasn’t Deltha O’Neal, but Ryan O’Neal. Just because the wrinkly old actor pulled a Ty Law — “The drugs found were not his. He would never use them,” his attorney told reporters — doesn’t mean it was actually a football player getting busted. So, relax.

That said, there was a recent arrest of a onetime member of the Patriots defensive backfield — old friend Lawyer Milloy, who went from celebrating on a Super Bowl team to sucking in Buffalo to, now, patrolling the artificial-turf-covered purgatory that is the Atlanta Falcons secondary. Milloy was busted for a DUI in the Atlanta suburbs around 4:30 am on September 15.

This probably won’t be the last straw, but it might be — is there a phrase for this? — one of the last straws. “I’m extremely disappointed and I can’t stress enough — it’s unacceptable,” Falcons coach Mike Smith said before wavering on whether there would be concrete punishment.

Milloy has been playing for 13 years, hasn’t been able to cover a tight end since at least 2006, and is in the last year of his contract. Something tells me he’ll be riding the Otis Nixon/Andre Rison Oft-Troubled Retired Athlete Express before long. Give him the minimum points for the DUI. (That’d be 25.)

Minor league mischief
Hey, I didn’t know there was an “ABA” basketball league any more. Like most Americans, I thought the ABA of Dr. J, Artis Gilmore, and the tri-colored ball went out with Gerald Ford, Karen Ann Quinlan, and the Gang of Four. But apparently a new ABA, called “ABA 2000,” was formed in 1999. It also uses a red, white, and blue ball, and has more than 50 teams. Former NBA player John Salley was one of the founding commissioners; Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff was the owner of one of the more successful franchises, the Vermont Frost Heaves.

Originally the league was semi-serious, as it cost $50,000 to start a franchise and most of the scheduled games actually occurred. Then disputes between the CEO and the COO, as well as several absurd controversies (teams flying to China to play the league’s Beijing squad were forced to spend a road game in a hotel that doubled as a brothel), basically knocked out the league’s credibility. By this year, multiple franchises were folding almost every week — any swinging sack with 10 grand could buy a team.

Kaidoku XXX

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:10:43 GMT

Psycho Sudoku

Crossword: ''On an axis''

MATT JONES — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:25:38 GMT

From one end to the other

To Hell and Harry

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:12:34 GMT

Hell Girl, The IT Crowd
American hetero pornography is, most often, a fantasy celebration of exhibitionist sluttiness, itchy whores on their knees, opening their legs, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of shame.

HELL GIRL: Anyone want to revel in teenage shame and humiliation?

American hetero pornography is, most often, a fantasy celebration of exhibitionist sluttiness, itchy whores on their knees, opening their legs, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of shame. The primal Japanese porn scenario is different: a sad-faced female is at the center, trembling and virginal, often a “schoolgirl,” and she cries and shrieks as she’s humiliated, penetrated, and soiled. I’m not able to explain this abiding Japanese pleasure in masochistic suffering, but it certainly reappears in a non-pornographic guise in the strange, unhappy anime Hell Girl, a Japanese series dubbed into English and showing on IFC starting this Tuesday, September 30.

Each program is about a kind, vulnerable middle- or high-school student who’s beset by troubles, brought so low and treated so wickedly and unjustly, that there’s no way out, except maybe suicide. Hell Girl dwells in excruciating close-up, as does Japanese porn, on the agony, the distress, the intense psychic pain — and four of the initial five episodes sport attractive young (animated) schoolgirls as their protagonists. Middle-schooler Mayumi is victimized by a pack of bullying mean chicks who make it appear that she’s stolen money and has been going to the bad part of town and cavorting with sordid boys. She is publicly shamed by their sadistic lies — and this is Japan! Teen Ryoko has, for an entire horrid year, been stalked by a cruel policeman. He leaves erotic messages on her e-mail; he breaks into her home and lays a dress on her bed. Ryoko is going mad, but the authorities will do nothing to help her.

All the narratives are the same: innocence unprotected, defiled, defeated. There’s just one slim hope: get to your computer and, at midnight, avail yourself of a weirdo Web site, HellCorrespondence, where you can get help from Hell Girl — but at what a price! A forlorn-eyed, zombie-like teen who resides with her grandmother in the country, Hell Girl hands you a crude straw voodoo doll. Untie the string around the doll’s neck and Hell Girl goes into action. She freaks out your enemy, then ferries him or her to Hell.

A happy ending? Not on your life. If you contract for Hell Girl’s services, you too will end up in Hades when you expire. Damned if you don’t, and truly damned if you do. Why should these poor adolescent-aged kids be faced with such a dilemma? But they are, and each episode ends with the troubling knowledge that the young protagonist is punished for all eternity! Whew! Hell Girl may fly in Japan, but this bummed-out American felt done in after watching the first three pessimistic programs.

Sith happens

RYAN STEWART — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:11:54 GMT

No new lease on life for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Many people regard anything produced in the past 15 years or so bearing the Star Wars brand as total garbage, and rightly so.

MORE DISAPPOINTING: If the Force-based stuff weren’t so much fun, the game’s myriad flaws wouldn’t rankle so much.

Many people regard anything produced in the past 15 years or so bearing the Star Wars brand as total garbage, and rightly so — George Lucas has spent that time pissing away whatever good will he earned from the original trilogy of films in a stream of dull, poorly written, family-friendly cinematic goop. But then some gluttons for punishment like myself, emboldened by the occasional fleeting moment of quality in the prequel trilogy, keep talking ourselves into each new SW-related property, thinking that maybe this will be what restores dignity to the franchise. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the newest video game to bear the Lucas-ian seal of approval, is closer to a return to form than most, but it still comes up well short. Which winds up being almost more of a disappointment than if it had been a total train wreck.

The story takes place during the chronological gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, and it’s an official part (as opposed to a spinoff) of the Star Wars canon. You play as Galen Marek, a/k/a “Starkiller,” Darth Vader’s secret apprentice. Vader sends Starkiller out to assassinate the remaining Jedi Masters hiding on various remote planets around the galaxy like Felucia and Raxus Prime. These missions are official Empire business, part of the ongoing Jedi purge. But as will soon become clear, Vader is also testing Starkiller’s loyalty in anticipation of their battle against the real foe: Emperor Palpitene. Yes, at the outset at least, Vader is one of the good guys. It feels at times like weird fan fiction, but it’s not terrible — compared with, say, Attack of the Clones, it induces minimal eye rolling and groaning.

As you’d imagine, the gameplay focuses on Starkiller’s ability to harness the Force. You can use its telekinetic powers to fling debris at enemies, or even levitate and hurl the enemies themselves. You can switch your camera angle to follow whatever baddie you’re flinging about in order to monitor the carnage. A perfectly executed Force attack can be incredibly satisfying — it’s how you imagined Luke felt in tapping into the Force when you saw A New Hope for the first time. (I should mention that I played the Xbox 360 version; I did not try out the Wii version’s motion-sensitive controls.)

Zero hour

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:20:40 GMT

Sports blotter: "Credit where credit's due" edition
Everyone knows there is a double-standard in the NFL when it comes to arrests.

Weeded out
Everyone knows there is a double-standard in the NFL when it comes to arrests: if a good player gets arrested for serious crimes, the front office inevitably talks about wanting to take its time with its internal investigation, that it would like to “let the justice system run its course,” and that it tries whenever possible to support players in their time of need, as one would support a member of one’s family.

But when a crappy player gets arrested for a serious, or even for an un-serious crime, that is when the front offices get tough. That’s when it starts braying about “zero tolerance” policies and making sure the players are good citizens, as well as good on-field performers, about sending the proper message to the kids, yada yada yada.

Thus it is somewhat surprising to see the Indianapolis Colts — a franchise we’d all like to hate around here, if we weren’t so busy mourning Tom Brady’s knee — hold a firm line this past week. Ed Johnson, a starting defensive tackle at a position where the Colts are perilously thin, got busted this past Wednesday for speeding and weed possession, and was axed by the team fewer than 24 hours later.

Johnson was a character flag in college and apparently was given a shot by the Colts only on the condition that he sign up for a zero-tolerance type of arrangement. He blew it and they pulled the trigger, despite the fact that the Colts in Week 1 were unable to stop a Chicago Bears offense whose best player is probably a middling rookie running back named Matt Forte. (That would be like the Patriots releasing Ellis Hobbs for jaywalking.) Hard to say if the reasoning is sound — one would think that 300-pound men should be able to smoke weed if they need to, to keep calm — but it sure is a remarkable decision, one that not a lot of teams would make. So we’re giving credit where credit is due.

Interestingly enough, one of Johnson’s backups, tackle Darrell Reid, was busted on weed charges in 2007. The team kept him on board, but then Reid didn’t have any strikes against him at the time.

Give Johnson three points for potentially blowing his career over a joint. We’ll see how long he stays unemployed — the guess here is that it won’t be long.

Well, that's weird
Strange, strange story coming out of Long Island, where onetime New York Giants wide receiver Mark Ingram continues to be one of the most dependable performers in all of retired-athlete crime.

The ultimate Schill?

CHRIS FARAONE — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:17:13 GMT

Number 38's political timeline
For a brief moment in late 2004, some people feared that Curt Schilling might pull through for President George W. Bush the way he did for the Sox.

For a brief moment in late 2004, some people feared that Curt Schilling might pull through for President George W. Bush the way he did for the Sox. His heroic bloody sock from Game 6 of that season’s ALCS was still odorizing New England’s consciousness; even here in blue Massachusetts, and even during a tight and emotional presidential race, there was much more love than loathe for baseball’s notorious conservative. Until the season ended.

On November 1 of that year, Schilling announced plans to stump with Bush in New Hampshire. At the time, it seemed as if any flare or fumble on either side could swing the outcome of the general election and, with the Granite State up for grabs, a potential Schilling trip up I-93 was frightening indeed. Luckily for Democrats (though it ultimately didn’t matter), he canceled the appearance last minute — first blaming ankle injuries, and, later on, (sort of) rescinding the endorsement on a fan site. (Rumors that Red Sox brass pressured him to back off were never confirmed.) On Election Day, Kerry took New Hampshire by less than one percent — a result that both analysts and common sense suggest could have been swayed had Schilling stayed in.

Now Schilling is back on the campaign trail, and this time he has more than just religion and ideology invested. The pitcher and Senator John McCain have been homeboys since the former played for the Arizona Diamondbacks from 2000 to 2003, which makes gestures such as his appearing with the candidate at a NASCAR event in New Hampshire this past weekend seem less like a way to irk his lefty neighbors than did his endorsement of Bush.

To fully investigate the pitcher’s Republican position, we’ve assembled this timeline of Schilling’s political involvement. Will the sidelined Sox ace have enough clout to get voters swinging?

OCTOBER 2003 In a ceremony on Capital Hill, McCain presents the Excellence in Cancer Awareness Award to Schilling and his wife, Shonda, whose charity work through their SHADE Foundation and other nonprofits aims to help prevent and detect melanoma, which both Shonda Schilling and McCain have survived.

JULY 2004 Days before the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Schilling protests his team’s allowing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to throw the first pitch at a home game by yelling “Go Bush” at presumably biased liberal sports writers after the Massachusetts senator leaves the locker room.

Troop surge

AARON SOLOMON — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:28:25 GMT

Mercenaries 2 does it the old-fashioned way
It’s tempting to write off Mercenaries 2: World in Flames , if only because of the noisy ads — they’re scored by an annoying white-boy rap song.

HOO-RAH: There is really only one thing to do — blow shit up.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames | for Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PC | Rated T for Teen | Developed by EA Games and Pandemic Studios | Published by Electronic Arts

It’s tempting to write off Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, if only because of the noisy ads — they’re scored by an annoying white-boy rap song. The song, it turns out, is not part of the game; the rampant mayhem and ludicrous violence of the ads are here, however, and they grow even more ludicrous as you progress. Mercenaries 2 improves on the underwhelming original, and though it’s the latest in a long line of Grand Theft Auto clones, at least it should reside at the top of that ever-growing heap.

The Mercenaries sequel is more open-ended than the original. This turn toward an even greater “sandbox” style of play — à la GTA — is an attempt to remedy what many people found to be the first game’s fatal flaw: the long driving sessions between missions. But though the action has been transplanted from WMD-heavy North Korea to oil-rich Venezuela, there’s still a lot of ground to cover, and you’ll still be annoyed by all the traveling. On the plus side, there’s the visuals, which if not quite up to GTA IV quality are a decided improvement on the original’s last-generation version.

When you’re not working on contracts for the various factions or going out on your own to hunt down the oil-mongering Venezuelan president who wronged you (somewhere Dick Cheney is smirking), you can spend your time collecting bounties. These range from capturing or killing “High Value Targets” to destroying the buildings of rival factions. This too is a good way of killing time as well as targets while driving around.

Once again, you have the option of choosing your mercenary — but let’s be serious, most everybody will choose to play as Mattias, the dude on the cover who’s featured so prominently in the commercial and voiced by Peter Stormare, whom you may remember as one of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski. Mattias, whose special ability is that he’s able to regenerate quickly, is fond of screaming non-sequiturs in battle, and he likes to name his weapon. Which is cute, but it all gets repetitive, especially since he has only a handful of phrases in his repertoire. The same can be said for the game. There’s really only one thing to do: blow shit up, and when that’s done, blow some more shit up. The occasional lapses in the AI add to the frustration. And the only way to do multi-player is through the live connection on your system.

I love the ’90s

RYAN STEWART — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:03:11 GMT

The CW’s new 90210
When the CW did not send out screeners of the pilot of 90210 some observers took that as a bad sign.

TIME WARP: It’s still a teen show — for the teens of yesteryear.

When the CW did not send out screeners of the pilot of 90210 (Tuesdays at 8 pm) — its update of the popular ’90s teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210 — some observers took that as a bad sign. Was the new show so bad that the network had to do an end run around the press? Others took it as a good sign, confirmation that the new 90210 would be ideal guilty-pleasure viewing.

As it turns out, both groups were wrong. The new 90210 is on exactly the same level as the old 90210. Which is to say not particularly good, but endearing and goofy enough to yield some memorable moments down the line.

The focus is on the Wilson family: dad Harry (Rob Estes), mom Debbie (Lori Laughlin), and the two kids, Annie (Shenae Grimes) and Dixon (Tristan Wilds — he’s the adopted African-American son). They’ve moved to Beverly Hills so they can better care for Harry’s troubled mother, Tabitha (Jessica Walter). The kids enroll at West Beverly High School and culture shock ensues. Annie stays out past curfew with a local rich kid; Dixon persuades his teammates to release some pigs on a rival school’s campus. Meant to be up-to-date, it’s all very familiar: who hasn’t seen TV teens stay out past curfew and pull pranks? The show’s creators, Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, worked on the brilliant, short-lived NBC series Freaks and Geeks, which eschewed teen television clichés; it’s disappointing to see them resigning themselves to such weary storylines. They do, however, deserve credit for not trying to pander to teens: though there is an implied fellatio scene, 90210 is tame and sanitized compared with, say, Degrassi.

Or maybe Sachs and Judah aren’t trying to appeal to teens at all. This new edition seems aimed more at the twenty- and thirtysomethings in the audience who are nostalgic for the 90210 of their youth. Self-referential in-jokes abound. “What is that girl, like 30?” a teacher remarks about one student, as if aware that many of the actors playing high-schoolers on the original show were close to 30 off screen. Two original cast members are back: Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth) is now a guidance counselor at West Beverly and Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) is the new drama teacher in town. It’s hard to imagine teens caring about these characters, let alone the storylines surrounding them. Some current high-schoolers weren’t even born until Beverly Hills, 90210’s third or fourth season, so this isn’t really their nostalgia. The modern elements feel odd — Annie’s friend Erin has a video blog, but it comes off as a pasted-on conceit. Even a scene where Dixon’s playing video games with one of his bro’s is anachronistic: instead of huddling over some generic Mortal Kombat clone, shouldn’t they be playing Call of Duty on XBox Live?