Summer and pop culture go hand-in-hand. Summer movies, summer reading, and in the last couple of years the world of gaming has even embraced summer releases. Here's what I'm hitting recently:
Books
My God, Johnson. I'm reading books. Boulder leaves me with lots of free time on the weekends, so it's lots of Barnes & Noble visits for coffee and reading. So far, Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential is what I hoped it would be: fun light reading full of Bourdain's famously raucous personality and a direct, straight-man's humor reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk. Aspiring foodies and restauranteurs, this should be required reading for you.
Next up will be Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. I'm a big Zakaria fan, and this book is pretty famous in circles that try to look at the next few years in international politics. Zakaria's analysis is, in general, so spot-on that I'm excited to see what he has to say about the next 20 years.
Movies
My God, I'm doing books and movies. What's happened to me?
Inception was fucking sweet. End of story.
Games
I'm spending the summer without my consoles, so I'm having to expand my gaming reach. That's left me spending time on my Nintendo DS, iPhone, and PC (now that I have a pimp one at work). Here's what's treated me well lately:
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is the latest in the Phoenix Wright series. The gameplay has evolved a little bit (where exploration now involves moving a character around in a 2D environment instead of Myst-style point-and-click), but the real joy is the improvement in writing. Crimes are less confusing to solve (but not necessarily easier), and the dialogue writing continues to improve upon its predecessors. This game's a joy, and certainly fills the DS adventure game void I'm feeling until the next Professor Layton title hits later this fall.
Mario vs Donkey Kong: March of the Minis is a great Nintendo-esque twist on Lemmings. Like a 90s Nintendo title, I find myself replaying levels I've already beat, just trying to get up to a silver or gold medal. If you need some bite-sized, old-school gameplay, check this one out.
Plants vs Zombies is PopCap's take on tower defense. It's everything you'd expect from a PopCap game: excellently addictive core gameplay, very easy to pick up, and some hilariously awesome characters explaining things along the way. This one, unlike earlier PopCap games, also adds a very well-done sense of progression where new plants (towers) are unlocked in thematically relevant batches. I'm spending significant time on my iPhone just to play more PvZ.
Other iPhone games I'm digging include: Flight Control, Harbor Master, and Auditorium. Auditorium's free, and the other two are cheap (usually about $1-2) and well worth it.
On the PC side...
Team Fortress 2 finally got all of its class upgrades sorted out, and it's a whole new game relative to what I played two years ago. Tons of content, a loot system, and the flexibility in weapons for each class adds tons of depth. It's good clean fun, but I have missed out on two years' worth of leveling, unlocking, and learning maps. It's hard to catch up.
StarCraft II is finally out, and I am miserably bad at this game. I'm going to just sit in the corner, play the campaign, and see if I can't get sucked into some Blizzard lore for once. I'll play multiplayer with people (be warned - I'm hideously bad) and get excited for the eventual genius that comes out of the user mod community. Don't forget that the last Blizzard RTS gave the world what are now two fully-fleshed-out genres: DoTA and tower defense.
I swear, I'm going to get around to replaying Deus Ex. I swear. By the way, if you haven't played that bit of genius, drop me a line. I will buy it for you if you'll play it. It's that good.