Blake Recommends: the Lightning Round

Holy moly, school hit me hard. I haven't updated what I've been consuming since last summer. Well then, it's time to catch up, and to do so quickly, I'm going to borrow a concept coined by my dear friend and colleague Adam Wright: the Instareview.

The Instareview is almost like a haiku in that it conveys a lot of information, or one very poignant idea, using a minimum of words. Hopefully, it'll take less time than dilly-dallying in the details and the track listings and the analysis, but still give a good idea of how I really feel about something.

Let's get to trying this out!

Music

Cee-Lo Green, The Lady Killer - Good all the way through, not just 'Fuck You.' A classic? Maybe not.

DJ Deckstream, Deckstream Soundtracks 2 - Like a gourmet steak from a fusion place: weird first taste, but definitely meaty with a great aftertaste. On heavy rotation.

Jasmine, Dreamin - The only ever time I've 'pulled an Aroon' and played one song, on repeat, for hours on end. 

Kenichiro Nishihara, Humming Jazz - In a post-Nujabes world, there's a gap in Japan's hip-hop, and Nishihara comes closer than anyone else to filling it. Don't miss the collab with Substantial.

modal soul classics vol. 2, DEDICATED TO NUJABES - Speaking of Nujabes, his old crew released an album to say goodbye. You can hear the celebration of life in some tracks and the hurt in others. 

Kero One, Kinetic World - An album so DIY, you can hear the Garageband in it. (But I'm still psyched for his next one, or a live show).

Lupe Fiasco, Lasers - 18 tracks of some overproduced rapper (feat. Lupe Fiasco).

Passion Pit, Manners - I admit it. I'm hooked. Love these guys. Next thing you know I'll be driving a Volkswagen, using Apple products and watching comedies on ABC. Wait a second...

Think Twice, With a Loop and Some String - Half of Specifics does his 'own' album, half of which is collab with Specifics MC Golden Boy anyway. Who knew Canadian hip-hop was so consistently good?

Games

Yakuza 3 - Are you a Japanophile? Did you like Shenmue? Do you like some really good narrative in your games? The more you answered yes, the more you should play this game. I'm biased, but it was my game of 2010.

Gran Turismo 5 - It's Pokemon with cars. BRB, gotta keep catching 'em all.

DJ Hero 2 - Everything I, the boy who fantasizes of DJing, wanted 1 to be. Devastated there won't be a 3.

Halo: Reach - Bungie knows how to stay ahead of the curve. 

StarCraft II - I'm too white to play this game. I'm also too white to play football. Doesn't stop me from loving watching either one as a sport.

You Don't Know Jack - Best trivia game ever gets best modern revival ever.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Mario game. What happened?

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - First time I've ever said 'meh' to a Layton game. What happened?

Call of Duty: Black Ops - Now's a great time to sell your Activision stock.

Red Dead Redemption - Objectively, extremely well made, but I can't get it out of my head that this is GTA4 with horsies. Sorry, Rockstar SD.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - The cool kids call it AssBro for short. And they stick to the extremely addictive multiplayer mode.

Movies

The Social Network - This movie speaks my language: specifically, techie startup business technobabble written by Aaron Sorkin. If you're me, you'll love it.

Sucker Punch - What's the word for "a mess of messes"?

Pirate Radio - Every bit as cool as 60s/70s Britain.

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OK, so it's not as good as Adam's work, but man, I had a lot of pop culture to get off my chest there.

Go read this website

Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits

It's true. I worked as one. It's a crappy job.

Also, it's very convenient to simply read their aggregation of actual journalism done, the not shit journalism tag. Interesting articles are highlighted and idiots are called out. This is what games blogging is supposed to be.

No wonder everyone's making Facebook games. You can rely on viral effects to spread games instead of insidious marketing types and the hordes of barely-educated, blog-publishing automatons they command.

Blake Recommends: Summer Edition

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.

Blake Recommends: April Fool's edition

Oh, man. It's time to get caught up on some gaming action. This was originally the 'Valentine's Day edition,' given the timing of when I played all these things, but then school came along and decided to get all evil for a month and change.

Now I'm back to a reasonable everyday schedule, so it's time to share my thoughts on some games and music. I want to get on to new things, so I'll be making this quick.

Grand Theft Auto: Ballad of Gay Tony
The best GTA game made. Fascinating characters and a tight (but not short) storyline filled with high-octane action sequences. It's like playing a Michael Mann movie. Or a Michael Bay movie. But good either way. If you play one version of GTA IV, make it this.

Forza Motorsport 3
Truly a great racing game. Even feels good using the Xbox 360 controller, which is odd since it's a controller totally set up for action games. I think the great racing games are less about moving around the track and more about diving headlong into car culture. In this regard, Forza and DiRT have both been great recent games in the genre. I have to confess, though: I'm still a Gran Turismo man, and the only reason I haven't poured 100 hours into FM3 is that I know I'll put more than that into GT5. If Forza finally let its players revel in gearhead culture, GT5 will be the damned Smithsonian of car culture by comparison.

Brace yourselves for this one
I put a few hours into World of Warcraft.

Yes. I, the blakerson, played WoW.

The economics of this game are very different from my last foray into the game several years ago. Basically, back then it was "I'm paying for this punishment?" and then Blizzard spent years tweaking the psychology of leveling and loot accumulation and then gave me a year's subscription for free. So now, my experience was "Hey, this ain't bad.. where my friends at?"

To answer the requisite questions: Blood Elf Rogue, got to somewhere around 16-18 before play tapered off.

Perfect Dark
This one's a last-second addition. A wonderous HD port of the game was released on Xbox Live Arcade, finally sating the innate needs of former Goldeneye players who needed a re-release ever since games started getting re-released.

Good news: It's a 60fps, 1080p, re-textured redux of the original game, with tons of local and online multiplayer options including co-op and deathmatch modes.
It's got a throwback mode, which lets you play on the game's three redone Goldeneye maps using just Goldeneye weapons. It's still addictive well over a decade on.

Bad news: It's not Goldeneye. Between the rights to the game (which lie with Nintendo), the assets (which live with Rare, now owned by Nintendo's rival Microsoft) and the James Bond franchise (Activision), it'll never get re-released. You don't get to go back and run through the Dam and the Facility and so on in single-player, repeating all those missions that drove you nuts when you were thirteen. There are only three familiar multiplayer maps.

Still, well worth $10.

OK, time for some music.

Specifics - Lonely City and II
Two white guys from Toronto who've got their hip-hop down. I think I've heard "Take Me Back" a thousand times and it's still smooth.

Funky DL - The 4th Quarter
A brother with American-sounding rhymes from London's East Side.

Utada - This Is the One
A J-pop star tries to make it in the US. She's been huge in Japan since her youth, but like many Asian pop stars the transition hasn't been easy despite her native English. Going full-blown slut on her first English-language album didn't seem to work, so she hunkered down and tried harder and came away with something better the second time around. She's coming on my Internet radio pretty frequently, and I can't seem to turn her off. Honestly, who can say no to a line like "chemistry like apple and cinnamon"?

Hey, want to share some music?
Join Dropbox and let me know you've joined.

Blake Recommends: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2. 

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.
Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?