Recently in Entertainment & Sports Category

Everything that happened at E3.

Two very different online flight simulators.

- This (nameless?) app from Electric Oyster lets you cruise over a beautiful snowy mountain range.

- Goggles is a simple flight sim that let's you fly over a Google Map location and shoot stuff.

If you liked Super Mario Brothers, you'll hate The Unfair Platformer.

(HT: Andy.)

I haven't yet actually seen such a thing, but The Onion imagines a game in which you control a character who plays World of Warcraft. 'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft':

I suppose that most sports video games could be considered meta-games in this same vein, but since the construction is foundational to the genre I'm not sure they count.

(HT: Kotaku and TechEBlog.)

So I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this afternoon... eh. There were some good parts, and a few solid laughs, but....

• The bad guys weren't very convincing.
• The origin of the "crystal skulls" didn't bother me as much as it did my wife, but I never had the sense of epic adventure that filled Raiders and Last Crusade.
• Harrison Ford is old, but at least the movie didn't pretend otherwise.
• Marian Ravenwood's reappearance was mostly annoying.
• Shia LaBeouf was mostly ok.
• I hate commies as much as the next guy, but the Nazi characters in the earlier movies had more depth.
• Some of the actions sequences were quite good, especially the jungle chase scene.
• I liked the 1930s setting better than the 1950s.
• The adventures Indy reminisces about (that never got made into movies) sound more exciting than the adventure he was actually on at the moment.

If there were ten Indiana Jones movies and this had been number seven, instead of being the last of four, I would have been perfectly content. Not the best, but not terrible. However, bringing Indy back after 20 years for this was anticlimactic. It's a real shame that there weren't more Indy movies made over the past decades, and the inadequacies of Crystal Skull make that shame more acute.

Now that I know the game, I'm restarting Travian on US2 in the Southeast quadrant. If you want to play, use this link and I'll earn some bonus gold at no cost to you :) If you want to play on US2 and plan to play seriously, start in the Southeast and shoot me an email.

American Idol finale... eh. The thing that's really bugging me is that I'm sure there's a "David vs. Goliath" joke in there somewhere, but I just can't find it.

I think I'm addicted to Travian. The game has just enough breadth and depth to keep me coming back every day, building, growing, raiding, and worrying when the giant alliances will notice me and crush me. It's one of the best games I've played in a long time. If you decide to check it out, use this link so I get credit for referring you!

I'm still playing Travian and having a grand old time of it. If you decide to play this online sim/military and use the link above, I get a small bonus for referring you when your city reaches a population of 75 :) Ok, enough blegging.

Just started playing Travian, a little village-simulator kind of game. Looks fun, and doesn't take a much daily attention.

I just finished reading "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, and it was brilliant. If you enjoy space opera, intrigue, a complex cast, twists, and a satisfying ending then I highly recommend it.

Next up: "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe.

Jessica and I have been working our way through The X-Files and it has struck me recently that the series has a tendency to take rape and non-consensual impregnation rather lightly in some circumstances. This treatment is especially surprising considering that one of the ongoing conflicts in the series' story arc is that Agent Scully's eggs have been stolen (leaving her infertile) and are being used by nefarious scientists to create alien-human hybrids.

Example the first: in the episode "Small Potatoes" a shapeshifter takes on the appearances of the husbands of various women and impregnates them. Most of the episode is a set-up for the final scene in which the shapeshifter takes on Agent Mulder's form and nearly seduces Agent Scully, until the real Mulder bursts through the door to discover the two of them on the couch. The conclusion to the episode is classic, and quite amusing, but writer Vince Gilligan works hard to keep the earlier rapes and impregnations from spoiling the light-hearted mood.

Example the second: in "The Post-Modern Prometheus" -- my least favorite episode thus far in the series, written by creator Chris Carter -- a stereotypical mad scientist (and/or his farmer father) create human-animal hybrids by drugging women and implanting embryos while they're unconscious. The hybrids are born with distinctive animal characteristics -- such as a chicken-women whose neck pecks like a bird -- with intended comedic effect. The "Frankenstein"-inspired episode ends with the villagers forming a mob to lynch the mad scientist, but he saves himself by pointing out all happiness he brought to the town through their children. All is forgiven! (The mad scientist is arrested, with an aw-shucks tenor.)

Come to think of it, non-consensual impregnations is a major theme of The X-Files. Numerous episodes feature it as a plot device (such as "Emily"), but the matter isn't typically considered to be as serious as I would expect.

Reader JV sent me this article about three-way chess, but it looks to me like it would turn into a mess very quickly. The first player to check-mate any other player wins, and any two players can obviously team up on the third very easily.

Does anyone know of any three-player adversarial games that don't turn into two-on-one dogpiles every time? Such a game would have to be inherently asymmetric, such that two players were forced to align against a more-powerful third, or such that the relationships between the players were not commutative (rock vs. paper vs. scissors). I imagine a three-player game would also be more likely to be playable if it were either not turn-based, or at least not based on cyclical turns.

Crazy episode. My thoughts:

Ben is the captain of the ship. Future-Ben. That's why Ben isn't afraid of dying on the Island, because he knows he survives into the future. Ben is his own spy on the ship. Awesome. That's how Ben knows everything about everyone.

Time on the Island moves at the same rate as the outside world, but there's some sort of discontinuity. Crossing from the Island to the outside or vice versa causes weird time effects, but time on both sides of the discontinuity passes at the same rate. Otherwise voices on the radio phones would be change pitch or have other distortions.

Faraday can see flashes into the future as a result of not protecting his head during his experiments. That's why he could identify some of the cards Charlotte had upside-down on the table.

Miles' backwards-talking is communication with ghosts, and he'll be able to talk to the Whispers that everyone hears in the jungle.

The recently-ended writers' strike cost Los Angeles more than $2 billion, not including "trickle-down" effects.

"That's a pretty bomb-proof number. Employees are not getting paid," Lindgren said. "But it does not take into account the trickle down effect."

One particularly hard-hit industry in that "trickle down" category is limousines. Experts estimate there are about 1,200 limo companies and 6,000 drivers in Los Angeles.

Alan Shanedling, president of the Greater California Livery Assn., confirms that November and December weren't a problem, but the new year "has been devastating."

Shanedling's own company, Fleetwood Limousine, lost $200,000 in revenue in January alone, and his 34 drivers missed out on $30,000 in tips, money they couldn't spend elsewhere and the cause of more trickle-down pain.

Because of the stripped-down Golden Globes ceremony, for example, several limo companies that were to supply 800 cars saw that business disappear along with 6,400 hours of work for drivers.

Maybe in the future these folks will be quicker to understand the trickle-down benefits of tax cuts?

If you're looking for a persistent-world casual game that has depth but can be played in just a few minutes a day, check out Skyrates. (I think it rhymes with "pirates".)

I was watching Nova last night on PBS about the "secrets of the Parthenon", and near the end I started getting bored. The show was good, but it was just too long. Thanks to my TiVo I'm used to 40-minute chunks, and a 60-minute show without commercials feels tedious.

Despite the imminent mockery, I will admit that I like Ryan Seacrest. The wife and I watch "American Idol" occasionally, and Seacrest's straight-man routine with the most bizarre and pathetic contestants is very amusing. When a screeching psycho bursts from the audition room swearing and raging and Seacrest asks him, "So what did the judges say?", it's great to watch the lunatics plunge off the edge of sanity into the abyss of madness.

He tends to give the weirdos plenty of rope to hang themselves with, and they generally oblige. "Why do you think the judges said 'no'?" "Are you going to train harder for next season?" "I can't believe the judges didn't like you!" "There must be some other reason they rejected you." Seacrest keeps a straight face the whole time and lets the clowns humiliate themselves, all for my enjoyment. Bravo!

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock asks "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" in an upcoming movie that takes him all around the Muslim world:

Spurlock traveled to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Egypt and Morocco, interviewing dozens of people from school children to bin Laden family friends. The work was extensive, much deeper and more textured than anything I’ve seen on network news shows.

Indeed, Spurlock travels to bin Laden’s former farm, now a group of abandoned huts in Pakistan. He even goes into one of those caves we keep hearing about, a likely spot where the maniacal architect of Sept. 11 could be hiding. He’s shot at, bullied and reprimanded. Spurlock even had his cameras shut down. But still he persisted.

The result of "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" is extraordinary. Along the way, his meetings with regular people — man-in-the-street-type stuff — in those aforementioned countries are superb.

No visits to Iraq or Iran, alas, but it still looks like a fascinating production. If it isn't a trash-America movie then this is certainly one I'm going to want to see.

I love the Japanese, but they are strange. On the fringe they seem to be stranger than Americans, even if our medians are very close.

In a drama that only grows more bizarre with each passing month, Britney Spears has been involuntarily hospitalized as a danger to herself and others and put on a 14-day lock down.

Britney Spears has reportedly been placed on a 72-hour lock down in a special suicide watch-style unit for a mental evaluation after holding her children hostage and refusing to hand them over to their father at a court-appointed time.

Amid extraordinary scenes, the fallen popstar was stretchered bleary-eyed from her home last night under police guard and then taken to hospital by ambulance for tests when she was suspected to be "under the influence of an unknown substance".

The story says 72-hour, but based on my familiarity with the system in Los Angeles I believe the authorities can hold her against her will for up to 14 days while they decide what to do.

Britney Spears' life is a tragic example of how the American Dream can go horribly awry without any moral boundaries or spiritual guidance. She has everything anyone could ever want, and is still a miserable wretch.