Everything Wrong With The PSP...And Its Commercials

Kevin Butler? Proof that a giant company like Sony can come back into the public limelight after years of abuse. Then again, all the Playstation 3 really needed was some good marketing. It's a more powerful, albeit more expensive, game console than the Xbox 360. And it offers just about everything the 360 has, often for less. And the only major region the PS3 has undersold the 360 thus far is in the US.

How To Keep Your Computer Running Smoothly

One question I'm frequently asked is this: how do you keep your computer running smoothly all the time? I have two solutions, based around two different schools of thought on computing. Both are simple and anyone can do them.

Alan Wake Semi-Review: I...JUST...CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Alan Wake has an 83 metacritic score. Yet the only thing I can think about when I read through this list is how many of these publications are even more than full of it, or have seriously never read a decent book or seen a somewhat good movie. I think this for one sole reason: I couldn't play through Alan Wake.

What Alan Wake does is take a narrative, which by itself is pretty decent (my younger brother played through the entire game and liked it, up until the end), and undermines every line of dialog, ever cinematic and every action on screen by telling the player that he/she is a complete idiot. After two full levels, I was offended enough and ripped the disc out of my 360, promptly put it back in it's Gamefly envelope, and it's now sitting in my mailbox.

I don't know where the hell Remedy gets off on describing every little detail as a thought Alan has. We don't often get to read the minds of people in real life, nor in film or books, or even most stories of any sort. Sure, there are exceptions, and often those exceptions work great. Here, it doesn't. Not only is Alan a criminally dull participant in his own game, he's blessed with an enlarged Prefrontal Cortex which transmits his thoughts at the worst opportune moment. Had I wanted to play a game that told me everything that was happening, I'd have let my brother come in and tell me what to do, when to push buttons, when to fire, etc.


The reason I just can't take it anymore is because not only is the narrative effectively ruined by Alan, the actual writing is pretty awful it itself. The book he wrote, from what I gathered in two chapters, is crap. Much of the dialog is garbage. Characters are, besides for Barry, not characters at all, just graphically designed automatons. I don't know what's worse, that the most anticipated narrative-driven title about a writer is poorly written, or that the writer himself is equally bad.

Perhaps my old editor's mantra was true: there's no such thing as a bad writer, only a bad editor.

Point being, I couldn't finish the game. I barely got past the second chapter. I don't want to play any more, and refuse to. I don't see how so many "reviewers" could have liked Alan Wake...then again, I guess I do.

Inception Review

Mind-thrillers, or films which dance around an idea that we all have at one point or other in our lives, are often the most complex and most emotionally draining and intensive movies we can see. Inception is no exception, and if the trailers raving that it’s from Christopher Nolan mean anything, we know that seeing this film means watching perfection.

For Nolan, this means perfection to a fault.

Attempting to be this decade’s The Matrix, Inception stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, a sort of industrial espionage agent working for a nameless mega-corporation to discover the secrets buried deep within the minds of the biggest corporate enemies. In his attempt to return to his children, Cobb embarks on a journey deeper into the mind than anyone has ever gone, doing something no one has ever done.

This film takes viewers on a sort of roller-coaster experience, doing its best to describe what we are capable of dreaming about. In this respect, Inception is stunted by, ironically enough, a general lack of imagination and interesting characters. While Nolan’s The Dark Knight raved fans with the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, no characters in Inception were captivating. Performances were fair enough, though possible rising star Ellen Page failed to provide any flair, instead playing the role of know-it-all psychologist.

The blandness of the characters, with the exception of the ever charming Ken Watanabe, is offset by visual spectacles and mental gymnastics that will cause any viewer to think through their own personal experience with dreams, and perhaps even judging reality. However, the dreams shown were nearly always drab, unremarkable segments that at the most resemble famous cityscapes. Some visual effects were exciting to witness, such as Escher's Infinite Stairs or seeing the world fold upon itself, with a ceiling another person’s floor. These unique designs are far too rare, and although clocking in at 2:28, I’d have liked to have seen more.

A tale of dream invasion, thought privacy and the power of the mind certainly resonates with today’s audiences, and indeed I expect some to come home to a sleepless night, pondering this film’s true meaning, coming to grips with reality as we see it. Therein lies the strength of Inception, driving home the idea, which like a virus that infects our very being, our dreams feel real until we wake up, and perhaps we’re all just dreaming right now, in this very instance, waiting to wake up.

Yet while Neo’s story gave us a bland hero in Keanu Reeves, it also gave us a great orator, tumbling us further down the rabbit hole with Laurence Fishburne. His speech of which pill to take, red or blue, was infinitely more memorable than any one scene in Inception, which ultimately leads us to its biggest flaw: in the end, no one will care. We may all question our sanity, but a few days after seeing the movie we’ll go back to our lives as if we’d never seen it. With no defining characters, no incredible moments, and only a clockwork, almost robotically made film, Inception left me feeling empty. An utter lack of humor, a general disregard for emotion and a cast equally limited makes Inception a mediocre film at best.