I bet this comes as a shock to a lot of you. I bet you were all lounging around, firm in the belief that YouTube is for video. Sorry, I know it was one more thing to cross off the list.
(Read more…)

When I was young my dad tried to teach me these extremely complex historic hex-grid style war games. They recreated famous battles of various wars: Trenton and Princeton of the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, The Battle of the Bulge, even Hastings and Agincourt. It was a little much for a kid of my age to learn, but nonetheless I successfully compounded my dorkiness by getting my first Dungeons And Dragons set in 5th grade. Since that time board games, and more specifically war games, have gone the way of the Dodo. They exist in dummied-down form, the notable company Avalon Hill still producing the World War II themed Axis And Allies series as a miniatures game. But the classic, complex hex-grid games I remember my dad playing are few and far between. It’s kind of a tragic loss, really. (Read more…)

www.coreybechelli.com

According to the Geeks of Doom site, Troy Duffy (foolishly self-destructive writer/director of The Boondock Saints) was let out of Hollywood purgatory and now has a sequel to The Boondock Saints in the works–The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day. (Read more…)

At least in my experience, it’s not a common misconception that gamers are disinterested in politics and world affairs. In my experience it’s actually pretty true. And when you want to talk about games and politics in the same breath, everyone assumes you want to prattle on about how those violent, sexual games turn kids into serial killers who want to go Doom on their high school, Grand Theft Auto on the town, and Hot Coffee on the cheerleaders. Or you get those paranoid, anti-Dungeons ‘N Dragons groups who want to ban Everquest or World of Warcraft because it will eat your children. (Personal experience alert: I had a D&D buddy in high school whose parents burned his Player’s Manual because they thought, at night, while he slept, demons jumped out of it and danced around his bed. True story!) (Read more…)

I always hated people who make alliterative jokes in seemingly eye-catching titles. Oh wait…

Anyhow, I’ve been (hard?) at work on a little Fhiz side project that I’m announcing: the Fhiz Forums. It’s a place where anyone can sign up and post whatever the hell is on their mind and get snarky responses from me and other members. Check them out here.

Or here.

(Personal note: Isn’t it sad as hell that I need to use FireFox simply because it’s the only browser that I know that has a built in spell-checker?)

Also, we’ve got a new writer for the main page who goes by the enigmatic screenname look_i’m_liam. He’s a veteren member of the (dreadful) NJ pop-punk scene (bunch of cheap MTV wannabe hookers … but I digress) but nonetheless has a good sense for music and will be bringing us reviews of shows, bands and albums you’ve either never heard of or never thought about in twenty years.

Thats it for now. Look for liam’s writing and go check out the forums. Right here.

Since it seems like forever since I’ve tortured anyone with my writing, I’ll rail on about this week(ends?) hot button news item: New York governor Spitzer and his really, really, expensive hookers. There isn’t a whole lot more I can say about the case in terms of fact. Major news media and The Daily Show, which anymore is major news media, have covered just about everything. And I won’t bother posting that retarded photograph of him swallowing his own face in apology because the only way I could possibly make it more widespread is if I photocopied it, stuck it in a frame and sold it in the cheap art-deco section of Walgreen’s for $9.95.

I do, however, have three points to make. First, this is just another case in a long sting of cases that hemorrhage hypocrisy the way an infant would project vomit if you fed her tinned cat food. Spitzer has joined the ranks of Mark Foley, who crusaded against child pornography while having i-Ntercourse with underage kids on MySpace in much the same fashion as the Apple-produced sex robot of the same name would (use your imagination.) Then there is Mr. Family, Larry Craig, Son of Uther von Craig, Bane of Gays, who is found nowhere else but in a bathroom asking a MALE federal agent for a blowjob. Spitzer himself led a crackdown on prostitution, only to be outed as a top ten customer to “The Emperor’s Club.” That’s the whorehouse, not Kevin Klien’s cinematic swift kick in the testes to Dead Poet’s Society fans everywhere.
(Read more…)

I played a lot of the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl this weekend. The attention to detail and overall crispness of the game is fantastic. Every sound effect is clear, every hit is realistically flesh impacting. The last Smash Bros. game, Melee, is a lot faster and the characters handle harder, like they were carved out of granite slabs. The characters in Brawl have a looser, more floaty feeling to them, like they all huffed too much helium. (Read more…)

I’m a big fan of blending text, images, language, and video. Unfortunately, most things that try to combine all those things end up jumbled and terrible.

I’ve found two people who are doing it well, and they give me justification for the entire Internet.

Yahtzee from Escapist Magazine does a weekly video game review video that combines simple drawing, fast talking, and the occasional explanatory text snippet. The great thing about the Zero Punctuation videos is that they’re some of the funniest videos I’ve seen on the Internet. They also contain some of the best game reviewing online. (Read more…)

If you’re into fantasy or gothic novels, and don’t mind books that run to 1020 pages, then you might like this odd “cult classic” by the British author (and painter) Mervyn Peake.

It’s usually considered, alongside Lord of the Rings, one of the great fantasy epics, but it is actually completely unlike LOTR, as its fantasy elements are subtle; rather than orcs, elves, hobbits or wraiths and/or bouts of rabid magic and mass killing, the world described here is fringed with a mystical glow — lots of centuries-old ritual, snotty aristocrats sparring off with “primitive” peoples, descriptions of castles and animals that seem to know what you’re saying, etc. It’s also quite funny, and might, in the end, be closer to Alice in Wonderland or Harry Potter than LOTR (though, again, with no magic).

The basic story concerns the Seventy-Seventh Earl of Gormenghast, Titus Groan, and the timeless world that he has been born into. We meet his incredibly depressed father, Sepulchrave, his flighty and also melancholic sister, Fuchsia, a very strange doctor named Prunesquallor and his annoying sister with the pointy nose, Irma, and Flay (played by Christopher Lee in the BBC version), the loyal but cantankerous servant to Sepulchrave.

(Read more…)