Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. One of my favorite games from the current era has finally had its sequel announced :cough: last week :cough:, and I must say I’m pretty excited about it. It features our favorite protagonist, Nathan Drake, treating us all to his trademark, characteristic wit while finding himself in a bit of a bind. Blink and you’ll miss the whole teaser, but it’s still pretty cool and good looking and I can’t wait until Naughty Dog puts the finishing touches on this guy. Unfortunately, my guess on that date will be next fall videogame rush… ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do. ...

The Dark Knight I saw The Dark Knight twice on Blu-Ray this week and after three viewings, this movies still undoubtably holds its own as the best movie in the summer and even fits into my top five of all time. What Christopher Nolan did with this movie was incredible, creating a superhero movie that feels decidedly not like a superhero movie (in that nothing that happens in it is that far beyond what you’d see in any action movie), and still retains a sense of cinematic integrity and depth beyond any Batman movie before it (save, perhaps Batman Begins). ...

Today’s the first non-WMQ Wednesday, so I thought I’d ease us into it with a discussion about competitive gaming, since that’s closer to a sport than, say, a book review. Online leagues are nothing new to the computer gaming space. For as long as we’ve been able to play over our 14.4 modems (or slower!) people have been fragging each other in Doom and Quake in leagues, continued doing so through the most popular competitive shooter, Counterstrike, and are even now forming clans and teams within Halo 3. ...

PA I think it’s worth mentioning that the guys at Penny Arcade are universally hilarious. I was tooling around their site today and I found a couple of oldies, but goodies that I thought I would share: There’s one about Pokémon that shows Gabe at his training worst. If nothing it’s a hilarious take on the oftentimes frantic and crazy love of the game that you usually witness in small children. ...

Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter. There’s still plenty of December standing in the way, but it won’t be too long before we hit January 21st and the fifth season on Lost hits the airwaves. I know this little Youtube video is old. It was featured as a special feature to get viewers up to speed for the pre-Season 4 happenings in the series. It’s quick, funny, and it sums up the past of Lost well. I highly recommend watching it for a few good laughs. ...

Here’s an interesting analysis of most of Stephenson’s writing by Matthew Bey of the Austin Statesman: But even as Erasmas and company pursue the answers to their cerebral quandaries, violence and chaos aren’t far behind. As intimidating an intellectual artifact as “Anathem” is, it’s still an action story. Stephenson takes just enough time to establish his setting before blowing it apart. Like the Unix machines he has praised, his novels are a system of logical mechanisms that run flawlessly until they hit extraordinary conditions. They never quite come to a clean ending, but tapering to a close was never the point. A Stephenson novel doesn’t wrap up so much as it crashes, one process at a time. ...

It’s been quite some time since Stephenson’s ambitious Baroque Cycle hit the shelves, but, based on his latest offering, it seems that Stephenson spent that time doing boatloads of research for his second most ambitious title to date (the ~2700 page Baroque Cycle has to take the cake on that one), Anathem. While it seems that his work is definitely well-researched and that he has a very clear unerstanding of what points he’s trying to convey, I think that Stephenson fails at the more important task of keeping the reader interested and conveying the complex-yet-interesting plots from the get-go that he is normally so capable of. ...

You’ve probably heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20 on Monday morning, so just imagine how well I can call ’em two days later on Wednesday. That’s right, it’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up. Yeah, yeah, I know I just said that this feature might go on hiatus until spring, but how can I ignore the Florida Gators making it, once again, to the BCS Championship Bowl game? ...

The ESRB has been making a spectacle of itself in recent months. Aside from the usual rating controversies, they have accidentally been spoiling the announcement of a bunch of games by posting ESRB ratings for games that are still in development. It’s all come to a frustrated head as of yesterday as the ESRB site, despite promising to stop doing this, managed to spoil three unannounced titles to be published by Atlus. ...