Red Dead Redemption hits the shelves

For years now, Rockstar Games has held the gold standard for open-world sandbox games. And with the recent release of Red Dead Redemption, they have most certainly set the bar to another all-time high.

The game is set in America’s semi-wild west at the end of the First World War and the beginning of the government’s attempt to expand and control. You mosey around in the shoes of John Marston, a former gang member who was just trying to make it as a family man before the government got all up in his business and blackmailed him into hunting down and bringing a former gang member to justice.

Like most Rockstar games, the story is amazing and fun to play, but its all the things you can do that isn’t the main story that makes this game so great. You can arm wrestle the local populace, attend the local cinema and watch a movie that shows the dangers of modern science, help random strangers you meet or just huff it into the wilderness and hunt yourself some ferocious animals.

There are literally not enough good things I can say about this game. The graphics are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The controls are sharp and precise. The story is sprawling and believable. And the game play is fun and engaging.

Possibly the absolute best thing about this game is how alive the world in the game feels. Heat shimmers off in the distance, tumbleweeds rolls lazily across the landscape; drunks stumble around town and yell obscenities at passerby. It is quite possibly the most realistic game-space I’ve ever seen

This review is so short simply because I don’t feel like wasting your time talking about all the things that are so great for there are too many, I can simply strongly recommend that you go out right now and buy this game. This is possibly the best game to come out this decade.

10 out of 10 stars.

Conan O’Brien returning to television

At this point in time, I am sure you have all heard about the Conan O’Brien fiasco that happened around three months ago; how could you not? After all, this issue practically overshadowed the disaster in Haiti in terms of media coverage. 

But I am proud to say that the issue has finally come to a close. After bouncing around for a period of time, O’Brien has finally settled and now plans to be a part of the TBS late-night family.

Come November next year, Conan’s new show will debut at 11 o’clock, right before George Lopez’s late night show. In my opinion, it is good to have Conan back on TV where he belongs. His late night show was really good and it was a shame to see it cancelled just as it was really starting to gather momentum.

As with any show that isn’t completely scripted, it usually takes awhile to get used to itself and rise to meet its full potential. Unfortunately, Conan’s show was cut just as I felt that he had finally reached that point.

Of course, Conan hasn’t been simply sitting around this whole time. He’s begun dipping into the vast ocean that is the Internet for a way to get his material out there. He has been “tweeting, since he was let go from NBC and has now set up his new live comedy tour which is titled “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.” The tour is set to begin 4-19-10 in Eugene Oregon.

It’s fair to say that I am a member of Team Coco and am thoroughly glad to see his vibrant red hair back on the air.

Assassin’s Creed 2

What makes a trilogy truly succesful? Some might say it’s the story, the production value, and the actors. While these may indeed help out, I believe that it all comes down to the ability to hold an audiences attention for three installments.

A lot of the responsibility for accomplishing this task falls onto the middle installment, which must answer questions from the first one, expand/improve the subject matter, rejuvenate the audience’s interest, and get people pumped for the finale.

The Assassin’s Creed trilogy is a very good example of these qualities and it astounds with its many improvements.

There is no doubt that the original Assassin’s Creed was fun, but it was lacking in several areas. The sequel takes everything that was wrong with the first one and fixes it.

Assassin’s Creed 2 picks up directly where the first game ends and never looks back. After a quick little explanation of the first game through cut scene, you are off and running as bartender Desmond Miles desperately tries to escape his confinement from the sadistic Templars. After a quick fight sequence you escape the facility and are brought to the nearby Assassin’s Hideout. Within 10 minutes of starting the game, you jump right back into the animus, the futuristic machine that lets you relive your ancestor’s memories through your DNA.

This time around you are taking control of upstart Ezio Auditore, a young noble from Florence enjoying the good life. The game then gives you a tutorial of basic things like fighting and climbing cleverly disguised as routines from Ezio’s everyday life. Before you know it, your family is double crossed and put in jail. In your final conversation with your father, he instructs Ezio to go back to his house and check the back room for a chest.

Once you locate the chest, you don the new and improved assassin’s robe and get to work. Your quest is one of vengeance: to find and kill the ones behind your family’s execution.  You soon learn that the trail of deception and treason runs much deeper than a couple of nobles in Florence. Sadly, the overall story line isn’t quite as interesting as this inner story. The whole reason for going through Ezio’s life is so that Desmond can be trained in the way of the assassins similar to the way Neo was trained in “The Matrix”

The story however, is not why most people play these sorts of games. Their level of enjoyment is based largely on game play. The game play has improved drastically from the first one. Gone are the awful eavesdropping and pick pocketing missions as well as the extreme aversion to water. There is a slew of new weapons including the coveted double hidden blades and, my favorite, the poison tipped hidden blade, which sends whomever you infect into a berserk rage until eventually killing them. Most of these weapon upgrades are given to you by your good friend and all around eccentric Leonardo DaVinci.

There are still buildings to climb and synchronizing to be done, but it is all made so much simpler and more fun due to Ezio. He can climb faster and smoother than Altiar ever could and frankly, Ezio is by far a cooler protagonist than his overly serious predecessor, Ezio will crack a joke given half the chance and is quite the charmer. He even takes off his hood once in awhile!

If I had one complaint in the game, it’s that they make it really hard to get anything accomplished. Every time I was making my way to a mission, I repeatedly got sidetracked by the sheer amount of stuff there is to do in the game. At every turn there is something else to do and you actually feel compelled to do them, unlike the first game.

Another improvement is the economy system. Everything costs money: weapons, armor, repair, health potions (your health doesn’t regenerate this time around), and even paintings. The paintings are displayed in your Villa, which you end up traveling to a lot. When you first go to your villa and settle in, it’s a dilapidated excuse for a small town, but after you sink a few Florins into the villa, you will see it blossom before your eyes. It proves that you must indeed spend money to make money for the more you invest in your villa, the more income it generates that ends up in your pocket. Also, if you upgrade the shops you can get very nice discounts and even the occasional weapon that is only purchasable in the villa.

Making money is actually quite easy. You get a fair sized amount after completion of missions and there are chests filled with money scattered across every city. The locations of these chests can be purchased for a nominal fee and to top it off, with the simple push of a button, you can pickpocket anyone on the street.

Probably the best upgrade from AC1 is that AC2 has so many ways in which you can accomplish a mission. They said there was more than one way to assassinate people in the first game, but there really wasn’t. In this game, it becomes obvious quickly that it lives up to what the first did not. You can of course simply assassinate someone, you can even assassinate someone from the air (which has been made insanely easy compared to the first game), but now you can do things like hiring mercenaries to attack anyone you choose and hire thieves to distract guards from a specific area.

Assassin’s Creed 2 does very few things wrong. If you liked the first game, then you’ll love this sequel. If you didn’t care for the first game, you’ll be singing a different tune after playing its follow-up. And if you just like stabbing people in the head without them knowing you were there, boy do I have the game for you.

Job market – outlook grim

Have you ever asked your best friend if they want to hang out, only to be turned down because your friend had to go work? I know I have. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, that example isn’t happening as much. There is no way around it, there are fewer jobs available for teenagers today.

It used to be that if a teenager wanted a job, they went to the local family owned business, earned minimum wage, and spent the money they made on movies and such. This is no longer the case. Jobs are nearly impossible to find these days, so if someone finds themselves a job they need to hold onto it with everything they’ve got.

On top of that, students need to spend their money much differently than the kids of old. Gone are the days of care-free frittering away of money. Here to stay it seems are the practices of paying for insurance and similar necessities.

It’s probably just my distorted view of adolescence, but I was under the impression that we had this time to enjoy being carefree kids without the worries our parents had to deal with. Life is going to be hard enough without that life starting a couple years earlier than it used to.

It is my belief that it is our right as teenagers to enjoy ourselves and be irresponsible with our money. It helps make experiences for us when we are adults. The only lessons we are learning now are how much working stinks and how it’s really hard to enjoy the money we make. That shouldn’t be something you learn until you’re at least 20.

These hard financial times are doing the youth of this country no favor when it comes to finances. Too many of us are focused on trying desperately to find jobs or feverishly holding onto those jobs. Jobs that we don’t necessarily even like.

No nine for the movie 9

When you think of legendary film director Tim Burton, films like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and even “James and the Giant Peach” come to mind. Most of Burton’s films have a similar artwork, style, and theme. Most people expect a Burton movie to be stop-motion-animation.

But now, Burton has graced the CGI world of movies with his film 9, and his tone has dramaticaly changed. Gone are the cutesy love scenes and characters based solely on comic relief. There are no magical forests or choreographed songs. In fact, there are actually no forests to speak of.

Many of you will recall the trailer for 9 where Burton made excellent use of a Coheed and Cambria song and showed scenes of awe-inspiring action while managing to give little to nothing away about the story. Let me fill you in.

In the world of 9, humanity has once again doomed itself. A machine that was designed for good has become self-aware and manages to wipe out all of humanity. Before you write this off as a generic apocalyptic movie, know that Burton has managed to add a very interesting twist on the overused plot-line.

Moments before humanity is wiped out for good, an unnamed German scientist transfers the life left in his body into 9 different ragdolls. He then instructs his creations to do what humanity has failed to do for the past years: kill the machine that’s causing all the problems. How the scientist figured that 9 pieces of cloth about 6 inches tall are supposed to destroy some doomsday machine that was capable of wiping out humanity I’ll never know.

Sadly, that’s where my knowledge, along with everyone else’s, stops. When it comes to the story, one of the major flaws of the movie is the lack of virtually any background information.

Another problem is the run time. 9 clocks in at about 79 minutes total. It has become customary now-a-days to have a length of at least 90 minutes, and even that is usually considered a short movie. My only other complaint is that the characters are pretty hollow and you never really get connected to them or understand their real motives for doing some of the stupid things they do.

I’m not saying that the movie was bad, I really enjoyed the experience. The action is both visceral and exciting. The world they inhabit is beautifully bleak and desolate. The animation is top notch, and the scale of the movie is great.

I’m not exactly sure that this movie is worth paying 10 dollars to go see in the theater unless you really want to experience the surround sound of the movie theater. But this is a movie worth watching. I recommend renting this movie from any movie rental store in the general area. 9 is definitely a unique experience that should be given a shot.

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars