Monthly Archives: November 2010
Tomahawk – God Hates a Coward
Medal of Honour
Medal of Honour reminds of the joke at the start of Annie Hall. You know, the one about the two women eating dinner at a resort, where one turns to the other and says “Boy, the food here is really terrible” and the other says “Yeah, I know, and such small portions”. *Medal of Honour* — EA’s entry into the ‘modern warfare’ arena — is like five hours of absolutely nothing. A ‘nothing’ with a multi-million dollar budget, so it’s a really flashy-looking nothing. Still, it’s hard not to come out of it underwhelmed.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There is one stand-out, genuinely memorable moment in the short single-player campaign. At one point, you find yourself completely overwhelmed by enemy forces who swarm around you, gradually whittling down your supplies of ammunition. No help is coming and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the number of enemies, so your entire squad resigns itself to the fact that this is the end. It’s sort of like the incinerator scene in *Toy Story 3*. Game over, man. It’s a pretty powerful sequence and one which is executed perfectly
Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just a string of disappointments and missed opportunities. You jump from character to character fighting the brain-dead enemies and the brain-dead game engine which they inhabit. This is 2010. We are 10% of the way through the twenty-first century and we still have enemies that do nothing but follow their scripted path, dutifully duck in and out of cover the same way regardless of what is going on around them. Bad enough, but… do you guys know what a ‘monster closet’ is? They’re fairly common in videogames, the places where enemies appear from until the player reaches a certain point or performs a certain action
Frustrating bugs in a videogame are one thing, and it’s easy to pick on them and write a blog post like this that says “WAH. This bug that hardly half the players will run into has *completely ruined the game for me*”. I mean, *Mass Effect* had some of the worst bugs of any game I’ve played, but I loved that game in spite of them
Three words: *Call of Duty*.
*Medal of Honour* has virtually no identity of its own. Almost every moment in the game is a direct copy of something that happened in one of the two *Call of Duty: Modern Warfares*
I’ve no doubt that the game has done enough business to warrant a sequel, and maybe then we’ll see some real innovation and it will be something actually worth talking about. Until then, we’re left with a piss-poor jump-start of a franchise that has no idea who it’s trying to appeal to.
Bunga Bunga, Presidente
I love when porn gets topical (see also: [Who’s Nailin’ Palin?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Nailin%27_Paylin%3F)), but seriously, did the makers of this [Berlusconi-themed porn](http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2010-11-19/28549/Berlusconi_:_Porn_Bunga_Bunga_Movie_Shame) really think about what they were associating themselves with? Nothing is guaranteed to kill a boner quite like the image of a creepy, demented 74-year old midget throwing a fuck into a bored-looking prostitute.
If nothing else, think of his *balls*. Ugh. That’s my next 10 boners completely ruined.
(via [the awl](http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/silvio-berlusconi-themed-porn-is-coming?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAwl+%28The+Awl%29))
Just the facts, ma’am
Use Stylish?
Read The Irish Independent?
Hate that site’s article page design?
Me too. So I wrote a simple (11 lines of actual CSS) user style for the article page which, to my eyes anyway,…
Just the facts, ma’am
Use [Stylish](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108/)?
Read [The Irish Independent](http://www.independent.ie/)?
Hate that site’s article page design?
Me too. So I wrote a simple (11 lines of actual CSS) user style for the article page which, to my eyes anyway, improves the experience of using that site. I changed the font family and size, changed the line height, italicised the first line of the article to make it more of a lede. Oh, and I also yanked the google adverts. I guess this is slightly rude, since, y’know — global economic crisis and all, they probably need the advertising cash — but seriously, there’s more advertising space than article space. That’s just bullshit.
I didn’t touch any of the main landing pages because I hardly ever go to the site directly, I just go to the articles from my RSS reader.
Before:
After:
You can [grab the userstyle here](http://lowbrowculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/irish-independent.css).
Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Corporate Rap
Gloriousnoise has come across a copy of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s amazing Corporate Rap from 1987. It’s great, but it’s no KPMG Corporate Anthem.
Also, as an aside: I realise this is…
Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Corporate Rap
[](http://www.gloriousnoise.com/articles/2010/kentucky_fried_chillin.php)
Gloriousnoise has come across a copy of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s amazing Corporate Rap from 1987. It’s great, but it’s no [KPMG Corporate Anthem](http://regmedia.co.uk/2005/11/28/kpmg.mp3).
Also, as an aside: I realise this is entirely a Pavlovian thing, but does the slab font Kentucky Fried Chicken used in the 1980s feel nice and comforting to anyone else? No? Just me? I guess that explains a lot.
Man, I’m hungry now.
Wherein I just don’t get Girl Talk
I agree with almost everything Mat Honan says in this article on the new Girl Talk album. The way the twitterverse went nuts for the album all at the same time is almost unprecedented now, in our…
Wherein I just don’t get Girl Talk
I agree with [almost everything Mat Honan says in this article](http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/we-are-more-excited-about-girl-talk-on-everything-than-the-beatles-on-itunes) on the new Girl Talk album. The way the twitterverse went nuts for the album all at the same time is almost unprecedented now, in our time-shifted universe, where we all watch the *Lost* finale at different times.
> Even live media events are fractured, splintered through the lens of FoxNews or MSNBC or Autotune the News. It takes something huge to crash through the filters and clutter of modern life to get us to all experience the same thing simultaneously.
>
> The new Girl Talk, released on Monday, did that.
Except one thing. I just don’t ‘get’ Girl Talk
Like everyone else on the internet, I downloaded the new album to give it a whirl. I put it on my iPod and listened to it when I went for a run the other day. Halfway through the third song, I’d had enough. I deleted it from the iPod when I got home.
My problem is that in any given Girl Talk track, there are flashes of brilliance that then gets lost under a deluge of novelty. “Oh No”, the opening track on *All Day* is the perfect example of this. It starts off well. I mean… shit, Black Sabbath, 2pac, Jay-Z and Ludacris all working in perfect harmony? Then, before we have a chance to really enjoy this mix and for no apparent reason, it segues abruptly into Jane’s Addiction and Cali Swag District. And since we’ve already gone down an evolutionary dead end in this musical menagerie, why not throw in a bit of “Swagga Like Us”. It’s like putting makeup on this dead horse you’re flogging.
So yeah, I think Mat Honan is right about the ‘event’ nature of the new Girl Talk album, and I can admire that. But I also think it says a lot that the twitter hash-tag people are using is [#favoritegirltalk**spots**](http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23favoritegirltalkspots) and not [#favoritegirltalk**tracks**](http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23favoritegirltalktracks).