Rec Room

They do like Mondays

JASON O'BRYAN — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:57:49 GMT

ESPN defends its AstroTurf
Monday is a hard sell.

Heightened anxiety

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:56:46 GMT

Sports blotter: "Attack of the seven-foot tall driver" edition
Look, it’s not easy being seven feet tall.

TALL TALE: Seven-foot high-school hoops star Anthony DiLoreto was the alleged getaway driver in a hare-brained bank robbery.

Short on brains
Look, it’s not easy being seven feet tall. If you are seven feet tall, there’s only one socially acceptable thing you can do with your life: play basketball. Creative thinkers might scheme their way into careers in pro wrestling, action movies about Vikings, or porn, but basically it’s basketball or nothing.

One career the seven footer should absolutely not consider, however, is bank robbery. The thing about bank robbery is that it’s usually done under the cover of darkness, or via a tunnel, or in daylight while masked (the mask being worn to protect one’s identity).

And here’s the thing about identity: ordinary-size people can protect theirs just by wearing masks, since there are a great many ordinary-size people (hence the term “ordinary”). But if you’re seven feet tall, a mask doesn’t help you that much. Because the police already have a lot of information when the witness begins his statement by saying, “Well, he was seven feet tall. . .”

That brings us to the story of Anthony DiLoreto, a seven-foot-tall high-school basketball star from Minnetonka, Minnesota, who was due to play for Cal Poly next year. On August 16, he and a 16-year-old accomplice allegedly attempted to rob the Bremer Bank in Danbury, Wisconsin. Police say DiLoreto was driving the getaway car, but got confused when he didn’t see his buddy come out. So he went into the bank and spoke with an employee about opening a student account. He took off after this, stopping for gas — for which he didn’t pay — before returning to the scene of the crime. When he heard sirens nearby, police say, DiLoreto got cold feet and headed home for good.

His partner, meanwhile, had allegedly done the deed, getting away with about $1000. Not seeing his ride, he fled the robbery on foot, and was eventually apprehended by police, apparently trying to walk the 100 or so miles back to the Twin Cities. The kid admitted to the crime, and told authorities he had been with DiLoreto. Police found our hero at home a few hours later.

DiLoreto was charged with being a party to an armed robbery and being in possession of a short-barreled shotgun. Cal Poly seemed willing to let him enroll as planned, but for now the youngster has put off his college career to focus on his legal troubles.

Nobody's perfect

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:53:46 GMT

To err is Too Human
Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation.

A STRANGE MISHMASH: And the saga of Too Human’s development is a lot more interesting than the game’s storyline.

Fair or not, it’s hard to discuss Too Human without bringing in the circumstances of its creation. Conceived by its developer, Silicon Knights, as an epic trilogy for the PlayStation One, Too Human spent the past decade getting delayed, reworked, and relaunched before finally landing on Xbox 360. Its development cycle was marked by constant on-line battles between Silicon Knights honcho Dennis Dyack and vituperative fanboys. Just weeks ago, Dyack was banned from the massive message board NeoGAF for starting fights with its members.

Whew! The development of Too Human is a saga with more dramatic twists than the game’s storyline. It’s also a lot more interesting. Too Human is a strange mishmash of influences and ideas that coexist uneasily, saddled with plodding dialogue and wooden voice acting. The setting and the characters are based on Norse mythology, but with a cyberpunk twist. It’s a strange mix.

As Baldur, you’re part of a team of cybernetically enhanced mercenaries charged with protecting humankind against an onslaught of evil robots. (Really.) Transposing traditional notions of divinity onto a technological foundation might have been a good idea if the events of the plot had made any sense. Instead, you get long cutscenes in which characters do nothing but explain to one another what’s going on. Yet by the end you know less than you did at the start.

The gameplay, though also muddled, at least has something to recommend it. Too Human is a traditional dungeon crawler, pitting Baldur against hordes of (mostly) easily downed foes who often drop bundles of sweet, sweet loot. Loot might be better weapons or armor, runes that upgrade weapons and armor, or cash to help buy more weapons and armor. You can’t take three steps in this game without picking up some new piece of equipment. And though the menus you have to navigate to customize Baldur can be laggy and unwieldy (he wears six different types of armor alone), increasing his abilities and his status is the most satisfying part of the game.

Silicon Knights took some chances with the gameplay mechanics, however, and not all of them pay off. Melee attacks are executed not with button presses but with the right analog stick. In a crowd of enemies, you simply rotate the stick toward Baldur’s next target and he does the rest. There’s more to it than that, but the system comes with tradeoffs. It removes camera control from the player, and the AI-controlled viewpoint is clunky.

Blood sucks

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:45:20 GMT

HBO does the ‘Southern Vampire’
With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine.

BLEACHED: As Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood’s telepathic waitress heroine, Anna Paquin seems a little lost.

With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine. There’s very little goth in my veins; I have no feel for the crypt or the curlicue. The vampire, as a figure, attracts me only in a remote and æstheticized sort of a way — like an Impressionist, say, or a Bolshevik. So I haven’t read Anne Rice, and I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer, and I haven’t read Charlaine Harris, on whose “Southern Vampire” series HBO’s new drama True Blood is based. I have seen Harris’s picture, however, and she looks like a lovely, jolly, un-vampiric woman.

Were you a fan of Six Feet Under? Because True Blood (which premieres this Sunday, September 7, at 9 pm) is written by Alan (American Beauty) Ball, who also directs a few of the episodes. The opening credits are great — bottleneck-blues thump over fretted images of snakehandlers, swamp shacks, midnight roads, trembling Pentecostalists, etc. And the premise is . . . interesting: after thousands of years of stakes-through-the-heart and garlic bulbs shaken in their faces like maracas, the vampires are comin’ out. They want respect, they want to lead normal lives. Above a liquor-store counter, a TV is making shrunken chat-show noises — Bill Maher is on screen, archly quizzing one of the brides of Nosferatu. “We’re citizens,” she insists, “We pay taxes, we deserve equal rights.” What? Rights for vampires? Surely this is liberalism run mad! “But doesn’t your race have a rather sordid history?” asks Bill, voicing the obvious concern. “Well, now that Japanese have perfected synthetic blood. . . . ” Ah, the Japanese. Bless their industrious hearts.

So the vampires are like . . . outsiders. Marginalized. Discriminated against. “GOD HATES FANGS,” proclaims a roadside sign. Ho-ho. And now they’re entering society. People are having sex with them, and not just that droopy vampire sex you see in the movies.

In recent years, the erotics of vampirehood have tended to function as a corrective to the hegemony of porn, privileging pallor, languor, swooning, and submission over the sunbed glow and the hard-on that never sets. The vampires of True Blood are raunchier than that. Nastier, if you will. Grrrr.

Crossword: ''I'm surrounded by idiots''

MATT JONES — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:10:19 GMT

To the left and right, as shown

Kaidoki XXIX

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:13:29 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Death of a hoop dream

MIKE MILIARD — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:37:08 GMT

Mario Hornsby Jr. was senselessly gunned down in May. Now his father is trying to make sure his death was not in vain.
This past fall, Mario Hornsby Jr., then a senior at Springfield Central High School, wrote an essay for English class.

This past fall, Mario Hornsby Jr., then a senior at Springfield Central High School, wrote an essay for English class. In neat handwriting on ruled paper, with a couple minor spelling errors, he took stock of his relationship with his father, Mario Hornsby Sr., and his responsibilities toward his mother, Monique, and younger brothers, Drevon and DeAundre.

Just last year I noticed a change in my father’s demeanor. He started to get moody and lathargic. So my first thoughts as a man was to drop out of school and get a job to ease the load of my parents. My father, knowing the power of education, told me to continue school and get a job part-time after school. . . . I always listened to my father’s advice, and it paid off. Now I’m a promising student with a great job, that’s going to suit up for the Central Golden Eagles basketball team this year. My father influenced my life in a great way; he made me a great man who can handle a bunch of tasks. It’s funny, because I was going to be another stastic on the drop-out list, but now the sky’s my limit.

Slideshow: A life cut short: Images from the life of Mario Hornsby Jr.

“When I read that letter, it just took me out,” recalls Hornsby Sr. now. “You really don’t know what’s happening in your kid’s life until you get something like that.”

This past fall, Hornsby Jr. started to turn his life around. For most of high school, he was a poor student whose report cards were litanies of D’s and F’s. But senior year, he somehow orchestrated a minor academic miracle. That first semester, his GPA skyrocketed. He made the honor roll. And, having never before played more than a couple of JV basketball games, his newfound confidence and leadership qualities led to his being named captain of the boys’ varsity team.

Then, thanks to the intercession of a helpful coach, something was on the horizon for the hugely popular 19 year old that only a few months earlier would’ve seemed unthinkable: college.

Right about now, Hornsby Jr. should be practicing his jumper, and gearing up for a preparatory year at Brandeis. But he never got to trade the chipped paint and cracked cement of Springfield’s violent Mason Square for the tree-shaded lawns of Waltham. He didn’t live to see his high-school graduation.

A life cut short

PHOENIX STAFF — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:28:42 GMT

Images from the life of Mario Hornsby, Jr.

Mike Miliard looks at the story of Mario Hornsby Jr., a Brandeis-bound basketball player who was gunned down in Springfield.

Photos courtesy the Hornsby family

Revenge of the toad

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:40:45 GMT

Sports blotter: "Irabu!" edition
Some sports-crime stories aren’t funny in any way — they’re just plain violent and tragic. But every now and then you get a story that’s just pure fun.

Flat-out awesome!
Some sports-crime stories aren’t funny in any way — they’re just plain violent and tragic. Others are too emblematic and telling, revealing awful things about our crass, media-obsessed society. And still others — DUIs of aging linebackers, for instance — just aren’t that interesting. When there’s nothing but stories like these to write about, it makes for a depressing week for the author of this column.

But every now and then you get a story that’s just pure fun. Like the one that came gift-wrapped in the New York Post this past week, under the headline DRUNK HIDEKI IRABU ARRESTED FOR ASSAULTING BARTENDER. It’s always great when Yankees get in trouble, but it’s particularly delicious when it’s a famously high-priced former Yankee import, washed up and drinking away the sting of a failed career back in his home country — while an ocean away, Daisuke Matsuzaka, in his nibbling way, is mowing down the American League, going 15-2 this season for the Boston Red Sox.

You basically know the Irabu story already, but here are the details, which are terrific. It seems the “Japanese Nolan Ryan” (yeah, right) spent a long night drinking in a bar in Osaka and then, when he went to pay, had his credit card rejected. Enraged, Irabu (who was once called a “fat pussy toad” by George Steinbrenner, back in the days when the Boss was still great and terrible and ambulatory) threw the bartender against the wall, pulled his hair, and smashed at least nine bottles of liquor. (It is assumed the credit card didn’t cover those, either.) Cops later showed up and learned that Irabu had drunk 20 mugs of beer in the bar.

Irabu was a Yankee during that franchise’s most recent golden age, and actually owns two World Series rings (from 1998 and ’99) despite not doing much to earn them. And . . . well, who cares what happened from there? The only reason I’m even continuing this tale is to segue into the current plight of the Yankees, at last count around 10 games out of first place. Which is really embarrassing for a team with a $200 million payroll. Did I mention they’re 10 games out of first place?

Anyway, give the fat toad 10 points for bartender abuse. Have another doughnut, loser!

Once upon a time in Hungary

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:51:58 GMT

Béla Tarr’s epic arrives on DVD
Since its release in 1994, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s 435-minute sui generis masterpiece Sátántangó has had the top critics grasping for superlatives.

ENTHRALLING FOR SEVEN HOURS? Can’t argue with Susan Sontag.

Since its release in 1994, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s 435-minute sui generis masterpiece Sátántangó (“Satan’s Tango”) has had the top critics grasping for superlatives. The late Susan Sontag exclaimed, “Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.” I never saw the film on the big screen, but after watching Facets Video’s shimmering, meticulous DVD version (the process took so long and was so laborious, they even made a DVD about making the DVD), I’d have to agree. Its opening scene — a 10-minute shot of the mud-filled yard of a dilapidated Hungarian collective farm that’s empty until some cattle make their inquisitive entrance — might sound forbidding. In fact, the film transfixes — witty, complex, and layered, this is a radiant and weighted detailing of a world. Only once did I think I might have to tune out. That was about halfway through, in a long sequence in which a feral little girl tortures a cat, and it wasn’t because I was bored.

Not that nothing happens in Sátántangó. Although the enigmatic Tarr has said that he hates stories, the film is filled with narrative bagatelles, and its overriding storyline, spread over a dozen chapters (or movements or steps), stops and starts again from new points of view. In this Beckett-like fable, some of the remaining inhabitants of the collective have hoarded some cash and are planning to divide it among themselves and leave. But the uncanny Irimiás (Mihály Vig, who also composed the film’s eerie music), a dreamy con man prone to pronouncements of gnomic nihilism, has returned after being reported dead. He says he has a plan to redeem these losers from their fetid futility, but it will cost them.

A messianic parable? An allegory about the death of the Marxist dream? Maybe so, but also much more and perhaps much less. Much of the film finds the camera following figures walking endlessly in the rain through trash-blown streets or toward empty horizons. (The eternal dinner guests in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie come to mind.) At the hub of these repeated and unresolved movements revolves the tango of the title, a drunken dance that a child watches through the window of a tavern and that leads to an appalling event, a vision that both vindicates innocence and blasphemes it.

Tempus fugit

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:29:34 GMT

Braid goes in search of lost time
What if you could do things over again?

PAST? FUTURE? Teaching your brain to make sense of Braid’s twisted timelines is a true pleasure.

Braid | For Xbox Live Arcade | Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older | Developed by Number None Inc. | Published by Microsoft

What if you could do things over again? Not just try again after failure, but actually undo your mistakes? What if you could rewind past the point at which it all went wrong? What if you could repair the things you’ve broken? Braid attempts to answer these questions: they inform the gameplay and set up the storyline, and they inspire a singular and haunting gaming experience.

On the surface, Braid seems to take its cues from 8-bit games, notably Super Mario Bros. Tim is a worried-looking young man on a quest to rescue a girl the game refers to as the Princess. To do so, he must collect puzzle pieces scattered across hazardous, two-dimensional worlds and defeat crawling enemies with a well-placed jump. But Braid has more on its mind than winking at the audience. It seeks to demolish the precepts that have defined platforming gameplay for more than 20 years.

Since the birth of arcades, games have trafficked in punishment. Instant character deaths and game-over screens were the best way to ensure that players in the grip of Pac-Man fever kept pumping quarters into the machine. Braid eschews all that and gives you a simple rewind button. Pummeled by an enemy? Rewind to before the collision. Missed a tricky jump? Just hold down the X button and Tim will levitate back to safety. Failure, in the familiar sense of the word, is impossible.

This is not to suggest that Braid is easy. Quite the contrary. In each of the game’s six worlds, a new wrinkle is introduced. Once the rewinding function has been established, Tim runs across clearly marked objects and enemies that are anchored to the forward timeline. Later on, he’ll find that time moves forward as he walks to the right and backward as he walks to the left. He’ll acquire a ring that slows down time within a certain radius. He’ll acquire a doppelgänger that mimics his movements in the future. All this sounds complicated, but the rules are plainly stated and consistent throughout.

Sum Sudoku XXX

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:14:45 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Scout's honor

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:34:16 GMT

Burn Notice ’s honest con job
In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European.

BE PREPARED: Jeffrey Donovan’s Michael Westen is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts.

In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European. The American contribution to pop imagination, the private eye, is more suited to our native character: brash, wisecracking, two-fisted.

One of the great jokes on Burn Notice, which is now in its second season on USA (Thursdays at 10 pm), is that it gives us an American spy who is neither a Continental wanna-be nor a shamus by another name. Instead, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is another established American icon: the Boy Scout.

Resourceful, industrious, clean-cut, helpful to others, honest (okay, a practiced undercover con man, but only in the name of righting wrongs), Michael, as played by Donovan, is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts. Even his cravings are healthy: he consumes so much yogurt that manufacturers must be fighting one another to buy ad time on the show.

The premise of Burn Notice, which was created by Matt Nix, is that Michael, a spy for some unnamed US agency, is abruptly “burned.” That is, he’s deprived of his clearance and his identification, his assets are frozen, and he’s dumped in a city — in his case Miami — on a kind of indefinite probation.

The backstory has Michael trying to discover who burned him and why. And the show’s creators are smart enough to treat his quest as comic investigatus interruptus. Every week, he’s guilt-tripped into helping some poor sap who’s stumbled into a situation that requires someone to outsmart a set of baddies who think they’re infallible. What follows, in voiceover and deftly edited sequences, is the meeting of Bob Vila, Mr. Wizard, and 007’s Q, in which Michael concocts surveillance devices, booby traps, and other handy gadgets from — all together now — common household items.

Since gadgets by themselves don’t get the job done, Michael’s good deeds entail luring the bad guys into a con. And it’s then that Amesbury native Donovan, posing as some overeager or impossibly cool player, really shines. He lays on the kind of Boston accent that Matt Damon fakes and Mark Wahlberg does naturally, and the result is peculiarly American: refusing to be intimidated by the villains he’s putting the squeeze on, he acts like a Southie kid who’s lucked his way into Hugo Boss suits and who eyes every sharpster who crosses his path as some foreigner not to be trusted. He’s a sharpie in lout’s finery, and what tickles you is the surface brashness and buried shrewdness.

Crossword: ''Flippin' Sweet''

MATT JONES — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:22:09 GMT

That's how it's gonna be.

Tiger trap

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:37:28 GMT

Sports blotter: "Walking in Memphis" edition
There are a lot of famously troubled college sports programs out there, the majority of them football teams.

Teach me, Tiger
There are a lot of famously troubled college sports programs out there, the majority of them football teams. Most of America knows that the Florida State Seminoles team, in its heyday, was once called the CrimiNoles; there isn’t a shop owner on the panhandle who wouldn’t move his finger toward the alarm button if he saw an FSU player drifting through his aisles. There were the problems with the University of Miami football team, and Maurice Clarett helped shine a light on a similar record of iniquity in the Ohio State Buckeye football program.

There are, however, some college basketball teams that have legacies of their own that are no less striking. Perhaps chief among those is the University of Memphis hoops squad, a group that has always had a reputation for, shall we say, generous academic standards, as well as a touchingly high degree of tolerance for talented ballplayers with checkered pasts. Over the years, the Memphis Tigers have seen quite a bit of trouble with the law, with some of their players continuing their unfortunate records even after leaving school and making it to the NBA.

What makes Memphis striking is that many of their arrested players are also their most prominent performers, even if their offenses are sometimes minor — as in the case of recently drafted Joey Dorsey, who was hauled in for traffic violations in 2006, or onetime Conference USA player of the year Antonio Burks, who was arrested on a failure-to-appear charge that same year. Now, the school has seen trouble hit their current squad. In fact, the team even appears to have a favorite arrest spot in downtown Memphis — the Plush Club on Beale Street. In 2007, Sean Taggert and Jeff Robinson were arrested for “inciting to riot” after a fight at the bar, and earlier this year junior forward Robert Dozier was arrested for hitting his ex-girlfriend there.

There have been numerous others, of course, but the relevant name this week is a Tiger from the past — Vincent Askew, a star for Memphis who went on to play in the NBA. On August 14, the 43-year-old Askew was arrested on felony charges as he was apparently caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old girl in Florida. Askew, who was interviewing for a coaching job at a high school in the Miami suburb of Pinecrest, had told the girl he was recruiting players for the team. Apparently he did this bit of recruiting in a hotel room, naked.

Cry babies

SHARON STEEL — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:05:50 GMT

Teen talent wails on High School Musical: Get in the Picture
The top brass at Disney knew full well what they were about to unleash when the original High School Musical premiered on the Disney Channel two years ago.

DESPERATE FOR DISNEY: But for how long?

The top brass at Disney knew full well what they were about to unleash when the original High School Musical premiered on the Disney Channel two years ago. Acting on their instincts — and in the process giving life to a number of insidiously successful million-dollar cottage industries — they modernized a timeless formula into something today’s young things would obsess over to the point of distraction. Boy meets girl; they’re different, but they both love to sing; drama unfolds; lifetime friendships are formed; repeat. One sequel and a gazillion licensing deals later, High School Musical 3: Senior Year is almost upon us. And pending that film’s theatrical release, Disney is hard at work pumping every last bit of commercialized fairy dust it has into the HSM brand.

Its most recent venture is the reality show High School Musical: Get in the Picture (ABC, Mondays at 8 pm), and this one embraces the wholesome antagonism that has surrounded HSM from the very beginning. The original movie, though squeaky-clean, stars actors who have since gone on to have their naked post-shower pictures circulate on the Internet, obtain nose jobs, and leak quotes about wanting to cross over into other, non-Disney projects as soon as HSM is dunzo. It’s safe to assume that at first the veterans — much like the new kids who are competing to Get in the Picture — just desperately wanted to be a part of the Disney family. But once your fantasies are dangled in front of you like a pair of freakish, glittery mouse ears, naked desire tends to trump playing nice.

The initial four episodes of Get in the Picture called to mind the sort of boring train wreck that characterizes every new American Idol season. Thousands of teens attended open castings on both East and West Coasts, and the show assembled a “faculty” of vocal, acting, and dance instructors to judge their trials. Nick Lachey served as the objective host and requisite “Guys, I’ve so been there” pep-talker. Once the top 12 were chosen, the battle could get under way. At stake is a lead role in a music video that will run during the HSM 3 end credits — not to mention an exclusive talent agreement with ABC and a recording contract with Walt Disney Records.

Championship Calibur

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:13:36 GMT

The soul still burns for a select few
Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games.

FIGHT CLUB:The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over.

Soul Calibur IV | For the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Project Soul | Published by Bandai Namco

Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a step through the electronics department without knocking over a stack of crappy fighting games. The market had hit its saturation point, with one mediocre cash-in after another flooding store shelves. Today, the situation is quite different. Only the best franchises have survived: Street Fighter, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Soul Calibur. Although they remain successful properties, the release of Soul Calibur IV confirms the genre’s current status as a niche. There’s no disputing the quality of the product. But unless you’re intimate with its predecessors, you may find the barrier to entry too high.

As a relative newcomer myself, I did read the manual to get a handle on the particulars of Soul Calibur’s fighting mechanics. That was my first mistake. The opening page of the manual tells you that it will henceforth refer to Horizontal Strikes as “A” and Vertical Strikes as “B.” If you’re playing the Xbox 360 version, that means you’ll want to hit the X button to perform A and the Y button to perform B. But don’t press the A button if you want to A! Press A to G, and B if you want to K. Got it?

Yes, it’s pretty nonsensical — as though the manual had been translated from Japanese by someone who speaks only French. The best way to learn is to dive in and start splashing around, and Soul Calibur IV is forgiving on this front. The single-player story mode is brief and easy, even for a novice. It’s a battle across five short stages for possession of two sacred swords, with a different text intro and cinematic ending for each combatant. Along the way — almost without trying — you unlock new fighters, new stages, and new weapons. You also start to get a handle on the tempo of play and some of the vagaries of the combat.

Then, brimming with confidence and inner centeredness, you play on-line and get destroyed before you even realize the match has begun. The era of bluffing your way through a fighting game with a frenzy of lucky button presses is over. (How I long for the halcyon days of Mortal Kombat!) The weapons-based fighting offers an endless array of defensive maneuvers and counterattacks, all requiring exquisite timing.

Crossword: ''Hit the bricks''

MATT JONES — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:03:50 GMT

A classic case of one-upmanship

Kakuro XXIV

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:03:14 GMT

Psycho Sudoku

Follow the leader

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:31:24 GMT

Geometry Wars 2 shoots and scores
What makes a man lust for the high score?

FOLLOW THE LEADERS In the Geometry Wars sequel, the scores take center stage.

What makes a man lust for the high score? What primal urges drive him to submit to one punishing gameplay session after another, in a vain and almost certainly futile attempt to surmount the highest peak of video-gaming glory? It’s a question scientists may never answer. For now, we can only observe the effects of this phenomenon — and never more clearly than on the roiling leaderboards of Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

GEOMETRY WARS RETRO EVOLVED 2
FOR XBOX LIVE ARCADE | RATED E FOR EVERYONE | DEVELOPED BY BIZARRE CREATIONS | PUBLISHED BY ACTIVISION

The first Geometry Wars Retro Evolved had high scores too, and a worldwide leaderboard you could access through Xbox Live, but the whole thing seemed perfunctory. In the sequel, the scores take center stage. The moment you begin a new game, you’re greeted with your ranking for each of six different gameplay modes, all on the same screen for easy reference. You may notice that, since your last log-in, one of your friends has buried your scores, shoveling millions upon millions of points over you like dirt on your grave. Your only option is to respond in kind.

Geometry Wars 2 retains the spicy retro flavor of its predecessor while bringing several new entrees to the party. In each gameplay mode, the fundamentals are the same: you control a little C-shaped ship with the left analog stick while firing unlimited shots in any direction with the right stick. You’re confined to a small, rectangular area that quickly fills up with enemies to be blasted. (Each enemy is a basic geometric shape, hence the name.) Within that framework, however, developer Bizarre Creations has found plenty of room to experiment.

“Evolved” mode is the one that will be familiar to those who played the first Geometry Wars, and it follows the most traditional rules. You start with three lives and a handful of screen-clearing bombs, earning more of each as you reach certain score markers. Ever more challenging waves of enemies spawn at intervals, until the screen is saturated and your ship is a microsecond from destruction at all times.

By itself, “Evolved” is enough for an entire game, and indeed that was the case with the original. A few tweaks make it seem new. Previously, you earned score multipliers only by blasting prescribed quantities of enemies. This time, shattered foes drop “geoms,” little jewels that increase your multiplier by one. Not only does this change result in stratospherically higher scores, it also creates an incentive to keep moving instead of trying to cover your flank in the map’s corners.