Humor

Welcome to part 3 of my SPOILER-intensive analysis of Heavy Rain's story!

Look, we all know that this is basically just another Saw game, and given how bad the actual Saw game was, I understand why hopes were high for Heavy Rain, and why we'd want to give it a pass for its unoriginality. But I thought I'd take a moment to acknowledge just how similar the premises are. They're both stories about a crazed killer who kidnaps people and then creates elaborate traps inside crumbling edifices deep within America's post-industrial wastelands, designed to test how much a victim will sacrifice to save a life.

It's fair to say that I don't have the greatest confidence in David Cage's ability to create something that makes sense. Still, I decided to delve into Heavy Rain and see what he'd produced this time around. Now, four hours in, just having completed "The Bear" I'm ready with some initial comments—and these are just going to be plot things, since this isn't an official "review" of the game. Also, unless it gets really egregious I'm not going to comment on the awkward phrasing caused by the game's sometimes iffy translation.

The year was 1999. A plucky young lad fresh out of the 8th grade, I had just finished reading Timothy Zahn's fantastic Thrawn trilogy a year earlier, which began my immersion into the Star Wars expanded universe. There's a lot of good stuff to be found in said universe-the aforementioned Zahn books, the Rogue Squadron series, the Crimson Empire comics and so forth. So you can imagine my anticipation of The Phantom Menace, the long awaited beginning of the prequel trilogy.

So it comes to this. The engineer, my favorite Team Fortress 2 class, the one in which I saw a need for some additional items before the medic update even came out, the one that I have almost 130 hours of playtime with, will be the last to get an update. I'm not mad. Really....I'm not.

(Note: I could've used Mad Props as the title but that's already been done like a thousand times)

I stumbled upon a really sweet TF2 mod a few days ago. The red team spawns as various pieces of scenery (barrels, rocks, trees, etc.) with the scout's health, and the blue team spawns as pyros. Blue has to kill all the scenery scouts before time is up or else red wins. Needless to say, the sight of a tree running away from a pyro is pure awesomeness. If you've not played it, you don't get to sit with the cool kids at lunch. You also don't get to sniff dry erase markers with us during recess.

Mad Props (couldn't resist) to the mod author. The Steam group page has a list of servers to play on.

Susie Sahim, the artist behind many of Google's event-based logos and and known to appreciate Legend of Zelda—and Link in particular, is believed to be have deliberately hidden tiny TriForces in her work. Neither she nor Google would confirm or deny anything.

Yeah, it's old, but I thought it was cute seeing someone using an classic toy like Legos to recreate a classic videogame like Donkey Kong.

I can't help but think that given time this could really become a good late night program. Can you picture Leno, Letterman or even Conan attempting something like this?

...there are some real crazies out there. And they seem to be able to find you with alarming ease.

07/01/2007: An Australian woman was charged with attempting to abduct a child after trying to get her Internet boyfriend, 16 at the time, to accompany her to Adelaide, Australia. Tamara Broome (pictured,) 31, met the teenager on the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, and the two engaged in an Internet romance during which they discussed marriage. Broome flew to North Carolina, where the boy lived, telling her housemate that his parents had paid for her ticket so they could "sort it all out." She was arrested after stepping off an Amtrak train in South Carolina, jailed and held on a $2.35 million bond.