The six-year-old murder of Rebeca Pe a finds new life on the Internet. Surveillance Video Leads To Arrest In Hialeah Beating, Robbery Police have arrested a man accused of pistol-whipping a woman during a robbery in Hialeah. Paralyzed Astrophysicist Fulfills Weightless Dream Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, fulfills a dream of […]

LIVE: Aloha 1, Jesuit 0 - Bottom 3
- Ford is up now and two pitches from Supple are strikes. He fouls away the third, and the count is 0-2. Ford will now take some time. He steps back up, and the last pitch is a called strike…

LIVE: Aloha 1, Jesuit 0 - Top 4
- 2 away and Conor Casey is at the plate. He shows some nice restraint, but the Aloha pitcher throws an excellent slider that gets him to swing for a strike. The next pitch is poopped up, and caught to…

LIVE: Jesuit 0, Aloha 0 - Top 3
- Campbell takes the count to 3-0 on three pitches before the pitcher finally puts a strike on him with 2 runners on 1st and 2nd. Campbell pops it to right and the outfielder snags it to end the first…

Job Seekers and Employers, Great news!
Hello job Seekers and Employers, Great news! There is a new job search resource that will help you find a new career fast, and its Free!! “Post A job Online” is new, and growing fast. Designed to be easy to use and expose you to hundreds of employer, everyday. Your resume, and job […]

Food: The Way We Eat: Stalk of the Town
Tart and intense on its own, rhubarb plays well with others. Surfacing | Minneapolis: A Foodie Scene in the Twin Cities In another sign of a cultural awakening, dining out in this city of sensible industry is no longer confined to steakhouses. With Jets Providing Accompaniment, a Rare City Treasure Stands Exposed […]

Crackdown is Surprisingly Fun
I’ll be the first to admit that Crackdown was, to put it politely, not one of the most compelling Xbox 360 titles at E3 2006. “Here we go again,” I mused, “just another Grand Theft Auto knockoff.” The thing is, I’ve been playing an early build of it now for several days, and it’s actually pretty dang fun.That’s not to say it’s not a knockoff. Crackdown is definitely open-ended and lets you car-jack in the same vein as the GTA games, and its big-city playground and orb-collecting character progression feel an awful lot like Activision’s recent Spider-Man games. But Crackdown, with unoriginal warts and all, is just hard to put down.The game revolves around you, as a super cop, taking down three mob-like gangs in Pacific City. Each mob has a kingpin, as well as seven mini-bosses that you can take down in any order. As you eliminate those mini bosses, your chances of killing the kingpin improve, because each mini boss is responsible for weapons, cars, close-combat training etc. So, the more mini bosses you eiminate, the less training or fewer resources the kingpin’s guards have, which means you’ll face less-skilled opposition in the final compound.What’s new with Crackdown, and what should make it even more fun when the final game ships, is that you can take out those crime bosses with a friend. The GTA games were strictly single-player fare, but Crackdown lets you team up with a buddy (even online) to leverage your skills in a semi-strategic way. So, if you’re a strong brute and your friend is good with explosives, you can toss your friend over the fence of an enemy compound, where he or she can then proceed to unleash the pain while you find another way into the base.Crackdown’s still got some holes in its super-cop armor (audio snafus, camera issues, etc.), but the final game isn’t due to hit stores until February, so with any luck those issues will be ironed out. However, you won’t have to wait a month to test Crackdown out for yourself. A free demo is going to be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace later this week.

Video Games Heart Politics
OK, so maybe video games and politics don’t really get along, but the timing of these two news items is just too good to pass up a Valentine’s Day reference.First, Republican presidential hopeful and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback has re-introduced a bill requiring the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to play final, retail copies of games before slapping a rating on them (T for Teen or M for Mature, for instance). The gesture is largely posturing to reach concerned parents, but let’s hope video games don’t become one of the battlegrounds of the 2008 presidential elections. Politicians are already out of touch with today’s games; being forced to watch them feign intimate knowledge of the industry would make watching the debates even more painful.Also today, Nintendo released the “Everybody Votes Channel” on its Wii console. Granted, the voting isn’t politically charged, but the Wii pollsters will gather up-to-the-minute results on such vital topics as whether Nintendo fans prefer cats or dogs. Honestly, the results of some of those polls might be more compelling than the debates between certain presidential hopefuls.

LIVE: Jesuit 0, Aloha 0 - 1st
BOTTOM 1 - Nic Ford comes up for Aloha now. He takes the first two pitches for strikes (one was a foul ball). Ford hits a nice bloop into left-center where no one can get to it quickly enough. A…

Old-School is New…And Good!
We’ve all heard about the increasing cost of video game development, the Hollywood-sized budgets and the need for games to sell by the boatload if publishers are to recoup their investment. Of course, in the same breath we’ve also heard about a resurgence in casual games, those pick-up-and-play-for-five-minute titles often developed by just one or two people.Well let me tell you, the newest casual game on Xbox Live Arcade, Heavy Weapon, has amazed me with its fun factor. Heavy Weapon been on PC for a while now, but since this is the first time I’ve played it, I’ll just call it “new” and move on.To call it “new” is a bit of a misnomer, though, because its art style and gameplay are about as old-school as you get. It’s basically a re-imagining of the arcade game Moon Patrol, with a bit of Metal Slug flair thrown in for destruction’s sake.Players take control of a tank that moves left and right over an always-scrolling screen. One thumbstick controls how fast you move across the landscape, the other controls the direction of fire. That’s it. Along the way you gather powerups that equip the tank with heat-seeking rockets, lasers, even nuclear bombs that obliterate everything on screen.The gameplay is completely and utterly basic (blast everything to bits), and that’s precisely what’s so fun about it. Playing online with four friends brings about so much laughter that’s it once you turn the power on the Xbox 360 off, you realize how seldom a mega-budget game elicits the same reaction. There’s certainly a sense of camaraderie in those games, but it’s not on the same “primal fun” level of Heavy Weapon. This “new” game is about as arcade-old as you can get … and I love every minute of it.

Pope Lashes Out Against Videogames
This just in from the Never-Saw-That-One-Coming department: Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out against videogames, referring to the most violent ones as a “perversion” and “repulsive.”I had no idea His Holiness even knew what a PlayStation was, let alone how a few games on the system might affect kids. Yet as part of World Communication Day, the Pope said “[a]ny trend to produce programs and products–including animated films and video games–which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray antisocial behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion, all the more repulsive when these programs are directed at children and adolescents.”So, the next time you fire up a game of Pokemon with your kid, I want you to sit there and stew in your own perverse juices. After all, that’s a rather violent game when you get right down to it. Then again, something tells me that’s not exactly what the Pope had in mind.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Portland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.