My wife wanted to watch the Star Wars on DVD last night but I wasn't having it. I can watch the Star Wars any night. But I could only see Loverboy, Tiffany, and Flock of Seagulls last night, on the gorgeous disaster that was the first episode of "Hit Me Baby One More Time." The premise was simple: Take a bunch of washed up 80s acts and trot them out on a gimpy little stage so we can all see how fat they've gotten and how little talent they actually possessed in the first place. It's an ingenious germ of an idea, and one that was executed to horrific perfection last night. Among the many surprises in last night's show: Just how puffy Loverboy's frontman has become; how Mike Score of Flock of Seagulls now looks like the kind of guy you'd rent a fishing boat from in Panama City; that Tiffany is now pregnant (at least, I HOPE she's pregnant, that was quite the gut she had); and that Arrested Development actually sounded pretty darn good. But let's get back to Flock of Seagulls. Judging by their outfits, I guess they forgot they were going to be on television. Mike Score's baseball cap and stringy ponytail immediatley recall the fashion stylings of the WWE's Paul Heyman; I have no doubt that Score is now bald as hell up top. But even worse than Score's hair and the rest of the band's South Florida Skynyrd cover band get-up was just how god-awful they sounded--flat everywhere and completely lifeless. The same could be said for most of the acts' abbreviated versions of their hits, save for a pretty enjoyable rendition of "Tennessee" by Arressted Development. Having seen AD back in the day, it was cool to see all of the original members (even the Grandpa still kicking it on stage with the rocking chair); though I could have done without their Puffy Daddy-esque maiming of Los Lonely Boys' "Heaven." I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the show's host, Vernon Kay, a vaguely Irish stiff with a strange propensity for widening his eyes at completely random intervals. There's so much to dislike about this show--the shoddy production values, the audience members-- all of whom looked like they were promised free Epcot Center passes just for showing up, and the cruddy performances to boot. Yet the show's central premise--a sort of slo-mo car wreck of misplaced nostalgia--will surely rope me in for additional viewings throughout its summer run. I mean, who doesn't want to see what Wang Chung, Irene Cara and Vanilla f'n Ice look like these days?

I know in my head that The Simpsons is a funny show. A classic even. I even tune into an episode every once in a while and, more often than not, laugh at one or more of the gags ("I was saying Boo-urns...") Yet, in my heart, I've got very little love for the show. Perhaps it all goes back to the beginning, when I found out the voice of Bart Simpson was a woman (yeah, I hold grudges). Or the fact that Marge's voice drive's me up a wall. Or the fact that Homer has, over the run of the show, devolved from a simple dim-witted Dad into a moronic caricature of himself. If you think about it, the Simpsons' Springfield is really just an animated, and slightly more manic, homage to Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon stories, with the heart, humor, and eccentricity well intact. The difference, I guess, is that somehow the writers and cast of the Simpsons know how great they are, and that crass, self-aware confidence somehow translates to the small screen in a way that has always irked me. The residents of Lake Wobegon, on the other hand, are just living their fictional lives, completely oblivious to the fact that we're peeking in their windows.

I may be one of the newer guys here on staff at GameSpot but I'm not exactly new to E3. As we approach the 2005 show, I've been thinking back to the other E3's I've attended in the past. Back when I was young magazine writer living in Atlanta, I attended both E3's held there. A few years later I paid my own way to see the show in LA just before the debut of the Sega Dreamcast and NFL 2K. No game since has even blown me away as much as NFL 2K did the first time I saw it. I loathe the phrase "jaw-dropping" with the the searing blue heat of a one million supernovas, but the first time I saw that game in action, my chin hit the ground and I just haven't been the same since.

In terms of the Atlanta E3's, I was covering the shows from a much different perspective, that of a local technology magazine. As such I was there to report more on the business impact of the show to the local Atlanta economy than how Ultima Online or Fallout played. Truthfully, at that time, I was just rediscovering gaming on the PlayStation after a self-imposed exile during my college years (where I had found myself troublingly distracted by things like beer and girls). Because of this, it wasn't my ideal job but it was at least in the same ballpark.

Despite being mostly maligned in hindsight, the Atlanta E3s were amazing experiences for me. It probably had something to do with basically roaming the floor at my leisure, playing games when and where I wanted, and chatting up booth babes as much as possible without attracting security personnel. Sure there was depressingly hot weather and most of the companies probably hated coming all the way across the country to set up shop for a week, but I had a great time.

This year, things will be different to say the least. There won't be any lazy roaming of the show floor, I'll be the same extremely tight schedule as everyone else here at GameSpot. I'll probably only have time to play the games I'm assigned to cover and, being married means booth babes are out of the question. Still, I can't wait to get back to the glitz of it all, to be smack-dab in the middle of the hype and excitement of being there when new things happen, even if we already have an idea of what those things will be.

I sold my car today. The wife and I are moving to Oakland in a few weeks and my car has been on the downhill side of functional for the past few years now--finally giving up the ghost just before Christmas. We were on the fence for a while, deciding whether we should fix it up and try to eke out a few thousand more miles out of it, donate it to a good cause, or just sell it and pocket the meager amount of cash we could get for it. After considering our options, we decided to go with the third choice, if for no other reason than the money we get in the transaction will help pay for our move.

But man am I bummed about this. Certainly, it's partially due to my tendendency to become sentimental about my possessions; but this was my car. The car that I hauled on the back of U-Haul truck from Atlanta to California back in 1998, only to have the U-Haul break down in Las Cruces, New Mexico roughly halfway through the move. The car I scratched up after inadvertently scraping a post at the Sutter/Stockton garage in San Francisco--two days after I'd gotten it back from the body shop repairing a ding in nearly the exact same spot. The car that I drove to nearly every major state prison in Northern and Central California when I worked for PacBell (ask me how I got locked in a telecommunications room in San Quentin some time...)

This was my car; now it's someone else's car. And in a way, that really sucks.

On the other hand, if there's any money left after our move, you can bet it will be going towards a new PSP...

This is a journal entry at least partially about smooth jazz. You have been warned.

Smooth jazz came back to me this week; as I've been spending the majority of my off-work time gearing up for a big move to Oakland (also known as Oak-town, the 5-1-0 and, my personal favorite, Bump City). As I've been preparing for the transition, I've tried to consolidate large portions of my life into progressively smaller bits: selling old DVDs that will never again see the inside of a DVD player, donating books to the local library and, most recently, copying my CD collection to digital form on my home computer. The thinking being that once everything's digitized and backed up on my external hard drive, I can unload the majority of discs and get mucho store credit at Amoeba Records.

Picking through the stacks of CDs, it's amazing to take a look at music I haven't listened to in a decade or more. I could go through the pain of listing some of the more embarrassing musical purchasing decisions I've made in my life--including an appalling smooth jazz streak running through the middle part of the collection that gives me teeny little tumors just thinking about it--but that wouldn't be very productive. Besides, in my defense, this was the kind of thing that my friends and I (most of us budding musicians and jazz snobs) were into at the time.

Now, ten years later, when I consider the collection as a whole, it's interesting for me to see how my tastes have progressed since the days when I was a near-obsessive purchaser of CDs. Of course "progressed" may be an inaccurate term because, if anything, my musical tastes have greatly simplified in the last ten years. I have almost completely lost my ear for the kind of challenging musicianship that thrilled me not too long ago. Flipping through radio stations in my car, if I happen to land on our local jazz station, I find myself often cringing at the soul-free production values and by-the-numbers formula of what I hear.

When considered against my musical tastes, my gaming preferences have remained largely steady for the majority of my life. For me, it's always been about sports games, with a light smattering of role playing games thrown in for good measure. Sure I'll dabble in other genres, particularly when big-name titles come around but I always seem to come back to the things I like, the games that I've most identified with during my time with the hobby.

In contrast, as I've been digitally backing up my musical collection, I've come across many CDs for which I have not a single recollection or emotional tie to. I'm quite sure there's a number of discs in my collection that never saw a single play-through, much less two or three. I even created a playlist on iTunes last weekend entitled "Songs I've Never Heard" and was surprised at how quickly that playlist filled up of music utterly foreign to me, despite having owned the CDs on which they came. That can't be said for my game collection; though it may suffer from sports-related tunnel vision, I have an emotional bond, a story or fond remembrance, for nearly every entry in the collection.

And still there's another layer to this hierarchy of personal pop culture priorities. Though I generally find greater pleasure in my games collection than my music collection, there are select CDs that I own that I would never want to be without and that I consider of great personal importance. I'm not sure I can say the same thing about any single game I own. I have a great affinity for many of them, yet there are few, if any, that I could absolutely not do without. Yet I have music (and, yes, books too) in my collection that, much like Charlton Heston and his rifle, you'll only pry out of my cold dead hands.

They're fickle things, these preferences and priorities, ones that are certainly difficult to define. Some are a product of time--what you think of as entertaining now you may look on as inane ten years from now--and some are utterly immune to it. And though I doubt I'll ever consider any title in my game collection to be the gaming equivalent of smooth jazz, at the same time I'm still waiting for that one title that will grab me and never let me go; the game that you'll only pry out of my cold dead hands.

Matthew Reilly writes video game novels. No, I don't mean novelizations of big-name game properties like Halo or Starcraft. Instead Reilly's novels feature the kind of relentless action sequences that pepper the best first person shooters and action games; the kinds of over-the-top, seat-of-your-pants action thrillrides that have made guys like Nick Cage and Michael Bay rich over the years.

Reilly's novels rely on straightforward action and little else; like a Serious Sam game set to words, except without as much justification for the violence. Whereas Cage/Bay summer popcorn flicks attempt a modicum of purpose when it comes to their actions scenes, Reilly tosses everything--motive, reason, even the very laws of physics--out the window, in his attempts to create 500-page shots of adrenaline.

I just finished Temple, the second Reilly novel, and I'm struck by the same two questions I asked myself after finishing his earlier book Ice Station:

1) How did this guy get a book deal with such a hyperbolic, hyperactive, damn near immature writing style?
2) Where can I find his next book?

The most charming aspect of Reilly is his complete lack of self-editor when it comes to piling on the action. If you think a plot point is precariously illogical, just wait ten pages and it will get worse. A few examples:

In Temple, he combines neo-Nazis, a German special forces unit, ancient Aztec myth, and a lingustics professor from New York City all searching for an ancient idol that can blow up the world; and it works. He locks his main characters in a Hummer being drowned in a Peruvian river while crocodiles and giant panthers attack them from all sides; and it works. In Ice Station, he pits French commandos against American scientists, a group of killer whales and a hyperintelligent seal. I kid you not. And it works.

Here's a typical paragraph from a Matt Reilly action scene, completey unaltered from how it appears in Temple:

And then he dropped down onto the conveyor belt and rolled quickly backward, underneath the the chopper's blurring blades, using his newfound leverage to yank Anistaze forward neck-first, right into the buzzsawlike blades of the helicopter!

Since when did "buzzsawlike" become a word? And check out all those italics and exclamation marks. It's like a journalism teacher's worst nightmare. Yet for whatever reason--the non-stop pace of his books, the winking self-deprecating dialogue, or just his simple exuberance--Matt Reilly's books are the kind of things great action movies are made of, the kind of thing great action games could be made of.

You ask me, a game publisher needs to hire this guy right away and get him scripting a new action title. Personally, I wouldn't mind shooting some French commandos... or killer whales for that matter.

Two remarkably similar messages I read this past week got me thinking about coaching; coach modes in sports games to be specific.

After falling out of fashion over the past few years, coach modes seem to be on the comeback trail. I could dedicate a GameSpotting column or two to singing the praises of the coach mode, and probably will at some point, but that's not my aim here. Suffice it to say, I've always enjoyed coach modes, if for no other reason than they provide a different method of playing the game; variety being the spice of life and all that.

Baseball seems to be the most natural home for manager/coach modes. The pace of the game, the sheer number decisions to make in a single at bat, the limitless possibilities that can crop up in a single plate appearance, all of which affect the manager's next call; it makes for compelling stuff. At the same time, as a virtual manager, you can coast your way through a game in no time, with nary a thought towards your hand-eye coordination or ability to read a pitch.

Which brings me back to my original thought regarding two comments I saw this week. The first was from a GameSpot reader who wondered on our Sports Forum if either Madden NFL 2005 or ESPN NFL 2K5 contained a coach mode (they both do). This reader was asking on behalf of his father-in-law, who was looking to play some football with his son-in-law but didn't want to have to deal with the intricate controls that today's sports games require. He just wanted to set his team up against his son's team and armchair coach them on to victory or defeat. It was his preferred style of play.

The second item I read was an e-mail from a reader named Adam who wrote to ask me if EA's MVP 2005 contained a coach mode. As it turns out, Adam has a physically disabled friend who is unable to play the baseball game in a traditional manner, yet still wants to play some games with his friends; something a coach mode would easily allow him to do. I replied that while MVP does have a coach mode, it does not use the in-game engine, instead presenting a summary of the game in a streamlined boxscore format. I added that I liked this coaching mode, because it allowed you to get through a game quickly without having to sit through the entire game pitch-by-pitch.

The more I think about it, however, it's clear that this streamlined approach won't cut it for Adam's friend. Sure, it will allow him to play the game and control the action on the field, but only in an abridged format. Instead of watching Sosa or A-Rod slam a home run in real time against his buddies, he'll only see the words "HOME RUN" on the screen. And that sort of sucks.

As I mentioned earlier, coach modes are on their way back. Titles like MVP 2005, ESPN NBA 2K5, and ESPN College Hoops 2K5, among others, make use of full or modified coach modes that allow you to control the action on the field or court, without having to make each shot, rebound, or block yourself. Madden NFL 2005 introduced a coach mode this year as a "new feature", four years into the lifespan of the PS2. You could even consider Gran Turismo 4's B-Spec feature a sort of coach mode, albeit an exceptionally boring one.

The great thing about sports games is their mass appeal. People who wouldn't consider picking up a World of Warcraft or Shadow of Rome, regularly trek out each year to pick up the latest version of Madden or the new NHL 2K game. Sports games also lend themselves to a wide variety of play styles. Some people want to make every pass, dump every puck, and drift every turn themselves. Some just want to call the action from the sidelines and watch things play out. Sports games can also be built to accommodate everyone, regardless of ability or preference. With the next generation of consoles just around the corner, here's hoping we won't have to wait until Madden NFL 2010 for PS3 to see the reintroduction of coach mode as a "new feature."

The XP grind has always been my MMORPG buzzkill. I'm certain that I'm not alone in that assertion but I've always felt particularly strong about it, mainly because I love the idea of MMORPGs so much. There's something inherently fascinating to me about people carrying on secondary lives in vibrant, fully-realized worlds. Hell, it's half the reason why I tried ingesting a few episodes of .hack, despite a violent allergy to most forms of anime. Yet the incessant need for *ahem* hacking out level after level of experience, killing the umpteenth monster in order to watch your experience bar inch imperceptibly towards that next plateau, has always seemed antithetical to the idea of simply existing in a virtual world for a few hours a week.

It's this kind of annoyance that has killed my enjoyment of MMO titles throughout the genre. My affairs with titles such as Anarchy Online, Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, and even my once beloved--and now uninstalled--City of Heroes have all ultimately ended because (among other reasons) I never felt like I was getting anywhere.

Enter World of Warcraft. With this game, I find myself in an entirely new grind-related quandary. Unlike many of my co-workers, I'm still below level 40--that mythic plateau of achievement that marks the truly dedicated WoW-er. In fact, my dwarf hunter is currently hovering halfway towards level 37. And that's my trouble.

As is often the case in real life, the problem begins and ends with finances. In short, I'm broke. Well not broke, really; I currently have about 50 gold to my name. Yet despite my considerable efforts--cutting a swath of skinned animal death through Stranglethorn Vale that would cause the president of the SPCA to faint; desperately sprinting to each freshly killed corpse when grouping with others, in the vain hope of grabbing every sellable iota of vendor trash; completely cutting myself off from learning new skills for at least my previous six levels; etc.--I'm still a full forty gold shy of the 90 required to purchase a mount at the level 40 milestone. And I want that mount. Bad.

I complain to guild mates. I complain to co-workers. I even complain to my wife, who simply asks me to move my head out of the way of the TV so she can watch the latest episode of Charmed. A few kind souls, both in the office and in my guild, have offered to loan me the money should I fall short upon reaching level 40. Though the offers are tempting, I feel obligated to turn them down, simply because I want to feel like I've earned the mount. Yet, for each hundred XP I earn, I grow more and more anxious that, when the level odometer turns over to 40, I'll be woefully short of my financial goal, stuck relying on my hunter's Aspect of the Cheetah to get me around.

And therein lies the rub. In previous MMORPGs, we've all complained about the XP grind and how, as you progress further up the experience ladder, the game experience seems to slow down and you never feel like you're getting anywhere. Each time I log onto WoW, on the other hand, I feel exactly the opposite; like I’m making too much progress for comfort, and that my rapidly accruing experience total is far exceeding my earnings capabilities. With WoW, I find myself in a unique situation: A willing slave to the grind. I find myself wishing for a bit less experience per kill (and a bit more silver for each corpse drop). I find myself longing to slow down and explore a bit more, hoping to find the freshly killed un-skinned animal corpses left behind by other players, a perfect opportunity to gather some leather goods for sale, without racking up pesky XP.

This problem is partially tied to Azeroth's rapidly evolving economy. The auction houses aren't necessarily the bargain bins they used to be, in my experience. Just a few weeks ago I could easily sell sets of green leather armor for 50-60 silver or more apiece. Yet when I logged on last night, I found three sets of the exact same armor returned to me via mail; not one of them had sold at auction. It's capitalism at its finest, and most frustrating: As competition increases, prices go down and profits decrease. So you head back outside and grind away.

In the end, grinding exists in WoW as a necessary evil. At the same time, it's rare to ever feel you aren't making substantial progress in the game. Among all the title's many achievements, WoW has done something I previously thought would be impossible to accomplish: Turned the XP grind on its head. That said, my in-game financial woes bring to mind the old adage:

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Just turned the last page on Dennis Lehane's Mystic River on the train home yesterday. After TIVOing the movie off of HBO last month, I figured I owed it to myself (and the movie) to read the source material first. I hope the movie ends up being less of a disappointment than the book did for me because, frankly, I was underwhelmed.

All the requisite ingredients for a good story are there: An emotionally charged story dealing with controversial topics, a murder mystery that kept me guessing until the end (more on that in a bit), and flawed characters you could relate to, all backed up by some above-average writing from Lehane; who once again deftly works in finely tuned human observations into normally mundane police procedurals.

So why didn't Mystic River work for me? The easy answer is the ending, which I found wholly unsatisfying. I won't give it away, but the whodunit revelation towards the end of the book came completely out of nowhere for me and felt forced on Lehane's part, as if pulled from the fictional ether. But more than that, the tone of the book seemed to be too restrained for its own good, too cold and distant to properly lend dramatic weight to the terrible circumstances some of the characters have endured through their lives.

In fact, as a side effect of this criticism, I'm actually expecting the film adaptation of Mystic River to be more successful than the book--simply because of the stellar cast. I've never known Sean Penn to pass up an opportunity to put his considerable emotional range in full view and I don't expect his Oscar-winning work in this film to be any different. I'll report back here, once I've seen the movie...

I've gotten my share of strange and/or passionate e-mails and private messages since joining the GameSpot staff but, for whatever reason, the comments really piled up over the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. As an aside to my more traditional GameSpotting musings, I thought I'd sample a few of these for you. Names have been obscured to protect the guilty. Unless the name made me laugh, that is. In all cases, spelling and grammar have been perfectly preserved.

Item #1 comes from via e-mail from a concerned Gran Turismo 4 fan who evidently was angered by my Gran Turismo 4 Japanese import impressions:

How is it on line? How many cars race at once? More then six I hope. If the is no online play and the bump car effect is still in the game. How will this game move the bar foreword? ... What other industry could tout such BIG INPROVMENTS and actually have changed so very little.

I barely have the heart to tell him that GT 4 won't arrive with online play enabled.

Item #2 arrived also via e-mail from a reader in South Carolina who wrote an impassioned letter decrying the EA/NFL and EA/ESPN partnerships that have recently developed:

And now... THIS! EA made me a little mad when they went and disposed of their enemy the way they did. They got outclassed from sitting on their ass so long, and it ticked them off. So now there's a good chance we're ALL going to suffer for it. They probably won't bring back those two fellows who did their hilarious (at times) commentary for ESPN ("Dan" and "Peter"), the "shoulder charge", the diving tackles, the MUCH BETTER LOOKING PLAYER MODELS (EVERY player in MADDEN looks like a block of granite!), etc.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions, and also I hope you have some words of solace or encouragement about this impending "doom". =)

This is not the first comment I've seen lamenting the state of sports gaming, the death of Visual Concepts' NFL 2K franchise, the lack of healthy competition in the market place, etc. Many people have asked me if I'm outraged by developments such as this and, frankly, the answer is no. Hindsight being 20/20 of course, we should have seen deals like this coming along months ago, if not years. The saddest part of the EA/ESPN deal? I'll be 48 years old by the time the 15-year exclusive deal expires. FORTY EIGHT. Now that is worth getting outraged over...

Item #3 arrived to me via GameSpot's private message feature and displays a commonly held misconception among our readers:

hey i was wondering if u gamespot emplyees could send me a $500.00 ebgames gift card for my birthday on Febuary 27th

First of all, I think this guy is confusing us (GameSpot) for the retail game store Gamestop. Secondly, even if I did work for Gamestop, why would I send you a gift card from EBGames, their direct retail competitor? Wouldn't I just send you a Gamestop card? Finally, the saddest part of this message is that I spent most of the weekend desperately seaching for someone I could randomly send $500 to. If only this gentleman had sent me his full name and address! On the plus side, I think we still have some of those Balrogs left...

The last message, Item #4, happens to be my favorite one of all, simply because it's sent from a user named mrsweden:

So are you swedish or what?

That's it. That's the entirety of the message. Apparently, this mrsweden guy is totally into being Swedish. And you know what? As a fellow Swede, I am totally cool with that.

I'll be back to the regular GameSpotting shrieking and raving next week. For now, feel free to fill up my mailbox with more good stuff. Even if you're not Swedish.