Lost's official podcast - surprisingly refreshing!

So I've been listening to the Lost podcast lately. I've gone through the handful of season 4 podcasts and actually went back and downloaded some of the season 3 ones. I don't even remember what it was that prompted me to check out the podcast originally, I tend to have a dim view of "official" TV show podcasts. This mainly stems from the Battlestar Galactica podcast, which got some discussion in blog comments here and here. My original objection to the BSG podcast was mainly that I didn't want to watch the show twice, and I as understand the BSG podcast it is designed to play alongside the episode. As time wore on I got increasingly annoyed at the fact that important story information seems to be revealed in the podcasts. If you browse around BSG fan web sites you'll run into things where you say "I didn't know that!" and it turns out that you didn't know it because it's not in the show, it's in the podcast. So the Lost podcast isn't like that. For one, it's much shorter than the show, usually less than half an hour. But the part I like best is that it turns out that a large part of the podcast is Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reading questions submitted at an ABC online forum. And they make fun of the questions, they make fun of the posters, and they occasionally reveal something interesting and insightful. They'll often say something like "This question comes from LockeIsTheBest48, who has posted 400 times in the last 90 days. That's a bit too often with the posts, you may want to get outside for a bit." or something to that effect. My favorite so far was somebody asking whether the injuries inflicted in the hatch explosion were based on the "four monkeys". They went on to explain that Locke was mute, Charlie was deaf, Desmond had been blown into the jungle naked, and thus they predicted Eko would be blind. (This was early on in season 3.) Carlton and Damon discussed this a little, running down the Hear No Evil, Say No Evil idea before there was a pause and Carlton said, "Wait, what's the fourth monkey? Don't be naked? THERE ARE ONLY THREE MONKEYS!" After a pause then Damon said, "Yeah, so interesting theory, but no." Then they move onto the next question. I don't know how I existed without the internet to feed me a constant stream of mockery-worth content. To find out that it comes *pre-mocked* in the Lost podcast. Well, that's exciting! On a more serious note, they do say interesting stuff. One of my favorites so far was that they say they knew that ABC couldn't resist promoting the episode where Eko dies as "Somebody on Lost will DIE!" promos and the whole "Don't miss this episode!" sort of vibe. So they claim that's why they introduced Nikki and Paolo when they did, that basically the audience would assume that Nikki and/or Paolo would die and the whole thing would be a big tease. That way, when Eko dies it was even more as a surprise. I have to say, that warms the cockles of my cold, marketing-hating heart. The idea that they deliberately inserted "red shirt" characters into the show just to confound the marketing expectations is brilliant. It almost makes up for the fact I hate Nikki and Paolo for their spider-throwing ways! Both of them got exactly what they deserved if you ask me.
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Mauvais Role

Boing Boing TV is a bit hit or miss for me, but they recently had a French CGI short film (of all things) on and I really enjoyed it. As Boing Boing describes it:
Today on Boing Boing tv, Mauvais Rôle ("Bad Role"), a short animated film about a computer game character who gets fed up with playing the same lame villain roles all the time -- and takes matters into his own (clawed) hands. His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...
Take a look. I thought it was worth five or six minutes.
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Recent Games

Been playing a whole crop of new (to me) games lately, thought I'd summarize a few of them. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (Nintendo DS) Yeah, it's another DS game that could go on any console. The second screen makes some things more convenient, but it's not critical. They've even dropped the weird "two battles at once" mode from the previous AW title. Advance Wars has always represented great turn-based strategy and this installment is more of the goodness. There are several significant changes and I suspect it has made the game overly favor the defender, but I haven't played enough multiplayer to be sure. The AI has always been pretty bad, and that is still true. I haven't completely finished the campaign, but I'm only a few missions short (I think) and the last few missions weren't fun so I think I'm done. But there are something like 40 "Trial Maps" which are fun. This is the first version of Advance Wars to support internet play, and that seems fairly solid. It is worth nothing that it doesn't support saving an online game, so I'd give the edge to Field Commander on the PSP in that regard. It does support internet voice chat but it's terrible. Tony and I have been disabling the built-in chat and using Xbox 360 for chat, which is superior technology. Basically, if you enjoyed a previous Advance Wars then you'll enjoy Days of Ruin. Pixeljunk Monsters (PS3) This is a "tower defense game". I'm not sure this is a real genre, I'm only aware of two other games in the "genre" - Desktop Tower Defense (Flash) and Hordes of Orcs for OS X. Hordes is in mind a very inferior ripoff of DTD. Pixeljunk Monsters doesn't play much like the other two. On the one hand, yes you're building towers to attack oncoming monsters, and different types of monsters are vulnerable to different towers. On the other hand in PM you have an avatar that runs around the screen and you have to collect the coins, as well as the power-up gems (which aren't present in DTD). You also have the ability to level a tower by standing on it for a while. Lastly in PM you can only build towers on trees. Different levels have different tree arrangements and more complex monster movement patterns which makes each level a different and unique challenge. I like PM a lot. If you have a PS3 it's worth the $8 or so it costs (it's a downloadable store title) Mass Effect (Xbox 360) This is where Bwana will try to make a joke as I start covering November titles. I believe that Gamefly doesn't buy enough of the big Christmas season titles, because this happens every year. They start sending me B PSP titles from about 7 places down my queue and then after Christmas they slowly ship all my backlogged high-profile holiday titles. Mass Effect falls into this category. Historically I've liked Bioware's PC games and disliked their console games. Even Knights of the Old Republic I thought was a crummy console game with clunky mechanics and a PC interface shoehorned onto a console controller. I'm definitely in the minority here, but I didn't care for KOTOR. Mass Effect is finally fun in combat. They still have technical issues - the game drops frames like crazy and the "AI" of your squad mates deserves the quotes I give it. But if you can get past those the story is interesting, and it's not as pause-happy as KOTOR was. Now, I'll warn you it does talk your ear off at the beginning. I finished the very first tutorial story in a touch less than an hour. Then I got to the Citadel, and it was just "As you know Bob, it's been over a hundred years since blah, blah, blah," for quite a while. I got up to about four hours of gameplay before I saw another combat. If you think you can survive the RPG world-building datadump at the start it's a solid game. Commanders: Attack of the Genos (Xbox 360) Last week's Live Arcade title came out of nowhere as far as I was concerned. It's more turn-based strategy! I find the retro art-deco looks (tanks with fins!) amusing, and the game seems pretty playable. Haven't tried it online yet, but I like the singleplayer game. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Woosh. I really wanted to like Uncharted. Truthfully this is a game that had I bought it I'd still be playing. But since I rented it I'm just sending it back. I had been looking forward to Uncharted, but when I played the demo I felt that A ) the melee system was stiff and awkward, B ) the attackers took entirely too much bullets to drop, C ) there weren't nearly enough bullets provided, and D ) the cover was both very "sticky" and just didn't work well. Having played the full game now I still think all of those things. The demo is Chapter Four of the game and I didn't see that very much had changed. I feel like the designers of the game decided it was too short so they compensated by making the combat encounters too difficult (they call that "adding replay value"). The platforming is a lot of fun, but I got tired of restarting combats multiple times until I learned where everybody was going to spawn from. Patapon (PSP - demo) I mentioned the crazy download process a few posts back but I checked out the game yesterday. It's cute, and it certainly has some interesting ideas. But at the end of it I sort of went "Meh." It seemed like too much work to try to figure out which command was needed when, plus the repetition of drumming the "march forward" command over and over just seemed plodding. I could be convinced the final game is worth playing, but the demo didn't raise my interest level at all.
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The Most of P.G. Wodehouse

I've piled up some books to review. Let's dive in shall we? Today's book is The Most of P.G. Wodehouse by well, P.G. Wodehouse (duh!). Some of you may not recognize the name but will know him as the author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories. I picked this up last summer after my quasi-regular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy binges. (A series that JP should totally read some day!) Often when I do these I only read the first four books, and then add on the pair of Dirk Gently books depending on mood. But this last time I read Mostly Harmless and The Salmon of Doubt. Douglas Adams called Wodehouse one of the greatest writers in the English language, that's good enough for me to check him out. This was not the first time I had considered reading Wodehouse, but this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Having made the decision to read such a prolific author the next choice is where to begin? This book was positioned as a "best of" sort of title in the Amazon reviews, so it seemed a good place to start. To be honest, I'm not sure it's the best introduction to his work. It contains selections from several of his "themes" - stories from the Drones Club setting, ones about Golf and so forth. Jeeves is the last section of the book and after a few short stories the book contains the complete text of the novel Quick Service I enjoyed this book overall, but I don't think it really is a "best of". Jeeves is by far the best material and it doesn't start until page 459. Even there, I think the characters get more room to act in the novel, so the best part is saved for last. The Drones Club section that opens the book was decent, but it was my second least favorite section (Golf being the worst). It's a good survey of the breadth of Wodehouse, but that means you're sampling from a variety of plates. I think on balance I would have rather focused on Blandings or Jeeves and skipped some of the other settings. I'll read some more Wodehouse in the future. I didn't really get the "best wordsmith of the English language" vibe from most of this, but I did quite like several bits.
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