It’s so easy for a video game critic to spend pages vivisecting mediocre games, picking apart all the nuances that keep them from being worthy of purchase. The trouble is, there are actually monumental games out there – those are far more difficult to pin down without waxing poetic.
Halo 4 is one of those titans.
As I get older and the car companies continually reinvent their mass-market creations, a thought occurs to me.
Cars today stink, and we’re feeding into the increasingly nauseating cesspool, lapping up the offerings like Stockholm Syndrome-inflicted slaves.
Only a decade ago, you didn’t have to buy a sports car to have a fun driving experience. Low-rent economy cars were simple in style and driving dynamics, but they were more fun than most of today’s offerings. My Focus turns ten years old in a few months, and despite its age, is more engaging than its current iteration. Ford’s offering under the “Focus” moniker has been altered and watered down to such a degree that the car barely deserves to keep the name.
In the shadow of the 12-12-12 Sandy benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, some of Staten Island’s musicians came together and organized a benefit concert of their own. Justin Sarachik (Process of Fusion), Jay Campbell (Everynightdrive), and Valerie Bond (Spread the Rumor) sat down with me on the 12th to talk about their own benefit concert, set to raise money for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
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Christmas music is out of control in this country.
Every autumn, a barrage of marketing and advertisements inundates consumers, urging them to spend their money on any number of stupid crap and useless items. But Christmas, unlike any other holiday, has its own “season,” a period that starts arbitrarily, some time around Thanksgiving.
For six months, the annoying, pseudo-hipster/carefree college girl anthem (“Call Me Maybe”) has dominated New York pop stations, which is bad enough in my book. But at least I could get some peace easily by switching the station. Then the song crept into retail store playlists, and my psychotic hatred for both Jepsen and her vapid shit pile of a song was born. The song was inescapable; morning news stations played the song’s chorus as a jingle, radio DJs and entertainment blogs sang Jepsen’s praises as the next big thing, and the goddamn USA Olympic swim teams sang the song in a video. Even our main newsroom was awash with female journos reciting the asinine chorus.
If you love rock and roll, you love Led Zeppelin. They were the harbingers of heavy rock and carried the counterculture torch from the late 60s to late 70s, bringing back funk and the blues along the way. There’s always debate over which Led Zeppelin song is the greatest – Rolling Stone, whose opinion I don’t regard highly, just released a new list of the “top 40 Zeppelin songs.”
…and Guitar World’s list sucks. Eddie Van Halen, Brian May, and Alex Lifeson were all placed before Jimi Hendrix (4) and Stevie Ray Vaughan (8).
Listen, I’m as hot for teacher as the next guy who grew up with Guitar Hero. But Eddie Van Halen isn’t the “greatest guitarist of all time.” He shouldn’t even crack a top five list. Not unless one of the major requirements of a winner is the ability to prance across stages wearing tighter pants than a ballerina.
Despite my disdain for ninety percent of Van Halen’s music, a fact remains: without him, speed metal isn’t as accepted in the mainstream and we lose the next generation of speed freaks…not that I’d weep if I didn’t had to sit through another terrible rendition of “Runnin’ with the Devil” at Guitar Center.
Well, that’s not a popular sentiment, is it.
Everyone from Rolling Stone to actual music fans has taken a shot at Nickelback in the past few years. “Alternative” music fans hate Nickelback and their formulaic, chart-topping albums. The records earn low scores and disdain from the “cultured” rock community. But they’ve got a much better repertoire than you think.
The beginning of autumn always has the baseball – there’s always a division or two still up for grabs. No matter who you root for, late September is always an exciting time to be at the ballpark. Unless you’re a Mets fan like I am. In which case, meet me at the bar on Nelson to drown our sorrows.
We barely had a shot at the Wild Card this year, even with Bud Selig’s ridiculous new “two team Wild Card” system. It pits the top two non-division-winning teams in each league against each other in a single game playoff to determine who will receive the final playoff spots.
Popular music always has its “edgy” outliers – bands you tell normal people that you like, so they’ll think you’re cool. Like the Foo Fighters: “hard” enough to give you some actual cred, but accessible enough for Z100.
