Portal 2 Games Reviews

After the end credits roll on Portal 2, it's kind of hard to believe that this series had its humble beginnings as a student project called Narbacular Drop, which itself just laid down the basic mechanical framework for the kind of fourth-dimensional puzzle-solving of the originalPortal. Even the original Portal was all but defined by its tight focus and limited scale; it just executed on all those elements with a consistent, almost preternatural level of ingenuity and humor. 

I use the somewhat dismissive "just" here because the challenges of following up something so inventive and so universally well-received are arguably greater than coming up with the core concept in the first place. The element of surprise was a significant factor in the impact of the original Portal, but going into Portal 2, you know how a portal gun works, you know that Aperture Science is essentially a less diabolical, but equally irresponsible counterpart to Half-Life's Black Mesa, and you know that GlaDOS likes testing, but loves murder. 

With these known quantities in mind, Valve does about the smartest thing it can with a full-blown sequel to such an effectively minimalist package by tossing out many of the self-imposed restrictions of the original and largely ignoring the temptation to lean on lots of easy callbacks. What it lacks in the surprise punch the original packed, it makes up for with scope and scale, couching that now-familiar combination of deadpan humor and brain-boggling puzzles in a game that's significantly bigger and more robust in virtually every meaningful way, but without feeling any less dense. 

Meet Wheatley. He means well enough!Since the apparent "death" of GlaDOS at the end of Portal, the Aperture Science Research Facility has gone to seed. After you're awoken from a hibernation chamber disguised as a cheap hotel room by a friendly, motormouthed AI calledWheatley--voiced with a terrific nervous energy by British humorist Stephen Merchant--it's not long before you're once again running a series of "tests" for a revived and coolly vengeful GlaDOS. It would be charitable to characterize GlaDOS as indignantly sociopathic, and her lust for punishing you for your past transgressions is riper than ever. 

I'll avoid any specific plot points, but suffice it to say that your journey takes you far deeper into the bowels of the facility than the original game even hinted at. This journey also serves as an Aperture Science history lesson of sorts, providing a glimpse of the company's dated industrial aesthetics through the decades, and introducing you to company founder Cave Johnson--another terrific performance, this time courtesy of perennial tough-talker and boss-man-type J.K. Simmons--as well as the evolution of the company's absurd corporate culture that would eventually give birth to GlaDOS. 

The visual style of Portal 2 seems to be in direct defiance of the tight, hermetic feel of the original, eschewing that singular aesthetic in favor of many shades of grimy, long-forgotten industrialism and cavernous spaces that hint at an almost deliberate carelessness. Everything is hastily built on top of everything else, which leads to environments that are haphazard, impossibly dense, and almost constantly in jeopardy on collapsing in on themselves. In fact, the game can be so propulsive that it's easy to blow right past lots of terrific, often funny set details. 

A brief glimpse into Aperture's dilapidated past.And the puzzles. Oh, the puzzles! Having already introduced the core tenets of how portals work in the first game, Portal 2 runs far more briskly through the fundamentals, and introduces a slew of previously abandoned Aperture compounds and technologies to help constantly re-complicate things for you. Like the original, though, Portal 2 smartly introduces each idea one at a time before requiring you to use them in concert. At a point it can be easy to lose sight of the fundamentals as you get caught up in all these new-fangled gels, laser-bending cubes, hard light bridges, tractor beams, and more. Don't forget! It's called Portal 2 for a reason. 

A certain amount of trial-and-error is a necessity in solving many of the puzzles as you boggle out which buttons activate which contraptions, and how you'll need to harness them to get to the other side. While a certain amount of crackerjack timing is key to solving some puzzles, brains almost always trump reflexes, and if you find yourself struggling with the controls--regardless of whether you're playing with a mouse and keyboard or a controller--you're probably doing it wrong. 

Being several times the length of its predecessor, with puzzles that are as hard, if not harder, pure mental fatigue can also be an issue in Portal 2. While the game is constantly luring you forward with the promise of new visual treats and consistently sardonic dialogue from the expert voice cast, a short break can mean the difference between sussing out the solution and turning your brain into a potato. 

Once solved, the puzzles themselves offer little reason to revisit the single-player campaign--which, in some ways, ends much more climactically than the original--though I still found being able to focus more on the game's plentiful gags on my second time through to still be quite fulfilling. Additionally, there's an enlightening developer commentary track provided by key members of the team at Valve that can be absolutely fascinating in its own right. 

Robots don't have to hug! But they sure like to.Portal 2 also sports an equally well-crafted co-op campaign, casting you as one half of a gangly, curiously likable robotic odd couple built by GlaDOS for the specific purpose of running through her diabolical test chambers. It's much less story-intensive than the single-player game, though having sets of portals with which to solve the puzzles, while also being fundamentally dependent on another player's puzzle-solving abilities, can unsurprisingly complicate things. This mode features a "ping" tool which allows you to better direct your partner, though I found voice communication to still be an absolute necessity. Frustration looms throughout Portal 2, though if you're not operating at the same speed as your partner, you don't know your partner well enough, or, God forbid, you know your partner too well, it seems more likely to rear its head during the co-op campaign.

Despite being so much bigger than the original, I actually felt a little melancholy once Portal 2 was over, simply because it's so rare to find a game this smart, this funny, and this rich with detail. It elevates Portal from an odd, memorable experiment to one of the most significant series in Valve's stable with a unique voice and an incredible level of quality that all developers should aspire to.

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No, That Absurd Witcher 2 Patch Isn't Actually 9GB

I saw more than a few people complaining on this here Internets last night about a crazy 9GB patch for CD Projekt's The Witcher 2. When exactly does a "patch" stop being a "patch"?

Turns out the whole thing is an error. CD Projekt's told me the patch is much more reasonable--less than 20MB--but an issue with Steam specifically forced users to basically download the whole game all over again. As far as CD Projekt can tell, it's only a Steam problem right now.

"We’re working with Steam to get the issue sorted by Monday morning," a company spokesperson said.

Darn. Gamers with digital pitchforks fighting over 9GB would've made a more interesting story.

Time to run from the big, bad bandwidth monster.

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Mortal Kombat's First DLC: All Those Pre-Order Costumes and Fatalities

If you're anything like the men of Giant Bomb, collecting all those scattered pre-order bonus costumes for Mortal Kombat was, to you, a calling second to none. Jeff and Ryan, in particular, got into a particularly heated competition to try and earn my unusedScorpion code. Jeff frequently tried to entice me with promises of free shitty PSP RPGs that happened to be sitting on his desk. Ryan took me to a Go! Team show. I think we know who won out on that one--though to be truthful, I ended up keeping the code for myself. Ain't I a stinker?

All that bartering and begging ultimately was pointless in the end, as series honcho Ed Boon let it be known via his Twitter feedyesterday that the first DLC pack for MK would be a collec--erm, sorry, kollection of all seven klassic kostumes--for Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Reptile, Ermac, Jade, Mileena, andKitana--and the accompanying klassic fatalities--for Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Reptile--would be bundled together into a single DLC pack. No pricing or release date has been announced for the pack just yet, though a trailer for the DLC is expected to drop tomorrow.

Boon likes to tease his Twitter followers with questions about what charact--okay, fine, "kharacters" fans would like to see as future DLC. Blind fighter Kenshi and a new female character namedSkarlet are still slated to be the first ones released--with Skarlet apparently coming first--but Boonpromises many more waves of additional kontent down the road. So don't worry if you're holding out for an updated version of Rain to fill out the last remaining color of the ninja rainbow, or just really want to play as Meat for some reason. Your day may yet come.

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The fairy-tale island

Mont Saint-Michel is a beautiful rocky tidal island, the most visited place in France.

The island is more than 1,000 years old. Its inhabitants are only 41. Every year, she’s visited by at least 3.5 million people.

“Do you know the most visited place in France?” asked my French teacher Stéphane Dugois.

Most students answered the Eiffel Tower. We thought that the Eiffel Tower is the most famous French site. Undoubtedly. Everybody knows that, even those who never visit France.

“No. It’s Mont Saint-Michel,” he answered shortly.

I was surprised.

Mont Saint-Michel is a beautiful rocky tidal island topped with an abbey in the region of Normandy. It’s approximately one-kilometer off the country’s north coast at the mouth of the Couesnon River. 

Standing majestically at 80-meters high, sandy land surrounds the island. When the tide is high, Mont Saint-Michel becomes a true island.

Historians used to believe that a forest, called the forest of Scissy, once surrounded the island. Yet the forest disappeared when the sea gradually engulfed it. Its geography reminds me of the Tanah Lot temple in Bali.

The island was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1979, making it one of several French monuments to enter UNESCO’s list. As a favorite tourist d estination, the island is open to the public except on 

Jan. 1, May 1 and Dec. 25.

My trip to the island took time. From Dijon, the city where I stayed, I took a train first to Paris for an hour and a half. From Paris I took another train to Rennes for another two hours. Rennes is the 

city where I stayed for a night before I continued my journey to Mont Saint-Michel the next day.

When the morning came I hurried to the bus station where frequent buses carry visitors to the island.

My bus departed at 9:40 a.m. and it arrived at 11 a.m. So it took almost another hour and a half from Rennes to Mont Saint-Michel.

The island was packed with tourists and I could sense what Stéphane already said. On the island, the ambiance was much more active with tourists flooding the small cobbled-stone streets and lines of restaurants and souvenir shops while 15th— 16th century houses decorated the streets.

Lines of souvenir shops, restaurants and small inns beautify the island’s narrow street.

One of the many restaurants, La Mère Poulard, is particularly popular for its giant pricy omelet. A French woman named Annette Poulard started the omelet and her restaurant in 1879 and it has been famous ever since. To eat an omelet there costs at least 28 euros.

In this place, I could eat the famous omelet, hunt Mont Saint-Michel souvenirs and also visit the museums.

There are four museums here. The Maritime and Ecology Museum offers the opportunity to discover the island’s tides and see a collection of 250 old model boats. At the second museum, we entered into a little room and there was a spectacle relating to the island’s history and its process of creation.

The third museum is a house once owned by French knight Bertrand du Guesclin in the 14th century.

The house was built in 1365 and the inside gives us a glimpse of a 14th century interior, from the furniture, the bridal chamber to armor previously worn by Bertrand du Guesclin.

The Museum of History displays a collection of ancient weapons and medieval instruments of torture.

The abbey crowns Mont Saint-Michel. And here lays the island’s long history.

It all began in the year 708, when Archangel Saint Michel demanded Bishop Aubert change Mount Tombe — the ancient name of Mont Saint-Michel — into a holy place. In short, a church should be built and the island should be dedicated to the Archangel.

Path to the abbey.

In the beginning, Bishop Aubert didn’t believe this order. After several miraculous events, he was finally convinced. The abbey started to build its church in the 11th century. It took 60 years to complete.

During the middle-ages, Mont Saint-Michel became a popular pilgrimage destination. Pilgrims came from Normandy, other French regions and Western Europe.

From 1154 to 1186, Robert de Torigny became the abbot. Under his reign, Mont Saint-Michel achieved its golden age. However, political upheaval in1204 caused a part of the abbey to be badly burned.

Later, a donation from King Philip Augustus helped start the reconstruction.

In the early 14th century, the hundred years’ war between French and England exploded. King Charles IV soon decided to fortify the abbey, protecting the entrance to the monastery with towers and 

ramparts.

However, the war destroyed the abbey’s church. In 1450 construction of a new church began and was completed in 1521. By that time, social trends had shifted. Intellectual, spiritual and cultural centers moved to town — closer to the King’s residence.

As for Mont Saint-Michel, half of its monks moved to town. The French Revolution in 1789 scattered the last monks. After the French Revolution the island served as a prison until 1863. In 1874, 

the French Department of Fine Arts finally took action to preserve the island.

After a bleak period lasting almost a century, some 19th century French romantic writers rediscovered its beauty. Guy de Maupassant regarded Mont Saint-Michel as a strange but beautiful object. Writer Victor Hugo, whose notable works included Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, considered it a beautiful pyramid.

For me, Mont Saint-Michel is simply a fairy-tale island. She’s far from the land and far from civilization. Her beautiful form is like something that comes out of imagination — just like her old fairy-tale story of the Forest of Scissy.

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Letting the sun trip into you

My latest trip to the sun washed cities of the Gold Coast and Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, taught me that people are at the heart of your every visit to every place. 

They are, in many ways, the ones who breathe life into a place so you can taste a little more of life.

People are the ones who get a place running again after devastating floods. Robert Friedler of Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary told me that the sanctuary was inundated by 13 meters of water when a flood washed over sections of Brisbane.

“Three enclosures — the koala, wombat and reptiles — were shut due to damage. The cafe also had an inch of water,” he told The Jakarta Post.

However, sanctuary staff took the animals to higher ground and spent weeks cleaning and rebuilding the parts that were affected by the flood, he said. 

Thanks to this work, the sanctuary has reopened its doors so you can hug a koala, hand feed the kangaroos and, for the less squeamish, hold up a baby crocodile to feel its amazingly soft underside. 

People are also the ones who put creativity and energy in turning a wild rainforest into a place where you can walk between and above ancient trees. 

The Tamborine Rain Forest Skywalk was born after the Moore family erected 30-meter cantilevers to support a 40-meter-long bridge that snakes through the trees on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast’s hinterland.

With these sturdy steel bridges, you can now walk among 8-meter-high deciduous figs and giant strangler vines. The neat, spacious and graveled paths on the slopes make it easy for parents to push their toddlers in strollers for a cool outing in nature, just like the family I met along the way.

“The rainforest should be fun and interesting. We try to present it that way. When people enjoy it, conservation and respect for it will follow,” Skywalk general manager Brendan Moore said.

People and their personalities can also define a place. Michael Ward is proof of that. Michael, who would make a good Santa Claus with his wild, white beard, runs the Tamborine Mountain Distillery with his family. 

He greeted me with a buoyant hello when I arrived and spoke jovially about the homemade, award-winning liquors, vodkas and various other drinks he crafted. 

Michael’s wife Alla concocted the recipes for these drinks, which taste wonderfully like the fruits they were made of, like the Lemon Myrtle Leaf Vodka. She also hand painted some of the bottles with floral motifs, turning each into a collector’s item. 

Another place that exemplifies how people bring a worthy place into existence is the Skypoint observation deck — with 1,303 tons of glass and aluminum — perched atop the 77th and 78th floors of the Q1 Building in Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast’s suburb famous for its beach culture.

Skypoint is fully enclosed with glass panels so you can view Surfers Paradise in its breathtaking entirety, from the scintillating blue waves of the Pacific Ocean crashing on the beach to the posh villas that line the waterfront. 

Natasha McNamara, Skypoint's PR executive, said that the best time to visit is during sunset. This is when the sun casts orange hues as it sinks beyond the horizon. Sunset is also when Skypoint kicks up its entertainment a notch, especially on weekends. 

“As the sun sets over the Gold Coast, each Friday and Saturday from 8 p.m. SkyPoint transitions from a fabulous day venue into a chic bar with smooth beats spun by local and international DJs,” Natasha said.

Ardent Leisure group, which runs Skypoint, also runs Dreamworld recreation park, where you can get adrenaline shooting through your veins, including those in your head, with their rides. 

“Dreamworld has a number of record breaking rides. One is the Giant Drop — the tallest vertical free-fall ride in the world. We also have the Tower of Terror II, which is amongst the world’s top five fastest rides,” Natasha said.

In the Tower of Terror you will be strapped to a car that shoots 100 meters skyward up a J-shaped ramp to send you hurtling back down 161 kilometers per hour into a 206 meter tunnel. 

People and the work they do far from the sight of visitors also make a noteworthy difference. Jamie Giddens, the publicity and promotions executive of Seaworld, told me that all their staff and animal handlers were certified animal husbandry and marine scientists.

“This is why we have one of the best breeding programs of anywhere in the world,” he said.

A knowledgeable staff is not only good for the animals but also the visitors. I had a good time watching the fish detective show and the dolphin show, where the animals charmed me with their antics while their handlers filled me in on the threats like illegal fishing that these animals face in the wild.

However, a kind of fishing that will not hurt any animal can be found at Tweed River with the Catch-a Crab tour operators. Before I went fishing I had to find some bait by going yabbie pumping. Yabbie pumping means that you have to wade waist deep near mangroves to pump up wet sand where the yabbies, a species of tiny, nearly transparent shrimp, live. Given my skills, I caught one yabbie and a few smaller fish.

Another place where operators share their love for nature with guests is Tangalooma Island Resort on Moreton Island. Tangalooma is a one and a half hour catamaran ride from Brisbane, but is worlds apart from the bustling capital city. For one, there are hardly any vehicles as the island is made of nothing but sand.

Once again, it is the staff who love nature that will leave you with a love for nature. Marine biologists will accompany you on tours such as whale watching.

Bird’s view: The Tamborine Rain Forest Skywalk snakes through the trees on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast’s hinterland.Courtesy of Tamborine Forest Skywalk“This ensures that all people who partake in these activities gain a full understanding of the environment they are in,” Tangalooma Island director David James said.

Tangalooma organizes whale watching cruises during whale season from June to November. Unfortunately, I came during the wrong season, but I did get to feed wild dolphins that came close to shore at night. It was the first time I heard the cries of dolphins coupled with crashing waves, sounds which resonated in my soul.

After all, these fine mammals represent the human spirit in abo-riginal folklore.

Tangalooma wrapped up my Australian vacation, as it was time to go back to Jakarta. 

As sad as it was to leave, I learned the importance of losing yourself in your vacation and letting yourself enjoy what the hustle of city life does not allow you to. 

It is also the best way to show appreciation to those who work hard to make your visit a memorable one. Because, like what the dolphins symbolize, we too need balance in life.

http://www.thejakartapost.com

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Mortal Kombat Games Reviews

Mortal Kombat, the reboot-friendly title of the ninth core game in a franchise that spans nearly two decades, manages to contain something for just about every sort of Mortal Kombat fan. If you're the type that just wants to see video game guys kill each other in gruesome and often-hilarious ways, MK has plenty of that. If you're interested in an approachable, well-designed fighting game that offers a variety of wild moves that are easy to execute but are tougher to work into timing-based combos, you're totally covered. And if you care about the lore of Mortal Kombat--bear with me here, I know how weird it is to talk about the story in a fighting game as a strong point--this game takes you through the early parts of the MK story, before it got too crazy and littered with more characters and realms than you could shake a loose spinal cord at. With its shockingly terrific solo components and a multiplayer offering that gives you plenty of options, Mortal Kombat might just be the most complete fighting game ever released. Oh, and yeah, it's a lot of fun to play, too. 

The fighting style in Mortal Kombat builds upon the relatively recent past, with some of its ideas coming out of the previous release, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. But that game was still set in a 3D environment, allowing players to sidestep out of the way of incoming spears, fire, and ice projectiles. The new Mortal Kombat flattens the action back down to a 2D plane, just as it was in the original trilogy of arcade releases. This change makes an immediate impact on the action, returning the game to an in-your-face, offensive style, where the best way to stop your opponent from teleporting behind you with his fist out is often to just do it to him first. Projectiles are truly dangerous again, and the game feels a bit more active than its immediate predecessor did. 

The game also returns to the uppercuts and sweeps found in the original trilogy. You can start combos with jump-in punches, juggle them up into the air, and do what you can to keep them there, delivering damage all the while. That's not to say that there's no defensive aspect to Mortal Kombat, as there's definitely value in turtling up, trying to poke, and baiting out someone's X-ray, a bone-crunching move that requires a full super meter to attempt. But at times it feels like the fights are best when two players are simply going for it at all times. It's a thrilling game with a lot of flashy moves and combos, many of which can be sussed out by newer players. The specials are easy to perform, and once you wrap your mind around the logic of getting someone into the air and keeping them there, figuring out the most damaging moves you can is half the fun (at least until someone does the math and tells you which combos, exactly, do the most damage). While it goes out of its way to recall some of the fighting mechanics popularized by MKII and MK3, the game doesn't play like some total throwback, either. Carefully considering when to use the moves that drain parts of your super meter and timing those juggles just right are both pretty key.

Johnny Cage, playing the minigame from Tapper... but with SKULLS.That style of fighting drives the entire game across all of its modes, but you can opt to play it in both a traditional one-on-one fight or in a two-on-two tag battle. The game actually lets up to four humans play at once, if you're interested in tag-teaming with a real person. The tag battles add some extra moves to the game, letting you call in your partner to perform quick special moves or tagging out in the middle of a combo with fast switches between fighters. Personally, I prefer the classic one-on-one style but tagging in and out makes for a fun variant.

Mortal Kombat probably contains the best collection of single-player elements of any fighting game, ever. Its largest piece is the story mode, a chapter-based tale that takes you from one playable character to the next as the events of Mortal Kombat's first three games unfold in an alternate timeline that allows the developers to change some pretty interesting things about the state of the Mortal Kombat universe. By the end, some characters are left in a completely different state than they were in the "normal" timeline, which is pretty cool. But the best part about the story is the way it's conveyed. The game seamlessly weaves from fight to cutscene and back again, loading the battles in the background as you watch the story scenes unfold. Each match even ends with a custom win quote specific to that situation. The flow of the story really sucks you in, and other than having to deal with some annoying boss AI near the end of each tournament (but especially at the very end), it's really outstanding. It's also pretty long, too, with over a dozen chapters that, if I'm counting, probably takes somewhere around seven or eight hours to finish, provided you aren't skipping cutscenes. In addition to the preset story mode, you can also take on an arcade ladder mode with each character, which gives you a quick batch of fights that culminate in character-specific endings. 

The other big single-player mode is the Challenge Tower, which is a collection of 300 tasks that vary up the rules of the fighting in a lot of different ways. Some are simple changes, like tag battles where the tagged out partner recovers health, or fights that must be finished with a fatality in order to be completed, or endurance battles that have you outnumbered. But some of them get way crazier, like one where instead of using normal attacks, each button press launches one of your limbs at your enemy. The limbs grow back over time, giving you a steady stream of heads, arms, and legs to launch. Others have the whole world tilt from side to side as hits land, with the fighter on the "low" side of the screen taking steady damage. There are a lot of inventive twists on the standard MK fight in the Tower, though a few types repeat a little too frequently as you rise to the final battle. Some of the tasks even come with a bit of dialogue, some of which gets pretty silly, such as one that has Mileena trying to give a teddy bear as a gift, or another that has Shang Tsung and Shao Kahn fighting over a gurgling baby that sits in the background as you battle. It really keeps you guessing in the same way that Soul Calibur's similar Mission Mode did.

Test Your Luck spins the reels and gives you random gameplay variants to keep you on your toes.The Challenge Tower and the story mode force you to play specific characters, giving you plenty of time to try out most of the 27 fighters and figure out which are your favorites. Being that the game is set during the first three games, the vast majority of the roster comes from that era, from the MK1 classics like Scorpion, Liu Kang, and Kano to the MK3 upstarts likeKabal, Nightwolf, and Stryker. Each character gets at least two outfits and twofatalities. Those second outfits, methods to perform the second fatalities, and loads of concept art and music are unlocked via the "krypt," which behaves much as it has in past MK games. There's only one type of coin this time around (as opposed to six), and sinking time into the story mode will earn you enough coins to unlock a lot of stuff. Like past games, most of the concept art isn't really worth dwelling on for very long, so versus screen "kombat kodes," costumes, and fatality instructions are the most important things to get out of the krypt. 

Online, the game plays mostly how it plays offline, provided the network conditions are just right. The structure of the online mode starts with the same sort of lobby system used in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, giving players a spot to swap text with one-another as challenges are passed around and battles are fought. If you don't want to mess around with chat rooms, the standard ranked and unranked options are also present. Both regular and tag battles can be played online, and a new mode called King of the Hill rounds things out pretty nicely. This is MK's take on the "quarter match" or "endless battle" mode, allowing up to eight players to join a room and spectate fights while they wait for their turn to take on the current winner. The loser of each fight goes to the back of the line. MK's take on the mode includes a visual lobby, of sorts, where avatars stand around and watch the battles. You can emote with your avatar using different button presses to express your joy or rage during a fight, or you can just hit the select button and make the fight take up the entire screen. After a fight, the spectators and the loser are asked to rate the match, which gives "respect points" to the winner. The avatar presentation is a cool way to present the concept, and there are even hidden emotes in there for players to figure out, proving that the team behind Mortal Kombat will stuff secret moves into just about anything they possibly can. 

Reptile wants to see your insides.Visually, the game is a big step up from the last Mortal Kombat game, with far more detailed characters and backgrounds. If I had to guess, I'd say that locking down the perspective to a fixed 2D battle helps make this possible, and there's a great amount of detail to be found in the graphics. As in the previous game, the characters' costumes get torn up over the course of a battle, resulting in bloody scrapes and cuts in the sides of faces, ripped clothes and masks, and so on. It's a great effect that looks even cooler when the fighters are also covered in blood at the end of a fight. It's pretty extreme and, well, pretty funny, too. Maybe I just have a weird sense of humor.

Though the look and feel of the game is roughly identical across platforms, thePlayStation 3 version of Mortal Kombat offers some additional features that make it the better version of the two. Specifically, the PS3 version has support for 3D televisions and also has an additional character, Kratos from God of War. The extra character and stage are nice, and Kratos has a pretty cool ending, but it probably isn't a make-or-break addition unless you're a huge fan of the God of War series. The game's 3D mode looks quite nice. I certainly found it easier to follow than the typical 3D first-person shooter, though that says more about the differences in presentation between the two genres than anything about the quality of any one game's 3D support.

Mortal Kombat has a broad appeal that I think will work for players from a variety of skill levels. There's a passable tutorial in place to teach you the basics, but no one thing in the game is that tough to accomplish. The game gets tricky when you start to put all of those things together into combos, but by the time you're thinking about that, you'll probably be ready to handle it. As for top-level play, I'm not the guy to judge any fighting game from the "is this game tournament-worthy?" angle. But MK feels solid, with enough depth and guessing games in place to work, provided that it's as balanced as it feels after a week of solid play. But even if, for some reason, the competitive aspects of the game didn't work out, there's so much great single-player material in Mortal Kombat that it's still worthwhile even if you aren't looking to fight others.

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Kids Make the Darndest Games: A Look at the Almost Unbearably Delightful 'Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure

Parents instinctively want to celebrate every little thing that pops out of their child, no matter how mundane it might be. That's understandable. It's your offspring, a tiny human representation of all your hopes and dreams for the future. When your kid screams out something about how a bear is a turtle and the mailman looks like farts, that is undeniably the most hilariously creative thing you have ever heard. Undoubtedly, many others will find it hilarious, too. Most would be content to simply film their kids saying and doing absurd things and post them on YouTube. Once in a while, however, someone takes things a step further, and actually puts their child's innocent nonsense to great, creative use.

One such case is Untold Entertainment founder Ryan Henson Creighton. Untold makes a lot of Flash games, some of which you've likely clicked on at some point over the course of your life--possibly on purpose. Ryan has a daughter named Cassie, a precocious, energetic little girl who has an active interest in her father's line of work. When Ryan suggested she come along with him toThe Toronto Game Jam--a festival of developers making games over the course of a single weekend--she greeted the opportunity not with the usual scrunchy face a kid might give at the prospect of hanging out with their dad all weekend, but one of pure excitement. So much so, that dad had to have a little talk with her before the event:

Me: Remember, you’re the first little girl who’s ever made a game at TOJam. And everyone’s worried you’re going to run around screaming and making noise and wrecking things.

Cassie: (shocked face) No i won’t!

Me: *i* know you won’t. (totally lying here – i was as nervous about it as anyone) But you have to prove to everyone that little girls can make video games too. If you’re very well behaved, then next year if another little girl wants to come and make a game, the TOJam people will say “the little girl who made a game last year was SO wonderful, we’d LOVE to see more little girls making games.”

Cassie: i’ll be have. i will!

The resulting game closely resembles the child-written comic book Axe Cop, as seen through the dual lenses of My Little Pony and Pokemon. Titled Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure, this Flash-based game operates in the vein of classic point-and-click adventures, but with the added bonus of hand-drawn art and voice work from little Cassie herself.

All programming and animation was, of course, Ryan's work, but all of the drawings are the result of many hours of drawing by Cassie. The imagery is exactly as bananas as you'd expect the art of a five-year-old to be, and that's half the game's charm. The other half is the voice work. Cassie voices Sissy, a girl who friggin' loves ponycorns--which are, like, the best thing in the world because they're like ponies AND unicorns--and wants to collect them in jars. Ryan clearly has a great deal of fun voicing the remaining characters, which include an angry dinosaur, a dickish lemon, and a mysterious ponycorn benefactor known only as "Orangeboy."

Of course the game is incredibly simple and short. It's a project sprung from the unchecked imagination of a five-year-old, after all. But that's what makes it so great. Every aspect of Ponycorn Adventure exists in that spectrum of imaginary loopiness that most of us stop being able to see once we become teenagers and incorrectly learn from our peers that imagination is for stupid babies who cry all the time. Every phrase uttered by Cassie shoots out of her mouth like it's the most exciting thing in the world, and that energy is incredibly infectious.

I don't want to herald this game as more than it is, mind you. It's something that will take you a short few minutes of your day to play, and you won't find yourself thinking much while you do it. That said, in the few minutes I spent playing it, the smile on my face never went away. As a game, it's an adorable trifle, but as an example of a father empowering his child's imagination and showing her how hard work can pay off in the end, it's simply priceless.

If you find yourself having a similar reaction as I did and want to make some kind of contribution for Creighton's effort, you can opt to click through the ad that plays before the game (maybe not the unfortunate one for TNT's The Glades, which features the tagline "Murder is Back in Season"), or send a couple of bucks via Paypal to an account he's set up. All proceeds will go toward Cassie's education fund. He's currently raised over $1,000, which is apparently enough to buy "500 fake moustaches, which she'll use in her campus-wide protest against perceived gender imbalance in comp sci admissions."

Cassie and Ryan Creighton

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Outland Games Reviews

Now that last year's ill-conceived top-down zombie shooter Dead Nation is fading into memory, Finnish developer Housemarqueis back on the right track with Outland, an eye-popping 2D platformer that owes equal debts to Metroid and--of all things--Ikaruga. That odd combination results in a tightly designed downloadable game bursting with demanding traversal, surprisingly deep combat, and lush visual design. You can't be a fan of 2D action games in 2011 and not give this game a look. 

Outland stops short of rendering its entire playable area on one giant graph-paper map, but the game's five areas are loosely tied together by level exits and teleporters that feed you fairly smoothly from place to place. You don't quite get the feeling of continuous exploration that you'd want after playing games likeShadow Complex or the latter day Castlevanias, but it's close enough. Though Outland is more linear and requires much less backtracking than those games, there are still areas you won't be able to access till later on, when you've acquired abilities that let you slide under things, launch into the air, or bust down walls with a charged shot. 

The sword combat is more involved and thus more satisfying than you'd expect on first glance. In addition to a basic three-hit combo, you can slide into enemies to daze them or slash upward in an uppercut-like motion to pop them up into the air. You can incorporate all of those moves into a single attack on an enemy, sliding into them, popping them up in the air, then leaping up and finishing them off before they even have a chance to hit you. It's a ton of fun. Both the fighting and the platforming are snappy and fluid, allowing you to get around the levels and fight enemies with speed and grace. 

Navigating the lush environments is quick and easy.It's a good thing you've got such precision control, because nothing about Outland's action is more demanding than its central reliance on a red-and-blue contrast that governs how you interact with enemies, platforms, and masses and masses of colored bullets. (There's that Ikaruga connection.) You can change yourself from one color to the other in a split second, which is a good thing, because you have to do that instantly, constantly, all the time to get by. You can only damage enemies of the opposite color, but you can only absorb bullets and stand on platforms of like color, so you get into lots of creative situations where you'll be switching colors every second or two to keep up. Like the combat, it's greatly satisfying to flip your alignment rapidly to get through some of the tougher scenarios cleanly without taking damage. 

The game ramps up the difficulty of these two-tone scenarios gradually--it's the better part of an hour before you can even assume both colors--but by the end of the game, you'll be looking at some downright grueling challenges that force you to navigate enormous clouds of mixed bullets while fighting enemies that change their own coloration randomly and will shock you if you hit them at the wrong time. Oh, and you're standing on platforms that disappear out from under you when you flip colors. For the most part, you'll get through these sections with patience or trial and error (or both), but some frustration is inherent in the later levels. 

As demanding as the action is, the game's presentation could be a little clearer. The camera tends to pull out to such a degree your character is sometimes only a few pixels high, making it tough to see exactly what's going on if you don't sit especially close to your TV. And someone made the needlessly confusing decision to have your character flicker blue and red when you get hit, which sometimes made me do a knee-jerk color change that made me get hit againbefore I realized that it was a bad idea to change color in the first place. 

Beware this hell of bullets.I have no reservation calling Outland an absolutely beautiful game. Housemarque does a lot with a little here, employing a silhouetted art style similar to Limbo but with Tron-like red, blue, and yellow highlights applied to the characters in mostly tribal patterns that make them stand out and help highlight the tremendous animation. The backgrounds look like spare watercolor paintings with a lot of gentle light blooming and copious parallax scrolling to give them detail and depth. The five major areas look significantly different, with motifs ranging from a lush green jungle to dank caverns and frigid, mountainous peaks. Every screen of this game makes a great argument for why 2D games still matter from an artistic standpoint. 

Outland's main campaign will probably run you about six hours, the high quality of which more than justifies its $10 asking price, and there are collectibles, speed-run levels, and some decent two-player cooperative challenge rooms if you want to lengthen the experience. I suspect this game is going to fly a little under the radar with so many high-profile titles releasing lately, but even a passing interest in 2D action demands that you at least give Outland a look.

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Brink is a class-based multiplayer first-person shooter from the developers ofEnemy Territory: Quake Wars, and a lot of that style of play is present and accounted for in the way the objectives are built and the classes function. The structure of the game is decent, but it's brought down by issues both large and small. The largest one is a simple lack of content. With eight maps, a lackluster arsenal, and a campaign mode that is, by default, populated with terrible AI-controlled bots, Brink just doesn't have enough going for it to justify a full-price purchase.

The game is roughly the same in both its campaign mode and its freeplay option. The difference is that the campaign mode offers up the different maps in a set order (which you can skip around, if you want) and the freeplay mode is a more open option that lets you jump into a game on any map, theoretically making it easier to get into games with real people. But both modes let you play with humans, if you like.

This is handy, because the game's bots are bad at playing Brink. Bots will run up against objects you're interacting with, as if they can't see you and are trying to complete the objective that you're already completing. The enemy team's bots will often run right past objectives completely, and they'll occasionally just sort of stare at you, like they've forgotten to shoot back. The only dependable thing a bot can do is revive you if you go down, though the medic bots tend run blindly in your direction when you drop, often getting taken out along the way. This stooge-like behavior lasts for most of the match, but when an objective is nearly expired, it seems like the bots suddenly get better, almost as if they've been designed to make the missions draw themselves out as long as they possibly can. If you don't intend to play Brink against people, do not play Brink.

That said, my recommendation for the game doesn't change much for those of you interested in playing with human teammates, largely because the game can become choppy and unplayable if you end up getting connected to a bad host, which seems to happen more often than it does in most other games, though your experience may vary. The one big positive is that the game rewards varied teams by letting each of the four different classes contribute and buff in different ways. The engineers can increase a teammate's weapon damage. Medics can raise a player's health beyond the maximum, as well as increasing a player's ability to regenerate health. Soldiers can refill ammo. And the operatives can mark targets and takeover enemy turrets. Admittedly, that's not all that different from other class-based shooters, but it's effective here and encourages players to not all rush for the one class that can complete the next objective. Also, weapon selection is detached from class selection, so you can carry whatever you like and still contribute to the team in any of the four roles.

The universe has some neat ideas in it, but you rarely get a sense of that while playing.

Beyond that, playing Brink is a bit of a mess. The weapons are incredibly underwhelming. Part of this is due to the sound design, which doesn't give anything an appropriate punch when it's fired. But the weapon damage feels weak and the bullet spray makes a lot of the non-scoped weapons feel imprecise and generally ineffective. Grenades are also lame, with pops that look and sound more like a firecracker than a hand grenade. They also don't seem to do much damage, making them better for knocking opponents over, giving you time to finish them off while they get back to their feet.

A lot of time in each map is spent running back to the battle, as the game lacks any sort of forward spawn capability. To let you worry less about obstacles in the environment, holding down the sprint button also allows you to automatically mantle up and over low objects. You can also slide under objects or, in some cases, you can leap up to grab ledges. Vaulting over these objects makes the path back to the battlefield more of a straight line, but once you're engaged, it feels like hopping around like a crazy person is just a good way to get gunned down because you weren't spending your time firing back.

Brink occasionally hints at a larger universe with its pre-mission cutscenes that attempt to set up the conflict between a rebel force and the security crew trying to hold them back, but these vignettes are incredibly half-hearted, introducing few characters and not really giving you much of a reason to care about the overall world. It's too bad, because the characters and the set of islands they inhabit have an interesting look to them. But beyond a couple of weak cutscenes you'll see when you finish campaign mode and some dull audio logs, Brink does absolutely nothing of value with its fiction.

You'll earn experience points and levels as you play, and with each level comes the chance to unlock a new ability. These vary from universal skills like extra health or the ability to reload while sprinting to class-specific perks, like building better engineer turrets or giving operatives a bomb in their head that lets them blow up on command when downed, potentially taking enemies along with them. You don't have to break these up into loadouts, as all your abilities stack.

This makes you more powerful at higher levels, something the game attempts to address by preventing higher-ranked players from getting matched with lower-ranked games. Ultimately, this just splits the people playing Brink into yet another smaller subset, which, at least in the near-term, has made it fairly hard for me to get into games with an abundance of other human players. Between breaking up the campaign mode options by map and the rank lockouts, Brink just feels like it needs a big "quick match" button to expedite the process and match you with human players and completely sidestep the game's weak AI.

Brink's stylized look is pretty cool, but the whole thing feels like a bust. The minute-to-minute action just isn't interesting enough to make the game's eight maps worth replaying for a serious length of time, which makes a lot of this come down to a basic value proposition. It feels like a downloadable game's worth of content that's been fleshed out a little by some slightly higher production values. Nothing about that sounds like a great deal to me at its current price, but its awkward structure and dull combat won't go away after a simple price cut.

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Square Enix Producing Another MMO for Some Reason

Despite the fact that the publisher hasn't exactly had the best track record with MMO development thus far-- Final Fantasy XI was tepidly received, but managed a decent audience following; Final Fantasy XIV...not so much--Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada seems awfully sure of the company's ability to develop and maintain a bunch of these things.

I don't know what the hell that is, but it seemed like a pretty good visual metaphor for Final Fantasy XIV. Because it's weird, and on fire.

In a transcript posted yesterday of the publisher's May 13th earnings call--which was translated by Andriasang--Wada stated that the company has a new MMO title in development that the company hopes to announce in this fiscal year. What that title is, exactly, is unclear at the moment, but it is something separate from the current titles Squeenix already maintains. Wada believes that the company having two-to-three different online subscription-based titles will help maintain the company's cash flow.

That probably doesn't do much to quell the seething hate currently residing within anyone still playing Final Fantasy XIV. Wada did apparently go out of his way to mention the problems currently plaguing that title and to state that fixing it will take a little longer, but that a "target" is in sight. So that's reassuring. Probably. Okay, not really.

Also, no word yet on that PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIV, but I'm guessing there's not very many of you out there still keeping a candle burning for that one.

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Top 10 Activities Seldom Seen Outside Gym Class

Gym class can be both a beautiful and dreadful thing: beautiful in its celebration of health, competition and physical fitness, dreadful in its Darwinian grading system, embarrassing requirements (come on, even real gym locker rooms are outfitted with private shower stalls), and failure to inform you correctly. Yes, gym class is prone to frequent misinformation, such as the fact it’s okay for a real teacher to be hungover on the job, or that a majority of the sports, games and activities that are played in gym class don’t really have a place outside of grade school. At least in any conventional sense.

For instance, there is no jump rope league, and the closest thing to lacrosse having a place in our day-today lives is using a pooper scooper to pick up some dog crap, followed by a wrist-guided flick into a trash bag. Sure there are informal organizations and such but there are only a handful of major sports that are given any serious or passionate consideration, and they are so for being national past times. Here we’ll take a look at some past times that never end up being carried into the present, the top ten activities that don’t REALLY exist outside of gym class:

10

Jump Rope

There’s no knocking that jumping rope is great cardio, and there’s always those champions at the gym who like to exhibit this fact, as if we don’t immediately think of “double dutch” and hot pink nylon chords with frilly handles, at the prospect of “jumping rope.” It is, after all, the activity of choice for little girls. Good thing, though, they do make them in baby boy blue. Gender equality indeed.

9

Handball

AKA “gatorball,” “Z-Ball,” etc. This game went by many names, depending on your gym teacher, which shows the games lack of universality. Handball, was essentially soccer, but with the ability to kick the the ball up into your own hands, or someone else’s, and pass the ball around as if basketball rules applied. It was fun at the time, but dangerous indoors, what with the ability to kick the ball directly into the girl with glasses in the bleachers. It probably didn’t catch on in any grander sense because the game is so unoriginal, kind of a hodge-podge of already-established sports (including dodgeball).

8

Obstacle Course

The real only other place an obstacle course applies is military boot camp (which gym class felt the need to prepare timid middle schoolers for). There was the infamous rope climb, which always beckoned the temptation of swinging from the rope like Tarzan before the gym teacher turned purple with anger. There was that box where you would stretch to see how far you could push the knob, a flexibility test. There was the pull up bar that separated the scrawny boys from the puberty-ready men. And there was the step box. Come to think of it, there was a lot of weird little doodads that seemed to have no other purpose but to “size you up for the pick’n's.” These don’t exist anywhere else (except for the pull-up bar), but they might prove more showing if they did, say for people old enough to make health a priority. Otherwise, it was the worst week of gym class, just after the scoliosis screenings.

7

Water Polo

Think regular polo, except with a volleyball and an open palm instead of a golf club, and with a drowned horse and you have a gratuitous definition of Water Polo. A better definition would be swimming meets handball, handball, again, being soccer meets hands. This game is very rigorous, and requires a level of fitness and lung capacity that can only exist in high school. As such, the game has its place mostly in extra-curriculars (apparently this was where the line was drawn at which grading on ability become cruel).

6

Badminton

While it’s not fair to say this game doesn’t exist outside of gym class, its only other apparent refuge is in a yuppie’s backyard lawn, or at a company barbecue. It is a whole lot of fun to play, largely in how it defies gravity and makes a plummeting object a little less threatening. Definitely more fun to play than watch (likely why it’s never televised).

5

Crab Soccer

Just like it sounds, this game required you to take an obscene, Exorcist-inspired position and carry on an otherwise regular game of soccer. As if soccer needed another way to make scoring impossible (what with tallies that rarely exceed a third). It was a blast though, and was at least as much fun to watch as it was to play.

4

Pickle Ball

Essentially, this was table tennis on a large scale. The components were a plastic paddle, a wiffle ball and a low net. This was a way to take a game room staple and make it somewhat athletic, though it should be obvious why it hasn’t come to replace actual tennis. Partly for the fact that plastic on plastic offers little trajectory. Next we’ll see large scale fooseball, with huge plastic spinny-dudes and actual soccer goals.

3

Tumbling

This is what gym teachers called “Gymnastics for Men.” Here gender norm-defying boys would “tumble,” do handstands, cartwheels and a bunch of other things that would be the juiciest insult bait, if it weren’t for the fact that EVERYONE was required to participate. Only good aspect: leotards weren’t mandatory. While it may have its place, as men very much participate in Olympic gymnastic competitions, there aren’t very many recreational clubs catering to this activity, partly for its lack of team-orientedness.

2

Ultimate Frisbee

Good news: Football has been officially made accessible for stoners, otherwise unmotivated by competition. Ultimate frisbee is, after all, really just Football with a disc, a disk that’s a whole helluva lot easier to catch than a ball (you know, that thing that’s scary when it decides to come right to you). A frisbee at least hovers passively before landing safely in some outstretched arms. Not surprisingly, this “sport” can’t seem to find a place further than college campuses. Now maybe if it had a better work ethic…

1

Dodgeball

AKA “Find-and-Eliminate Fatty.” This game is the rawest form of determining who in a select group is fit to survive and procreate (all those genital shots help decide this as well). The game requires coordination, reflexes, and other things that a computer game can’t teach. When a gym teacher allows this game to go on, all rules of a fair and decent society quickly disappear to be replaced by basics instincts of the lowest, id-guided order. Now imagine if, instead of job interviews, a game of dodgeball took its place; there’d be no chance of success in this world for the weak. Also, the world would be a very beautiful and largely unintelligent place.

by Ryan Thomas - http://listverse.com

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More sick, dead, in European E. coli outbreak

Two new deaths linked to a mysterious bacterial outbreak in Europe blamed on tainted vegetables were reported Tuesday, including the first outside Germany, as the number of reported cases continued to rise.

The deaths brought to 16 the total number of fatalities linked to the E. coli outbreak, with northwestern Germany the hardest-hit region.

Hospital officials in Boras, Sweden, announced the death of woman in her 50s who was admitted on May 29 after a trip to Germany. In Paderborn, Germany, the local council said an 87-year-old woman who also suffered from other ailments had died.

In Germany, the national disease control center said 373 people were sick with the most serious form of the outbreak - hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, a rare complication arising from an infection most commonly associated with E. coli. That figure was up from the 329 reported Monday.

Susanne Glasmacher, a spokeswoman for the Robert Koch Institute, said another 796 people have been affected by the enterohaemorrhagic E.coli, also known as EHEC, bacteria - making a total of more than 1,150 people infected.

Hundreds of people also have been sickened in other European countries, but until Tuesday Germany had seen the only deaths.

The same strain of E.coli now in Europe hit the U.S. state of Montana in 1994, leaving 11 people sick, including four who were hospitalized. A year earlier, a related strain of E.coli killed four children in the western United States and sickened about 500 people after they ate contaminated hamburgers at a fast-food chain, Jack in the Box. Unlike those limited outbreaks, however, the European one is much larger, deadlier, and predominantly striking adults.

In Sweden, hospital medical chief Jerker Isacson said Tuesday that the Swedish woman who died had been ill for a few days before she arrived at the hospital on Sunday and died early Tuesday.

"She developed serious complications, among other things on the kidneys," he said.

The Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control on Monday said 39 Swedes have been infected with EHEC so far, including 15 with the severe HUS.

Britt Akerlind, spokeswoman at the institute, said it is unclear why so many Swedes had been infected, but said it could be that efficient reporting mechanism in the Nordic country means more cases have been discovered here.

Other cases have been reported in Denmark, France, the U.K., the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment is still warning consumers to avoid all cucumbers, lettuces and raw tomatoes as the outbreak is investigated. Although the number of officially reported cases has shot up since late last week, regional officials have said this week that they are seeing a sharp drop-off in the number of new cases.

European Union officials have said that German authorities identified cucumbers from the Spanish regions of Almeria and Malaga as possible sources of contamination and that a third suspect batch, originating either in the Netherlands or in Denmark and traded in Germany, is also under investigation.

They have also noted, however, that the transport chain is long, and the cucumbers from Spain could have been contaminated at any point along the route.

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said Tuesday that no traces of EHEC acteria were found in tests conducted over the weekend.

"There is therefore nothing that indicates that Danish cucumbers are the source of the serious E.coli outbreak that has infected several patients in Germany, Denmark and Sweden," the agency said.

In the meantime, Russia's chief sanitary agency o Monday banned the imports of cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh salad from Spain and Germany pending further notice.

It said that it may even ban the imports of fresh vegetables from all European Union member states due to the lack of information about the source of infection.

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Phase: The wounds of change

Waves of change: Maria Bernadeth (left) and Davit (right) perform in the dance titled Padusi, choreographed by Jefri Andi Usman. Photo courtesy of Bodi CH

Silence swept through a stage dotted with dead trees, until monotonous low-key sounds could be discerned. 

Some movements accompanied the continuous sounds, bathed in illumination on the right-hand corner at the back of the stage.

The movements and sounds were a reminder of oil refining machines endlessly draining our earth’s resources. A body later appeared, crawling slowly like a caterpillar coming out of a “time machine”, looking wobbly. Another body also emerged. They were seemingly part of the dead vegetation around. 

Other monotonous sounds followed, mimicking the drone of chainsaws in forests along with sawmills. The silence came to an end. The bodies were wriggling, trying to rise, only to fall headlong to the ground. The earth was wounded. The sounds of woodcutting machines never ceased, humming all the time and creating inconceivable agony. 

This portrayal of a wounded and aging earth of life caused by neglect from the modern men was featured in Tanah Merah (Red Soil), the first part of Tabusai Dance co.’s PHASE presented by choreographer Jefri Andi Usman, 39, at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (GKJ) this month. 

Of Minang (West Sumatra) origin, Jefri has toured various countries and collaborated with world choreographers like Henrietta Horn, Juan Cruz (Germany, Yukio Waguri, Kota Yamazaki (Japan) and Peter Chin (Canada). 

Change has given rise to countless wounds. This situation was portrayed with a murky sense of poetry. 

Red soil: Choreographer and dancer Jefri Andi Usman performs in his choreographic work Tanah Merah. Photo courtesy of Bodi CH

The entire imagination put across on stage stemmed from human tragedy. 

Normal life is something indistinct, only to be longed for, which was articulated by the sounds of sampelong and puput labu (traditional Minang wind instruments) and digirudu (aboriginal instrument), wailing vaguely, as if coming from a far-off cave. 

Jefri, with his awareness and experience, has freed himself from the temptation or desire of presenting neatly composed and beautifully designed works for spectators to feast their eyes on, which would ruin the artistic quality of his choreography.

Padusi (Minang for women), was the second part of the PHASE show. The stage was cleared of the dead trees. The entire space was left open to depict the existence of women under the matrilineal system currently battered by the waves of changing times, which Jefri has been obsessed with. 

Bodi CH: Photo courtesy of Bodi CH

In Minang society, women as the pillars of family life or clans and whose position is guarded by a social system based on religious culture, today have to face the inevitable waves of transformation.

Padusi was not staged in a realistic manner. Songs, percussions and wind instruments offered richer artistic energy to convey the reality of change taking place at present. Today’s Minang women freely go beyond the confines of gender, causing them to be alienated from traditional life. 

Removed from traditional frames of the past, they appear to be modern, yet without having created a new identity for themselves. They may be enjoying their freedom, but they have lost their identity in the course of the change, which is still not well understood. 

They are more concerned with deriving pleasure from freedom rather than with the honor and moral superiority of padusi as implied by their tradition and culture. 

The ancestral songs belted out by golden-voice singer Piterman, a touring vocalist and graduate from the Indonesian Art College of Padangpanjang, sounded like mantras. He produced humming, groaning and even howling tones for the sake of recreating the lost air of tranquility of bygone times, now overwhelmed by the waste of change.

Along with Risdul and Desmal Hendri, also alumni of the same college, he built varying moods by presenting several acts without music while maintaining the musical atmosphere of the stage. 

The jerky body language of Maria Bernadeth and Davit with padusi being carried on male shoulders was the most down-to-earth expression of the wild transformation as perceived by Jefri. 

With Jefri’s artistic and lighting direction that remained open to various possibilities, the stage was like two paintings of PHASE that still left unfilled spaces on the canvases. The trees also assumed a minimal function. More extensive and profound exploration is needed for high quality artistic achievements. 

Jefri was capable of communicating it all as proven in his previous work, Akan Jadi Malam (It’s going to be night). Davit and Maria as dancers in Padusi were not adequately challenged to demonstrate their best quality as they had done in Akan Jadi Malam, though. 

Finally, with the potential they all have developed so far, the future of Tabusai Dance co. will depend highly on their management competence.

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LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game Reviews

Traveller's Tales' Lego action series may have been skirting the risk of oversaturation for a while now, but it's hard to fault the company's prodigious output when it keeps upping its own quality bar.Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is already the second Lego game in the first five months of this year, so it's no surprise how closely it hews to the specific formula these games have been using since the very beginning. But Pirates advances the look and feel of the Lego series in enough meaningful ways that it's mostly a genuine pleasure to play, provided you haven't had your fill of Lego action already.

This package covers all four Pirates of the Caribbean movies, including the new not-quite-yet-released-at-the-time-of-this-writing flick On Stranger Tides. You get five lengthy levels per movie that all spawn from an island hub area, which is itself bursting with scores of unlockable characters, cheat code-enabling pickups, and sundry other collectibles. This series has always been about amassing as much of its collectible riches as possible, and I still found myself getting sucked into the feedback loop of collecting Lego studs to buy new characters and cheats so I could go back to previous levels and access new areas so I could get even more studs so I could buy more... well, you get the picture, but the point is, the formula still works.

The puzzle design has gotten a bit more sensible.

At least it works when it's supported by well-designed gameplay and a subject matter that lends itself to the irreverent Lego treatment, and Pirates succeeds on both of those fronts better than some past Lego games. The movie franchise itself is already pretty silly, so Captain Sparrowand friends slide right into the ridiculous, mute cinematic style Traveller's Tales has polished to a high sheen over the last few years. There are plenty of great little touches spread throughout the game, like Lego Sparrow's ostentatious walk animation or the way the cursed crew of the Black Pearl seamlessly turns skeletal when they step into moonlight. The game does a great job of recreating the feel of the movies and eliciting a good number of chuckles.

Trial and error has traditionally ruled the experience of playing these Lego games. In this one you'll still spend plenty of time busting up every piece of scenery you can until you figure out what it is you need to do--which still has a simple charm to it, don't get me wrong--but at least Pirates is a little better about directing your attention via floating button prompts and other onscreen iconography than previous Lego games like Batman and Harry Potter. In this relative absence of head-scratching "what the hell do I do now?" moments, the game peppers some more thoughtful environmental puzzles here and there, as well as some neat action setpiece moments that have you sword fighting up on catwalks or riding giant water wheels through the jungle. The game isn't without its frustrations: any sort of platforming or jumping-based puzzle usually ends in gritted teeth, and the dynamic split-screen that comes into effect in co-op isn't as intelligent as it should be. (Put those two specific things together and you may end up throwing a controller.) But these levels are more varied and rewarding to play through than I remember those old Lego games being.

Lego Mortal Kombat, coming soon.

It's kind of shocking how much the graphics and presentation of the Lego series have matured over time, culminating in this game with a visual style that doesn't just look fantastic for a Lego game, but for any game. The developers have added so many little cinematic tricks to the game's repertoire--things like high-contrast lighting and reflections, motion blur, and depth of field--that it looks way, way better than you would expect a kid-friendly game like this to look. Graphics don't make the game, of course, but they sure make it a whole more pleasant to look at.

That's the biggest success of the Lego franchise to date, and specifically of Lego Pirates: it's a game for kids that adults can have fun with too (and one they shouldn't be ashamed of enjoying). It's nice to see this series mature and evolve over time, and while Traveller's Tales will need to continue upping the ante if it intends to keep putting out new Lego games at such a rapid clip, for the moment Lego Pirates offers plenty of reasons to jump back in and mash a few plastic bricks together again.

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