Game of the Year - Tomb Raider (2013)

I've played 7 out of the 10 Tomb Raider games that have come out since 1996, and across platforms (PC, Wii, and now, Xbox) - I only skipped 5, 6, and Anniversary. And before I played the new reboot of Tomb Raider that came out last month, I was one of those people that pined for the good old days of Tomb Raider 2's tigers and Venetian canals.

That has changed. Crystal Dynamics have made a reboot that rivals any reboot in any media (yes, including Batman Begins), and not only is it my favorite Tomb Raider ever, it is also my favorite game this year (so far), and it works as a remix of Indiana Jones, Lost, and your favorite FPS...

To me, this beats Assassin's Creed III at its own.... uh... game. It features better storytelling, equally good combat/ free-running, and amazing puzzles and exploration elements, all in a somewhat smaller world-size. AC better watch out, because Lara even has her own Eagle Vision now!

I started writing this post on Google+ and switched over to the blog as my raving grew in length. I now realize this is the first game I'm actually blogging about. How about that? Well it is a deserving one, that easily deserves a 9 on a scale of 10. Here's why...

Man of Tomorrow - Today

You will believe...

When Richard Donner made "Superman" in 1978, the tag-line was "You will believe a man can fly". Although Star Wars had only just come out, and Krypton could be pronounced as "CRIP-tun" by half your characters (instead of CRIP-taun) without a Reddit-y uproar, it was necessary to reassure the audience this was just a man, not an alien from another world. That world therefore had to be a pristine, crystalline, neon-lit, but ultimately sterile place backed up by the gravitas that Don Corleone brought to it.

Superman could be - had to be - the blue eyed, red-brief-on-the-outside wearing Nietzschean hero who (Fascist undertones notwithstanding) would be a bewildered Kansan in a big city that fights for 'truth, justice, and the American way'. The meanest villain imaginable for Superman in this Cold War era was nuclear weapons gone rogue, and no one took a super-hero seriously, so it was OK to reverse the Earth's spin and turn back time and for Lex Luthor to be a bumbling criminal genius with a real estate fetish...

Actually corniness was not something to be frowned at - it was a prerequisite! One of the iconic funny exchanges I remember from the movie is this mid-air snippet from when Superman saved Lois Lane as she fell out of a helicopter and off a building:

SUPERMAN: Don't worry miss, I've got you!
LOIS (hysterical): You've got me..? Who's got YOU?!

A trustworthy alien?

Fast forward 35 years and audiences no longer have trouble believing a man can fly! We've seen Neo go off and "do the Superman thing" in the Matrix movies. The Avengers have fought as a team to ward off an invasion of Earth. Alternate worlds have come alive, fully fleshed out, in their grime and bile as much as their radiance, in everything from Avatar to Game of Thrones. Zod can no longer be a promise made for a sequel in the era of instant gratification.

We leave rogue nukes for mortals like Jack Bauer to handle these days, and even cartoon fiction like 'Ben 10' is deadly serious about the origin tale, and has little tolerance for corniness. Comic books, and movies based on them, are acceptable and mainstream enough that critics spend time debating what the Joker (from The Dark Knight) represents in a post-9/11 era...

This is the perilous airstrip on which lands Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel". I thought it does the job of bringing Superman to the post-modern era well, while faltering just a little... I am not much of a star-giving reviewer, especially when the movie is about source material that I am so invested in - but if I had to, I'd give this a 3 out of 5. Let me explain why...

The Game

To understand the game
Needs rising above it.
Until, beyond,
At the root of meaning
One finds the reason,
And in disdain,
Loses the appetite to play
Thus losing the game...

A Pirate's Life, Just Not For Me?

I came across this thoughtful post (titled: Piracy was my shot at equality) in my morning trawl through the internet, and it really resonated with me; if you replace "Bulgaria" with "India" throughout this piece, and made a few other contextual amendments, I could've written it!

Piracy has become a four-letter word. In the public square, everyone agrees it's bad. Then everyone not in the US goes home from the debate, starts up uTorrent, and downloads Season 1 of House of Cards...

A lot of these people are 'pirates' only because Netflix is stupid enough to (despite being, y'know, an online company) not optimize its access to the global market-place. Or because the big evil "Studios" demand distribution in this country and not any other (this doesn't really apply to House of Cards though, methinks?) Others (even so called rich young brats) pirate it because they simply don't have the money to buy it. Still others pirate it because their government has decided that the depiction of duplicitous politics and (gasp!) sex and swearing is a no no for its populace of tender asexual lambs.

But is it really all that bad a thing? This is a question I've struggled with pretty much ever since I got access to the Internet - what, a little less than 20 years ago? What follows then, is a rumination on this still unresolved conundrum...

The Worldstream (and yelling: STOP!)

I consciously stay about a month behind in reading long-form items in my Google Reader stream. This is one of the reasons why I am only now reading this article by David Gelernter; and despite the fact that all the comments it has received on Wired basically accuse him of smoking something while writing it, I find it to be... well, visionary. Among other things, this napkin sketch the author did for Wired (on the left) struck me as one of the best representations of the new paradigm.

The web is changing - or has partially changed, and irrevocably so. We have gone from the "Web" metaphor of the 90s (when Google could capitalize on the way pages linked to one another to come up with a Page Rank) to the "Stream" metaphor, where companies like Twitter lead from the front, and those like Facebook or Google or Pinterest get it with their Timeline and Google+ products. In the Stream, you're not looking for things of interest alone, you're looking for things you should be looking at right now.