Tracy Chapman - Give Me One Reason

When this song came out, I believe I was only about 10 years old.  I wish I could say I was a savvy cool music kid back then, but I was very much the opposite.  "Give Me One Reason" had come and gone and I was none the wiser until over a decade later when I started learning guitar and getting into blues music.  Tracy Chapman's song had instant appeal, and I fell in love with the soulful bass-line.  This song has a very calming effect on me and, more often than not, I find that I have to replay it as soon as it's over.

Mass Effect Franchise

My gaming habits for the past few years have been very socially driven.  Games like Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands 2, and my horrible not-brief stint with World of Warcraft.  Every once and a while, I start a game that is so engrossing and immersive that I will plunge in both feet and get lost.  This is more true of Mass Effect than almost any game I've ever played.
The Mass Effect franchise is a huge branching story that really puts the player in the hot seat for making important and impactful decisions.  I would never have imagined such an ambitious game would hit the market, but the Mass Effect games really pushed the envelope for the gaming market.

The beauty of all of the Mass Effect games is not in any of the mechanics, as even into the 3rd game, the combat could be a bit clunky and frustrating.  Instead, the game accomplishes something that I really didn't expect.  It is the prime example of a world-builder.  All three games have countless subtle ways of enriching the environment and making you feel like you really are traversing the galaxy.  The races, politics, worlds, cultures, accents, archetecture, etc. are all thought out to an extreme measure that the game itself has it's own encyclopedia in it's pause menu.  Not only this, but you can tell that thousands upon thousands of decisions were made to make the settings, storylines, and NPC's really mesh together in interesting ways.

© Bioware

Another thing that the Mass Effect games do better than any game I've played before it, is that it truly makes you feel important.  The games raise the stakes to such a hopeless level and yet still somehow manage to make you beat those odds without it being too ridiculous.  I never got the sense that the game was making too big a jump within it's own set of rules and I definitely felt like the galaxy really did hinge on me.

© Bioware

The games by no means perfect, but it's really hard to nitpick too much on a game with such an expansive scope.  You may hear that the ending is bad, but I personally didn't mind it.  I understand why people are angry at it, but I appreciate that they took it somewhere unexpected.

Black Science

Superhero comics have always been the big discussion with comics, but this year I've gotten cold on a lot of the titles from 'The Big 2' (Marvel and DC).  There have been some real gems, but what has grabbed a lot of attention (including mine) are the new Image titles that were released in the last year or two.  I will no doubt be talking about more of them later on, but one of the standouts has been Black Science.

I have read some of Rick Remender's work and it was good, but didn't blow me away.  On this title, however, it is obvious that Remender had free rein to see his vision out.  This book goes beyond what I could have ever imagined and is pure creativity leaked onto pages.  I've said before that a book goes places you would never expect, but Remender takes this mentality to it's truest core.  Black Science follows a format like the old TV show Slider's where a group of travelers port to different dimensions.  When they do, truly, anything can happen.  What sets it apart from any other dimension-travelling story, is the beautifully fleshed out human drama that is surprisingly deep and complex for such a fast paced action-driven book.

All of this is accented by the amazing artwork by Matteo Scalera who finds that perfect balance between realistic and cartoonish that I absolutely adore with other comic artists.  Scalera fleshes out the off-the-wall adventures and environments and really captures the desperation and action in all of the scenes.  I have picked up the first trade of this book, and hope it goes on for a long time, as I feel it isn't getting quite the credit it deserves.

Blue's Clues

As mentioned previously, I have been thrown into the world of fatherdom.  Way before I entered this strange new world, I had come across Blue's Clues when I had no basic cable back in the late 90s.  As I would flip past the show and even as a teenager, the show grabbed my attention.

Now that I have a son, I have really grown to love the show.  I'd never actually seen a full episode (as I was a tween when it first aired) but I could tell immediately it's quality children's programming at its best.  Steve, the first host of Blue's Clues, has a way of talking to the camera that falls perfectly in the space between enthusiastic and sincere.  Too many kid shows seem to patronize the children without even realizing it, and I never got that feeling with Steve.

Luckily for me, Parker really loves Blue's Clues, which is great because it never seems to grind on my nerves when it's playing in the background.  The smiles he gets when a song comes on have become highlights of our day, and I'm really thankful that the Blue's Clues crew could give that to us. 

Love Letter

For the past few years, there has been an entire wing of geek culture that has been swelling into the mainstream.  I would hear of Settlers of Catan games popping up from friends every once and a while, but I never jumped on it.  It wasn't until my cousin got really into board games that I realized there was an entire renaissance of board games happening right underneath my nose.  Board game sections at comic stores started ballooning out of control, and I would start hearing names like "Ticket to Ride" and "Small World" in conversation with fellow geeks.

Recently, I have started dipping my feet into this world, and I stumbled onto the game Love Letter.  Well known to the tabletop world, Love Letter had enough universal praise to fight back my gut instinct against it.  I needed a quick 5-10 minute game for my work breaks, so I bought the boxed version and boy, am I glad I did.

This game is so genius in it's simplicity and I couldn't imagine the fun that a 16 card deck of cards could bring to the table.  The straight forward rules and portability makes Love Letter a dangerous gateway for me into the world of tabletop gaming.