This console generation, more than any other, looks back at its predecessors with an incredible amount of nostalgia. There’s never been quite so many ways to play the games of years past as there are currently. Even most handhelds can play games from their prior iterations via digital downloads. The Nintendo 3DS has a way to do this and the PlayStation Network allows for downloads of PSOne Classics.

But over the past two years, and it seems like more of the same for the near future, retail versions of remastered collections have begun cropping up at an ever-increasing rate. Just off the top of my head, there’s been The Sly Collection, the God of War Collection, and the recently released ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection. That’s just counting Sony. Microsoft’s Halo: Anniversary, Nintendo’s Star Fox 64 3D, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D are part of the same trend.

I’ve been wanting to write about SyFy’s newest superpower show, Alphas, for a while now, pretty much since I watched the very first episode. I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about the show until I saw this article over on Wired and, basically, disagreed with everything.

First off, if you don’t watch the show, you should probably know what it is about. Alphas is about a team of people with superpowers who fight superpowered crime and, less frequently, regular crime. Yep. The show is very regular, except for one part, which happens to be one of the best things happening on television right now.

Electronic Arts has been toying with their own download service for some time now. Even prior to announcing Origin, they had their grubby mitts on the digital market with their EA Download Manager which, like the name suggests, managed all of the digital downloads purchased from the Electronic Arts website.

As one of the biggest publishers out there steps up their digital game to go toe to toe with Valve’s Steam service, one can’t help but wonder if there aren’t at least a dozen or so good reasons as to why they really shouldn’t be going ahead with this no matter what they tell themselves. Well, wonder no longer, because here they are.

IGN: “Of all the video game movies, why was Uncharted the one for you?”

David O. Russell: “Because it’s centred around a family, and I like the combination of criminals and truth. These guys they’re tough but they’re working on this crazy case, and they can’t do it without truth. I think that’s cool.”

In an interview with IGN about the upcoming Uncharted movie, David O. Russell showcases what little knowledge he has regarding the franchise, the characters, and story. As of Uncharted 1 and 2, there is no focus whatsoever on main character Nathan Drake’s family, nor is there a focus on anyone in the supporting cast’s family. As far as we know, there is–quite literally–no one related to each other in either of the games. There have been slight murmurings that the upcoming Uncharted 3 may focus on some kind of familial relationship (or possible surprise twist) between Nathan and older partner-in-crime Sully, but my theory is Russell saw a screenshot or video or walked by his kid playing the game, noticed a young Nathan standing next to an older Sully, then immediately assumed the game was about father and son rogue artifact thieves. One might suggest that Russell is talking about “family,” the kind of metaphorical bond that isn’t defined by a literal blood relation, except it was previously stated that the movie will feature Nathan Drake’s literal father and uncle. Also, not one fan of the series would refer to Nathan’s adventures as “working on a case,” as Nathan is not a detective — he’s a treasure hunter and thief. Thieves work “jobs,” David O. Russell.

(IGN via Eurogamer)

I’ve written one of these open letters before, and only do so when I feel the world is in peril. What greater peril than a direct sequel to the disastrous Final Fantasy XIII?

Back in 1988, an amazing movie featuring human interaction with animated characters was released. It was called “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and it signaled a shift in my childhood perspective on animated characters. As a child who had gone through a phase of adamant refusal to watch anything that wasn’t animated, “Roger Rabbit” was my first real exposure to an acknowledgement of animated characters in a live-action world. And it was fascinating. The ‘Toons were like another race of linguistically developed, perhaps further evolved humanoid creatures that these people lived alongside with little consequence. (Unless a ‘Toon killed your brother.) But they were still cartoons. They weren’t flesh and blood people, they were Ink ‘n’ Paint.

So, my beef with the influx of 3D animation/live action movies is this: Are we supposed to think these characters are real now? Seriously? When we see characters like Garfield, Marmaduke, the Chipmunks, Yogi Bear, etc. interacting with humans, animated to look like they were born of this world, organic, living creatures that look freakishly unlike other animals of their species (is Yogi an av-er-age bear in this world, or is an average bear an average bear? or is Yogi the only one like that? WHY? What happened?), how is it that the humans with whom they interact don’t question it?

This past week, we’ve been doing our best to ignore a perniciously misleading science story that’s been making its way through both blogs and mainstream media. According to these reports, bees have managed to solve an NP-hard problem in mathematics and computer science known as the Traveling Salesman Problem, which consists, when “given a collection of cities and the cost of travel between each pair of them,” of “find[ing] the cheapest [lowest-distance] way of visiting all of the cities and returning to your starting point.”

Many news stories about this, which stem from research done by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London, take the angle that this somehow proves that humble bumblebees have beaten computers and those egghead scientists that rely on them. “Bees’ tiny brains beat computers, study finds” proclaims The Guardian‘s headline.

As a writer who regularly attempts to cover scientific developments in a way that’s easily understandable by a broad readership, I can understand the appeal of this strategy: It takes the forbidding topic of the Traveling Salesman Problem, to which volumes of arcane computer science literature have been devoted, and makes it into an emotionally resonant populist narrative. “See, bees can beat computers after all!” Read that headline and you don’t have to know or care what the Traveling Salesman Problem is or what the research consists of; you just know that the bees have bested machines. Sadly, this isn’t true.

Semiconductor company AMD recently published a guide to getting a geek guy in five lessons. It is either a fiendish, deliberately outrageous troll post to get blog links (success!) or merely a patronizing dispatch from a bizarre mirror universe governed by high-schoolish social rules and wince-inducing gender norms. Let’s run through the steps:

The rumored Ninja Theory-developed Devil May Cry game has been officially announced by Capcom, complete with trailer and screenshots, prompting the following letter of melancholy and defeat. The above picture on the left is of the old, ruggedly handsome, Josh Holloway (Sawyer from LOST) lookalike Dante and the picture on the right is the new Dante. And yes, that is a mugshot full of teenagery angst.

I hate the Shrek movies. I just hate them. In what, at times, seems like a golden age of children’s entertainment (see: every Pixar movie that doesn’t include Larry the Cable Guy), they’re a sharp reminder of just how lazy the genre can be. They have nothing to say, their only purpose is to steal money from indiscriminating parents, they’re marketed based on the actors in them instead of a the characters and story (this is even worse for the rest of the Dreamworks Animation bilge), and, worst of all, they feign “sophistication” by filling the movie with dated and inappropriate pop culture references that are meant to keep the poor adults in the audience from committing mass suicide and traumatizing their children even further. I’ve said it many times; the Shrek movies are poisoning our youth. Now though, it seems they’re poisoning kids literally.