part i | in TOMB RAIDER, you are playing as a woman

What was the last good game I played where my character was a female? Emphasis on character. Emphasis also on female. I've played plenty of games where my avatar has been a chick. They were hardly characters or women though. Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect, my "FemShep," Lu Shepherd (named after my bro's adorkable black lab rescue), was indeed a woman -- but she was also androgynous. She was a soldier and a human before she was a woman. The Mass Effect galaxy reacts to Shepherd's good/evil tendencies more than his/her gender, which I suppose is optimistic for the future of humanity. In the future, we won't be as hung up about that. I previously mentioned how Saints Row: The Third was the biggest feminist statement in gaming in years for how your female avatar earned respect for her actions, not because she was a dude or a lady.

Ahh, another year, another crop of over-qualified slave labor for unhappy mid-management jerks to exploit! Welcome to the terror-dome, new graduates. The good news is, you're probably smarter than you realize. The bad news is that not many people care. It's not really your fault, it's just that you probably have a spine and individuality, more so than any other crop of potential graduates. Also, you're probably dumber than you realize, sorry to circle back on that point. But it's true. You just don't know much about the world you're entering. You might remember I spun up a similar article around this time last year, and you can give it a gander here, but it's a year later, and I'm a year wiser, and wouldn't you know it, there are nine more things worth knowing, now that you've graduated from college to the desert of the real.

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

Truth, justice, and the American way. Strangely enough, I learned a lot about Superman from my mom, who in turn had learned it through osmosis from her brothers when she was young. Back when comic books were books, and not recognizable intellectual properties ripe for mass-marketing, they represented a kind of simple math that a kid could understand. Superman was the simplest, so much so that most people, young people especially, are untucking their shirts and sneezing directly at the idea of Man of Steel coming out in June, because while The Dark Knight Rises was a French revolution allegory, what in the blue fucking hell could boring-ass Man of Steel possibly bring to the modern discussion? These days, we have Batman, and Wolverine, and The Avengers, and Robert Downey Jr, who is a genre unto himself. Superman's a boyscout. Punch the Commies, save the cat in the tree, last son of Krypton, Moses-allegory, defend the defenseless so they can live in peace, and on and until the day is done. Superman was conceived in 1933 in a time before the term "nuclear family" had been added to the American lexicon, nevertheless, he was the hope, the aspiration that even though we aren't invincible like he is, America, and all its promises, won't burn out if we stick together and keep driving forward.

The shift from tasteless to anxious was instantaneous when I saw marathon runners with names scrawled down their arms and legs ("Go Jack! Run, Lu... I think Lucy?") starting to call and text as they loped by at mile 22 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Some, but not all, were running with smartphones, and I very much wish now that they had been vanity-Tweeting, shouting to the world that they were indeed doing the marathon. They were using their devices because they were being inundated by notices and updates humming through their phones to the point that they could no longer ignore.

Something was wrong. Those that stopped running early were lucky. Hours later, after night has fallen, there is a pile of hundreds of discarded equipment bags near Copley Square, left in a panic after the explosions. Each bag contains a runner's ringing, vibrating phone, buzzing over and over with notifications that will go unheard. Their family members are trying to find their runners.

Now that people have gotten the chance to digest Bioshock Infinite's ending, its meaning, and its place in the world, its presence still lingers in our minds. It's got a twisty, gooey, book of the month kind of blubber on it. I wanna chew it. That's a credit to the product as a piece of entertainment and as a bit of pop culture, too. This game requires discussion with good grammar. There are so many angles you can examine the game from -- c'mon, then, you Dickensian urchins, let's point them out!

Are you wondering just exactly how all those bits and pieces of Bioshock Infinite fit together? Wonder no more! I only found it complicated at first because it's a little contrived, with some odd character motivations at first glance. It's not more esoteric than what I examined in my Metal Gear Solid 2 review or The Fountain review, or, I don't know, a whole short story I wrote over a year ago, but it didn't make sense right off the bat. That's good. A game that requires examination is art. Yeah, there, fine, I said it, games are art, and so is Bioshock Infinte. It looks nice and it makes you think. Anyway, without further delay, let's dig into what a floating city in the sky and a girl with some quantum physics books have to do with the Battle of Wounded Knee and alternate versions of reality.

The first, but also technically not the first, trailer for what was formerly Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeros, and The Phantom Pain, is now officially Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It's a Metal Gear game directed by grandmaster troll Hideo Kojima, who is a fellow that has ideas and likes films, but seems more intent on heckling and abusing his fans. In response, they get weepy and pine over his oddities, begging him for things he cannot give -- a phantom pain, you might even say, in their videogamishful hearts.

I wonder what my neighbor is doing. He's up there. I can hear him. I can hear him trundling around and he makes it sound like worlds are colliding. He doesn't have feet. Instead of feet, he has unexploded cannonballs that his cousin dug out of the ground at Valley Forge. It was an okay birthday present. When he walks, the British children run down side alleys awash with slimy runoff, and they say a chant to keep the unexploded bomb-foot man from killing the king in his bed.

Oz the Great and Powerful is the frantic outcome of a thousand-million primary-colored Legos clicked together, discovered at dawn after showing your four year-old daughter Army of Darkness the night before.

Oz the Great and Powerful is a grilled ham sandwich served to you on a plastic Fischer Price plate at high tea-time, between the hours of 5-7pm. It's best to watch Oz the Great and Powerful with no intention of liking it, because that will set you up for some electrically-enhanced make-up sex. Oz the Great and Powerful contains an intricate adoration normally reserved for a drunken retelling of your fifth-grader's stage performance of The Wizard of Oz, if you were at a train station bar, and you were describing it to a stranger that you suspect is there to kill you, and you're stalling for time. The point the movie is trying to make is that your lies aren't nearly as convincing as you might think, and that you aren't fooling anybody, and Oz the Great and Powerful is full of characters like this, and deception and self-deception will make you real ugly, real fast.

Being of sound mind and body, I will now attempt to review The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part II with as little foreknowledge of the book and film series' as possible. Hang on.

Taking one for the team here, folks.

A funny thing happened during this experiment. I tried, and eventually failed, to keep track of how many times I said, out-loud, "This is fucked up." Not yelled, or laughed, but just said, in a normal speaking voice, "This is fucked up," while watching The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part II. Let's talk about why.

Okay, so, how bad can it be, right? Optimism! Always give cultural watersheds the chance to win you over -- The Hunger Games acting as a good indicator that things can still surprise me. With no prior reading or viewing experience of the Twilight franchise, save for the funny but still-painful Twilight 1 Rifftrax, which taught me that a mustache is a big responsibility, I made the brazen decision to watch this here final Twilight movie. For science! I'm a smart guy, I can figure out what's going on! Something this popular can't be complicated. I know it's about chastity and vampires and mustaches, and I know that their names are Edward and Bella, and I don't care about how or why the girl hooks up with a werewolf while her vampire boyfriend is away. Just tell me how it ends! Do they finally fuck? Do they finally fight? Does Kristen Stewart finally install her emotion chip and stop tottering around like she has two left wooden feet?

Perhaps, most pertinent, is it actually bad?