“Why don’t you just turn it off?” Rebecca Hall’s character, Evelyn, chides during TRANSCENDENCE’s opening.

part i | TRANSCENDENCE is full of bad ideas

What high school sophomore scribbled this story, eyes leering in bored desperation at the stains on the classroom ceiling, searching for a clear thought as his math and home-ec classes ooze and BLORP together? Truly, if a high school sophomore conceived of the story of a man that dies and is reborn again as a godlike computer through his wife’s pants-on, lights-on, Facetime-on-iPad love-facsimile, then it was most certainly proof-written by his gluten-free former-missionary Earth Sciences teacher.

"The last of his people comes to a strange land."

part i | Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge is a suicide note

As a reminder, only sociopaths take full, physical glee in videogame violence.

Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge positions the series' main character, Ryu Hayabusa, as an outdated, barbaric relic. All he does is slaughter. He's kept his face hidden. He hardly talks. His favorite weapon is a sword, one sharp enough to hack off limbs. You can't track him. His agility is inhuman. Other global forces from outside Japan whisper tall tales about the ninja and just how many people he has killed in his life. The actions of a videogame character are being dragged into a realer light—what, did you think nobody would notice when you just spent two full games leaping over rooftops, summoning demons to modern cities, killing the demons, beheading people, and then vanishing off into the secluded hills of Japan. It's like, man, Japan is full of psychos, isn't it?

In games and in real life, I mean. Right? There is a western videogame producer somewhere snorting over his early-morning Monster Energy Drink, wondering who makes a game where your avatar is a masked, remorseless bladestorm in this day and age? When will the Japanese learn that that isn't what videogames are about anymore?

Ryu the super-ninja is outdated.

It was not difficult to decide on the best games on the PlayStation 3.

The first test was to try to remember which ones I really liked.

The second test was to try to write about them. Some couldn't summon strong memories. Others were pungent with feeling, really slathered in emotion, you know? The PS3 was a strong system. If somebody asked me which games they should buy for it. This is the list.

These are the essential PS3 games.

The Best PS3 Games of the Generation (Alphabetical)

BAYONETTA

 — Bayonetta is your first crush ever.

Forget about Bayonetta's narrative. Bayonetta herself certainly has. She is impossibly-proportioned, seriously, her giraffe-neck legs are about twice the size of the rest of her torso, for some reason, the artists chose to draw her like those oddly-figured visualizations fashionistas pencil together to show how the swooshing, dramatic clothing is appearing in their minds, and it isn't until they actually try to put thread to cloth that people are usually people-shaped, not Bayonetta-shaped.

With the two Hobbit movies, we, the people that bother to think, and wonder, and hope for good movies set in worlds other than our own, are living the life. We are not living well, though.

The movies are so long. They serve so many masters, standing trial accused of Being A Chopped-Up Hobbit Movie and three charges of Being A Lord Of The Rings Movie. There are a lot of places for them to go wrong and send out ripples of wrong across all of that real estate.

Two questions arise:

Hey, everybody! It's the Internet! It's that galactic, pirouetting party that never gets shut down—because the sun never comes up in the Internet, dummy, Al Gore programmed it that way—full of conversation, debate, shouting, threats, and dicks, literal and metaphorical.

The above is the first comment on a recap of Breaking Bad's penultimate episode.

Grand Theft Auto 5, the newest installment in the best-selling video game series, was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Tuesday, September 19, 2013. Fans are eagerly awaiting another opportunity to visit the virtual world where that they can experience a lengthy crime saga from three difference perspectives, a new feature to the series that has built itself on dark satire that holds a cracked mirror to Americana. In past installments, the series usually achieved this through absurdism—often through player-controlled actions—film references, and pop-culture references, focused through a comedic lens, amidst regular violence.

The series first made its own pop-culture splash in 2001 with the release of Grand Theft Auto 3 for PlayStation 2 with a condensed version of a New York City stand-in to be explored. It proved to be cathartic to laugh at the game's unmasked, hyper-sardonic violence that could be embraced, uninhibited by consequence, all while experience a story where voice actors portraying facsimiles of gangsters swore out-loud in dialog. Twelve years, and multiple editions of the game later, and Grand Theft Auto 5 has released, and the joke isn't fucking funny anymore.

"When the shit goes down... Spring Breakers is... miles and TIMEZONES away from Scarface and Britney."

Taking the turn onto Spring Breakers' back stretch, we were already taking bets on who would die. Because the movie appeared to be, quite plainly, a movie (and little more). The story's good Christian girl had already gotten out of dodge when things got too real, and our quartet of skinny young skanks was down to a trio. So, would the really bad ones get their bodies dumped in a swamp or fed to a gangster's pet hammerhead shark? Without the good girl, the movie had been let off the leash, we were free to follow these miscreants on a hell ride down Florida's dirt path. James Franco, draped in the ceremonial robes he raided from Kevin Federline's closet, will be your Virgil for this journey. You are about to see the seedier side of spring break, guys—

The Raid is the single best movie about an expert fighting for his life in very threatening surroundings.

Art can be commended for being thematically-focused and for authenticity. In this case, we're talking about movies. For example, praise can be heaped upon a movie because of a lead in a biopic performing flawless mimicry. It feels authentic. It might be the movie's biggest strength, perhaps it's only strength. Movies where authenticity are their main strengths can overpower other potential shortcomings, so when a movie is about a place, or when a movie is about ideology, or about traveling, about being on the run, about emotion, and fear, and love -- even if the rest of it is vacant, that one authentic trait can make it rise up because viewers will walk out of it and say, "That was a movie about [SUBJECT]. Finally, somebody made a great movie about [SUBJECT]."

"If there ever can be a best game, unfortunately, about war, this is it. It's long, brutal, occasionally boring, always intense, and above all else, never really in your control."

We can think about life faster than it actually goes by. Without meaning to, certain events and entanglements can consume years of unconscious thought, running parallel to what's actually happening right before you, sometimes outpacing your senses, sometimes overwhelming them altogether. You often are not in command of your mind, and what it will be, as those years pass. A decade from now though, it may. Life does not embolden life immediately. Experience's benefits are staggered and we cannot derive clarity at first glance because memory is not good enough -- true clarity comes from acknowledgment and confrontation, a repulsive thing to face right here in the waking present.