Since you so rarely get to hear me on a podcast, you might be interested in the latest episode of Roleplayers’ Realm, Gamepro’s RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey. We talk about Big Huge Games’ upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in a bit more detail than I was able to go into with my preview. As soon as I leave, everyone breaks out into a Dark Souls conversation. Typical.
Check it out. That’s my Honda Fit tearing it up at Tsukuba in Forza 4. Pretty awesome, huh? I don’t know why you don’t see more Honda Fits in the racing world. Like, say, the Annual Honda Fit Invitational at Nurburgring.
Paramount’s 2003 remake of The Italian Job was a love letter to (i.e. product placement for) BMW’s new Mini Cooper. I think it’s time for a similar movie featuring the Honda Fit. Paul Walker will star as the hero who assembles a plucky band of heisters, each with a different colored Honda Fit. Daniel Day-Lewis will play the villain, who drives a Humvee. In the big finale, our heroes will save the day because Day-Lewis has to pull over at a gas station to fill up, while the Fits merrily drive away, getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon.
Among my emails this morning was the following:
Hi First Access Member,
The Hail to the Icons Parody Pack add-on for Duke Nukem Forever is now available! It offers three new multiplayer game modes, four new maps, as well as new weapons. As an early member of the First Access Club, you get it for free!
To get the code for your platform of choice, head over to http://www.dukenukemforever.com/access/
– Your friends at 2K Games & Gearbox Software
I vaguely remember talk of an expansion pack for Duke Nukem Forever. So, what’s this thing all about? Oh man, it’s called the Parody Pack. When I first saw that, my reaction was similar to the reaction of the reels guy having to load the Hulk running in Modern Romance. This isn’t looking good.
In this pack, you get access to a few new modes, including the Hot Potato one where you kidnap a woman. The other big draw is the release of four new maps, all of which are parodies of other games. There’s Call of Duke (Call of Duty), Sandpit (Halo?), Inferno (Doom), and 2forts1bridge (Team Fortress 2) all available for download in the new pack. Each map includes a special weapon, most notable the DFG on Inferno. In Doom, BFG stood for Big Fucking Gun. What does DFG stand for? Duke Fucking Gun? Probably.
Good luck to the 12 of you trying to play online tonight.
I didn’t realize it at the time because I was just a kid, but the 80s began on December 14, 1979 with the release of London Calling. The Clash’s masterpiece of focused punk rage was varied, catchy, and smarter than any mere punk rock. The rest of the 80s had a tough act to follow.
London Calling was added to the Rock Band catalog earlier this year when Harmonix released the entire album. But as far as I’m concerned, The Clash’s contribution to the 80s isn’t fully represented without a single from their album Combat Rock, released two years later. Rock the Casbah. I was never a big Clash fan while growing up. Silly Brit musicians, thinking they’re playing punk rock when they sound nothing like Black Flag or The Dead Kennedys or even The Sex Pistols. But I remember everyone playing Rock the Casbah when the Gulf War began in 1991. If you listened to the lyrics, which were mostly easy to parse except for some line about being “fundamentally caught naked”, the song was about repressive Islamic governments cracking down on Western culture. It was probably a response to the Islamic revolution in Iran, something kind of weird for a punk band to get bent out of shape about, particularly a punk band with an album called Sandinista. If you overthrow puppets like the Shah and Samoza, you’re going to get what you get. But it was the Cold War, so the rules were more about ideology than consistency. “Fundamentally caught naked” indeed.
So thematically, nearly ten years later, Rock the Casbah had nothing to do with an American-led coalition responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which I would argue was the end of the 80s, as we found a new post-Cold War place in the world. But there was some stuff in the song about jets dropping bombs between minarets, so it would have to do. And because it was a very English song, it folded nicely into Operation Desert Storm’s international flavor. Just as The Clash played us into the 80s, here they were playing us out of the 80s as we made our way into the 90s.
Rock the Casbah is available today, along with some Blink 182 stuff that I’m sure the other kids in your dorm would enjoy.
