JAPAN - HOLIDAY OR HOMELESS?

Japanese office culture is strange. People in business together don't talk, ever, except for a couple times a year when they spend five obligatory days getting absolutely smashed and passing out all over the city because it's expected of them. Afterward, they revert to how things were and don't discuss what happened. In the middle of this wave of festivities, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning headed into Shinjuku, land o' plenty when it comes to hostess bars, love hotels, and nightclubs... and right now drunken salarymen napping in the street with homeless people. If it weren't for the sort of clean clothes I probably couldn't tell them apart. Let's play a game called Holiday or Homeless!

NEW YORK - TEEN PREDATORS

When I joined a group of teenagers wolfing down pizza in the cafeteria at Raytheon, one of the world’s largest defense contractors, they didn’t look like trained killers--they sported braces and misguided attempts at facial hair, not steely eyes and piano wire. But they’d spent thousands of hours perfecting a certain set of skills that made them perfectly competent at eliminating lives. We were all there to test out the Universal Control System, or UCS, the first piece of military-grade hardware inspired by and specifically designed for the video-game generation. 

LONDON - SOMETIMES A CAVE IS JUST A BIG VAGINA

Ryan McGinley’s new exhibit of cave photographs, some of which we featured in our Photo Issue, opens at Alison Jacques Gallery in London tonight and it’s already getting tons of accolades. People keep talking about the gorgeous colors and the masterly compositions, referencing Tom Sawyer’s “spirit of adventure” and Journey to the Center of the Earth, sprinkling biblical Jonah and the Whale references here and there, but what’s really baffling is that no one is stating the obvious: These are all pictures of vaginas. I mean, they’re caves. With all those surreal colors, they’re practically Georgia O’Keefe paintings. You don’t have to be a pervert, or Freud, or both, to see it.

AUSTRALIA - DO YOU LIKE COMPUTER GAMES?

This one looks like it could be pretty good.

For more on games of the computer variety, check out our man Steven Lea Sheppard’s regular games column Sheppard’s Video-Game Pie, or if you can’t be bothered reading, The Gaming Hour on VBS. By the way, he played Dudley in The Royal Tennenbaums, and Harris the dungeon master in Freaks and Geeks.

NEW YORK - GOOD GAME, ALISON HAISLIP

Today was a good day. I got home from work, popped open a beer, and sat down to kill zombies in the Xbox game Left 4 Dead with my new friend Alison Haislip, host, interviewer, and badass of G4’s Attack of the Show! We decided to do an interview while buckshotting zombie brains all over each other in the deserted farmland of the Blood Harvest level. I was in New York and Alison was in LA, but thanks to Xbox Live, petty details like that don’t matter. It should be noted that a) Alison fucking wails on this game and saved me at least a dozen times, and b) during the interview the zombies wouldn’t leave us alone! We were constantly shouting out to each other about Smokers, Tanks Hunters, Hordes, and Witches, some of the super-zombies in the game. But you knew that. 

NEW YORK - WAY TO GO, GUYS!

It’s been a few days since the VICE soccer team didn’t completely lose a tournament like usual and the guys won’t stop talking about it. I guess we’re all supposed to feel proud of them because in the six years these Bad News Bears have been playing, they weren’t knocked out of the running by getting creamed in their first game at the eighth annual Fanatic tournament at the Chelsea Waterside Park last Sunday. Let’s see how they made the magic happen…

BRAZIL ISSUE EXTRA - SHEPPARD'S VIDEO-GAME PIE

NINJA BLADE
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Ninja Blade is fun.
The obvious point of comparison is Ninja Gaiden II. By almost every common standard of measurement, Ninja Gaiden II is the better game. It’s got more polish. It’s got more levels. It’s got more enemies, and more weapons, and more magic, and more special moves. The combat system is tighter; tight like unto a fighting game. It’s a big blockbuster of a production. Yet I did not find Ninja Gaiden II fun. Ninja Blade, I did.

AUSTRALIA - ROLL ME OVER AND TURN ME AROUND

 
Rockstar’s new game Red Dead Redemption sets out to redeem the entire cowboy genre. And after Brokeback Mountain, it has it’s work cut out for itself (we thought cowboys didn’t shoot each other from behind). Anyway, it’s the follow up to Red Dead Revolver from a few years ago and we have the trailer right here.

CORPORATE SHILLING - NINJA BLADE EXPLAINED EVEN FURTHER

Hey, remember this manga thing from last month for the Xbox game Ninja Blade? Of course you do. Well, today the preludial saga of Ken and the swarms of alpha-worm-infected zombie-things comes to a tearful finale. Click here to read the whole thing or, if serials are more your thing, head back to our original post and follow the daisy-chain of sites forward to the present (the last one was jackassworld.com, so if you pass that you've gone too far).

AUSTRALIA - GTA IV THE LOST AND DAMNED

A few of days ago a bomb went off in Sydney, destroying a well known Hell’s Angels hangout. It’s the latest chapter in what we’re tentatively calling a rapidly escalating turf war of Road Warrior proportions. Does that whet your appetite for a little biker destruction?