Virtual Dork: South Park Stick of Truth Review

There is a moment, after you've vanquished a member of a rival faction using an arsenal of farts, Cheesy Poofs and magic 8-ball-handed weapons, when you, as the "new kid" in South Park, witness a familiar cast of characters bickering over how to take down their greatest foe.

"Suck my e-e-e-elven dick, Butters," Jimmy Valmer says on the screen in front of you, perfectly framed as only the construction-paper inspired animation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone can be.

It is these moments that elevate South Park: Stick of Truth above a normal licensed game. The script was written by Parker and Stone. The game was made using resources from South Park Studios' animation team. All of the voice actors (including Isaac Hayes in a brief cameo) are here. This looks and sounds exactly like an episode of South Park should.

It's only a pity that, under the hood, Stick of Truth is an exceptionally easy title with little reason for multiple playthroughs. While the South Park fan in you will squeal with joy as you battle Al Gore and try to beat back the flaming farts of Wizard Cartman, the nonsensical ending and shallow gameplay keep Stick of Truth from being a truly great video game, although it's undoubtedly a wonderful narrative experience (with some caveats).

You begin the game as the "new kid," moving in to a home on the same block as series regulars Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormack and Kyle Broflovski. You quickly join forces with Butters Stotch, who informs you of the game du jour in the neighborhood. The conceit, a mystical RPG quest with fantastical elements, is drop dead similar to the narrative sheen that ran through last fall's "Black Friday" trilogy on the show. Cartman and Butters are members of the human guild, while Stan and Kyle do battle as knights of the elven faction.

After creating your character, you learn from parents (who share your physical traits) that there is something just not right about you. Unfortunately, what is one of the most interesting and novel story quirks in the game gets dismissed in a trivial and surprisingly uninteresting and unfunny cutscene toward the end of the game featuring an eye-patched, shadowy government figure.

Your journey will take you to all the staple locations in South Park: Skeeter's Bar, Jimbo's Gun shop, City Wok, Tom's Rhinoplasty and the abortion clinic. Throughout the game's roughly 15-hour playtime, you'll run into all the classic characters, who you can "friend" through the game's Facebook system. As you gain friends and experience points, you'll be able to add perks and abilities that increase your powers in turn-based combat that hearkens back to the old days of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy.

Unfortunately, that combat is relatively uninspired. While there are some fun elemental quirks to the game that you can use to turn the tide in your favor when the combat screen does appear, most of the fights are winnable using a simple pattern of actions, and because there is no limitation on the amount of items you can carry and stockpiling combat potions is merely an exercise in searching for cash, strategy goes out the window in the second half of the game.

As a thief, I was granted a basically game-breaking ability early on to stun the most powerful enemies while I picked off minions. Using Butters' "Healing Touch" ability, I was able to win almost all fights in the game following a relatively simple pattern once I had a level 10 weapon. Combat becomes a slog to get to the next brilliantly written cutscene.

That is, until the end of the game, when you're forced into a series of battles that increasingly make little sense and the difficulty factor is artificially inflated. Without spoiling the ending, I can say that the final climactic scene can be seen coming from a mile away, something that is relatively unconscionable for a series and writers known to toy with the absurd in pursuit of satire.

Despite my poo-poohing, Stick of Truth is an extremely fun romp through America's finest source of scatological satire. Fans of Matt and Trey's work should not miss the opportunity to visit this quiet little redneck mountain town and relive some of their favorite experiences from the long-running series. However, I would advise against paying the full price. Wait for a discount for your trip to Colorado.

Verdict: 3/5 stars

An Inexplicably Close Look at an Incredibly Obscure Song: "10 Days Late" Third Eye Blind

Third Eye Blind burst onto the scene in the late '90s displaying an uncanny ability - like Matchbox Twenty, Semisonic, the Goo Goo Dolls and their ilk - to pen hits that blended complicated, sometimes soul-crushing things with sugary delicious pop rock licks. Whether it be the depths of crystal methamphetamine, suicide, or an incredibly painful break-up, Stephen Jenkins and the boys seemed to be able to tackle it with a riff that made the crowds feel like dancing anyway.

Perhaps the one strength that set the 'Frisco rockers apart from their mainstream contemporaries was their very real, very raw way of talking about sex - its passion, its complications, its fundamentals. This is a band that wrote about wasting days in bed, Cunnilingus that would make Colonel Angus blush and orgasms that last ages of summer afternoons.

Which makes "10 Days Late," the third single off the band's 1999 album "Blue," a bit of an anomaly.


In a way, the song is vintage 3EB. It's got a bass line followed by a riff that will tingle your spine. The chorus does not shy away from the, ahem, practical side of sexuality, making the ditty perhaps the highest-profile song about a missed period in pop music history. Jenkins croons and delivers punchy soundbites throughout.

But much like Ben Folds Five's "Brick," released a year prior to "10 Days," the song is almost hopelessly wrapped up in how the man's life is affected by the early pregnancy of a woman. Our dramatic voice in "10 Days" shows his juvenile perspective by saying, "I'm in trouble now, and it cannot wait." Never mind the fact that this young girl he's impregnated is faced with a decision that has moral, legal and life-altering ramifications.

Also, for some reason, there's a need for a choir and a cowbell in this one.

In an effort to continue its track record of writing about complicated themes, 3EB may have bit off more than they could chew with "10 Days Late." It's little wonder why the band's popularity faded considerably after the release of the single (OK, hardcore fans, I know the inner turmoil with Kevin Cadogan probably didn't help much).

Where "Brick" succeeded by emphasizing the limited perspective of its dramatic voice and adopting a sufficiently somber tone, elevating Ben Folds to a level of popularity that lingers today and causes Folds himself to question the message his song about abortion is leaving with folks, "10 Days Late" comes off as something Jenkins insisted it wasn't - just a modern pop/rock song about menstruation. It had the potential to be so much more.

Or maybe I'm just looking at it too closely.

Why I'm anti-Mizzou. In one half.

I get funny looks every where I go after telling folks I attended the University of Missouri, but Kansas Jayhawks garb fills my closet and bedclothes cocoon me in the frigid Spokane evenings.

Today's SEC matchup, and specifically the response to the televised championship, have given me further ammunition.

I don't hate Mizzou. I don't hate their fans. In fact, because of my time there, when they're playing an opponent I don't particularly care for (like Auburn), I tend to throw my weight behind them. But it's impossible to continue to support a fan base that can find any possible excuse to say they're disrespected, when the simple fact is they're disrespected because they've never stepped up on the biggest stage.

In the past, it's been the BCS. Or referees. Today, it was the media. In the Tigers' fan mind, they are the greatest, and any possible adversity is evidence of an unjust deity pulling strings in someone else's favor.

Exhibit A: A tweet that gained traction sometime around halftime Saturday:

Drinking game: take a shot every time the commentators say something anti-Mizzou. Die in approximately two minutes.
— Average MU Student (@AverageMizzou) December 7, 2013

I'll be the first to admit that Gary Danielson is a giant douche, and Verne Lundquist is a human dollop of sour cream. I've done it in the past, and I'll continue to do so.

What the "Average Missouri Fan" doesn't want to admit is that Auburn's running game is completely decimating the Missouri defense. Once again, Missouri fans refused to look themselves in the mirror, evaluate themselves and their weaknesses, and admit that maybe they're not the unblemished image of football perfection they think they are.

I don't mean to say every Missouri fan is like this. And I certainly don't mean to imply they're the only fan base that engages in this kind of "wahmbulance" chicanery that afflicts all entitled enthusiasts.

But it's certainly an epidemic I see particularly among those I grew up with and with whom I attended classes in Columbia. You can write me off as a jaded Jayhawker if you must. I'll admit, part of me is dying watching the Tigers on such a big stage the day Kansas basketball lost a heartbreaker in Colorado.

But ask yourselves - if another Missouri meltdown is on the way, whose fault is it?

Page-turning: My thoughts on David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"

After more than a thousand pages of signature prose from one of America's most distinctive literary voices during the past two decades, I'm left with two prevailing emotions setting up permanent shop in my gut: jealousy and despair.

These feelings have nothing to do with the brilliantly constructed dystopic future David Foster Wallace brings to life in "Infinite Jest," his epic novel published to nearly universal acclaim back in 1996. They have everything to do with witnessing a depressingly intimate look at substance addiction, narrative brilliance and synaptic hyperactivity from a writer, in his early 30s, who showed limitless promise and was taken far too early from this world.

To the uninitiated Wallace reader, Infinite Jest will sound in summation like the ramblings of a madman. The plot, so convoluted it prompted drawings of story maps resembling unpopped blackheads (warning: spoilers), centers geographically around a substance-abuse halfway house and academy for precocious and talented tennis-playing preteens in central Boston following the consolidation of North America into one nation-state. People remain glued to their entertainment screens (in a kind of cultural foresight that could only come from a writer so in-tune with social strata he turned an essay about cruise ships into a discussion of the loneliness of human existence) and the accumulation of garbage along the former U.S./Canadian border has turned the area into an exotic wasteland, where plants tower over humans and giant feral hamsters (yes) roam the countryside.

What keeps Wallace from dwelling in the absurd (that is to say, when he doesn't want to dwell in the absurd - as readers of DFW have come to expect, there are moments of comic hilarity where the absurd is precisely the initiating agent, but only when the author has a point to make) is the development of his characters. The Incandenza family is perhaps the most wildly realized nuclear unit in modern literature, but the pathos does not end there. Every character in the Enfield Tennis Academy (one of the novel's settings, where tennis prodigies - like DFW himself - go to hone their skills as they foster dreams of making 'the show') is fully realized. Michael Pemulus, a substance fiend and mathematical wunderkind, could flesh out his own novel in this fully realized world. This is to say nothing of Donald Gately, the square-headed football player who's reached his "rock bottom" on oral narcotics and serves as house manager at Ennet House, the nearby halfway facility for other substance abusers on the mend.

There is a scene in roughly the final 2/3 of the novel that perfectly encapsulates Wallace's brilliant fiction. The tennis youngsters are assembled on one of the academy's courts playing a game with tube socks, tennis rackets and balls that is essentially a play version of the kind of thermonuclear warfare that haunts Wallace's world on the brink, where the U.S. president is a lounge singer and Canadian officials are falling like flies to a band of wheelchair assassins asserting Quebec independence. Pemulus is the star of the show, developing a mathematical program that determines the payload of each nation and where their weapons caches are stored. Each team selects a "lobber" to send cruise missiles (tennis balls) at the other nations.

It's a tradition that marks every Interdependence Day in the novel, the day when American/Canadian unity is observed and the normal frenzied pace of the academy grinds to a halt. Wallace describes the game, "Eschaton," with a level of horrifying detail, that shifts effortlessly into comic relief as we're reminded these are 12-year-olds playing this game signifying mutually assured destruction. The game crescendos into a schoolyard brawl, hastening the drug testing that brings the novel's to its quasi-conclusion.

I say quasi because Wallace pulls a Tarantino on the reader, leading with details in the first few pages that become of utter importance in the novel's final moments. I read the hefty novel over a period of two months (I blame Grand Theft Auto and the arrival of a certain new feline companion) and was puzzled by the novel's seeming lack of resolution. I had to recrack the first few pages after finishing last night, reminding myself of the puzzles solved (or seeming to be solved) in the novel's opening scenes. A word of warning, then: Infinite Jest will command your full attention. Grant it the respect it deserves.

I've been a fan of Wallace's nonfiction ever since I read the opening lines to "Consider the Lobster" many years ago. I've been telling myself I'm making a grand error not cracking his fiction until now. "Infinite Jest" is a monster accomplishment that will leave you questioning what the role of entertainment is in your life and what constitutes an addiction in this new world of constant media dependence. It is darkly hilarious, deeply insightful, and simply a stunning masterwork of American fiction. Read it now.

Verdict: 5/5 stars

An Inexplicably Close Look at an Obscure Song: Jimmie's Chicken Shack "Trash"

I remember my early encounters with pop-ska-rockers "Jimmie's Chicken Shack" with a fondness that came from two sources.

The first being my excitement that I had another group of counter-culture dudes to look up to with which I could ignore the drivel that dominated Total Request Live. The second, much-earlier bout of happiness came the first time I heard the group announced on the radio and hopes sprung that we had a new restaurant in town that could compete with the dry-heave-inducing Popeye's (Louisiana Fast...all the way to the john).

Those first hopes were sustained through the band's first effort I was aware of, 1999's "Do Right" off the group's second-major release, "Bring Your Own Stereo." It was the perfect blend of angst-y, drunken fantasy mixed with power chords that mixed well with the Blink-182's and Sum 41's of the era.

Then came "Trash," the second single off the album.

It's not that the sophomore effort is worse than "Do Right" in any way, it's simply that, at its core, "Trash" is the exact same song. For a band with "chicken" in its name, Jimmie's Chicken Shack's music is surprisingly more like pancakes - as the great Mitch Hedberg once told us, great at first, but by the end, you're fuckin' sick of 'em.

In "Trash," we're introduced to a dramatic voice that, for all intents and purposes, is likely the same manic-depressive mess of a lead singer who's regaling us in "Do Right." Indeed, lead singer Jimi Haha (I wish I was making that up) has said the entire album is about his ex-girlfriend from New Jersey. In other words, this pony's doing the same trick over and over.

While "Trash" attempts to do a few things its predecessor did not, including a foray into the trilingual ("Auf Wiedersehen, yeah my mon ami"), the basic premise is the same: I'm more than you're making me out to be. And, predictably, the final few lines of the song unravel into a nonsensical rant about "jumping right in," presumably to attacking the "mom" in the song that keeps calling our sweet Jimi trash.

By the end, we've learned that the judgmental matriarch enjoys purchasing drugs from our sweet Jimi and ignores personal hygiene.

Not included in the liner notes: Whether it would be a reasonable expectation for a Baby Boomer to label those pictured above as filthy.

The final line of the song gets in the ultimate dig for a musician clawing his way up the modern rock charts: "Tell your mom, I'm on the radio." Yes, Jimi, yes you were. For about 14 minutes and 59 seconds in an era jam-packed with post-grunge talent, some extremely gifted and others not so much.

Jimmie's Chicken Shack may have cornered the market on angst-ridden young men heaving spite at past lovers. One wonders if this band, which had a unique sound and a hook unlike many of their contemporaries, could have clung to a little more fame had they branched out, song-writing-wise.

But perhaps I'm reading into it a little too much.

A postmodern meltdown: Some thoughts on GTAV and contemporary culture

'Cause I got bats in the belfry
I'm in the kitchen boiling society
I'm in the open catching all the leaves
We all see what we want, yeah

-Dispatch, "Bats in the Belfry" (Bang Bang 1997)

As Franklin Clinton, one of three protagonists in Rockstar Games' latest iteration of their billion-dollar Grand Theft Auto franchise, I'm cruising back to my pad in Vinewood, GTAV's version of Hollywood set in the hills over Los Santos (read: Los Angeles). I notice a patrol car speeding toward me, a not uncommon occurrence in a title that sets fits of unbridled rage as a gameplay mechanic. Except this police officer is chasing another violent offender, who is seconds away from veering in front of my vehicle's path.

Here's where choice sets in. And we're not talking the "will you or won't you" narrative mechanic like something out of Bioshock. This decision in front of me will have no bearing on my character in the long-term or how the game's story unfolds. It's simply a moment, in the countryside of San Andreas, where I as a player have to choose.

I swerve in front of the crook, blocking his path and making the pursuit all that easier for the patrol car. Both pursuer and pursuee (word?) emerge from their vehicles, weapons drawn. I do the same, hunkering for cover behind my sedan's engine (in retrospect, not the likeliest choice for safe-hiding-spot in a shootout). I pull the left trigger on my Xbox 360 game pad to go into targeting mode with my pistol. In another subtle nod to my choice as a player, I default to targeting a police officer, but I don't pull the trigger. Instead, the crook blasts him away before my eyes. Law is restored when his partner, at a different angle, takes one shot to put the murderer down.

GTAV isn't a perfect recreation of modern life. Following this encounter, the involved officer simply strolled back to his patrol car (I half expected to see him whistling) now sans one of its prior occupants and drove off. But these serendipitous moments of choice, and just HOW MANY there are in this massive game world, elevate Rockstar's latest above mere interactive entertainment to something more.

The chorus above is from one of my favorite ditties by 90s jam rockers Dispatch. The song begins with some psychedelic riffs on the electric guitar that fade into more ska/reggae beats at intervals. In the song's final act, the guitar swells to a pulsating fit of hyperactivity, echoing the mind of our speaker as he descends slowly into madness (hence the title) by the frenzied pace of modern life.

The Grand Theft Auto series has always been about choice. It was arguably more about choice before its 3D days, when the first two numbered installments in the series were "beatable" only after you obtained enough cash to proceed through a series of locations. GTA grew up with its first appearance on the PS2 and Xbox (GTA3), and has become a cultural force to be reckoned with.

The genius of GTAV is that it perfectly encapsulates the kind of frenzied mind that is created by the postmodern world. Michael and Trevor, the two other protagonists in the game, are relics of a bygone era, former heist aficionados sinking their teeth back into "the game." Because of ten years of cultural evolution that have left them behind, both have become mentally unstable in their own ways. The player, faced with a map the size of Rockstar's previous open-world games combined and numerous potential tasks throughout that world (in addition to just wreaking mayhem, a staple of the series) faces a similar kind of emotional distress (or, at least, I have multiple times while playing).

I'm not nearly finished with GTAV. I plan to sit down for a good long while with it today, some caffeine and alcohol at the ready for my fits of existential calamity. But, to date, the most impressive thing about the title is its ability to mimic the malaise of living in a world where choice is omnipresent and morals are blurry at best.

Sonic doom: In defense of Fun.

I've gotten a lot of guff over the past few months from friends who fail to see the appeal of Fun. I'll admit, they're kind of the kitschy alternative choice of the moment, and their melodramatic "Tonight (We are Young)," which is STILL burned ineffably into my car stereo speakers hasn't done much for my pro argument. Saturation has a way of destroying a pop song and the artist responsible (see the One Hit Wonder phenomenon).

Why, then, do I find myself consistently defending the New York, Fueled by Ramen rockers? Does it have something to do with the fact that I still (shamefully) dust off "A Mark. A Mission. A Brand. A Scar." some evenings over a bottle of red wine, dabbing at the corners of my eyelids with a handkerchief? (I don't. It's more like once every year...sort of.) Until this morning, on my first true run in about a week in the blazing Spokane summer, listening to the opening chords of "Carry On" that it hit me.

Fun. writes like the dramatic poets of old.

Yes, I seriously consider Nate Ruess' writing prowess up there with John Donne, Ben Jonson and even Goethe. Will bored schoolchildren read Fun.'s liner notes in two hundred years with the same lazy alacrity as they do in today's high school classrooms? Probably not. But they should. Consider the opening lines to the aforementioned "Tonight," often excised or sped through in radio edits:

"Give me a second I,
I need to get my story straight
My friends are in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State
My lover she’s waiting for me just across the bar
My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking 'bout a scar, and
I know I gave it to you months ago
I know you’re trying to forget
But between the drinks and subtle things
The holes in my apologies, you know
I’m trying hard to take it back."

Now, compare with the first few lines of Donne's "The Flea," that lyric poem you had to memorize then immediately forget before fourth-period algebra:

"MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, 
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."

What combines these two pieces of fiction? Story, symbolism, narrative directness. Both Fun. and Donne (see why I did that now?) are speakers addressing an unknown audience. There's a history here that is explored partially in the words, but also invites those reading/listening to cast their own experiences through the language jotted down.

To be sure, Fun. are not the only pop artists engaging in this kind of lyrical storytelling. Indeed, the dramatic poets often set their verse to song, hence the terms "verse" and "chorus" and the invention of what is commonly referred to as an "earworm." But the prevalence of the technique throughout Fun.'s album, Some Nights (see also: the introductions to "Carry On," "One Foot," and the album's introductory track, for crying out loud), demonstrates a commitment you just don't see these days.

Pop artists usually pay lip service to the need for story, allusion and higher thought in their works. I suspect that's due to the ceaselessly shrinking attention spans of pop music's target audience: teens. It's nice to see incredibly successful artists recognize there is still an audience out there that gives a damn.

That's why I like Fun.