I am a jaded old f@$# these days. Aaron played the fantastic "Munich" by Editors at Popscene last week, and despite this being one of my favorite songs in recent memory, i refused to join the dancing masses because ... well ... they don't appreciate Editors like i do. Something about the commonness of the masses. Going back to that ever-useful Men in Black quote: "A person is smart. People are stupid.".

The time with Splinter Cell: Double Agent promised me last Saturday didn't materialize, both because i ended up spending almost six hours at Veronica's work that afternoon (slightly more than the advertised "two"), and also because by the time 9pm rolled around i was wiped. I arose at 9am Sunday morning to check it out, and found my stealth skills have mostly deteriorated. It took me much failure and reloading to get past the introductory Iceland and prison levels, and then more trial-and-error once inside John Brown's Army to grasp the mechanics of playing as a double agent, with relationships to two organizations to maintain. However, a few more hours on Monday and Tuesday have reacquainted me with the joys of creeping past unsuspecting enemies and ducking into the shadows. Your torn allegiance is central to the game's plot, and creates some fantastic gameplay that forces you to make real choices that will affect how the story evolves. A brilliant injection of real-life gravity into the typically linear and rigid world of adventure games. Well done again, Sam Fisher.

I downloaded a demo of the new FIFA 2007 from Xbox Live the other day. Preliminary reviews indicate that EA has completely redesigned the gameplay for the next generation systems, trying to get away from the arcadey baloney of previous FIFAs in favor of a Winning Eleven-like focus on realistic player movement and ball control. The demo suggests as much, but to my eye still suffers from a level of inorganicness (not a word, yes, but it conveys what i'm thinking). That is after playing it for a bit you get the impression that you've seen all the possible scenarios, unlike WE where i still encounter fresh situations with every match. FIFA is apparently still not as deep as its Konami competition. The full version is released on Halloween, i'm undecided as to whether i'm going to plunk down $60 to see if it can convince me.

I awoke this morning to the not-so-comforting sounds of George W., as V had left the TV on and Bush was in the middle of his press conference when my alarm i went off. I hit the snooze for another fifteen minutes, but found it difficult to relax and catch a few more z's listening to Dubya trot out the same tired parade of clichés. According to CNN, the White House will no longer use the phrase "stay the course" to describe our philosophy in Iraq, but that didn't stop Bush from using every other euphemism for it. It's very worrying when our government's response to a very real crisis is to alter their semantics. Wonderful. When the economy craps out because of the increasing U.S. investment in foreign wars (hello, North Korea!), Bush and co. can call it a "self-correction" and we'll all feel much better. The most annoying thing about watching his press conferences is that he never answers the questions put to him. Dubya just launches off on some tangent, spewing forth a lot of meaningless catch phrases, until the audience's memory of the original query is gone. Don't take this as a pro-democrat rant, because i'm just as annoyed with the complete ineptness of democratic party these days. Lou Dobbs had an interesting editorial recently where he suggested the only way to get politicians to recognize the fact that they've alienated the public is for voters to register as independents en masse. That's making more and more sense to me.