If Madden NFL 10 is college calculus, Batman: Arkham Asylum is kindergarten finger painting.

To be fair, I've only played the demo. But to complete the demo, I only needed one button on my controller. Apparently anyone can be Batman, so long as they have an "X" button. This is the sort of behavior that I would expect from a Superman game. (Really, if you could shoot laser beams from your eyes, would it really matter if you had any other powers?) Run, punch. Sneak, punch. Drop from the ceiling, punch. While I'm not really expecting a solve-it-yourself Agatha Christie mystery in a video game, I would've like to have seen the World's Greatest Detective featured in something other than an upgraded River City Ransom.

Maybe I could forgive even this if I thought the game looked good. But a Batman wearing plate armor, Joker wearing makeup, Harley Quinn dressed as a circus slut, and a Jim Gordon who has been moonlighting as a body builder are hardly my idea of good design. (It's better than the designs in last year's hideous Mortal Kombat vs. The DC Universe, but then everyone involved with that game should have been subjected to Johnny Cage's Ball Breaker.) And Batman has pupils. Why, oh why, does arcade Batman have pupils? It's not like he's looking at anything.

Despite all of this, it may still be the best Batman game ever. That's damning with weak praise, indeed.

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Madden NFL 10 loudly and proudly proclaims itself as the best NFL game on the market. But look a little closer and you'll realize that it is the only NFL game on the market. And it sucks.

If you haven't been playing Madden since 1989, don't bother picking up the controller unless your idea of a good time is sitting in rush hour traffic while the car next to you plays music you can't stand loud enough for you to hear over the sound of the horn blaring from the car behind you. Everything about the game is designed not for the football enthusiast but for the Madden-ophile, though the game would attempt to berate you into believing that the two terms are synonymous with its derogatory help text and insulting in-game commentary.

By "help text" I really mean "sarcastic text." Because while the instruction booklet includes an entire page devoted to button combinations for establishing a "Defensive Playmaker" without ever defining what exactly that is, its advice on how to complete a forward pass is limited to "Throw the Ball: X, A, B, Y, or LB." Needless to say, this "instruction" is surprisingly inadequate to the task of conveying the exact level of skill needed to get the ball to what would appear to be a wide open receiver but is in fact a masterfully created interception beacon for the CPU's defense.

Byzantine menus require hours of exploration to decipher. Franchise mode alone shows more non-football data about your team than you could glean in an entire week's worth of NFL Network coverage. Taking the time to navigate the dozens of unexplained play-calling options means that you hear only slightly more delay-of-game penalty whistles than in-game Snickers advertisements. (I'm not kidding: they're everywhere: Snickers heavily subsidized a game that still costs more than $60.) At any given time, there is more information on-screen than F-22 fighter pilots have in their 21st-century HUDs, which is kind of appropriate, as this "game" is more flight-simulator than sports recreation.

If you, like me, haven't at this point in life mastered Madden, the game insinuates, you don't know shit about football. Which is demonstrated in the game's only 2 levels of difficulty: Rookie, which is about as much like real football as a rousing game of Duck, Duck, Goose, and What-The-Fuck-Do-You-Think-You're-Doing-Noob? The learning curve is so steep that "imminent-failure cliff" is a better term to describe it.

So I guess if I don't know it by now, I never will. Oh, well. I just wanted to play an intuitive football game with my favorite teams and players. If Madden's too difficult for me, I guess I'll just go play... oh, that's right. Thank you, EA and NFL for your exclusive contracts. Nevermind.

I should note that the game isn't all bad. My favorite part of the game is the list of Hall of Famer players. Not that you can play them. It's just a list. Embedded in a video game. Taking up space. It's not even a complete list. Among those missing from the list of HoF members is none other thanJohn Madden, the man known for introducing the fun and excitement of the NFL to generations fo fans. And that really about sums this whole game up.

Welcome to Batman and Football Month, everybody!

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The new Wriphe.com version 3.0 is now online. Some things have been moved, so a little reinvestigation (and re-bookmarking) may be necessary for those of you who don't come in through the front door.

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Last night Katie Couric told me that U.S. Government studies reveal that the general public is skeptical of the need for a new flu vaccine. Among the concerns specifically included in her over-simplified info-graphic were the following three points:

1. people believe that the H1N1 virus is a "mild disease overblown by media";
2. the potentially dangerous "new vaccine developed too quickly";
3. and the standby "parent's fear for children's safety"

Putting aside the fact that the media informed me about the public's distrust of the media (curse you, CBS, for making me doubt that I doubt you!), this made me wonder: what does America trust anymore?

Point 1: Clearly it's not the media. They've enjoyed exaggerating the dangers of a flu virus variant that has almost exactly the same death rate as the standard flu. But wait, the media cries! This flu tends to kill the young instead of the elderly, the inverse of a typical flu virus, so be afraid! The media enjoys reporting the difference in ages as "years of lives lost", meaning that this virus kills more potential years than most preceding flu viruses. (I'm not making that up; I read it in Time magazine). That would make this the worst hypothetical danger ever besides perhaps the Death Star or the year 2012. Also, you'd best not take into account perennial potential-stealers such as SIDS, which has killed more babies than this new flu virus has killed humans over the same time span. So maybe this distrust in the media is valid.

Point 2: Clearly it's not the government. Big Brother Obama wants the vaccine deployed yesterday. Earlier this week, the White House "advised" the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to accelerate vaccine availability. HHS is the umbrella agency which provides oversight for the CDC, FDA, and NIH. And of course when the White House says jump, all Cabinet members, including the Secretary of the HHS, has to say how high or risk losing their jobs. So should people have concerns that the political expediency needs of the White House would cause the HHS to rush the production of a potentially dangerous vaccine before the appropriate alphabet agencies have had a chance to verify that it is safe? Yes, they should. (See President Ford's ill-fated 1976 mass inoculation program against swine flu for details.)

Point 3: Clearly it's not reason. Parents are so afraid of the side-effects of a vaccine of weakened virus that they'll run the risk of exposing their children to a strong, baby-killing flu virus instead? Do these same parents wrap their children in suits of padded bubble wrap? Cover their mouths and noses with tape to keep out smog and allergens? Keep them locked in the basement to avoid falling down stairways and being exposed to carcinogenic sunshine? Clearly God sends disease to punish us, so who are we to try and oppose his will? Who wants to live in a world where our entertainment outlets and elected government alike are out to kill us, anyway?

The cure may be worse than the disease, but I doubt that either is worse than the symptoms.

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No post of significance today. I've been taking care of business working on a jigsaw puzzle of Elvis and watching preseason football. (I hadn't noticed, but apparently I've been in football withdrawal.) Sorry.

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I have a friend -- a real friend, not the Facebook variety -- who has a specific use for Facebook: he's trying to become "friends" with all of his favorite character actor television stars of the 1970s. He's particularly partial to Don Stroud. Most of you would know Stroud from... well, most of you won't know him, but trust me when I say you've seen him in something. ("Facebook friend" is sure to soon be the new shorthand term for "that guy looks vaguely familiar.") My friend has also recently "befriended" Robert Conrad of Baa Baa Black Sheet and Wild Wild West fame (the man loves his alliteration) and Lynda Carter. Sweet, sweet Lynda Carter.

So maybe Facebook isn't all bad but that's as far as I'm willing to bend on that point.

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All I've heard lately are cries about the inevitable destruction of America. The popular media is abuzz with stories of people determined to reveal that the planned federal health care reforms are really just an excuse to start a new wave of eugenic cleansing. Somehow, "damn Mexicans are stealing our jobs" became "damn bureaucrats are trying to kill our children," and no one seems to think that's really funny but me.

My father is convinced that the secret cabal manipulating the government of the United States is determined to take away all of his rights. Most recently he was concerned that soon all cars on the interstate highways will be driven by computers, removing the ability of citizens to drive wherever they want. I'll bet we'll glad we cashed in all those clunkers for new cars when we're walking everywhere.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine has been complaining that the federal government will soon take away all of our handguns. This will be a problem, he says, when the oppressed criminal class of America (by which he means citizens who are or have been sentenced to prison, estimated to be 1 in 13 citizens and fast growing) stage their armed uprising against the American justice system. This will prove the old adage: when guns are outlawed, only most people will have guns.

It's not enough anymore to just hate gays and women anymore. If your pet theory doesn't involve government conspiracies or the end of the world, you're practically un-American. I'll bet it's all that fluoride the Jews have been putting in our water. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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Old Age is like a zombie. No matter how fast you run, it's still coming slowly but inevitably towards you with a desire to eat your brains until you're dead.

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When I was young, the world feared the effects of a nuclear war that could end mankind as we had come to know it in a matter of days, if not hours. These days, kids seem to be more concerned about the effects of using non-renewable resources such as coal and oil. I'm pretty sure that no matter how old I get, I'll never be more concerned about the extinction of endangered species or the melting of ice caps than I am of the possibility of unexpectedly finding myself trapped in a glow-in-the-dark corpse. Hard to believe that within a generation, people have moved from fearing sudden, immediate death to fearing the use of gasoline-powered automobiles. Is that really an improvement?

This trend is clearly visible in modern movies, where nuclear war seems to have lost some of it's impact. Of course, I have complained in the past that in The Day The Earth Stood Still remake the aliens aren't worried about man's use of The Bomb, but of how we treat our own environment. (Why the fuck do aliens travel across the infinite reaches of space to warn us that they will kill us if we don't stop killing ourselves? Ugh.) In the recent movie version of the 1986 Watchman comic book, the solution to imminent nuclear war was nuclear war. (Not a perfect adaptation to Alan Moore's original solution: fake aliens.) And in this past weekend's G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the 1980s Cold War sentiment directed at a child audience has been adapted from an evil anarchist organization threatening world destruction into the "mature" story of a weapons manufacturer who wants to destroy manmade things. (Presumably, natural things will only be damaged if Cobra is really pissed off, not as a byproduct of some stupid explosion. How urbane.)

What's next? Movies extolling the virtues of laying miles of recycled water bottles instead of asphalt in roads so that less energy can be expended on the nation's highways-turned-conveyor belts? Sci-fi flicks where the creature is mutated not by nuclear tests but by "inorganic" corn crops? A remake of Dr. Strangelove where the world is doomed not by overzealous militants but by overaggressive fishing practices? A modern Soylent Green in which the hero proclaims that "Soylent Green is people," and he's happy about it?

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd really rather duck and cover my eyes than watch these. The old ways may not be the best ways, but if you ask me, they certainly make for better cinema.

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After a focused site re-tooling and a couple of long nights, Boosterrific.com is now the number 2 return in Google on the key phrase "Booster Gold" (behind Wikipedia, curse them). I consider this to be something of an accomplishment. Maybe not so great as founding a country or curing smallpox, perhaps, but certainly better than having a million Twitter followers or running a multi-million dollar business into the ground. So, congratulations to me.

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