As an aside, this video is proof that Superman doesn’t need to be recast for the upcoming Superman reboot.  Brandon Routh is more than up to the task if given a script where he’s able to DO SOMETHING.  Honestly… if you didn’t see it, the climactic threat in Superman Returns was a big rock.  I guess Superman vs A Large, Wet Hill wasn’t going to sell tickets.  The Superman Who Went Up With A Mountain and Came Down a Corpse.  The airplane rescue was good though.

Lisa: I really feel like playing the game.

That’s right; my wife is so hooked on Borderlands, she refers to it as “the game.”

Jack: Why don’t we wait for the new DLC?  I don’t want to be burned out on it when there’s finally something new to play.

Lisa:  (sighs) Yeah.  Fine.  You’re right.  (Pouting ensues.)

I never wrote reviews for Borderlands or any of its subsequent downloadable content.  Here’s the quick take.  The original game is fantastic.  It’s a good time solo, and a blast in two-player co-op and multiplayer.  The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is one of the best DLC packages I’ve played; buy it.  Mad Moxxi’s Underdome is mostly a waste (all that arena fighting, no XP).  The bank where you can stash some extra loot is handy, but not worth 12 bucks.  General Knoxx’s Secret Armory is huge, loaded with loot, and can be challenging depending on your character’s level, but it is also very repetitive.  Buy it, if only for the increased level cap; from 50 to 61.

Last week, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution was finally released.  Lisa was out of town most of the week, but half an hour after we arrived home from the airport Friday afternoon, we were parked in front of the 360, looking for bandits to blast and new guns to blast ‘em with.

It is immediately striking how little is new in New Robot Revolution.  Patricia Tannis, a core character from the original game, is the first person you meet when you arrive at Tartarus Station.  The only thing different about her shack is its location.  The next stop is a garbage dump that looks quite a bit like Crazy Earl’s Junkyard… and the Trash Coast… and Treacher’s Landing.  Next is a town that looks like someone piled two or three New Havens and one or two Old Havens on top of one another.  After that… more familiar people and places.

The enemies are familiar too.  Bandits, beasts and bosses have been converted into robotic versions… Claptrapped, if you will… but the changes are superficial only.  There is a variety of traditional Claptraps to fight, but mostly they serve to replace the midgets (hold your comments please, that’s what Gearbox calls them) that are so prevalent in other areas of the game.  Still, after a year of impotently watching one-eyed waste baskets dance and beg for attention, there is joy to be had in blowing the gears out of a few of the noisy bastards instead of repairing them so that they might live to irritate again.

Claptrap: I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  Look at me!  I’m dancin’, I’m dancin’!

There is a scene in Zombie Island… one Claptrap kills another… I will admit to having had envy in my heart while watching it.

Here’s the thing; while most of what goes on in New Robot Revolution is a rehash, it is a rehash of a great game; entertaining missions, scads of villains, buckets of loot and even a few scavenger hunts.  You won’t be disappointed.  I wouldn’t have been disappointed either, except, again, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Borderlands; I was hoping for something other than more of the same.  But more of the same is probably a great way for you—you, who aren’t married to my wife– to burn a slow weekend.

Ok.  Time to feed the falcon… have fun.  Don’t waste money on grenade mods, you’ll scav better than you can buy… and don’t sell lower level weapons just because they’re old.  My level 61 Hunter doesn’t carry a gun higher than level 45, and his best pistol is level 20 something.

One last thing; Gearbox has promised a patch that will allow characters to advance another eight levels, to a max of 69 (always going for a laugh, those Gearbox lads) but it hasn’t been released yet (October 4).  Don’t make the mistake I made; wait until the patch is in place before using level 61 characters.

See you out there.  Say hello if you like.  I’ll be the skinny guy with the pistols and the flaming raptor.  Lisa is the sexy redhead with the incendiary SMG and the dangerous gleam in her eye.

I was foolish enough to Google Ines Sainz today.  Silly me, I wanted to find out what happened before I picked sides.  I looked at some photographs of Ms Sainz, which I will admit to enjoying, but will also concede, did her no favors.

Wait, wait.  I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “You pig!  She’s a professional journalist!  It doesn’t matter what she’s wearing!  She should be treated like a professional!”  My response?  Grow up.  Just because that’s the way you want the world to be, doesn’t mean that’s the way the world is.

Ms Sainz’ stated intent is to be the “hottest sports reporter in Mexico”; not the most respected, not even the most popular; the hottest.  Her professional goal is to be objectified… and she’s good at it.  She walks into an NFL locker room and her appearance, as intended, elicits a reaction that one might expect from a room full of amped up, twenty-five year old millionaires who very rarely hear the word no.  Her job is to make men horny.  She did her job.  Yet somehow, from somewhere, shock ensues.  She tweets that she is embarrassed to be in front of naked men–

–Which, by the way, is a fairly common sight in a locker room.  You know what’s in those lockers right? Clothes.  A locker room is where people change their clothes.  Sometimes, if they’ve been sweating, say after an NFL practice session, they even take showers first.  Imagine her discomfort; wet, naked men everywhere and nowhere for an innocent like Ms Sainz to comfortably avert her eyes.  Thank goodness men are never uncomfortable being naked in front of complete strangers or we might have had a real problem.  As we all know, men are mostly without feelings and have no need for privacy.  Imagine how complex this issue would be if men weren’t emotionless automatons, each just the same as the next.  But any man will show his genitals to pretty much anyone who asks, right?  Of course–

–Where was I?  Oh yeah.  The woman who entered a men’s locker room of her own volition tweets that she’s uncomfortable.  There is some “hooting and hollering.”  There are some suggestive remarks.  But no one lays a finger on her.  She never feels threatened.  I know that because I heard her say so three or four different times to three or four different media outlets.  She gets her interview with the handsome Latino quarterback (he surely wasn’t objectified, right?) and she leaves.

Her colleagues though; her colleagues are offended.  The Association for Women in Sports Media is offended.  The 24-hour news beast smells blood.  The outrage begins to flow and twenty-four hours later, Ines Sainz is victim.

It isn’t the players and coaches of the New York Jets who have made Ines Sainz a victim.  Ms Sainz is a victim of a news media she is too naïve to understand and too desperate to please.  She is the victim of those desperate to put forth their own agenda, regardless of how their “victim” feels.  She is the victim of her own ambition, her own narcissism and her own greed.

Sexual harassment is more important than this side-show.  We need to have conversations about the objectification of women, but this is not the right context.    We cannot mortgage our moral authority on the news media’s desperation for damsels in distress.  We must not diminish the importance of these issues by canonizing Ines Sainz, her vanity,  or the zealots who would use them both for their own benefit.

I’ll tell you who the real victims are: we are.  We’ve had to listen to self-involved media hair-dos pontificate about this for two days.  We’ve had to listen to Ms Sainz give half a dozen interviews in a language she doesn’t speak. We’ve had to imagine NFL offensive linemen naked.

So now I’ve contributed to the noise surrounding this nonsense.  Media Whore comma Color Me A.  But I’m done with it now… unless that Gloria Allred gets involved… then I’ll… well, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I’m at the end of a business trip (already this has stretched into fiction).  I’m packed and ready to go home, but I have half an hour to kill before the taxi comes to take me to the airport.  I’m sitting in the hotel lobby, bored.  After my virile display of business acumen, I’m too amped up to read.  I open up my computer, bring up Netflix in my browser and start watching… I don’t know… Jaws.  About the time the kid with the super-creepy mom becomes a stain in the Atlantic, the cab pulls up and I hop in.  It’s a little cramped in there, so I pull out my iPhone, open the Netflix app and there, in my instant queue, is Jaws.  I don’t have to start from the beginning.  No fast forwarding.  It knows where I left off and begins playing with the kid’s half eaten raft washed up on the sand.  A few minutes later, around the time Mr. Holland finds the severed head, I arrive at the airport.  I check in, satisfy the needs of the fear-ridden populace, and sit down in the terminal.  Now I have a choice.  Laptop or iPhone?  Laptop.  But… Jaws may be a little bloody for an airport terminal.  Maybe I’ll watch an episode or two of Family Guy instead.  A little while later l’m all Stewied up (it’s the one where he and Brian have some shenanigans and Lois gets mad at Peter) and they call me to board.  Now, I like to sleep on a plane, which is handy, because not all planes have wi-fi.  But if my plane did have the WEE-fee, as my father used to like to call it, I could have watched Roy Scheider smoking a butt, suggesting a craft of greater tonnage, which might have been more appropriate to the task at hand.  Right.  I land safely and grab another cab to take me to my ticky-tacky free bedroom community.  Twenty minutes and one dead Islander later I’m home, wife kissed, kid tousled, vodka poured, sitting in front of my big ol’ TV watching Chief Brody turn oxygen into fruit punch as Jaws streams through my Xbox… in HD.

Guess how much I had to pay for this remarkable experience.  Nuthin’.  Well… I paid them the eleven bucks a month I’ve been paying them since my local Blockbuster became a dry cleaner and a Chinese take-out.  I get Netflix on about 147 different devices and it costs me exactly zero dollars more than it did when they were just sending me a Blu-ray every once in a while.

So it’s cool, right?  See?  I knew you’d like it.  We’re gonna get along, you and I.  I can feel it.

The argument for video game companies refusing to serve the owners of second hand games is simple.  Developers and distributers don’t profit from second hand games.  Therefore, the owner of a used game is neither their customer nor their concern.  This argument is fallacious.  More than that, it is terrible business.

All customers, and particularly all gamers, have the potential to become repeat customers.  They develop loyalties (and boy, is that an understatement).  They talk.  That has a name… what’s it called… oh yeah, word of mouth… buzz.  Buzz moves product like nothing else.  Buzz sells DLC.  Buzz sells sequels.  Buzz is priceless.  The more people playing and the more people talking… or posting or tweeting or putting up gamerscore… the better, no matter how they got their hands on the game.

People buy second hand games for a reason.  Maybe they aren’t sure if they’re going to like a game and don’t want to gamble the full retail price.  Maybe they just don’t have the cash for retail.  Most kids and college students don’t.  Maybe they missed the game when it was new a couple of years ago and want to see what they missed before the “hotly anticipated” sequel hits.  But guess what happens if they like their secondhand purchase?  They buy the DLC.  They ask for the sequel for Christmas or their birthday (which is exactly what happened at my house last winter with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2).  They grow up, graduate from college, get a job, stick a few bucks in their pockets and remember how much they liked playing John Q. Gamecompany’s game with all of their buddies in school and maybe the guys can get together again online for the sequel… and the DLC… and the next sequel… and the next sequel.  Oh, and they can’t forget to renew their Xbox Live membership either.  What’s that?  The next-gen console is coming?  Someone has a new peripheral?  There’s a guide?  A toy?  A t-shirt?  A movie?  I need a new video card for my PC?  Forget that, I need a new PC and make it the biggest, baddest, ballsiest PC any wonder-nerd has ever had the audacity to construct.  Bill Gates will be jealous of my PC.  I’ma have Skynet on my side when I’m kicking your ass in Modern Warfare 8.  And so the marketplace rumbles on.

Companies that refuse to service used games are short sighted, probably poorly managed, almost certainly cash-strapped, and are likely trying to sell bad games at a premium.  These are companies that have no confidence in their product. They have no interest in your satisfaction.  They don’t want your loyalty.

If a company doesn’t believe you are a customer, don’t be.  Buy someone else’s game.  When you do, Microsoft will notice.  Sony will notice.  Apple will notice.  Amazon and Best Buy… even GameStop will notice.  That company’s displays will be moved to the backs of stores.  Its games won’t make the front pages of web sites, or the newspaper filers or the email ads.  Its booths will be set at the backs of convention showrooms, far, far away from the mothership brands…. removed from the traffic, from the customers, from the people who got their start, who fell in love with gaming, playing a used copy of a great game.

How many years will it be until all of this is moot anyway?  An all download digital marketplace will be the end of second hand games; maybe the end of retail software sales as we know it.  Amazon and Best Buy and GameStop will notice that too.  At the beginning of this piece, I jokingly asked if you remembered video stores.  How about record stores? What else are we going to laughingly reminisce about in a decade or two?  Oh… one last thing… do you think the price point will drop when games are download only?  No, neither do I.