Rec Room

Crossword: ''Hidden strength''

MATT JONES — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:24:52 GMT

Yes, we can solve this puzzle

Kaidoku XXXII

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:13:09 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Wander lust

RYAN STEWART — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:10:33 GMT

It's okay to look in Fallout 3
Several games have attempted to re-create an entire major city to serve as the environment. Fallout 3 destroys one.

VIDEO: The trailer for Fallout 3

Fallout 3 | For the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Bethesda Game Studios | Published by Zenimax

Several games have attempted to re-create an entire major city to serve as the environment. Fallout 3 destroys one — Washington — and deposits you in the midst of the wreckage. You'll find the Reflecting Pool on the Mall filled with radioactive water, the Jefferson Memorial crawling with zombies and mutants, and the Washington Monument reduced to its skeleton. That last one in particular makes the game all the more unnerving and unsettling.

You play as an individual who was born and raised in a bomb shelter. You're compelled to leave the security of that shelter when your father (voice of Liam Neeson) escapes without warning or explanation and the shelter's cult leader orders your execution. You set off after dad, only to discover that what lies beyond the vault's walls is a ruined wasteland, the result of a nuclear disaster. You find more than a few villages in addition to the DC metro area populated by survivors and settlers. Your pop has visited a few of these places, and the locals will tell you where he's going. But that information doesn't come free — you have to embark on a series of quests to increasingly remote locations in the wasteland. You'll do something for one settler, who will then tell you to go to another town, where you'll meet another person with a different task for you, and so forth. It makes sense in context: you're armed and intrepid, so of course people want you to run errands for them while they stay safe. There's a moral aspect to Fallout 3 as well: you earn karma for helping people and lose it for robbing them, lying to them, or attacking them without provocation.

For combat, Fallout 3 implements the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which lets you zero in on a specific area of a foe's anatomy. You can target a mutant's arm and render him unable to use his firearm, or his legs, so he can't escape. Or go straight for the head shot, which will dispose of him faster, even though you're more likely to miss. Or go for the torso, which is easier to hit but less damaging. It does take some time to adjust to VATS, since it will stop each encounter cold to bring up the targeting interface, and after you've used it to attack, the interface does not pop back up even if your quarry is still alive, so you're vulnerable to attack if you're not quick on the draw. Once you've gotten used to it, though, you'll find it's effective.

Bad idea jeans

MATT TAIBBI — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:10:18 GMT

Sports blotter: "You’re looking at some years, son" edition

THE NOT-SO-GREAT HEIST: Charleston Southern University football teammates Tyrone Lattimore, Zachery Hillery, Ronald Jay Baldner, and Samual Baptiste teamed up to rob a couple — and scored $7.50 a piece for their efforts.

Bad idea, Ch. 1
Man, there must have been something in the air last week. A rash of arrests across the sports world, with most of them involving college football players. And not little piddly-widdly, penny-ante, wuss-bunny arrests, either, but serious, man-size, you’re-looking-at-some-years-son felony arrests.

The worst (and stupidest) of these might have taken place in South Carolina, where four men associated with the Charleston Southern University football team were arrested and charged with armed robbery and kidnapping. It is really difficult to describe, with accurate pathos, exactly how tragic and tragically idiotic this crime was.

Here goes: Tyrone Lattimore (the CSU starting running back), Zachery Hillery, Ronald Jay Baldner, and Samual Baptiste are all staring down the barrel of two major felonies, but get this — all they got was 30 bucks!

Apparently two of these men, armed and in masks, approached a young couple in the parking lot. The men told the male victim to get behind the wheel of the car and drive. They drove to an apartment complex, took the $30 or so both victims had, then ran away.

This ingenious crime somehow involved four men, though, which means they got to split the $30 four ways, with each man having almost enough to eat a Steak and Shake dinner. Sounds worth 10 years in prison to me.

A sad commentary on the declining level of criminal sophistication among collegiate athletes. Hell, just a few years ago in the Palmetto State, football players at the University of South Carolina were smart enough to steal whole laptops without a gun. Sixty points apiece for the goofballs.

Bad idea, Ch. 2
A former Ohio state-wrestling champion and current Miami of Ohio football player gets drunk. He’s walking around his dorm feeling frisky. He opens some chick’s door, walks into her room, lies on top of her, puts a pillow over her face. She screams. He is surprised that she is not rolling with the situation, gets up, and flees. She runs after him. He gets popped and then it’s discovered that he walked into someone else’s room the same night.

The arrest of Zachary Marshall would be Cecil “The Diesel” Collins all over again, except the Diesel was sober when he walked into women’s bedrooms. The Diesel’s thing was also watching couples sleep together, not women all by themselves. Either way, this is not a good way to further your athletic career.

Magnum farce

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:48:47 GMT

Sports blotter: "CSI: Binghamton" edition

Binghamton University hoopster Malik Alvin broke new sports-crime ground recently, stealing a 36-pack of extra-large condoms and assaulting a senior citizen in the process.

CSI: Binghamton
New can’t-miss TV show concept: find some aging washed-out actor (Danny Bonaduce? Tim Matheson?) and turn him into a sneering, Armani-clad, cool-guy chief of the Binghamton, New York, municipal crime-scene investigators’ office. And then have him exclusively investigate crimes committed by members of the Binghamton University Bearcats basketball team. It’d get great ratings and then you could spin all 300 episodes off to the A&E channel for endless syndication.

The Bearcats, as you may recall, were once the home of New York Post back-page mega-villain Miladin Kovacevic, a Serbian hoopster who got in some trouble in May for beating the shit out of one Bryan Steinhauer in a bar. Steinhauer suffered a fractured skull, a broken jaw, and two broken eye sockets, and had to be put in a medically induced coma — nice work for a basketball player who apparently couldn’t hit the side of an airplane hangar with an actual basketball.

Kovacevic initially left the country and escaped prosecution in his homeland. The Serbian consul in New York was arrested for helping Kovacevic out of the country (he was accused of forging papers for the basketball player) but has since been freed; Kovacevic, meanwhile, has been arrested in Serbia but has yet to be extradited to the US. Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer will likely continue to stump loudly for said extradition, or at least until such time as the prosecution of hulking Serbian goons who put American college kids into comas becomes unpopular in the polls.

All of that, however, is academic, as Binghamton now has a second national scandal on its hands. This past week, Bearcats coach Kevin Broadus (no relation to Calvin, rap fans) was distressed to learn that 20-year-old junior guard Malik Alvin had been busted for shoplifting a 36-pack of Trojan Magnum condoms. Not only that, but as he made his getaway, Alvin knocked over a 66-year-old woman — causing a concussion. He’s been charged with shoplifting and assault.

The Binghamton program had to watch quietly as sports publications across the country laughed out loud at the incident, with Sports Illustrated even going so far as to put it in its “Dumb Arrest of the Day” section — alongside a joke which suggested that Alvin had cooked up the scheme to advertise the fact that he has a Magnum-size dong. “Good PR,” the magazine quipped.

Is he being served?

MIKE MILIARD — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:03:58 GMT

Tony Millionaire's still best on the page
In the first animated adaptation of Tony Millionaire's sumptuously debauched comic strip Maakies , the soused Drinky Crow was voiced by erstwhile Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter.

BOMBS AWAY At least “Beer Goggles” is an improvement on The Drinky Crow Show’s pilot.

In the first animated adaptation of Tony Millionaire's sumptuously debauched comic strip Maakies — a half-dozen or so shorts shown between skits on Saturday Night Live in the late '90s — the soused Drinky Crow was voiced by erstwhile Conan O'Brien sidekick Andy Richter. It worked well: reedy and weak, Richter's intonation was perfectly suited to a sad-sack creature so ill-equipped to deal with this poor world that his daily routine veered between drinking himself into oblivion and blowing his birdbrains all over the screen.

In the latest stab at adaptation, which turns Maakies into The Drinky Crow Show (debuts November 23 at 12:15 am on the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim"), Drinky is voiced by Dino Stamatopoulos (Mr. Show, Moral Orel). His constant companion, Uncle Gabby, a simian-looking fellow with a shamrock in his top hat and a shared lust for liquor, is voiced by David Herman (MADtv, Office Space). Neither of them is wrong per se. In fact, I'm an admirer of both guys' other work. I just remain convinced that Richter's were the proper pipes to give Drinky the gift of gab.

If the above suggests an unseemly amount of thought expended on something astoundingly inconsequential, so be it: I'm that much of a Maakies fan. Created by Millionaire (a/k/a Scott Richardson) and Scott Kaplan, The Drinky Crow Show first aired as a lukewarmly received pilot in the spring of 2007. In that clip, the animation seemed clunky: flat, washed out, sorta bland. It had none of the weird and wondrous rococo flair of Millionaire's intricate inky lines. (He's heavily influenced by the gorgeous fantasias of early-20th-century comics artists like Winsor McCay.)

I'm happy to report that the new season premiere, "Beer Goggles," is far better than the pilot. The animation is more detailed and expressive, with more of a hand-drawn feel — whether it's limning a candy-spangled fantasy land or the sagging breasts and cellulite of two over-the-hill ladies of the night. The themesong by (of course) They Might Be Giants and the voice cameos by Brett and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords are gravy.

The story here — thanks to the steampunk-style beer-bottle optical device he's got strapped to his noggin, Drinky doesn't notice that the world has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland — is also a lot funnier than the pilot. (As is the second episode, "Old Girlfriend," which airs December 21.) And if it's impossible to capture fully Millionaire's drawings in motion, at least the show can indulge in some of his favorite thematic fetishes: rampant alcohol abuse, copious spumes of vomit, gory self-mutilation, interspecies copulation, and pupating insects.

Sacked

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:05:20 GMT

A platformer with little, big problems
It helps to think of LittleBigPlanet not as a game but as a toy — more like digital Legos or Lincoln Logs than a typical narrative-driven experience.

VIDEO: The trailer for LittleBigPlanet

It helps to think of LittleBigPlanet not as a game but as a toy — more like digital Legos or Lincoln Logs than a typical narrative-driven experience. It comes in the guise of a traditional side-scrolling platformer, but there's no point to it, really: you just mess around with the tools it provides and see what happens. The single-player experience is threadbare, designed mostly to showcase some of the possibilities of the meat of the game, which is a robust and user-friendly level editor.

And the editor is something to behold. It's not technical or onerous to learn, though the sheer number of tutorial videos you have to wade through in order to do anything can be a pain. (There's some compensation in the droll narration of the British comedian Stephen Fry). Every function is driven by a simple, graphically pleasing menu tree that's simple to navigate. You can switch from editing to play-testing your new map almost instantly. I was surprised at how absorbing level building could be — and how easy. Within two hours of starting the editor, I had created a functional world. It was ugly as sin and no fun to play, but my objective — to create a level centered entirely on the mechanic of swinging from one platform to another — had been met.

I didn't upload my awful level to the public servers — which is just as well, because it would have been buried immediately. LittleBigPlanet has been out for only a few weeks, and already users have created some real gems. I played a level that captured the look and feel of the classic PlayStation 2 game Ico as well as one that was a dead ringer for the brand-new Mirror's Edge. Original creations outdid some of the developer-created levels, like an escape from Alcatraz and a gorgeous underwater maze. These are mixed in with plenty of forgettable levels, but the community rating system disposes efficiently of the losers.

Still, LittleBigPlanet's gameplay isn't nearly as successful as its level editor. No matter what maps I played, my reaction was often the same: first awe at the ingenuity and artistic acumen on display, then annoyance at the lackluster play control. Said control is truly terrible. One assumes that a sidescrolling game will be as tight and responsive as Super Mario Bros or Mega Man. LittleBigPlanet's protagonist, the cuddly and customizable Sackboy, moves with all the grace you'd expect from a stitched-together lump of cloth. He's slow and plodding and has an irritating tendency to tumble off things at the worst possible moments.

Stepping-stone sudoku XIII

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:12:32 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Crossword: ''Court case''

MATT JONES — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:05:39 GMT

Time to mix and match

Claws for concern

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:55:29 GMT

Further Defying Parody
Further Defying Parody

Crossword: ''My heart belongs to you''

MATT JONES — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:50:05 GMT

A little organ music.

Going native

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:14:59 GMT

Far Cry 2's heart of darkness
Far Cry 2's heart of darkness

VIDEO: The trailer for Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 | For Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated M for Mature | Developed by Ubisoft Montreal | Published by Ubisoft

Misery has been visited upon Africa for hundreds of years now, so you might be surprised to learn that it's taken video games this long to get in on the action. Far Cry 2 fills that dubious void by envisioning a continent straight out of the worst nightmares of 19th-century colonists. Its Africa is an unforgiving landscape populated almost entirely by mercenaries, arms dealers, and power-mad militia groups. What good men there are tend to stay well hidden.

Into this powder keg steps your character, a freelance soldier charged with taking down the Jackal, the alpha male in the region who's arming both sides of a civil war. Eliminate the Jackal, the thinking goes, and you end the war. Except it's not quite clear who you're working for. And as your reputation grows, an increasing number of shady characters want you to do jobs for them. Self-interest begets treachery, and before long your moral compass is spinning like a top. It's hard to tell who's a good guy and who's a bad guy — though if the game world had any mirrors, by the end it's a safe bet you wouldn't be able to look at yourself in them.

Far Cry 2's story line is fascinating for its pessimism. It takes its cues from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with the Jackal as the Kurtz figure and the player as Marlow, but its greatest success is in the purity of its gameplay, which is superimposed on a masterfully rendered setting. The game world is massive, incorporating thick jungles, vast savannahs, and scorching deserts. Against this backdrop, you engage in pitched but localized battles, often storming a fortified location. After the gunfire, the explosions, and the screams have died away, all that remains is a vast and indifferent land.

Then there's the strong sense of your character's physical being — you're aware at all times of the burden of his body. The map screen isn't metatextual but an object that your character lifts up in front of him and that occupies most of his view. He administers first aid by jabbing a needle into his arm; he might pull bullets out of his body with pliers. This avatar isn't merely a floating, disembodied gun.

Sum Sudoku XXXI

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:54:01 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

He choked big time

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:36:12 GMT

Sports blotter: "Ugly incident" edition

He choked big time. Choked a woman, that is. University of Florida cornerback Jacques Rickerson was involved in one of the ugliest sports-crime stories of the year this past week, accused of beating, choking, and suffocating his girlfriend at her apartment complex.

Rickerson allegedly struck his girlfriend and choked her; then, when she screamed, he threw her down on a bed and put a pillow over her face. He also blocked the door when she tried to escape, and grabbed her phone when she tried to call police. Cops eventually arrived at the scene and hit Rickerson with charges of felony domestic battery by strangulation.

These stories of chick-battering by football players just get worse and worse, and, dare we say it, it might be time to start asking if both the NCAA and leagues like the NFL are complicit in the problem.

Granted, Gators coach (and good Bill Belichick buddy) Urban Meyer did the right thing this past week by removing Rickerson from the squad. The normally squeaky clean Meyer immediately bounced Rickerson, saying, "That is not what our team is about."

The question is, how long it will take for some other college to pick up a guy who had been a good player for an SEC powerhouse. The one constant in college domestic-violence cases is the second chance — if the guy can play well enough. If and when he reaches the NFL, the same guy could then get a third and fourth and fifth chance.

Watch any NFL game this week and see if you can count the number of players on both teams who've skated on a domestic-violence incident at least once. Larry Johnson of the Chiefs is actually going to be back in uniform this week after his fourth domestic-violence incident. A one-game suspension for your fourth domestic-violence case? After you got caught going all Pacman on your ex, spitting in her face in a bar?

The curious thing is that Dolphins linebacker Joey Porter recently chose to make an issue of the league's inconsistent discipline policy by wondering aloud why first-time drug offender Matt Jones is still playing after catching a coke charge. But Porter's comments were actually off-base. If anything, the NFL and the NCAA go after drug abusers harder than they do batterers. Multiple offenders on the domestic-violence score — guys like Michael Pittman — can stay in the league for years. And too many teams draft guys with domestic-violence histories and then give them second chances once they misbehave in the NFL; the Bills' Marshawn Lynch, last seen getting stifled by the Patriots defense this past Sunday in Foxboro, is a great example.

Greater-than Sudoku XXV

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:29:05 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Crossword: '''Tis the season''

MATT JONES — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:18:05 GMT

For once, I hope you don't catch on

Christian’s folly

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:59:17 GMT

His Own Worst Enemy
Two men. One body. It sounds like the title of a squeamish sequel to “Two Girls, One Cup.” But the good news is it’s just the premise of My Own Worst Enemy , Christian Slater’s foray into the world of crappy small-screen dramas that use a lexicon of jargon in order to sound “sciency.”

WHAT HAPPENED, CHRISTIAN? You used to be so sly, so sexy. Now you keep running those possibly meaningful hands through your greasy, thinning hair.

Two men. One body. It sounds like the title of a squeamish sequel to “Two Girls, One Cup.” But the good news is it’s just the premise of My Own Worst Enemy, Christian Slater’s foray into the world of crappy small-screen dramas that use a lexicon of jargon in order to sound “sciency.”

Slater’s Henry Spivey is a regular golly-gee working man who lives a regular life with a regular wife and kids. The twist: not only does Henry have a government-operative alter ego named Edward Albright, but, through the magic of thoroughly improbable television bio-technology, he doesn’t even know that Edward exists! Turns out “Henry” is just a cover, one who is blissfully unaware of his nefarious other self. It’s like a combination of Fight Club, The Truman Show, and the Bourne trilogy, without all kinds of fussy nonsense like good acting and writing to get in the way of what Slater does best — quizzically raising his eyebrows.

When Henry morphs into Edward, and vice versa, he first experiences eye-squinting lightheadedness (indicated by a mélange of unintentionally comic wincing); that’s followed by a blackout and then total dissociation. This Jekyll-and-Hyde switcharoo is made possible through — what else — a computer chip the government planted in Henry/Edward’s brain that allows Edward (the Alpha personality) to control whose identity is front-and-center at any given time. That is, until the chip goes haywire and we get Henry becoming Edward becoming Henry becoming Edward at random intervals. Thanks to this glitch, Henry becomes aware of Edward’s existence, and the two-in-one doppelgänger begin to communicate with each other by recording video messages on a cellphone.

Which raises the question: if government-employed scientists could invent technology that allows one man to split his Freudian id/ego/superego three-fer between two personalities, why can’t they just fix the damned thing when it breaks? Or implant Henry/Edward with a new chip?

Besides plot idiosyncrasies, the show is riddled with terrible acting and bouts of amateurish cinematography that may or may not be imbrued with deeper meaning. Were any of the characters remotely likable, it might warrant reading something into repeated fleeting shots of miscellanea like, say, Henry/Edward’s hands folded in his lap. But they’re not. So it doesn’t.

Evil urges

AARON SOLOMON — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:46:26 GMT

Fable II leaves it up to you
Those who've played the first Fable already know that being bad is a hell of a lot more fun than being good.

VIDEO: The trailer for Fable II

Fable II | For the Xbox 360 | Rated M for mature | Developed by Lionhead studios | Published by Microsoft

We live in an era of difficult choices: Mac or PC, gas or hybrid, and, as always, Coke or Pepsi. Fable II, the sequel to one of the premiere titles on the original Xbox, offers you yet another choice. This one, however, is a little easier: be good or be bad. Really, really bad. And those who've played the first Fable already know that being bad is a hell of a lot more fun than being good.

Fable II opens on a beautiful sparrow's-eye-view flyover of the Kingdom of Albion. As you and your older sister set out along Albion's streets, your actions start to affect your personality. Give the drunken hobo his wine (bad, but fun) or give it to his lady protector (good, and therefore boring); smash up the shopkeeper's inventory as payment to the mob (again, bad and fun) or clear beetles out of his storage. To make a long story short: you get an invite up to the castle, and that leads to the Castle Lord's killing your sister and throwing you out of the window. You spend the next 10 years recovering in a Gypsy camp. Eventually you're ready to seek revenge.

There's tons of gameplay. The entire forward-moving campaign clocks in around 12 to 15 hours, but you can double that by moving laterally through the side quests. These might not advance the plot, but they will affect your renown and your purity and your appearance — all of which have an effect on how the citizens of Albion will react to you. Not only does eating too many meat pies and baby chicks increase the size of your gut, it counts as an impure act. Eat tofu and celery and you'll keep that heavenly figure and appearance — at the cost of the crunchy fun of baby-chick eating, of course. Visiting prostitutes and committing murders and robberies will also move you toward the evil side; soon enough you'll be sprouting a nice pair of horns.

Fable II adds a Warcraft-ian on-line feature that allows you to recruit a friend to engage in dastardly deeds in your game without affecting your morality or purity. You have access to that new-fangled invention called a "condom," and guns now augment the ranged weapons. But the more important addition is a canine companion whom you can teach to do tricks, dig for treasure, and even help you in battle. Your pooch's appearance changes alongside yours; look for people to run from your hellhound as well as from you.

Quiet before the storm

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:03:42 GMT

Sports blotter: "Good call, coach" edition
There have been a lot of mysteries surrounding the Patriots in the Bill Belichick years, not surprising given the intense effort the team puts into maintaining airtight clubhouse and organizational secrecy in general.

QUIET BEFORE THE STORM: Belichick dropped cornerback Jeff Burris without explanation last year. Turns out it was a good choice.

So maybe that's why
There have been a lot of mysteries surrounding the Patriots in the Bill Belichick years, not surprising given the intense effort the team (read: Belichick himself) puts into maintaining airtight clubhouse and organizational secrecy in general. A Pats player might see his patella sheared off during a game, fly across the field, and hit a cheerleader in the mouth, and on the injury report two days later all you find out is that he's doubtful for the next game, because of "leg." Unlike other teams, where wide receivers do their complaining openly, in front of reporters, about not getting enough touches, on the Patriots all the idiotic in-house stuff happens in a way that passes mostly undetected.

Thus, we never really knew what Hakim Akbar did to piss off Belichick, never found out what Kyle Brady did (if he did anything at all), never learned the full story on guys like Steve Martin, Jonathan Sullivan, Fernando Bryant, Leonard Myers, and others who went the revolving-door route on the roster. Only occasionally, like when Pepper Johnson decides to write a book, or when some news report trickles out long after the fact, do we get some hint as to why this or that player didn't cut it in Pats-land.

Example: Jeff Burris. Anyone remember Jeff Burris? He was once a starting cornerback for the Colts, back in the days when "starting cornerback for the Colts" was a synonym for words like "consistently ineffective" and "posterized" and "total pussy." This was a while ago, back in the pre-Marlin Jackson, pre-Kelvin Hayden days. Burris left the Colts in 2001, played for the Bengals for a while, and then — this was after the Pats' most recent Super Bowl win — Belichick managed to get Burris to sign a one-year deal for less than a million bucks. It was considered something of a coup around here. We thought we had another bargain-basement pickup on our hands.

Then a funny thing happened: Burris didn't show up for training camp, and was quietly released. Nobody knew what happened.

Well, last week we got a little peek into the private life of Burris. He was busted for a very odd DUI in Carmel, Indiana — caught driving not only drunk but backward. . . not to mention west in an eastbound lane. This is a bad-driving trifecta perhaps never observed before, even among pro athletes: driving drunk, backward, and in the wrong direction. At the same time.

BBs and b-balls

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:13:57 GMT

Sports blotter: "Inducing panic" edition
A few years ago, it looked like college athletes shooting strangers with BB guns was going to be the boutique sports offense of the 21st century.

Air power
A few years ago, it looked like college athletes shooting strangers with BB guns was going to be the boutique sports offense of the 21st century. We had a rash of interesting cases. Remember Adam Gourley? No? He’s the Oklahoma State offensive lineman who sat in his dorm-room window popping passers-by with a BB rifle. Or how about that case involving the Rider University baseball team, when a player named James Kennedy pulled a BB rifle on a pizza-delivery chick? Or how about Winston Justice — yes, that same Winston Justice now playing tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles — who, four years back, pulled a pellet gun on a student in a parking structure on the USC campus?

There were more. Marsalous Johnson, a defensive back for the Tennessee Volunteers, was involved in one of the more bizarre cases of 2006 when he waved a pellet gun out the window of a speeding car at an off-duty Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officer (Johnson was eventually found not guilty). Then there was onetime Super Bowl hero Dwight Smith, formerly of the Tampa Bay Bucs, who pulled a BB gun on a slow-to-decide motorist in a McDonald’s drive-through.

Need more memories? How about Ohio State University basketball recruit David Lighty, who escalated the phenomenon by pegging a 55-year-old jogger in the neck a few years back? Or Billy Tibbets, legendary hockey goon, who violated his parole with a BB shooting and ended up doing two years? Of course, locally we remember the story of St. Anselm College football players shooting the hell out of a bunch of skate-geeks with BB guns, understandable behavior that for some reason is designated as a crime.

Now we have another case, and what’s noteworthy about it is the new choice of weapon and target. Ohio University sophomore basketball player Maurice Pearson has been arrested and charged with the fantastic-sounding crime of “aggravated menacing and assault” after shooting a pair of Delta Gamma sorority girls with an “Airsoft” rifle. For those of you not familiar with the device, an Airsoft rifle is a kind of play-gun used by grownups who think paintball doesn’t hurt quite enough, but aren’t willing to go far enough to do us the favor of using real guns to remove each other from the gene pool. Airsoft guns fire little non-metallic pellets that can break the skin and leave welts on exposed beer bellies and bald heads. They are not the kind of thing you typically want to fire at a sorority girl if you’re trying to get laid. Firing one at two sorority girls is even less productive.