Well, I was wrong.

This is why sports writers don't make predictions like this right before they could potentially become irrelevant. It looks like the Nuggets won't be winning the championship after all.

Who are the 90's Bulls?

Ever since His Airness first ascended to the heavens (sometime during his on again, off again years in Chicago), talk of the second coming of Michael Jordan and the 90's Chicago Bulls teams has been derailing, confusing, and more or less saturating the discussion surrounding the NBA.  Vince Carter was MJ until it turned out he wasn't, Chris Webber was MJ right up until the point he couldn't be, Kobe Bryant might have been MJ until we learned we didn't like him, and we decided he was just Kobe, and now seriously, for real this time, Lebron is MJ, and to make things even more boring, the Cavs this year are the Bulls (srsly!)  We've been living with this discussion of who's the next Michael Jordan long enough that the backlash against it is just as much apart of the whole charade as the doe eyed participation.

When Lebron James made that 3-point buzzer beater at the end of the second game of the Orlando series it became official though, Lebron James is Michael Jordan. ESPN dot com ran about 100 special little videos comparing Lebron's buzzer beater to Jordan's "The Shot." After the game, Lebron James made the statement to the media, speaking to the Cleveland fans, "You guys don't have to worry about the old 23 in black and red no more, because the new 23 is in wine and gold..."

The new 23? Holy shit. This is serious... and LAME.

But here's my position: While Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have picked up the needle and thread of the magic quilt of the 90's Bulls teams (kept in the basement of the NBA Folk Art Museum?), it is way less boring to draw that same thread through a different team, one much less "written in the stars": the 2009 Nuggets. And they're going to win the championship (crosses fingers.)

The other day, I was watching the Lakers/Nuggets series with some friends when my friend Michael posed the question to the group, "How much does Chris Andersen want to be Dennis Rodman?" The answer of course, is 100%. And why not?

The thing I remember most about the Chicago Bulls from the 90's wasn't their winning percentage, or Jordan's PER, what I remember most, and what I remember knowing and caring about most was how cool they were, how complete a story they told. When I talked with Andy X about the idea behind this article he looked at me puzzled and asked "you think the Bulls were the coolest team from the 90's?" I don't know, I was 10 in 1995, but to me they were like a comic book super-hero squad. And maybe 10 year olds today can look on Lebron and see what I saw in Michael Jordan. Maybe? In terms of effectiveness, the comparisons are there. In terms of prowess and dominance, yes definitely...but cool, style? I don't know, I'm not 10 anymore, but I doubt it.  And as for the rest of the Cavaliers, there's no discussion. Delonte West? Anderson Varejão? Ilgauskas? I mean, they're fine, I wouldn't have any problem with them if it weren't for this ridiculous victory lap of a season (which looks to be coming to an end, sans victory) and this pinheaded comparison to the Bulls.

As I said though, I'm not ten anymore, and Cleveland has spent their cultural currency this season buying imaginary cameras to take imaginary pictures of themselves during the Disney: Family style pre-game circus.

With what's left over, Lebron's been saving up to start his own private Michael Jordan Memorial Collection. After game two in the Orlando series, he bought "The Shot", but he's really hoping to get that first Championship ring, and take it to the next level.

David Drake, a friend and blogger at www.somanyshrimp.com who's been hyping Gucci Mane recently, wrote of Pac, Biggie and peek period Jay Z, 

"Their careers weren't dominated by thoughts of saving rap or some greatest-rapper/artiste-alive narrative that seems really important now to guys like Kanye & Wayne & late-period Jay-Z (never mind dudes like B.O.B. or Lupe or whoever else). One of the reasons I'm really enjoying new Gucci is that he's really having fun when he raps." 

You have to build your ideas of cool from the past, but you don't copy and paste and hype hype hype. Birdman suffers because of this, but at least he's imitating someone other than Jordan, at least he's digging a little deeper. We're fans, not statisticians.  Sure Bron is the best player in the world (don't even bring Kobe's name into this, and certainly no one's talking Melo in this contrived discussion) but that's not what I'm talking about.  These Nuggets are cool; Chauncey, Melo, JR. Smith, Birdman, Nene. ( Just a little shout out to Andy X and Freedarko for christening my love of Melo, Nene and J.R. Smith.) It's not just their personas that are attractive though, its their play. You can spot the moment Carmelo takes the team on his back and starts nailing all those corner J's.  You can tell when J.R. is taking the ball up the court that he's going to toss up a 25 foot 3-pointer in wildly bad taste, but hit it at a decent rate. When Billups is on the court, everything seems certain. One of the top overall point guards in the league.

And then there's The Birdman, and Nene, who compliment each other so nicely. Birdman, a recovering drug addict and white country boy with freakish athleticism and a passion for blocks and boards, and Nene the Brazilian in c'rows who battled back from testicular cancer last year, and is back playing his nimble seven foot basketball.  I'm not 10 years old anymore but these Nuggets are doing it for me, just like the Bulls in the 90's. (oh yeah, I meant it, they're going to win the Championship. Maybe.)

Red Dead Redemption Trailer

Here at NDG we don't spend a lot of time and energy (doing anything?) focusing on games that have yet to be released. We eschew responsibility to "break stories", or "make news",  or "take bribes" and have, all very intentionally and with great philosophical grounding, taken the stance to leave the maintenance of the game-hype-industrial-complex up to the forum hawks and news sites; the leaders in the inter-gallactic plot to turn gaming into a list of future promises, pics of Halo 3 collectors toys and stale "specs": graphics, features, control schemes, etc. 

Despite this, I was unable to avoid the first official trailer to Red Dead Redemption - a sequel to Red Dead Revolver -currently in production by Rockstar San Diego. While all Rockstar games have been relatively professionally produced, and more or less unique (at least in style and execution, if not in premise,) it has always seemed that the GTA series held a special place in their... budget. With the release of GTA IV last summer, this trend appeared only more glaring. What GTA IV made even more obvious however, was that Rockstar is no fucking slouch and GTA IV was no Missile Defense System and as a result, you may have heard, Grand Theft Auto IV made enormous amounts of money ($300 million on the first day, $800 million in the first week, and with current sales figures at somewhere over a billion.) Judging from the trailer to Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar has apparently thrown a bunch of those dollars at their  new "Sandbox" style take on the Red Dead series, and in doing, look poised to change this "GTA and the rest" character. More importantly however, Red Dead Redemption looks as hot as a panfried flapjack.

So what makes Red Dead Redemption look so good? The graphics, which are so legs open in the trailer, are very impressive, but honestly, lots of games look great these days. The gallant cinematic feel is nice for a trailer, but we all know we aren't going to be getting Western Gear Solid VI or Final Tumbleweed XXXIV.  What makes Red Dead Redemption seem so promising is the hope of a game world half as richly conceived and ecstatically executed as GTA IV, with a bow legged, hunched-back ambling gate, a subtle snarl and a slow drawl - the pace of freedom, boredom and Morrowind; the pace of stories by the camp fire, chewin' on straw, and walkin' a horse to water. Red Dead Redemption proposes to breath the air of the fantasy of the American frontier West, and from the looks of this trailer, you'll hear a low crackle at the back of its' throat from the hard years in the dusty desert. Gruff, quiet, tense, and terse - this trailer is sweet.

I don't think this answers the question it poses.

I don't know who the Birdman is. I do know, however, that if he got 30 minutes a game he'd be really, really fantasy relevant.

Countdown: AJX's all-time fav Genesis games (15)

Number fifteen:
Sword of Vermilion



A trivial, slipshod, rehash of all the cliches from Dragon Warrior on; an amalgam of the crudest story-telling techniques featuring some of the least-affecting dialogue ever written; a game stuck in the period before 16-bit roleplaying games became art, Sword of Vermilion is a somewhat bizarre game-- technically questionable, but fascinating in the way that clunky medieval paintings of sword wielding jesuses are fascinating. It has a commitment to real-time action that would later be re-introduced to role-playing games and tagged years later as innovative, but it is also a mess of cluttered, quaint, and counter-intuitive menus. Getting treasure out of a treasure chest involves not only opening an ugly menu and then scrolling (which, as always is accompanied by an awful chirping sound effect) down to to the "open" option, but, having opened the chest, you must then re-open the menu, and then-scroll (more of that awful tone) down to "take," at which point you get a cheery little tune and a message like: "you opened the chest, and there was a candle inside!" Also, my first ever favorite RPG. You'd be mostly blameless for taking a tone not-dissimilar to that of our esteemed video-game reviewing colleague about the game:



Or, you can take a little trip through history. Shall we?

As I ran laps around Perley elementary's big, barren field behind the playground every day after school I balanced my fatigue and buoyed my squat fourth-grader legs along with thoughts that every lap around the vast lot was one more penciled "x" in a box on a cross country club fill-out sheet, each filled box building on the last, springing forward on the page from left to right, onward and onward as I rounded the monkey bars and went back out for more. Surely there was some goal, some reward, some t-shirt you could win for running the most laps, but I don't remember it. The goal was always just to get farther, get more points. I was determined, and the thought of going farther excited me, and that was all there was.
Having only been old enough to be in awe of my brother as his 80's twitch skills got him all the way through Shinobi on the master system I only came into my own as a video game player with a bit of an inferiority complex. I knew that I would never be able to score as many points as my brother as my quick-fingered and guitar-soloing brother. In order to prevail in the same way he had prevailed, then, I'd need another way around. Steadily earned experience points would come to replace the hi-scores I'd known. Sword of Vermilion, with it's simple boss sequences and not-quite-action combat style (link to battles) was perfect for me because it could be beaten with the same sheer force of will and patience that propelled me around the field at cross country practice. Thus, it was the first non-disney-sponsored game that stubby-fingered and stubby-legged me could be comfortable with and good enough at to call my own.



At the time I didn't know what I was getting into. But, imagining the sun setting over Vermilion's Malaga, big-shouldered and kingly and beside my queen, I had a home in a kingdom not far from that beaten-down Perley grounds. There were rewards for those untold laps and dungeon crawl toils, I suppose, but they were mostly in my head.