Best New Artist Grammy -- Esperanza Spalding

I wanted to say something about a new artist that has me spinning a little bit with her talent.

So a girl named Esperanza Spalding defeated Justin Bieber for the Best New Artist Grammy Award this year. Naturally that turned more than a few heads, including mine, particularly when I noticed that Spalding was a jazz artist, the first of which to win Best New Artist. I was reminded of 2003 when Norah Jones beat Avril Lavigne and was comforted by, how as a friend said later, the Grammy panel hasn't completely lost it.

So how did an African-American jazz bassist beat Bieber, the modern-day equivalent of Elvis Presley? I don't have anything against Justin Bieber, he seems to be a fairly talented young kid. But plainly put, Esperanza Spalding is that good. After you have a listen (or two), you realize what a no-brainer this award really was.

I Know You Know
Precious
Espera
Winter Sun

Dragon Age II

Dragon Age II came out on the 8th. I enjoyed the first Dragon Age very much. After years of playing games like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and the Might and Magic series (I'm showing my age here), I was pretty disillusioned with the RPG genre. Dragon Age helped me enjoy the genre again, for a few reasons.

A lot of story-based role-playing games railroad you towards the ending that they have in mind for you. KOTOR was like this, despite not being a too terribly bad game. With Dragon Age Origins, however, your choices and the decisions you made when it came time to kingmaking or treating average people will affect the ending of the game. You're still going to have to fight the ultimate fight at the end, mind you. But the world that results is the one you make, not the one the game funneled you into.

The second thing I really liked about DA: Origins was the way they made you make ethical decisions. Many games are very black-and-white with decisions that they present you with, i.e., you can either help some beggar or kick him. It'd gotten to be almost the rule that you wanted to steer your character either towards being a really "good" guy or a really bad guy. With DA: O they REALLY introduced shades of grey into the decision making that you have to do. You might kill the demon that's ruling over an area, for example, in the name of good, but you have to consider that maybe letting it live will result in less people suffering. I think that is a really poignant ethical crisis in our time, particularly in the wake of the leadership crisis currently inflaming the Arab world. Real life isn't black-and-white very often. Are these tyrant dictators in the Middle East better for the region? They stifle democracy but often are cornerstones of peace and both political and economic stability. Anyways, that's a definite feather in DA:Origins' cap.

Dragon Age II so far is proving to be a little bit different from its predecessor. They've definitely moved it more towards action RPGing at the expense of strategic RPGing, something I'm not so excited about. The action in combat sequences is extremely fast, almost too fast to react to. The talent trees are a little confusing as well now. The talents are more wide-ranging and can be gotten at in different ways, but the user-interface for them is very poor and confusing, even for someone who logged many hours in Origins.

I hope DA II will become more fun as it goes on. I don't think I'll be playing it as much as I did Origins.