We take a final peek at the latest entry in the X franchise just prior to it’s release.
By Paige Osburn, GamingExcellence

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Presentation: 7

Visual: 6

Audio: 7

Gameplay: 8

Replay Value: 9

Final Score: 8

Pros: tactical conundrums; entertaining game play; unique mechanics including the heightened importance of defense and resource management; oodles of weapons and cool field effects; the thinking involved is actually enjoyable

Cons: some repetitive missions; loads of “to do” lists of side-objectives and achievements, many of which wind up ignored

Mindless fighting that requires a mind—who would have thought it?

If real time strategy games are your type, then you’ll fall madly in love with and proceed to stalk Project Aftermath. As a game it has all the little UI touches that make good RTS an anal-retentive’s dream—and since us obsessive-compulsives usually derive such little pleasure from our tendencies, it’s nice to have one place where it really works for us. Seriously, though, the endless juggling of—and here’s the key word—realistic features as you navigate through a campaign that combines Freedom Force with Battlestar Galactica results in gameplay that is, if nothing else, never ever boring. And that’s really at the heart of what games should be.

The plot, in brief (because, yes, it is brief): you are a part of the Morphids, a suspiciously-human race who have come together after the pre-game destruction of their home world by the malevolent New Order, a bunch of gene-splicing alien-human crazy hybrid mutant soldiers. That smell bad (as stated in the intro movie). If you’re thinking this sounds like a plot contrived solely as an excuse to kill stuff, then you, good sir, would be correct! This is unabashedly a game about kicking ass and taking names, and the scowls and scars and tattoos and burly muscles that lather our Heroes all play to this fact. But there’s nothing wrong with that since killing stuff in this game is harder than you might think—or anyway, killing stuff well is.

I mentioned earlier that the features created for the player to manipulate with behind-the-scenes maniacal glee were realistic. Here’s what I mean (and, btw, these are the things in the game I found by far the most fun). First off, all that stuff you took for granted in other action/adventure games, the resources you just sort of assumed came from somewhere and the damage resistance that you could bypass by equipping hardcore enough armor or big enough weapons? Those are the sorts of things this game hinges on. Strategy games are excellent at highlighting all the little features you’d need to control if you wanted to win a real war or build a real town or fire-bomb the real Visigoths—Project Aftermath is no different, except in that it may be better. Project Aftermath eliminates the obnoxious first-tier of many RTS’s (that 15-30 minutes where you’re totally broke and have two villagers and a pile of firewood) and slingshots you into a system where you start the fighting before building your base/hoarding your resources while still maintaining these two all-important features. Here’s how.

Progress in the game is reliant upon a GOOP system—GOOP being the fuel you need to run your ships/power your weapons/get up in the morning. In order to unlock the next level, you must end the first with an acceptable amount of GOOP—end it “in the red” and you’ve failed the mission, despite the achievement of any other mission objective. While this starts off pretty annoying, it becomes very quickly an asset to the game, since you later use GOOP at the “Research Center” in order to level-up your team and select the skill sets needed to customize your peons. The higher your resources, the more technologically-advanced your team will be which totally makes sense.

This freakish concept of “totally making sense” continues the damage resistance system. Most games employ damage resistance/enhancement in some way, shape or form, but Project Aftermath very nearly depends on it: there are four ways of inflicting damage and the amount of HP lost is drastically lowered if you’re inflicting it the wrong way. Luckily, enemies (and allies) are color-coded to illustrate which damage they repel. If you see a bunch of little dudes running around in red speed suits, they’re resistant to physical damage, and if you still insist on punching them in the face afterward you’re going to lose quickly and efficiently. (The bad part of this is that it can make distinguishing Friend and Foe a huge pain the rear, particularly in later levels where there are squads and back-up and enemy units and bipedal robots running all over the place. Luckily, the mini-map rectifies this subtlety by labeling enemy forces with big yellow skulls.)

Much of the game’s frustrations are simultaneously part of its appeal. Twisty roads and mountainous regions? Frustrating, but a challenge. Resource dispersal? Frustrating, but a challenge. Dragging yourself across the screen with the right-click in order to follow your guys? …Yeah, okay, that’s just frustrating and one of my very few gripes, mostly because it leaves the tendons in your right hand a gnarled mass and can make keeping track of your squad difficult when they’re busy swarming all over the place.

Visually, the game is very nice and belies its somewhat meager budget. There are bright colors and pretty trees; everything flows nicely and the landscape’s textures are seamless. It looks like if Neverwinter Nights and Age of Empires had a baby which then grew up and had a weekend tryst with the Elder Scrolls backgrounds. The mountains are snazzy-looking and create some awesomely mind-boggling tactical problems your team to kick and scream their way through. Plus, the comics-style cut scenes and hardcore action-movie dialogue (“Cold brutality’s gonna win this war!”) creates a hilarious and adrenaline-lined environment.

Project Aftermath as a game combines the brain power of a good chess match, the fire power of a good war movie, and the common sense of hopefully most people on the planet to create a hearty strategy game where things start moving and stay moving through every level. This game may have oodles of features to juggle and poke and tinker with, but in the end it’s very much “kill stuff yeah woo” with a sense of humor. For all the mountains and all the weapons and all the “energy force” it can be summed up with a panel from the comic-book intro movie—a big guy and a big gun and a capslocked sound effect reading “BRAKKA-BRAKKA-BRAKKA!”

Presentation: 4

Visual: 7

Audio: 7

Gameplay: 5

Replay Value: 4

Final Score: 5

Pros: entertaining arcade combat; attractive graphics in a setting that brings them to the fore; an entire section devoting to pimping out spaceships

Cons: a ridiculous plotline with ridiculous dialogue and ridiculous backstory that eats up a ridiculous amount of time and brain cells

A video game that needs, more than anything else, one serious copy editor.

There comes a time when enough is enough.

For me, it is Dark Horizon.

It’s not that it is a terrible game. Far from it—Dark Horizon has battles galore for the arcade-loving space shooter, battles which prove themselves to be challenging and engaged (dropping attention from a mosquito-like swarm of enemies results very quickly in black-screen death). It has a very cool ship customization system, combat modes you can shift between, some glorious graphics in the form of explosions and nebulas and interstellar lights.

It just also makes no sense.

Dark Horizon markets itself on the infinitely vague “Action” platform, but takes its pride on being a third-person shooter with a heavy RPG twist. This should be awesome, and in some games it is, but the story (read: RPG) elements woven through Dark Horizon like a noose serve only to wring every bit of potential life out of the game, leaving it alone to dangle in the breeze while a single carrion crow soars down to nibble upon the pale, pasty flesh of its ruin. Okay, see that metaphor? That metaphor I just wrote? That metaphor that was overdramatic and didn’t actual make much sense when you think about it a little too hard? That is an example of the kinds of metaphors that crop up every thirty seconds in Dark Horizon.

Somehow, against all physics, this game manages to be both deep and shallow. The plot runs: you take on the role of a newbie Guardian who has just taken the helm to fight against the mysterious but definitely evil force known only as The Mirk. What is The Mirk? I don’t know, but it’s Evil—and you’re infected with it so that’s no good. Also, it turns out that humanity just found its last best hope in the form of a mysterious but definitely good super-weapon known only as The Light Core. Which unfortunately is still being come up with, and defending it is what you and your buddies are for. Commence lasers.

Despite a storyline that is, literally, “The Dark” (mirk = murk = dark) versus “The Light” this game is accompanied by a serious amount of literature, back story, encyclopedia entries, research, dream analysis, philosophical conversations, voice-over musings, etcetera, etcetera. Normally, this sort of thing is what I play games for—it “turns my crank,” so to speak. But have you ever written an essay twenty minutes before its due when you haven’t actually researched the subject, but you have watched a whole lot of TV about the subject and so you just sort of string together buzzwords in the hope that it’ll make sense? Dark Horizon is a whole lot of buzzwords that don’t make sense. It’s oodles of fanfare that, in the end, comes down to one trumpet with a megaphone. With nonsensical phrases like “disaster has taken its harsh grip” and nonsensical terms like the “meta-force” and the “psychomatrix,” it’s as if somebody checked out every H.P. Lovecraft novel and proceeded to highlight words at random, later combining them into things that sound like they should mean something important (this type of behavior led to “synergy,” people!).

The no-substance RPG bits are easily the worst parts of the game—and they, unfortunately, make up a ton of it. However, the arcade-style battle sequences are fun in a manic sort of way. It’s dogfight heaven in its truest form, to both its credit and detriment. Enemies zip around you in little metal triangles—you lock on and shoot. This can get boring (and painful on the wrist), but in short spurts it’s nice to have the opportunity to blow stuff up and make use of the lovely graphics. And the previously-mentioned battle modes add a bit of spice to the point-and-shoot formula—do you want the heavy defense of Shadow? The heavy offence of Corter? Like every decent shooter, there’s no perfect weapon, no indestructible ship. Also, the technical work you can tinker with (customizing your hull, your armor, your shields, your kill machine) is a jolly good way to pass the time.

But again the illogical elements of the all-too-hardcore plot ram themselves in your way. The AI (both the enemy’s and your shipmates’) is either single-minded or absent-minded, in the very literal sense. Your shipmates are straight-up useless in a fight—which, for all the helpful information and philosophic rambling they feel like dispensing every five minutes, makes their presence nonexistent. And your enemy seems interested in nothing but killing you—you personally. They don’t target your mates in front of you (making commanding and group strategy impossible); they don’t target the Light Core you’re guarding. They just seem to have a serious grudge against you and you alone, so much so that a major stratagem among the Mirk seems to be kamikaz-ing their ships straight into your face. For beings that like to flit around like moths and twirl overhead like gymnasts they also seem really fond of ramming your ship like semi-trucks, and it disrupts the mood just as much as it costs you some serious hit points.

The verdict here should be pretty obvious. For a simplistic shooter it’s actually great. The space setting gives the graphics folks a real chance to shine, and they do—nebulas melt into deep space like oceans and explosions bloom in the night sky like daisies. You get to make your cruiser a serious hotrod, you get to relieve any stress work might be causing you—as a blow-stuff-up free-for-all it really works. For a game built on a battle system designed to be fun and simple, you have to wonder why the story’s just so complex and grim. In the end, it turns out a lot like space: majestic and somber, but even emptier than air.

The Secret Lives of Techies,

by Paige Osburn

High above the stage of the Merle-Reskin Theater, Nick Gajary hangs lights.

Every night of “tech week”—the 1½ -2 week block of time before a show’s performance—each of the 24 “giant” lights used to fuel the upcoming Theatre School production Burial at Thebes needs to be unscrewed, turned to a specific spot on stage, checked, and screwed in again. During tech week, rehearsals commonly last anywhere from four to six hours (twelve on weekends) due to the addition of lighting, costumes, make-up, scenery and other “tech” elements–all done by backstage technicians in black jeans and sweatshirts dangling on a catwalk eighty feet above the audience and the stage.

“Oh please,” says Gajary, shrugging and rolling his eyes. “I don’t dangle.”

Nick Gajary, sophomore Theatre Arts major and work study employee at the Merle-Reskin (one of DePaul Theatre School’s three “mainstage” theatres), has been a paid technician for five months, but served as a “techie” since high school—which explains a bit about his cool attitude towards imminent death.

“There’s a lot of safety training we have to go through before they let us get on the rail [the metal line above the stage where dozens of ropes connected to set pieces and curtains are operated to make objects fly in and out],” according to Gajary. “Most of it’s common sense. If you’re doing something stupid, you’re gonna get hurt, and you probably deserved it. That is the creed of the Merle-Reskin Theatre.” He pauses. “In my mind.”

The latest project he and a dozen others have been assigned is the February 2008 run of Burial at Thebes—a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, newly-penned by Nobel-prizewinner Seamus Heaney and directed by faculty member Barry Brunetti.

Officially, Nick Gajary has not one job to work on Thebes, but two. While he is paid to be a technician, he has the additional assignment of serving as a dramaturg. “Dramaturgy work is behind-behind the scenes,” Gajary explains over silver-dollar pancakes at Clarke’s. “You spend several weeks just learning about the time period, learning about the playwright, learning about other persons and places involved—[and then] another couple weeks assembling information for the actors and techies to study.”

The Theatre School’s philosophy is to have students experience all aspects of theatre, and all freshmen are assigned to a variety of crews, learning the nitty-gritty of behind-the-scenes production. Theatre School Technical Director Timothy Combs explained that later, as upper level students, “their assignments typically depend on what they major in. Technicians may start off as a Carpenter or Master Carpenter, but move on to become Technical Director or Assistant Technical Director.”

Since Gajary finished his dramaturgical chores (a process which can take up to five weeks), he now focuses his energy on tech week. “This past weekend was pretty intense,” Gajary reflected. “We start off with a light hang, which is taking a few hundred giant theatre lights up from the basement of the theatre, up the rafters, through the rails, hanging everything everywhere—that takes a couple days. Then we get the set to load in, which this particular show is enormous so there’s a lot of bolting pieces together, erecting things– and then after that, once the show’s up, we go back to the lights and focus them since we actually have things for them to shine on now….There’s always stuff to do.”

“What a technician does depends on the show and on what their position is,” Combs explains. “In the scene shop, you’re mostly making things out of wood, foam, plexiglass—you’re working with whatever tools the design typically calls for. Backstage, if it’s a unit set they’d possibly just be sitting, waiting… or they could be moving scenery, flying in scenery, moving wagons, props….”

And each day, when rehearsal is over, everything—the lights, sets, costumes—need to be “struck”: taken down and put away. But that’s just another day for Nick Gajary and the techies at the Theatre School.

“Why’d I get into theatre?” Gajary stares at his flapjacks for a few seconds—and grins. “Anything else sounded like a lot of work.”

‘Things Can Get A Little Weird’

“I really don’t know anything that makes me as happy as performing.”

These are the words of Lauren Lapkus, 22-year-old DePaulian senior and part one of the two-man (woman?) comedy act The Money Kids. Lapkus and her partner in crime—Candy Lawrence, 27—formed their duo a little over a year ago but have in the months since skyrocketed in popularity, earning themselves recommendations from TimeOut, Centerstage Chicago, and the January 31^st issue of the Chicago Reader.

“We started out performing as part of the sort of “open mic” improv nights at random bars like the Spot.” (The Spot is North Broadway’s resident piano bar/steakhouse/comedy improv club/lounge/tasting room/sports bar, with karaoke and live music acts added for flavor.) “We’d go in with basic premises of sketches and improvise and see what we could come up with. Then we’d take the best aspects of those scenes and keep re-working them until they became sketches we could perform again and again. We have a really genuine connection that makes it easy for us to collaborate.”

Lapkus and Lawrence’s meeting was, in many ways, the stuff of fate.

“We met in 2005 on an all-female improv team called The MISSfits at The Playground Theatre, and really loved performing with each other,” recollects Lapkus. “We never really hung out outside of the group, but on a whim we decided to move in together. Writing sketches just happened naturally and the process was so easy it was hard not to stick with it and see what we could do.”

What they could do turned out to be quite a lot. In early January, during a showcase of up-and-coming acts and comedy troupes, they were booked by Matt Barbera, president of the Playground Theater—“the nation’s first and only not-for-profit co-op theater dedicated to the performance and instruction of improvised comedy – an art form for which Chicago is internationally renown.” (According to their website, the-playground.com). The Playground has around 140 actors affiliated with their productions, all of whom operate on a volunteer basis—The Money Kids included.

Lapkus herself is also an active participant of The Darned and Felt at the North Side’s infamous iO Theater. She’s been creating and performing sketch and improv comedy since high school.

“I was always really into Saturday Night Live and shows like that as a kid, and I loved making my friends and family laugh,” offers the impish brunette. “We [Lawrence and I] know that if we’re enjoying performing the scene, then the audience usually will too. I know from both sides (watching and performing sketch and improv) that if the performers don’t enjoy the work then it’s hard for the audience to get on their side. Candy and I are big on having fun, and the second something stops being fun for us we tend to drop it or find new ways to make it exciting for us.”

The Money Kids have already made a name for themselves as “two friends screwing around” but, in the words of Centerstage Chicago, “since the two friends in question are this smart and funny, this is not a complaint.” Their shows are spontaneous, wild, eccentric, charming—but above all else, they’re fun, and it’s this sheer goofy entertainment that makes it well worth the cost of admission.

“I always get really excited before Money Kids shows. There’s still that bit of nervous energy and that hint of fear…wondering if the audience will like it, etc. But I always have confidence when I perform with Candy. I have complete trust in her and I know we can make anything work.” She laughs. “We work so well together that finding out our entire set is going to have to be reconstructed moments before we walk on is actually… well, awesome!”

Upcoming show dates are available either on their website (www.moneykids.net) or on their MySpace homepage (www.myspace.com/moneykidsrule ). This Friday (the 15^th of February) they are performing at the Lincoln Lodge, 9 pm. Tickets are available via the Lincoln Lodge website (www.thelincolnlodge.com) or via the phone (773-251-1539).

Alternative Spaces—The Radish Patch

Tucked away in a 3-room apartment building, nestled between embroidered wall-hangings and a cat named Griselda, there grows the Radish Patch. Created and cultivated by university students and frequented by folks from as far away as Australia and as exotic as Arkansas, the Radish Patch fills an ever-widening hole in the alternative music scene—a place for the solo performer to be heard, as opposed to crushed by flashing lights, blaring amps, and the less attractive features of the music scene.

“I used to live at this place that would host all these crazy shows—the kind of stuff where you party till 3 am,” says Edwin Perry, a lanky English Lit senior at DePaul University, and co-founder of the Patch. “Nobody really gets to know anyone at a party like that; everyone’s in their own little pockets and sockets. And the Patch— it’s this tiny space, and there’s no amps or anything, it’s all acoustic—and it kind of creates this one conversation. Everyone ends up discoursing with one another… You meet people you wouldn’t normally meet. It’s an atmosphere that allows people to actually meet one another.”

For eight months (they began to book acts April 2007 and are continuing today), the Patch has served as a Mecca and a safe haven for traveling performers (“kind of like minstrels, storytellers—or that’s how I think of it”). The space typically serves anywhere between two and six acts a month—each act being three or four performers in a line-up. Mostly the acts will perform there on they’re way through Chicago to the wild blue yonder—in these cases, the performer(s) will come in, perform, stay for a few days, and leave again with as much or as little gear as they can carry.

“It’s all very self-sufficient,” Perry clarifies over coffee at the Bourgeoisie Pig. “If you need an amp, you bring your own. Generally speaking, it should be something you can do anywhere—you could play it in a park, you could play it in your house. That’s how the idea began.”

And that’s always been the Radish Patch’s goal, ever since it’s conception in April 2007. Perry tells the tale:

“I was traveling around with this band called the Roaring Twenties. We were in North Carolina performing, and there was a space there, a black-face venue [“black-face” is the name given to storefront venues where the owners have blacked out the windows, so as to avoid harassment by the local law officials.] The owner had two different spaces—a room in the back that’s got like loud shit going on, and a space at the front for solo, quieter, acousticky acts. That night, there was this kid from South Carolina playing called Those Lavender Whales and he played with just a boom box, a tape with batteries in it.” (Perry leans back, his voice getting quicker—)

“The charisma of this kid was amazing—and I would walk into the other room and it would be all this enigmatic bull! No one ever talking, no personality, loud rock music full of people wanting to be mysterious… whereas, you really know this kid and at the end you feel like you’ve become friends. The point of the Radish Patch is to champion the charisma you have to develop when you’re just one guy with a guitar—it’s an extra sort of personality that can get washed over if you’re just not in the right place.

The Radish Patch is located at 2122 N. Maplewood Avenue on Chicago’s North Side. Performance dates and contacts can be found at their MySpace address: http://www.myspace.com/theradishpatch. Soonest upcoming performance falls on Tuesday March 18^th and features interviewee Edwin Perry and “Growth Spurts,” an explosive kid from Arkansas.

Alternative Spaces: The Guesthouse

The Guesthouse (2139 W. Potomac Avenue) rests in the intricate arteries that flow from the heart of Chicago’s Wicker Park. Once a neighborhood of abandoned factories and cracked sidewalks, Wicker Park has been molded and morphed into an area of wealth and prosperity thanks to the white-collar workers that flocked there during the 1980s/90s. Rows of houses line the streets like well-kept soldiers, their woodwork elaborate and their iron fences barred.

Walking to the Guesthouse is much like meandering through Lincoln Park, staring glass-eyed at the two-/three-/four-level triple-figure brownstones down Orchard or Belden and thinking, “Maybe I could live here if I sold my ovaries to science.”

The Guesthouse is not a four-level triple-figure brownstone.

In fact, if the Guesthouse was to encounter a four-level brownstone chances are it would be driving past the aforementioned homestead in some kind of used brown MG, giving it the finger before turning back to its buddies and shrugging it off with a “Aw, well, they just need to loosen up.” Then it’d have a smoke. Or three.

The building itself is made of wood, painted the kind of powder blue found in children’s nurseries the nation wide. A screen door stands in front of the actual door, which is wide open when I appear twenty minutes late to the party. The first thing I see is an empty cat carrier. The second thing is someone I’ve never seen before in my life smoking three cigarettes at once and introducing themselves to me.

It’s at this point in my article that I’d like to make something clear: I am an introverted person that forces herself to be extroverted. I mention this because I want you to know my full meaning when I tell you that if the Guesthouse made me comfortable, it will make you five times more so.

You will go to a show there, and meet your next best friend. You’ll talk about something you hadn’t thought about in years, something obscure from high school or before then, something you’d thought you’d completely forgotten, dug out of your head like a penny from a sofa cushion. And you’ll talk about it with somebody you’d never seen before.

This is because the Guesthouse is very literally what its name suggests: it is a house. The owner lives here. Soapy plates and food-crusted silverwear sleep in the kitchen sink; people sit on countertops and linoleum chairs, couches and once-white carpeting.

The bands themselves perform in the basement, a concrete affair that looks like it may or may not collapse or flood or both during the bipolar Chicago springtime. I hover a few rows behind the rest of the fans for the first two shows. Patrons tonight are mainly college students and even some high school brats, most friends of the bands or friends of friends of cousins of the bands. The corners of the basement are in true home-fashion littered with stuff: empty paint cans, moldy rugs, a pink bicycle and a backpack the color of 70s bathroom wallpaper.

As I stand and watch the show, the audience sit Indian-style on the floor, like a gaggle of third graders and the bands squat with their guitars on milk cartons and cardboard boxes. It’s like being in grade school again—before the hormones and the self-conciousness, before I knew what being introverted was. The Guesthouse sends you back to vacant lots and baseball games where the goal is to bean the other players someplace painful. Comraderie reigns and friendliness abounds because after all, we’re here for the music, and in the words of one (chain-smoking) patron: “Hey, I don’t judge.”

Midway through the line-up a college-age boy singing lead shouts into the microphone, “It’s Friday night, people, get the f—k up and dance!” And, in eager response, the ten or fifteen patrons sitting on the cement floor bounce up and begin in bop and twitch and flail to their collective hearts’ content. They aren’t the greatest dancers in the world, but who cares? After all, it’s Friday night and we are there to dance.

(The Guesthouse can be reached at http://www.myspace.com/yourguesthouse; their next show is April 26^th at 8:00 p.m. It has a $5 cover charge.)

Alternative Spaces: Reggie’s Rock Club

The woman in front of me has a Dark Mark.

Those of you who know what that is: gold star for not living under a rock for the past decade. Those of you who don’t know what that is: gold star for not living under a YA wizarding chronicle for the past decade, slowly feeling the small chunk of dignity that kept you from spending $14.99 on a T-shirt reading “Make Love Not Horcruxes” be crushed beneath its 4,224-page weight.

I speak, of course, of Harry Potter and the Insert-Noun-Here series. One of the three bands featured tonight (Diagon Alley) is a proponant of wizard-rock, which is exactly what it sounds like, and which the five Hermione Grangers that mill around me now confirm. And this is my first glance of Reggie’s Rock Club.

The Club—which is Chicago’s “coolest new concert venue featuring 18+ and All Ages Shows, Full Bar, Cheap Eats” (cred. to their website, including the inexplicable capital letters)—is a haven for local rock and punk acts to strut, smear, shriek, sprint, and moan their stuff all over a polished plywood stage to an elaborate backdrop of graffiti and fried hot wings. The Rock Club is part one of the Reggie’s polyphonic triumverate—the other two operations being Reggie’s Music Joint (a bar and grill with live music acts) and Reggie’s Record Breakers (a mini-record store). Purchased by Robbie Glick (a 44-year-old South Loop resident) in 2007, Reggie’s was once-upon-a-time an auto-repair warehouse and it displays its roots with obvious relish.

Steel framing lines the ceiling and concrete walls have been plastered with elaborate murals in primary colors, showing the El, the Loop, the players of buckets and saxes on the street. The sound system shakes your teeth but no so hard as to displace any fillings, and the sightlines are great no matter where you stand (head of the person in front of you notwithstanding). There is a mythic VIP balcony which provides a birds-eye view of the club.

The rock club boasts a 300-person capacity, most of whom will spend the show standing in place trying to ignore the person directly behind them who will be either chatting with (screaming at) their best friend about their water bottle or their boyfriend that wouldn’t come along because gawd, he’s such an asshole—or that guy who keeps trying to mosh with the three people within a four-foot radius of them, sometimes failing, sometimes achieving moderate chaos, always leaving you weirdly impressed. Personally-speaking, I don’t quite mind, although I do keep wincing at the phantom sloshing of the beer which at a show that didn’t admit 18-year-olds would most assuredly be oozing down the back of my shirt.

Reggie’s Rock Club (2109 S. State Street) is a space where I feel obliged if not downright obligated to re-visit someday in the near/distant future simply because the day-to-day atmosphere of the venue probably doesn’t involve a crowd wherein 2/3rds are sporting lace-trimmed robes, purple hair, lightening-shaped scars, and glasses ($13 regular admission, $10 if you come in costume). That said, reviewing it with this horde may end up too complimentary to the baby-aged venue; there’s a special kind of love and acceptance that comes with nerdy pop culture obsessions and something tells me that having the audience break out in spontaneous hugging and roars at the line “Luna Loony Lovegood, you’re okay in my book.” I just regretted leaving my $14.99 T-shirt at home.