As a graphic designer that is my biggest peeve on shows/movies. CSI is alway guilty. Take a black and white static camera shot from 100 yards away and zoom in and make the image crystal clear to reveal a logo on a shirt or hat or the killers face.

But that's a whole other topic.

The "Heavenly Sword" product placement in Heroes was actually used to good effect, I think... the target audience was watching, it looked decent, and it left people wondering what the game was.

Can someone give us a synopsis of this Life episode? Who was the little girl mimicking controller motions with her empty hands? Why did an excel sheet come up at the end of the 10th level? What was that going to be used for?

I had heard the show was decent, too...

I wonder what kind of licensing fee you have to pay to use a game in the show. They were playing a pretty old PoP game, right? In Scrubs the other week they clearly showed a real FPS game, but then obviously didn't use the real name and put up fake character screens... did they still have to pay the license fee? I love that show, but they showed two people playing an FPS on a screen where only a single player was playing...

Meanwhile the Big Bang Theory, which seems to make an effort to get particularly geeky things at least somewhat correct, used Halo 3 by name.

Occasionally life has some lame mysteries even while the overarching mystery is very good. This was when the show hit the bottom of the barrel and surprisingly it's been great ever since. Easily my most favorite new show of the season, and 2nd only to Dexter in my "can't wait" list.

For fujishig:
The girl's brother had disappeared in an apparently racially motivated attack. Major Winters Detective Cruise assumed that there was more than that, i.e. money and suspected he was a drug dealer. They couldn't find any records of money (and he was so organized he had to keep records on a computer somewhere!) so Cruise guessed he might have stored them on his Xbox. That would have been a fine plot point, but apparently he stored them in a spreadsheet only accessible after beating the 10th level of Prince of Persia which must have been really frustrating to him as he seemed to do a high volume of business.

I can't recommend the show enough though. Don't let a horrendously stupid 10 minutes keep you from watching.

Every time that happens me and my wife receit the "enhance" lines from Super Troopers

Even if in this alternate universe, a console is only really a "computer with games on it's hard drive", how did they know it could be accessed after the tenth level of PoP?

Forget having to beat the game to input the info, what about having to type all that stuff without a keyboard?

So everytime this guy needed to access his organized spreadsheet of drug dealer contacts, he had to play ten levels of Prince of Persia? That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Did they at least think to see if the dude saved his progress at, say, level 9 to avoid that whole idiotic montage of everyone playing the game?

And the clip doesn't bother me in that people are pressing too many buttons or POP is not exactly depicted correctly. I'm willing to overlook that. What bothers me is this is supposed to be straight drama, but it comes across as a funny Internet film.

My mom does that when she plays video games. Particularly Super Mario Bros. As she runs and jumps for the flag she would move the controller to match Mario's movement on the screen.

We watched Life for a while, but got bored with it very fast.

Thank you, I couldn't remember and it was killing me. Especially funny since the entire movie is based on a real life event.

Forget how he typed all that without a keyboard. How did he save all that info onto a non-rewritable medium? If he modded his Xbox, saved the entire game to the HD, then hacked the game code to display the file at level 10 then why not use your great hacking skills to hide your file on an actual computer?

The more I think about this the more absurd it gets. So every single time he needs to access his file he has to play those 10 levels to get it?

"Oh shit, I forgot to carry the one!" *goes to play 10 levels of PoP*
"I spelled Steve's last name wrong!" *goes to play 10 levels of PoP*
"I better ad this guy to the list!" *goes to play 10 levels of PoP*

Ya know what? 99.9% of the people who watched this don't care. Hell, I play games I don't care. Absolute accuracy isn't important to the plot. TV/movies screw up everything. I was in the military and trust me, they get all kinds to things about the military wrong. I have a doc friend who won't watch a medical drama because all the errors piss him off. TV/movies take liberties with everything, just the way of the world.

I care less about this than I do about those "Enhancer" programs on CSI shows. I can't even count the number of people I have heard or talked to who think those things actually exist.

I'm surprised Fred Savage was standing next to that chick telling everyone how she got "fifty thousand on Double Dragon".

You'd be surprised. As I posted above, I'm a graphic designer. When I have clients come in to work on a design or tweak one I worked out beforehand, I'd say 100% of them are surprised at how involved and time consuming it really is. I've even gotten the "can't you just press a button to do this/that" numerous times, sometimes even citing how easy it looks on tv.

What's sad is even Law & Order pulls this crap now. Makes me crazy.

That clip was really funny. Thanks for the laugh! I've never played POP, so I wouldn't have known what they took liberties with, except for the spreadsheet part obviously.

You'd think they would want to show the Wii. That way, people could get into it and swing the controller around, and it wouldn't seem out of place.

For one thing, all the text like "You win. Advance to the next level." and "You died. Play again." are not in the game. There actually are no set levels in the game.

That was on last nights episode of Reaper. There were three of them playing what looked to be Quake II on the Wii.

Wow, that was truly bad. I watched only half of the pilot episode of Life and gave up on it for the acting and plot. This just justifies my decision, LOL!

Getting things "right" is one thing. But playing ten 'levels' of a video game to get to his excel spreadsheet files? Come on. This was hilariously stupid. Made even funnier by the stereotypical attitude - playing PoP is a 30yr old Star Trek geek in his mommy's basement specialty - the girl's thumbs twitching like a druggie's nose twitching for a hit - oh, and and "a console is just a hard drive with games on it".

YOU HAVE DIED!

play again?

*suspense*

Anyone *ever* played a game that said "You win. Advance to the next level." after every level?

Maybe they should have just made it say:

You Win! You have made it to level 10 and the super secret hidden spreadsheet is ready for viewing!

And then played the windows 95 startup music.

I'm sorry, I cannot process anything beyond these words.

Ugh...doesn't surprise me. Silly network television...