Never Too Old To Play™

I started off the summer excited as I always am for a new season of Psych, but to be quite honest the first half of the season has been pretty disappointing so far. I just watched the summer finale last night with two episodes I missed still on my DVR, and I have to say that Shawn and Gus’s misadventures these past couple of months just haven’t done it for me.

I can’t fairly judge episodes 4 and 7 – “Chivalry Is Not Dead… But Someone Is” and “Ferry Tale,” respectively – yet, but at the midway point the only episode I really found funny was the penultimate episode of the summer season in which Lost and The Tick alum Nest0r Carbonell’s character – skilled criminal profiler Declan Rand – is introduced.

That episode – entitled “Shawn 2.0″ – had tons of successful bits that kept me laughing through most of the “hour.” My wife and I especially loved Shawn’s observation that Rand had “the most impossibly dark eyelashes on any man ever” because she had wondered aloud during past viewings of Lost episodes whether Mr. Carbonell wore mascara. Shawn’s misinterpretation of MBA as “a monkey basketball league” as well as all the back and forth around Shawn’s attempt to bring back “…not!” and “said the liar” were also hilarious.

Guest star Curt Smith from 80′s pop rock band Tears For Fears had some amusing scenes, but his more appealing contribution was an interesting interpretation of the Psych theme song played over the opening credits in place of the usual jingle.

The summer season finale – “One, Maybe Two, Ways Out” – guest starred German actress Franka Potente as a special ops agent on the run (an homage to her star turn in 1998′s Run Lola Run) and included a verbal nod to her major role in The Bourne Identity.  Other than that, though, the episode was rather rudimentary and fairly uninteresting – not a great cap to this first half of the fifth season of one of my favorite shows.

The highly anticipated Halo: Reach raked in $200 million in sales after just one day on retail shelves, outshining Halo 3′s first day take of $170 million on September 25, 2007. That impressive total generated on Tuesday’s launch is far short of the current single day record of $310 million posted by Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which debuted on November 10, 2009 on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

It’s a rather auspicious start for the new first-person shooter game that chronicles the actions of the doomed Noble Team, a squadron of Spartan super soldiers stationed on human colony Reach during the massacre Halo fans know as “The Fall of Reach.”

I’m personally happy that Halo: Reach has done so well in just this short window of time as it proves that gamers can embrace a Halo game that isn’t just more repetitive schlock involving Master Chief. After the massive disappointment of Halo 3, Halo: Reach seems to be another breath of fresh air (Halo 3: ODST was a nice appetizer) that can put Halo back on my personal list of great gaming franchises.