Video games in '09: Our favorite titles of the year

Readers have selected their choices for the top games of the year - both by vote and in the forum. Now, Game Hunters chooses out favorites from 2009.

Despite the exodus of video games into 2010, there were still plenty of quality titles to select from. The decision was quite difficult, so much so that we have two top 5 lists, one from each of the Game Hunters.

No. 5

Mike - Wii Sports Resort. There were many other great games that I considered for my fave five. But perhaps it was the pure excitement I saw on the faces of those I bowled, played ping-pong and clashed swords with that earned this game its spot. Like the Wii itself, this game attracts others to games, exponentially upping the fun factor.

Brett - Wii Sports Resort. What better way to top the phenomenon that is Wii Sports with even more mini-games and improved motion controls. It was tough to not enjoy yourself slinging arrows and sinking three-pointers.

No. 4

Mike - Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Like many, I underestimated this sequel from the creators of the Crash Bandicoot games. But the action, the look and the characters of this game trumps the latest Indiana Jones film and won me over.

Brett - Flower. Most video games prefer pumping adrenaline through your body. The PlayStation 3 download soothed your nerves with enchanting visuals and a relaxing environment. It was one of the year's most imaginative games.

No. 3

Mike - The Beatles: Rock Band. Perhaps the ultimate rock band to build a game around. And Harmonix hit enough right notes to make me want to play eight days a week.

Brett - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's hard not to include this considering the dozens of hours I've invested in multiplayer (Level 35 on first Prestige rank as of this post). While the single-player boasted some crazy moments (fighting inside a faux Burger King), the multiplayer is what entices gamers to enlist.
No. 2

Mike - Assassin's Creed II. The original intrigued me, the sequel carried me away. As a lover of art and history -- and art history -- this game set in Renaissance Italy had an attractive setting. But the gameplay and story is what kept the game on my mind when I was away.

Brett - Batman: Arkham Asylum. It represents arguably the best superhero game ever created. The Caped Crusader returns as his dark, brooding self, trying to restore order to the famed looney bin. While the appearances by Joker and Harley Quinn are top notch, it doesn't match the brilliance of Scarecrow. It felt like Scarecrow wanted to play mental tricks with me just as much as he did the Dark Knight during his haunting sequences.

Our favorite game of 2009

Mike - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. High expectations were set for and met by Infinity Ward's follow-up to Call of Duty 4, which earned top honors from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Sure the single-player plot was over-the-top, but not any more so than a blockbuster action film -- and it was more fun. And the fun continues with the new Special Ops co-op mode and online multiplayer.

Brett - Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The single-player adventure cements Nathan Drake as video games' signature action hero, evoking classic blockbuster film franchises such as Indiana Jones and Die Hard. Perhaps one of the best moments this year was Drake leaping between speeding trucks in an incredible interactive chase scene. Most surprising is a multiplayer component that's both diverse and highly entertaining. Every PlayStation 3 owner must have a copy of this on their shelves.

Frigid temps break winter weather records

Bitterly cold air and howling winds spread across the USA — from the Dakotas to Florida— over the weekend, breaking weather records in the upper Midwest, the Great Lakes and New England.
The wintry blast even shocked International Falls, Minn., the self-described "Icebox of the Nation," where temperatures bottomed out at 37 below zero Saturday and Sunday mornings, breaking records that have stood since 1979. Sioux Falls, S.D., was 30 below on Saturday morning, the coldest temperature recorded since 1974.

"We basically have an anomalous high-pressure system that came out of Canada and brought some really cold air with it," reported Jennifer Laflin, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sioux Falls.

After a slight moderation early this week, yet another cold air mass — likely even colder than this one — is poised to invade the entire eastern two-thirds of the USA by later in the week, said Weather Channel meteorologist Mark Ressler.

The unusually powerful high-pressure ridge causing the current freeze is holding at bay warmer air from the west and allowing frigid air to spill directly south from north-central Canada across the Midwest, Laflin said.

Snow was the main issue over the weekend in much of New England and the interior Northeast, where nearly 3 feet blanketed Burlington, Vt. The 31.8 inches of snow recorded as of Sunday afternoon represented the city's all-time biggest snowstorm in 120 years of recordkeeping, according to the weather service's Scott Whittier in South Burlington. Snow was still falling late Sunday in Burlington.

The cold air had marched all the way down the East Coast into south Florida by Sunday, where freeze warnings were issued for nearly the entire state for today.

Robert Ritchey, a tomato grower in Alva, Fla., said temperatures dipped to 39 degrees in his 3-acre fields Saturday night. "I ain't lost any (crops) yet, and I don't want to," Ritchey said.

Daytime TV takes stock, retrenches in a changing world

It has been a season of loss for daytime broadcast TV.
Not only has the viewing audience continued its gradual decline, but daytime's biggest star, Oprah Winfrey, will be ending her show in 2011, and another talk host, Tyra Banks, announced last week that she would be leaving after one more season.

The soap opera world is taking a hit, too, as one of the most enduring soaps, As the World Turns, will stop telling stories after 54 years in September, joining the canceled Guiding Light.

"Viewership in daytime is down, and it's also unfortunately happening at a time of economic downturn. So the combination of the two makes it pretty difficult in the daytime arena," says Bill Carroll, vice president of Katz Television Group.

Winfrey's choice is considered personal rather than connected to the daytime drop, although her top-rated show also has experienced audience erosion. Nevertheless, her departure will leave a huge hole in the daytime lineup that no current host will be able to fill, Carroll says.

Doctors are very in

Daytime's audience loss reflects ratings drops throughout the broadcast day as cable competitors chip away (Winfrey will be taking a major role in her own cable network) and innovations, such as Soapnet and the DVR, let viewers catch up with their shows at other times. But there are also fewer women, the target audience, available to watch during the day, a trend that has been building for decades.

The news isn't all bad, however. The top performers in the talk, soap and court genres still perform well, although most have seen declines over the past five years. Some newer medical shows, such as the syndicated Dr. Oz and The Doctors, seem to be catching on by prescribing useful advice in an engaging way.

Doctors creator Jay McGraw says time-strapped viewers want more than just pure entertainment. "We like to think that we are a very entertaining show ... but we make sure in every episode that we give our viewers usable information," he says.

Bernanke: Regulation can hold back market excesses

Stronger regulation should be the first line of defense against excessive speculation that could send the economy into a new crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Sunday.
But he didn't rule out higher interest rates to stop new speculative bubbles from forming.

The Fed chief's remarks were his most extensive on the subject since the housing market's tumble led to the gravest financial crisis since World War II— and perhaps the worst in modern history, in his view.

Critics blame the Fed for feeding that speculative boom in housing by holding interest rates too low for too long after the 2001 recession.

But Bernanke, in a speech to the American Economic Association's annual meeting in Atlanta, defended the central bank's actions. Extra-low rates were needed to get the economy and job creation back to full throttle after the Sept. 11 attacks and accounting scandals that rocked Wall Street, he said.

Bernanke said the direct links were weak between super-low interest rates and the rapid rise in house prices that occurred at roughly the same time. The stance of interest rates during that period "does not appear to have been inappropriate," he said.

Still, the enormous economic damage from the housing bust — the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s and double-digit unemployment — shows how important it is to guard against a repeat, Bernanke said.

"All efforts should be made to strengthen our regulatory system to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, and to cushion the effects if another crisis occurs," he said.

"However, if adequate reforms are not made, or if they are made but prove insufficient to prevent dangerous buildups of financial risks, we must remain open to using monetary policy as a supplementary tool," he added.

Speculative excesses are not easy to pinpoint in their early stages, he said, and using higher interest rates to combat them can hurt the economy.

For instance, rate increases in 2003 and 2004 to constrain the housing bubble could have "seriously weakened" the economy just when a recovery from the 2001 recession was starting, he said.

To help the country emerge from that recession, the Fed under then-Chairman Alan Greenspan cut its key bank lending rate from 6.5% in late 2000 to 1% in June 2003. It held rates at what was then a record low for a year. It's this action that critics blame for feeding the housing speculation.

Bernanke, however, said the expansion of complex mortgage products and the belief that housing prices would keep rising were the keys to inflating the housing bubble. As a result, lenders made home loans to people to finance houses they couldn't afford.

The Fed in 2005 did crack down on dubious mortgage practices and the type of mortgages blamed for the crisis. Bernanke acknowledged that these efforts "came too late or were insufficient to stop the decline in underwriting standards and effectively constrain the housing bubble."

Still, Bernanke said the lessons learned from the crisis isn't that regulation is ineffective but that regulation "must be better and smarter."

However, the Fed's regulatory lapses and its failure to spot problems leading up to the crisis have spurred efforts in Congress to rein in the Fed's powers and subject it to more oversight. Bernanke, who has been tapped by President Obama to a second term as Fed chief, faces a contentious confirmation in the Senate.

During a brief question-and-answer session after his speech, Bernanke didn't talk about current economic conditions or the future course of interest rates.

When the Fed meets later this month, it is expected to keep its key bank lending rate at a record low, near zero. The big question is whether the Fed will provide clues at that time about when it will need to start raising rates to prevent inflation from taking off.

Some analysts worry that the Fed, which has held rates at record lows since December 2008, could be fueling a new speculative period and potentially a future economic crisis.

Looking back, Bernanke suggested the Fed might have underestimated the full force of the recession, which struck in December 2007. "It turns out the recession was worst than we thought at the time."

After a four straight losing quarters, the economy finally growth from July through September last year. Much of that growth, though, came from government supported spending on homes and cars. There's concern about how vigorous the recovery will be once government supports are removed later this year.

Swine flu, space interest scientists most in 2009

Science marches on, sometimes with headlines and awards, but most often with little fanfare.
A look at the year's most-cited papers in science, ones that scientists themselves referenced in their own work, for example, finds studies that did and didn't make any "Top Ten" lists.

"What scientists themselves are interested in often differs a good bit from the public's interests," says analyst David Pendlebury of Thomson Reuters, the international specialty information firm. "Often the stories that really matter in science are the ones still unfolding."

As part of his efforts for the ScienceWatch.com website, Pendlebury compiled 2009's top topics in science, by citation, using an "Essential Science Indicators" database of publications, citations and trends in all disciplines. Here are the top 10:

•NASA's measures of the age, expansion and distribution of galaxies throughout the universe based on observations by its WMAP probe, launched in 2001. Not on a lot of lists, but, "the studies just provide a wealth of data that everyone in physics from cosmology to high-energy physicists will use for years," Pendlebury says.

•Prostate cancer studies suggesting that screening and Vitamin E had few benefits in treating the disease. These made news but were also highly cited by other researchers.

•New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association studies showing problems with the blood-thinning drug Clopidogrel for heart patients. Another newsmaker.

•Diabetes treatment consensus statements that were updated this year. "Such articles are typically highly cited," Pendlebury says.

Fla. suspect held without bond in 4 Thanksgiving slayings

A Florida man accused of killing four relatives at a Thanksgiving dinner is being ordered held without bond on four charges of murder.
Paul Merhige was booked early Sunday at the Palm Beach County jail, hours after he was captured at a motel in the Florida Keys.


DAD: Florida Thanksgiving shootings were planned

The Palm Beach Post reported that Merhige was silent at his first court appearance. He was appointed a public defender, and an arraignment is set for Feb. 1.

Merhige had been the subject of a massive manhunt from Miami to Michigan that included billboards and flyers with his image and a $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He is accused of gunning down his twin sisters, a 79-year-old aunt and a 6-year-old cousin on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 26) at a family gathering in Jupiter.

Merhige, 35, was arrested without a struggle Saturday night after the TV show America's Most Wanted aired and provided the tip that led to Merhige's capture on Long Key, Jupiter Police Sgt. Scott Pascarella said.

"I'm elated that the monster is in the cage," Jim Sitton, the father of 6-year-old victim Makayla Sitton, told The Palm Beach Post. "We don't have to worry about him killing my wife or coming back for my father-in-law. It doesn't bring my daughter back, but at least this chapter is over."

Authorities said Merhige checked into the motel Dec. 2, using the name "John Baca" and a false Homestead address. He had the same blue 2007 Toyota Camry that had been a key part of the manhunt, but police said it was hidden at the motel.

U.S. Marshals said Merhige, who had withdrawn $12,000 from bank accounts before the killings, paid for his room in advance in cash. It turned out that the license tag on his car had been registered to a Lexus he owned in 2006.

Merhige was on his computer when U.S. Marshals and local deputies entered his motel room, according to a Marshals statement.

It wasn't immediately clear Merhige had an attorney. Authorities said he was taken to the Palm Beach County jail.

Police said Merhige opened fire at a home where 16 relatives had gathered for the holiday in Jupiter, an affluent community about 90 miles north of Miami. He faces four counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder in the shootings, which also injured two other people.

Police said Merhige shot and killed his 33-year-old twin sisters, Carla Merhige and Lisa Knight, both of Miami, along with his aunt Raymonde Joseph, 76, and his young cousin. Police said Knight was pregnant.

Authorities have said Merhige carefully planned the killings. Sitton has said Merhige was heard saying after the shootings that he had waited 20 years to kill the relatives.

Merhige sat through three hours of dinner and sing-a-longs around the piano before the shootings, Sitton has said. There were no arguments, warnings or red flags before the rampage, he said.

Police said Merhige was taking numerous medications, including Ativan, which is used to treat anxiety disorders.

Copyright 2010

Stocks post biggest rebound in 2009 since Great Depression

NEW YORK — Few analysts forecast this year's remarkable stock market rebound as major indexes were plunging to 12-year lows last March. Now, with most experts predicting the pace of stocks' gains will slow in 2010, there's reason to believe they will be proven correct.
Despite fears early in the year about a potential financial system collapse, stocks managed to have their best year since 2003 on growing signs of recovery in what turned out to be Wall Street's biggest comeback since the Great Depression.

Stocks began the dramatic turnaround in March after Citigroup and other big banks said they were making money again, and then climbed at a fairly steady pace as signs of an economic recovery from the Great Recession became more pronounced.

Once it was clear a collapse wasn't going to happen, the Standard & Poor's 500 index roared back 64.8% from its early March low. For the full year, the index rose 23.5%, or 211.85 points, it's best showing since 2003.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 1,651.66, or 18.8% for the year. From its March 9 close, the Dow jumped 59.3%. Powered by the recovery in high-tech stocks, the Nasdaq ended 2009 with a gain of 696.12, or 43.9%. Tthe Nasdaq has surged 78.9% from its March low.

But despite the spectacular gains in 2009, stocks have turned in one of its worst performances over the course of a decade. The S&P 500 posted its first losing decade, falling 24% from the start of 2000.