The hospital door shuts behind me with an Enterprise “shoosh,” and I am standing in the December cold. I am 32 years old. My wife, still weak from 3 days of labor and 2 days of recovery, hangs on my left arm. In my right hand I hold a 10-pound baby girl, strapped in to an infant carrier, covered in layers of pink fleece. The parking lot is 40 feet away.

With the first step, I realize my life will really never be the same. By the 10th step, I feel the loss of the hospital: an invaluable safety net of professionals who actually know how to take care of an infant.

At the end of the 40 feet, I realize that I am utterly capable of murder.

Like most folks, I turn to my phone to help pass the time. I don't carry around my DS and my laptop's battery is good for about 20 seconds without being tethered to a wall-outlet, so my phone becomes the default timewaster when I'm out and about. Usually, this involves mundane texting of contacts, random questions to Google's txt-based search service, and an occasional clearing of my voicemail. But games hardly ever come into the equation.

That's because my phone is a four-year-old relic. It is one of the lingering pre-iPhone creations, representative of a bygone era where phone-based marketplaces (known to modern man as "App Stores") were savage lands of wordy textual descriptors. Usability was second-fiddle for the chance of making a quick buck. Does anyone know if the version of Guitar Hero: World Tour in the Verizon store is any good? I don’t see how anyone could, considering the infoblurb sounds like something taken from a marketing release. How could anyone resist taking a $6.99 leap of faith on a game for unlimited uses? (Unlimited! that's, like, forevertime!). Just make sure you don't upgrade your phone anytime soon -- games are tied to your hardware and don't carry over. Sorry.

Perhaps the price of ownership is too rich for your blood? Verizon's considerate enough to offer a subscription-based plan. $3.50 a month, renewable from your phone. Just think of it as renting the application. (additional charges may apply)

It's odd to think that this was ever considered a viable sales model, and it's a bit humbling to think that this was the trajectory that phone-based stores were on: closed systems, tyrannically dictated by carriers, designed to squeeze precious dollars from an unwary subscriber base. I have a sneaking suspicion that the games marketplace on my phone is little more than a pump-n-dump of tie-ins and impulse buys. Metal Gear Solid, G.I. Joe and Avatar all have offerings, but god only knows if these are rhythm games, sidescrollers, or first person shooters.

Or it could just be a monumental case of hubris. Anyone with the stones to charge $8.00 for Tetris is either a financial shark or an insane idiot.

I'm not eager to find out, either way.

I’ve only purchased one game from my phone’s store – a Chose Your Own Adventure romp through high school that, surprisingly, included weekly DLC. It wasn’t anything revolutionary, but it was a perfect diversion and had a large enough backlog of scenarios that I felt the $5.00 I spent on it was well wasted.

And then, in 2008, I was advised to perform a “free update” of the game. Miraculously, I lost the license to the 2007 edition of the game and was instead provided with a sneak peek of the new and awesome 2008 iteration. I could purchase the ’08 version of the game for the low, low price of $8.00. What a bargain! I’ve been wary of paying for anything on the thing since.

It’s enough to make a guy take up reading again.

“Obviously this was not our first choice … it was not our eighth choice. But I am determined to make the best of this situation. So ladies and gentlemen, people that are watching, here’s the plan: tonight and tomorrow night, we are going to have a lot of fun on television.”

A few scant hours after you read this, Conan O’Brien will wish his audience a good night, walk away from his desk, and end his all-too-brief reign as host of the Tonight Show. I’m not going to rehash the business politicking behind the mess – it’s been covered enough through blogs, in the media, and even on other late-night talkshows. What I can say is that Conan’s departure leaves me feeling robbed. What should have been a decade-long dynasty of comedy and general goofiness was instead reduced to a handful of embryonic months. I’ve seen Joss Whedon shows on FOX treated with more respect.

If there’s any silver lining to the shenanigans seen in the last two weeks, it is that Conan’s waning tenure is producing some of the most honest, cynical, and darkly humorous entertainment ever seen on a major broadcasting network. The nation is watching a man deal with the abject denial of his childhood dreams, and his reaction is to laugh as his lifelong ambitions crumble around him. Well, laugh and spend as much of the network’s money as possible. All while doing everything in his power to insult the network executives responsible for this rigmarole.

Future generations will most certainly look to the Bugatti Veyron Mouse sketch linked above as the empirical definition of catharsis. Standing next to the world’s most expensive car, laughing maniacally over the ridiculous excess of it all, it’s almost possible to see concentrated beads of schadenfreude drip from Conan’s being.

It’s little wonder that the man has garnered so much support. Freakishly tall, pasty white, with unruly red hair accompanying a litany of self-deprecating comments, Conan’s characteristic pessimism is practically custom tailored to the geeks and dweebs of the world. I remember Conan’s Late Night antics accompanying many of my study sessions throughout high school and college. Musing about his audience (dozens and dozens, maybe!), Conan would launch straight into one of his irreverent and wildly inappropriate staples – a “self-pleasuring” bear, robotic pimp or “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever” – and leave me entranced. Conan’s show was the underfunded underdog crawling through the infomercial wastelands of late night television, and he made sure you knew it at every turn. He captured the minds of young people who identified with his instability (we had nothing to show for ourselves; no one knew our names; we were unimportant workers or students earning a quiet existence) as we admired his ability to laugh at his shortcomings.

When Conan signs off later tonight, I’ll lament the loss of a youth icon, however temporary. I’ll feel no anger for the way he was treated, no rage for the old standards maintaining their foothold, only sorrow for the lost possibilities.

But I’ll be damned if Conan didn’t go out the way that so many of us have only dreamed of: a pocket full of cash, a laugh on his lips, and an obscene gesture flying in the face of his ex-bosses.

Godspeed, CoCo. You were not long for this world.

It’s rare for a game to overcome the kind of horrible first impression a bad demo can bring. After I tried the Bayonetta demo, I spit venom on the podcast and said it was the most inane, over-sexualized crap I’d ever seen. That would normally have sealed it for me, but when resoundingly positive reviews started pouring in, I was thrown for a loop. I hedged and rented it, wondering if reviewers with Japanese fetishes were about to lead me astray.

At first I was sure they had. Bayonetta opens with the sort of overwrought, nearly-impossible-to-understand cutscene that became popular when game developers began to exploit the processing power of the PS2. The story's opening is mainly about establishing a stylish main character with as much subtlety as a sledgehammer to the face. Bayonetta standing at a grave, disguised as a nun with bell-bottom dress pants and pearly white vestments. When the angels descend from heaven she launches herself into the sky and becomes a gun-firing whirlwind of destruction. Blood and feathers everywhere. Eventually her costume is ripped, revealing the leather-clad bombshell that has proved to be so controversial since the game came out.

I was both flummoxed and intrigued, I decided to give it a few hours and see where it took me. I’m glad I did.

2009 will forever be known to me as “The Year that My Childhood Died.”

This is not because of some unsuccessful remake of a cherished childhood series or because of the staggering loss of celebrity life during the preceding 365 days. Not even the gradual, slinking spread of white strands among the brunette tones of my facial hair was cause enough to abandon the graces of my youth. No, the culprit was “the times,” and its crime was proving that the media of today and yesteryear must unavoidably walk down a trail of tears towards irrelevance.

I’m no stranger to the upward climb of life. I’ve discarded many a portable radio, cassette-based Walkman and portable CD player in my time. Along with them have gone numerous plastic-shelled consoles and dozens of cold PC components. But while these items may have been lost to me, I still felt that they retained a kind of silent relevance to life. They were breadcrumbs on a cultural landscape that was rich with relics and stories. Though tossed aside, these little gems held meaning.

2009 changed that. (On my birthday, no less). In January, at the start of what should have been a promising year, I heard about the death of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

The original Assassin's Creed was a prototype. This is clear after finishing Assassin's Creed 2, which is better in every respect, whether it's improving features from the first game or rolling them up in a carpet and throwing them off a bridge. I've never been so happy to be free of monologues by boring old men and galloping across endless plains before finally getting back to doing something marginally interesting.

Rather than drop 4000 words about how much I've enjoyed Ubisoft's latest, let's get right to the meat of it: Are you the sort of person who should buy Assassin's Creed 2? Let's explore a few perspectives.

Nathan Drake doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy I’d want to meet at a bar. Not because I’ve watched him snap countless necks and gun down hundreds of men, but the odds are I wouldn’t have much to say that would interest him. I can just imagine his face going slack and his eyes staring off into space as he realizes that not only do I not have the Holy Grail hidden away in my basement, I’m not even the secret ancestor of Marco Polo. I’d have nothing to offer this man.

How can a game with a brilliant visual language be a failure?

Eufloria (formerly Dyson; $20 on Steam) is much more than pretty -- more than beautiful, even. It's gorgeous to look at the swarms of pastel spaceships ("seedlings") flying by the thin "trees" (factories) among the simple circular "asteroids" (territories). It's utterly charming when you're zoomed in and watching clouds of wings riffle past each other, like a ballet of moths. And it's charming in a totally different way when you're zoomed out and looking at bright dots pouring kinetically from asteroid to asteroid, splashing as they land and regroup for battle. Each unit is like a tiny droplet of water, poured through space from one asteroid to another. At their destination, they splash out from impact and leave a crater, a temporary shallowness, and then rush in to fill it. It's a majesty of fluid dynamics. The screenshots do not capture the power of the game in motion. It is certainly pretty.

But it's more than pretty because those great visuals are full of game-play meaning -- they are a visual language. Eufloria is a simple real-time strategy game, and almost every part of the simple game design gets a straightforward, sensible, text-free cue in the visual design. Seedlings sport bigger wings if they are faster, bigger bodies if tougher, and bigger probosces if stronger than normal (lasers are always in the nose; it is our ancient way). Older trees are taller and fuller, and produce more seedlings than younger ones. The beautiful swarmings of your seedlings are not just decoration. They determine the battles. Opposing seedlings start shooting each other just when the tides of their chaotic seas bring them together. Strike where the enemy is shallow.

Chuck Kroegel has a thing about tanks. We should be happy about this.

The honest truth is that I almost missed Panzer General: Allied Assault entirely. While I played Petroglyph Games' previous entries in the strategy space – the Star Wars: Empire at War series and the more recent Universe at War for PC and Xbox 360 – I found neither one particularly engaging. But Petroglyph's legacy, mostly in the person of CEO Chuck Kroegel, goes way further back than console Real Time Strategy games.

That legacy blossoms in this latest take on Panzer General.

There is not a single child in my 400-student high school who is even remotely interested in the PSP Go. If that’s not a condemnation of the platform, then I know not what is.

Many of these children already own a PSP model. Most of them use it as a glorified iPod. Some of the more clever kids have discovered the device’s capacity for emulation and delight in playing Marvel vs. Capcom during lunch. When either of these groups was asked what their last PSP game purchase was, a uniform look of existential blankness constituted their response. Experiences like that lead me to believe that the PSP was a success of name over utility.

Sony’s ineptitude during this hardware cycle is astounding, to the point where I’m almost convinced that their cell processor manufacturing plants are placed in some kind of unholy Lament Configuration over the major indigenous burial grounds of the world. But dismal as their failings may be, it takes a certain kind of craptitude to garner a near-universal panning of anticipated hardware revisions. It’s not just a major fumble; it points to a pathological inability for Sony to gauge the needs of its audience or to design a guiding philosophy for its portable.

But the most disappointing aspect about this whole mess isn’t the tarnished Sony brand or the inexplicable reinterpretation of the Mylo’s tainted shell. The real disappointment lies in the fact that the botched delivery hoopla is masking some very real, very immediate problems concerning the on-demand model of game delivery as a viable commercial alternative.