In this week’s Georgia Straight is my latest round-up of reviews.

• Afro Samurai
• F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
• Flower
• GTA: Lost & Damned
• Killzone 2
• Noby Noby Boy

Now your iPod can talk back to you. It better not get lippy.

Apple announced today the availability of a new iPod Shuffle, and this one will talk to you. The new VoiceOver feature enables the $99 music player to speak song titles, artists, and even battery life. The feature, it should be noted, can be switched off.

Interesting news out of Vancouver yesterday as indie developer Hothead Games announced the appointment of Ian Wilkinson, founder of Radical Entertainment, as president and CEO of Hothead.

Ian Wilkinson has joined Vancouver’s Hothead Games as president and CEO, the company announced yesterday. Wilkinson has been an integral part of the video-game development community in Vancouver since its beginning.

My latest “Trigger Happy” column in the Georgia Straight has published. This week I review two Nintendo DS titles: KORG DS-10 Synthesizer and Bangai-O Spirits. I also provide a details about a few headsets: SteelSeries 5H v2, PS3 Bluetooth, Psyko 5.1.

A gamer friend recently confessed to me that he turns the sound down when he plays video games at night. I was about to hand over a couple of games that I had agreed to lend him. “But you’re missing out,” I told him. “The sound design in a game is at least as important as all those lovely pixels.”

In the latest edition of the Georgia Straight is my article on inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about engineering human health.

“Biology,” Kurzweil told me in an interview, “is suboptimal than what we can build.”

When Ray Kurzweil talks about the future, people listen. Some think he’s crazy. Others believe he’s nothing more than a wishful thinker. Then there are those who find that his predictions of what our society may look like in the future are eerily prescient, given the rapid pace of technological change. In an interview at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Kurzweil talked about the future he imagines for human health.