Another month, another Geeking Out. Lots to talk about this month, so let's just dive in, shall we?

Grand Theft Auto 4: Might as well start off with the 800lb gorilla in the room, the newest GTA game. With GTA4, Rockstar has further blurred the lines between videogames and cinema. The story of Slavic immigrant Niko Bellic's quest for fortune, power, and revenge feels like a videogame merging of the cinema of Michael Mann, John Woo, Johnny To, Beat Takeshi Kitano, and Sam Peckinpah. It's like Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, only playable. It's got everything we've come to expect from a GTA game--violence, vulgarity, hilarity, challenge, and a wee bit of pathos. It also has something that most of the other games have lacked--a main character who may have some sociopathic tendencies but is also very easy to identify with. Truthfully, for me, what makes this GTA game so endearing (and so much better than the games that have come before it) is the cast of characters. In typical GTA fashion, players will encounter a steady stream of quirky criminals, but a few (like Little Jacob, Brucie, and your cousin Roman) are so intriguing and interesting that you come to care about them a lot more than you did in characters found in GTAs past. The game is not perfect, but it's very close. It's GTA with tweaks, better graphics, an easier to use (though still not perfect) aiming system, and characters you actually come to care about. There's a lot of 2008 left, but this has to be the early favorite for Game of the Year honors.

Man Vs. Wild: I've read all the stories about how Man Vs. Wild is staged and fake and frankly, I don't give a flying fuck. This Discovery Channel show is easily the best thing on the network. Host Bear Grylls (who I might have a bit of a man-crush on...and please, let me never type the phrase "man-crush" ever again) might find himself in staged situations (to show you how to overcome them) and might return to a base camp every night, but this dude could survive in these situations if he had to. The guy's been up Everest--he's a tough SOB. Anyway, each week the show drops Grylls into some insanely inhospitable part of the world and he has to survive while showing you how to do it if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. What ensues is an hour of watching the guy show you how you can make your own urine drinkable, eat off dead animals and various kinds of vegetation, and make sure you have a place to sleep at night. It's compelling TV--even if you're not very likely to ever find yourself in a situation where you'd need the information.

Gutterballs: With a title like Gutterballs, you could be forgiven if you thought I was going to talk about some weird comedy about bowling (maybe some kind of low-budget Kingpin or something). Instead, Gutterballs is a new slasher film from Ryan Nicholson (who made the entertaining stalk-and-kill flick Live Feed a few years back). Paying homage to the '80s slasher flicks (which was the heyday of the form) Gutterballs is like a fond trip down memory lane. After a brutal rape happens at a late night bowling alley, a masked assassin (known hilariously enough as "the Bowling Bag Killer"--no doubt because he wanders around with a bowling bag on his head) begins offing the teens involved--in some truly creative and brutal ways. Filled to the brim with '80s slasher film prerequisites (nudity, sleaze, and gore), Gutterballs is essential viewing for anyone who remembers the days when horror cinema was synonymous with masked slashers instead of torture porn. If Ryan Nicholson keeps making films like these, he's going to become one of my favorite horror filmmakers.

And there you have it. Tune in next time when I'll be talking about Chuck Pahlaniuk's new novel Snuff and some other cool crap.