Every main character needs a good nemesis. Seinfeld has Newman. McBain has Mendoza. And Tiger Woods has Scott Ratchman.

Ratchman? Not Phil Mickelson or Vijay Singh or some other golfer? Well, no. None of those guys played against Woods in his youth, which forms about half of the "Legacy Challenge" in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, in which you recreate significant moments from more than just Woods' professional career. The game needed a foe in Woods' youth tournaments, and Scott Ratchman represents all the older kids Tiger defeated.

"Tiger mentioned in his interview with us that he was always one of the smallest kids competing against older competition on the weekends," said Christian Brandt, a member of the development team. "Tiger would always beat his competitors with his putting and short game skills, but would always get outdrove by the bigger/stronger kids. So we modeled Scott Ratchman after a "big kids" type character."

A week before the game released, I was playing the game for review and lost to Ratchman in our first duel. I vowed to kill that little bastard. On the off chance he was real—a childhood friend of Tiger's? who knows—I Googled "Scott Ratchman" (in quotes). I swear to you, only one result came up, a census listing from the 1890s, I think.

Now, you Google the name, and you get all sorts of invective thrown the way of Ratchman, a pasty-faced redhead with a perpetually severe expression. He does outdrive Woods, but has difficulty staying on the fairway and will miss a lot of putts.

But in match play, you have to go after him, because he'll still play close to par, and the opportunity to make birdie will be limited by young Tiger's lack of power. I think I got into a four-hole sudden death playoff with Ratchman on our first encounter. His resilience, I think, is what pisses people off.

And, well, his looks.

"My arch nemesis this week is Scott Ratchman and his stupid ginger Xbox golf skills," tweeted "Zaco" on April 3, a week after the game released.

This is deliberate, said Scott Gilbert. "I modeled Scott Ratchman, first thinking of a Bizarro Tiger," he told me, "then started to joke that he should be Scut Farkus," the redheaded, yellow-eyed, coonskin-capped junkyard bully from the cult flick A Christmas Story.

"Scott Ratchman had a similar sounding name, so it still tied in nicely to the character that inspired him," Gilbert said. And where did that name come from? Well, the guy who modeled him, and his bride-to-be. Ratchman takes Gilbert's first name, and Gilbert's fiancé supplies the second. Brandt said the two became engaged right around the time the character was being developed, so, why not name him for them both?

I dunno, maybe because in addition to giving up her maiden name, she's now giving it to a despised video game character? Sheesh. I sure hope Gilbert went to Jared!

Here's something I did not know, however: There are two Scott Ratchmans. There's the youth Ratchman everyone knows and hates. But at some point—and I drove myself crazy trying to get to it over the past three days—you unlock an older Ratchman, whom Gilbert says was modeled on Val Kilmer's "Iceman" from Top Gun.

"It seemed to fit the time period he would be used for and I like to imagine a similar cockiness as he tries to out maneuver Tiger's 'maverick' up to the pros," Gilbert said, "ultimately ceding the title of Top Young Golfer to Tiger in an inspiring story end moment."

That works. But Iceman and Scut aren't exactly twins, y'know.

"I also tried to give the glasses [that older Ratchman wears] a bit of a yellow reflection in keeping with 'yellow eyes' of Farkus," he added.

I asked the guys to make up a fake future for Ratchman. I offered that Ratchman actually did overcome his childhood humiliations to make the PGA Tour for one short season, with his best finish being 16th at the 1996 Greater Greensboro Open. Then he flamed out in Q school and was never heard from again.

Brandt wouldn't even give him that.

"I would think Ratchman to be one of the really good golfers on a small college team," Brandt said, "but when matched up against a Division I school he gets crushed. So, he's a guy that's always bragging that he is so great at golf, but never actually played against tough competition until Tiger came around."

"I also like to think he would end up as a course pro suffering from a horrible case of the yips brought on by his losses to Tiger," Brandt said, "He probably finds anyone he can at the bar, so he can tell them tales of his 'epic battles' with Tiger."

The people who are making the next Call of Duty will barely tell us anything about the new game's multiplayer. Oliver North won't, either.

But Mark Lamia, the head of the studio Treyarch that is making the game, says this in a press release heralding the new game today: "And in multiplayer, we're embracing all skill levels and play styles to give players more ways to engage."

That reads to me as Treyarch trying to make Black Ops II fun for all the ace players who will prestige the game on day one—and for those of us who don't have time to gain those kinds of skills.

Hopefully!

It's game day in Speak Up on Kotaku! Commenter David Green challenges us to distill our proudest gaming moments into one sentence (yes, we've spoiled his), while everyone else tries to guess what the game is. We'll let him explain.

You have one sentence to define sheer joy for your game of choice without giving away the title. Others get to guess the game then post their own moments of joy. I'll start with an easy one:

Artillery Shot on the flag carrier.

No new Portal or Left 4 Dead announcements either. Valve is attending the annual games conference, but won't be showing any new games, the company confirmed today. [Valvetime, via Joystiq]

In a post on his Major Nelson blog, Xbox Live's Larry Hyrb announced that Inside Xbox—the internally-produced video show that delivered game news and previews directly to Xbox 360 owners over Xbox Live—will be ceasing production in the United States. That means that other English-speaking territories like Canada, Australia and New Zealand will no longer get the show as well. More details here.

The wind and haze
I'm bound for better days.
It's my life and my dream,
Nothing's gonna stop me now!

You hear that, world? Nothing's gonna stop me now!

I think that Perfect Strangers' theme song embodies so many of the best things about people, a celebration of can-do spirit and optimism. It's the kind of energy we could use more of in video games!

Thanks to a designer named Jason Oda, the world of video games just got a little bit more Balki.

You start the game by telling it your personal dream. What dream? Any dream. My dream is to build an island fashioned out of airplane bits, so I put that. With your deram entered, Balki takes over and urges you on to achieve it.

Which… you do by running down a fairly hilarious pathway, gathering stars while the Perfect Strangers theme plays and its lyrics fly past. (At one point, you fly.)

Look... it's a Perfect Strangers video game. Do you need to know more than that? Go play it.

Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now [Official site]

Most games concerned with keeping their heroes undetected create a reliance on a few familiar mechanics. Sticking to shadows, staying out of sight and keeping quiet have staple stealth mechanics for as long as the genre's been around. And Dynamite Jack uses all of those. But, given that the only weapon that the titular hero can wield is dynamite, maintaining silence gets very tricky..

This PC/Mac action game comes from Phil Hassey, the game designer behind the hit multiplayer strategy mobile game Galcon. Players control Jack, a human space marine who's being held prisoner but hostile aliens. He managed to break free from his captors and now needs to escape the subterranean caverns where he's been forced to mine valuable minerals.

Luckily, Jack has access to the loads of explosives left lying around underground. Along with a flashlight to illuminate the darkness, you'll use bombs to create paths, eliminate obstacles and kill guards. Jack needs to find the glowing portal exit on each level to proceed and will be able to pick up chunks of ore to add to their score. Each level is timed and you can earn achievements for feats like clearing a level without killing.

I've spent a good chunk of time with Dynamite Jack and have come to really appreciate how it generates a nice tension between the necessity to explore very loudly with explosives and remain unseen. It can be easy enough to track patrol patterns and weave around guards' fields of vision. But when you need to blow out a cave wall to get a key card, they'll hear it and come running to investigate. If you get spotted, you get shot death on the spot and need to restart the level. Best of all, there's a frightening unpredictability to the guards' investigative rambles. I rarely felt safe while hiding in the aftermath of an explosion. And in a stealth game, that's a great thing.

Puzzle elements show up in DJ, too. Some level will have you blowing up technological barriers to access interiors. These moments can result in beautiful cascades of destruction that are both fun and useful. There's a mini-map for a little help but it only shows the pathways that you've already discovered or made, so it never becomes too much of a crutch.

Dynamite Jack sports an undeniably retro aesthetic but combines the top-down look with smart, challenging modern-day design elements. If it were a coin-op arcade game, Dynamite Jack would keep players pumping quarters into it until they'd mastered its challenges. As it is, you'll be able to grab it on Steam when it releases on May 10th.

Dynamite Jack

"Skyrim Steam Workshop downloads are over 13.6 million," Bethesda said on Twitter today. "PC mods FTW." Wondering which are the best to download? We've got you covered. [Bethesda]

Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took this stage this weekend at the GeForce LAN Shanghai to introduce the GeForce GTX 690, a dual-GPU monster designed from the ground up to be the most powerful video card in history. Are your nipples hard too?

What, it's a ridiculously powerful graphics card. When the news first dropped this weekend, Nvidia compared the power of the GTX 690 to that of two GTX 680s slung together in SLI. If we read between the lines we can assume they mean the performance Nvidia likes to think that configuration has and not the actual performance of SLI'd cards, which isn't nearly as impressive. If this one card can delivery that sort of dreamy power, than I'd like two of them please. And a new motherboard. And a case.

Tell you what, I'll unplug my speakers, and you can just slip an entirely new machine in.

I like how Huang says that no design was included unless it enhanced the performance of the GPU, and then points out that this is the first graphics card with its name imprinted on the card itself. How does that aid performance? Shut up, it's cool.

The game, recently launched on PSN and Xbox Live, will be available for digital purchase later in 2012. The PC version includes several game updates, which will be added to the console versions in free downloads later this year. [Gamasutra]