Gamers today are incredibly spoiled. Thanks to today's vast amount of developers and platforms, we've grown to expect amazing Grade A games every week. Our insatiable gaming rage is furthered by an entire industry of gaming magazines, websites, and reviewers... who, despite their ubiquitousness, do very little to increase the pastime's legitimacy.

I'm highly amused by the resounding Thumbs Down for State of Emergency, which is getting worse word of mouth than Spielberg's A.I. If I had to guess - and I have to, since I haven't played it - I'd suggest that State of Emergency's biggest failure is a lack to live up to the Grand Theft Auto 3 standard. When I first read about SoE, I immediately likened it to Dynasty Warriors 2, which is a comparison I have yet to hear anybody else make. I mean, both games have hundreds of onscreen enemies that you have to pummel through to reach various goal points, right? Perhaps the noted redundancy of SoE - that appeared without warning to most reviewers - was the true killing stroke. We all knew Dynasty Warriors 2 would be redundant; that's why there's only 6 levels.

Nintendo decided not to sell the Game Boy Advance/Game Cube link cable in retail stores, making the $10 item only available through their online stores. Now, Nintendo is no stranger to once-and-done peripherals (Game Boy Camera, R.O.B. the Robot, N64 Microphone), so why the hem-haw on the GBA/GC cable? Perhaps because the only GameCube game that currently supports the trinket is the Sega-produced Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (in conjunction with the GBA game Sonic Advance, naturally)?

I ordered my cable already and I don't think that any anti-Sega conspiracy has much to do with it. It's just because the Chao-trading dynamic of the two Sonic games is incredibly boring. You see, you can download a GameCube Chao into the GBA, but it doesn't unlock anything different than what you already can do with a GBA-born Chao. So why? It's interactivity purely for the sake of promoting interactivity.

Like most Americans, I had no idea that somebody had made a Broadway musical out of "The Wind in the Willows," but Rhonda and I received visual and aural proof last weekend, when we saw it at a local high school.

Now I've been a huge fan of the book since 1982 when my aunt gave me a copy (Thanks again, Lisa!) and I've tried to enjoy media interpretations of it. The animated Disney version ("The Adventures of Mr. Toad," 1949) mainly sought to turn a contemplative, pastoral story into a cartoon version of The Love Bug. The 1996 live action version (known as "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" here in the US) - while notable for reuniting just about the entire Monty Python cast - takes an overblown turn towards the end, and the purposeful non-animalness of the actors is very distracting.

I'm about six hours into Fatal Frame and I'm scared. The game does atmosphere exceedingly well, particularly when played loudly in a dark room. Once you're into it, it's very tough to shake off and you'll be convincing yourself that your own house in infested with evil spirits. Ghosts seem much more likely to be lurking at the bottom of my basement steps than, say, zombies. Or zombie dogs, zombie spiders, or ten foot tall zombies in trench coats.

Fatal Frame is survival horror, and everybody wants to hold that against it. It's not like we have a ton of survival horror games out there; there's no glut on this genre. We have the Resident Evil series and the Silent Hill series. That's about 7 games total. That's about how many PSX light gun games there are, and I never heard anybody complaining about "yet another light gun game" being released.

You are absolutely fucking nuts if you decide to buy this. Good christ people, you intend to crack open your Game Boy Advance and solder in an internal light all by yourself? Just for what, so you can play Advance Wars under your bedsheet?

I always get these oddball games on my radar and end up haunting IGN and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine for details and release dates. I'm not talking about big games, like Star Fox's Belated Adventures... I'm more along the line of Mister Mosquito.

Right now though, it's The Three Stooges for Game Boy Advance. This is actually an old Cinemaware game, part of a unique family of games that sang like sweet sweet music back on the Amiga. I never had an Amiga - been Apple-bred since Day 1. But a great pal of mine did, back in the days when owning an Amiga was something special. If you'll recall, America used to have tons of different computer systems... all specialized into cute niches. Apples were quirky educational machines. IBMs were confusing and old. Commodores were kind of like an advanced Atari 2600. But Amigas were graphics showponies, literally light years beyond what anybody else was doing. Looking back, they were no better than the Super Nintendo... but in 1986 they were drool-worthy.

Although this isn't a game that gathered a great deal of press, the few bits of info leading up to its release were enough to hook me. First, it's PS2 survival horror, which we haven't had so much of yet (and I'm still extremely bitter about the halfway point boss fight of Resident Evil: Code Veronica X.) Second, the battle mechanism involves using an antique camera to "kill" the enemies.

The back of the box goes a long way to make the whole camera thing sound gay. In fact, this was really all that anybody talked about, giving rise to the easy-desc of "Resident Evil meets Pokemon Snap." Well, although that's plenty to get my game on, that label no doubt scares off a lot more gamers, who would probably rather just use a shotgun. In actuality, your ghost-killin' camera is nowhere near as silly as it sounds.

I consider that the first test of Fatal Frame. Are you man enough to check out a survival horror game that doesn't fall back on the now-standard formula of mega-weaponry versus advancing zombie horde? The testosterone-soaked among you are probably not, but you're playing Halo and not reading this.

Being a huge fan of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (PSX) and Klonoa: Lunatea's Veil (PS2), I was eager to jump into Klonoa's first GBA adventure. Klonoa himself is becoming kind of a second rate mascot for Namco, but Empire of Dreams does not totally match up to the standard of the PlayStation outings. Mainly because it's much more puzzley and much less actiony.

There are five worlds of several levels each, full of the regular cast of inflatable baddies (Moos, Boomies, Tetons, etc). Klonoa keeps his familiar magic ring powers here, although this game brings little Huepow back as the ring's power source... he was some kind of lost prince in the first PSX game but was completely forgotten in the second. By manipulating the enemies, blocks and switches, Klonoa must make his way through over 40 "visions." (including several optional boarding and scrolling levels.)