Clan Fourhman tried out the complete Lord of the Rings Board Game experience tonight: the original boxed set, plus the Friends & Foes Expansion and the new Sauron Expansion. I highly recommend this game to you. It's cooperative - which is a rarity among board games - and it's terribly hard. This game will kick your ass three times out of five.

The Sauron Expansion lets one player assume the role of the Deceiver himself. This kind of removes the randomized element of evil the game once had, but it's certainly interesting to play out. As you might expect, it makes a tough game even tougher.

On the IGN Animal Crossing message boards, I fight the good fight against cheating. Like all collection-based games, the lure of cheating is undeniable. And since the game unfolds extremely slowly (in real time), the pressure to cheat is doubled.

The baseline defense against cheating in AC - in any video game, actually - is that it wrecks the game's experience as intended by the creators. As noble as that argument sounds, it isn't a very good one, as most casual gamers aren't likely to care about heightening their game experience. Much less the intents of the game's designers. Most casual gamers (and younger gamers) have a strike-first-strike-fast mentality, where they simply want to get into the game, skip all the cutscenes, beat it, and move on to something else.

Last Saturday we had another ad hoc Doomtown tournament, happily hosted by Scott. Rhonda played her usual Blackjacks deck, Scott was testing out a Dead Man's Hand-based Law Dogs deck, Mike played his Sweetrock Influence Reducer, and I fielded my predictable Whateley Fear deck.

Mike ended up with the most wins, with his deck packed with Rumors and the various Phobias, not to mention the reduction abilities of his starters. It's a tough decktype to work around, especially when he pulls a Christmas Day. Later in the day, Mike showed off his new Collegium Turtle/Lion deck, which uses the Experienced Xemo to drop a Mountain Lion on the top of his draw pile. Ugh.

Although I'm sweating with anticipation over Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire, I must confess the slightest disappointment over the initial batch of screenshots. The battle scenes still look empty, and the world still looks like Game Boy Color. I guess I was expecting something a little more SNES-looking. But I suppose Pokemon really doesn't require an amazing graphical look, since the attraction is in the depth of the game itself.

Which got me thinking, what would the Perfect Pokemon game be like? Well, it'd have to mimic the world as presented in the cartoon, comics, movies and previous games as closely as possible: a journey across several lands to capture and train pokemon. Here's my feature list, as imagined for the Nintendo GameCube.

Simpsons Road Rage is one of those titles that gets ported to every system. These usually suck; after all, the developers need to make it as non-envelope pushing as possible for it to work on every system, and they probably had to cough up some bucks to Nintendo just to let 'em liscence for their competitors (or at least would in the olden days; read The Making of Mario if you want to find out how dirty the Big N could be). So it's with some bit of incredibility that I say Simpsons Road Rage is pretty fun.. at least, for small stretches.

Essentially, if you don't like the Simpsons, read no further, this game has no appeal to you. Crazy Taxi does the concept of picking up fares and driving like a hoodlum so much better anyway, there's no reason for you to even look at this game. If you do like the Simpsons, or at least enough to laugh at a character you recognize getting run down like a dog, then there's some fun to be had here.

Are gamers really this stupid?

I honestly have no idea why people would want to play this. I thought PaRappa the Rapper, while not my style of game, had an honestly novel concept, and was amusing as far as that concept could go. Ultimately, however, it was hitting buttons to a beat. I could just go and buy a drum pad for that. In Jet Set Radio Future, you're supposed to be rollerblading around spraypainting stuff. Well, gee, I think I can afford some cans of spray paint…

I finally tackled a small re-design of the card games page. So it certainly looks prettier, even if the Doomtown and Pokemon decks are still fairly old. Here's a breakdown of what lives in the new page, now that it includes some non-card tabletop games:

• Doomtown fan art by yours truly, suitable for desktops everywhere. (More coming.)
• Doomtown and Pokemon decks and links. The decks are fairly old, but maybe my renewed graphic vigor will inspire me to update them. (Or make Mike and Scott post their decks, hurm...)
• My Doomtown custom cards: the Mob Justice home and the never-before-available Town Square. Printable and generally game-legal.
• My Lord of the Rings help sheet. It's built for the full version of the board game, including both expansions.
• Frag Deadlands character sheets, based on Doomtown characters.

Cartoon Network recently added "Lupin the Third" to their Adult Swim lineup. This show has been lost in the recesses of my braincase since high school when a friend of mine was into anime and manga (well before DBZ and Pokemon made it mainstream.) All I really remember about Lupin was his slick monkeylike head and the unusual French name. In fact, I confused Lupin 3 with Golgo 13 for many years.

CN is running a modern redub of the show, which was originally animated in the '70s, I believe. I don't know much about it. Like DBZ, my only meaningful exposure to the show is whatever Cartoon Network places in front of me. A quick internet search reveals that there have been several animated series and movies, some lousy looking video games, and quite a bit of typical angry otaku response whenever anybody tries to dumb down the show for US audiences.

This past week has seen an entire shutdown of my county's educational system. Perhaps some more snowplows are in the budget for next year, no? Or at least a policy of dumping snow on the most troubling of students, now that would get passed by any right minded school board I know.

So what did I do with all this free time? Usual stuff of course, including dipping into the classics, which finds me reading The Jungle by our good buddy, Upton Sinclair. Interesting work of believable fiction that takes place in a pre-depression Chicago meat packing factory. If you love savoring Big Macs and Slim Jims, then please don't read this novel and continue to devour your carnivorous delights. Really, that stuff is so goood for you.

With February 25th marking an official end to the blanket of snow that has covered our village since mid-December, I thought I'd send you all an update on Adamsvil.

ITEM. We have a new human in town. His name is NESJoe and his responsiblity is to create the best NES arcade in town. In truth, NESJoe is a soulless automaton manipulated by yours truly, which allows me the dual purpose of finding out what the animals think of me and building a bitchin' NES arcade. Since I am covering NESJoe's debt to Nook out of my own vast bank account, I estimate that there will be a second lifesize statue by the train station within a few weeks.

ITEM. Groundhog Day completely sucked. I had heard that festivities began at 7am for the big ceremony at 9am (thank you, Nintendo Power Strategy Guide)... but in fact the ceremony was held at 8am. I showed up at the Wishing Well at 8:45am, and all I saw was the post-Groundhog afterglow.