You may have heard that we had a school shooting here last week. It wasn't a grand scale massacre (a single shooter killed the principal and then himself), so it only floated through national news for a day or two... but as you can imagine, it has put the local community on edge.

It took about three days for somebody locally to blame video games. Because - get this - the kid played them. An article in one of the local newspapers quoted Jack Thompson, the grandstanding pop activist most famous for attacking 2 Live Crew, pointing fingers at violent video games, specifically Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. He even volunteered to come to Red Lion, PA to help investigators. (That same article also pointed out physical similarities between the Red Lion shooter and another recent child killer, as if you can tell a kid planning a murder just by looking at him!) A recent editorial referred to Lt. Col. David Grossman, who visited the area on a speaking/book tour in the wake of the Columbine shooting. He claims that video games - "killing games," rather, he's not attacking Tetris - are teaching children to ignore the natural inhibitors against taking a human life.

We bought an iBook last weekend. The 12" current middle model. It's primarily Rhonda's machine, a distinction unclaimed since I gave her PowerMac 6400 to her folks and swapped in a 600 MHz Compaq PC. Oops.

But naturally, I've been all over it installing stuff and integrating it into fourhman.home. For one, it works wonderfully with our in-home wireless network. It sensed my Linksys setup right out of the box. I've already been online from as far away as our outside deck, and I intend to see just how far into our backyard I can roam. For another, I was able to enjoy iTunes 4's amazing music sharing feature. The upstairs iMac holds our entire CD collection (for the iPod), but activating sharing allowed the downstairs iBook to see and play the entire song library. Instantly. With no pause during playback or anything. Apple's one great strength is that they make stuff that just fucking works. (Although I am pretty pissed that the new iPod software is being denied to previous generation iPod owners.)

I did train up a little bit, but not as much as I had intended. I didn't want to wander around Victory Road for the experience, because I hate stupid Golbat Confuse Ray attacks. So I stocked up on Hyper Potions and Revives and made for the Pokemon League. My party needed a sixth player, so I threw in the Kyogre simply because it was my highest level pokemon stashed in the box. It is not one of my favorites; looks a little too Digimon for my tastes. The following is a play-by-play of my final battles against the Elite Four and the League Champion.

Sidney fields quite a mixed bag. He has a very diverse team, but they are all from level 46 to 49, so he was not much of a challenge. First up is his Mightyena, which I countered with ol' Knifejaw. I kept Knifejaw in against his Absol, which isn't the best move when the Absol uses an Aerial Ace attack, but whatever. When Sid brought in the Cacturne, I switched to Razorbeak, back to Knifejaw to handle the Sharpedo, and back again to Razorbeak to polish off the Shiftry. All in all, very little damage and no wasted items.

It's rather intriguing to think that a game can be Not Hard and still be Fun. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is definitely Not Hard. I just beat the game last Friday night, besting Ganondorf (and his Puppet sub-boss) on the first attempt. Sure, I had three Fairies-Suffocating-In-Bottles and a life meter about 16 hearts long... but still, I stumbled into two major boss sequences, sussed out the weak spots and general strategy, and layeth the smackdown without much trouble.

I suspect that Wind Waker purposely geared down the difficulty for two reasons. #1) Accessibility. Nothing is more frustrating than having a game you love but end up being simply unable to win. From Nintendo's standpoint, the game has so much extra stuff to do that it's quite all right if the main quest errs on the side of easy. #2) Presentation. Normally, when you die during a boss fight, you have to rewind time and enter the boss fight again... breaking the illusion of living a video game character's real-time challenge. But if the boss fights aren't too terribly hard, and you win on the first time through, you maintain the pace of the game's storyline. No duplicated scenes, you see.

No, I'm not at E3. But I have been trolling the gaming websites for news from the show. Here's some of the standout stuff I've seen so far...

One of the early stories was news of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. After watching a few seconds of Snake in the jungle eating a snake, I figured this one was a fake, but it's not. True, true, completely true. And on top of that, creator Hideo Kojima is up to his old tricks of obtuse dialogue:

Kojima: "It is the third Metal Gear, and in that sense, it is very important. Not that there will be a lot of threes in the game. You see, Metal Gear Solid is the third game in the series. There is has been Metal Gear games on the MSX and a solid is something that is three-dimensional, and it's solid. This is the third Metal Gear Solid. So, in a sense, this is like Metal Gear nine, with the three threes. (Laughter)"

Unresponsive combat controls. Inattentive camera. Overly long and complicated levels. No save points. Mysterious, sudden deaths.

That's the recipe for a crap game, and X2: Wolverine's Revenge has all that tucked inside one of the nicest presentations possible. It's like one of those big jungle plants that lure in small animals with a sweet scent but then boil them alive in jungle plant acid.

First of all, understand that I don't play bad games. So if this comes off harsh, it's because I'm comparing Wolverine's Revenge to bona fide GameCube hits like Super Mario Sunshine and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I'm sure this game would look great compared to one of those $10 PS1 titles. But I don't have the luxury of buying crap.

I finally got a chance to watch Tech TV's X-Play this weekend. It's a half-hour covering video games, hosted by Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb. The show has been around for a while in one form or another; Sessler has been on it for years. We first watched it when it was called "GameSpot TV" and the set consisted of Sessler standing amongst several old coin-op games, even though he was talking about PC and console stuff.

The thing about X-Play is that it's obviously the result of a terrible marketing experiment and a desperate bid for ratings. My guess is that "the video game show" has been failing on Tech TV for a while now... but they keep it around because it fits the network's theme and it's cheap to produce. This particular reinvention of the show reeks of overdone EXTREME ATTITUDE, hoping to lure in the 14 year old gamer crowd. Which is silly since the average gamer's age is like 25.

I'm halfway through Splinter Cell and I keep thinking "THIS was the Xbox's big game last year?" You remember the hype; this was the Metal Gear Solid 2 killer. Everything you loved about MGS2 without everything you hated about MGS2. Having played it, I feel sorry for Xbox owners circa Fall/Winter 2002. PS2 got Vice City, GameCube got Metroid Prime... and Xbox got Splinter Cell.

It's not a bad game, not at all. It just falls short of MGS2 in just about every area. I was expecting a much deeper and engrossing title. Color me fooled by marketing. The game's tagline is "Stealth Action Redefined," which is an obvious jab at Metal Gear... since it is extremely fashionable to bust on MGS2. But it's more like "Stealth Action Reduced to Linear Paths Where You Must Do Exactly What the Game Expects to Proceed."

Look at that Spider-Man... can you resist his simplified design? His super-deformed feet and arms? I think that thing is hilarious. I love the entire line.

He's from the Spider-Man and Friends set, which is a new preschool action figure line. The style is aping the popular Rescue Heroes series, with the exaggerated limbs and broad, happy smiles. As with all of these things, there's about a hundred different Spider-Man figures, all with increasingly strange outfits and props... Hang Glider Spider-Man, Fire Fighter Spider-Man, Snowboarding Spider-Man. I'm not collecting all of those, hopefully just one of each character... whichever one is closest to the comic book original.

Actually, the adorable Spider-Girl was the figure that sold me. She comes with pull-and-go roller blades. The very next day I went back to Target to get a Spider-Man and a Captain America.

In a directionless game like Animal Crossing, it's easy to fall into the trap of "I've done everything I want to do; this game is over." By this point (eight months after the original release), I've seen many message board postings saying "How can anybody still be playing this game?" Here's how.

#1) I don't cheat. That's the biggest point of all. Many gamers have bought the Action Replay cheater add-on, entered in the code for Complete Catalog, played level 1.1 of hidden item Super Mario Bros, and traded in AC for credit towards a new Xbox. But with no catalog cheats or sneaky time travelling I still have secret items and future events to look forward to.

I jumped into the Battle Tower this weekend. You can only register a three-poke team, so I brought in Darkling, Knifejaw and Gringo. Although they make a big deal about "surviving seven matches in a row," your team is completely healed between bouts so it's not such a problem. I beat the lv50 mode. The Sableye did most of the work against the randomized, robotic opponents. ("I'M READY FOR BATTLE ARE YOU")

But here's what gets me. You get no experience for Battle Tower matches. So what's the point? And how are you ever supposed to become competitive enough to attempt the lv100 mode? You also don't get any money out of it. My big reward for beating lv50 mode was the Iron item. Maybe after lv100 you get Carbos. Hot damn.

I've now been to the Towson MD Apple Store three times in one week. On Saturday, we breezed through the Towson mall on our way to see Our Pals Pete and Margaret Hansen (whom we haven't seen in far too long.) I really wanted to pick up a new iPod glove, but everything they had was either Luxurious Leather or Hideously Repelling. Rhonda got a very nice iBook carrier, however.

But while we were at the Hansens', I had a call from Dad... his DV iMac modem was not responding. Somehow the entire internal modem had gone missing. I did everything I know how to do: zapped the pram, re-installed the OS, installed a clean OS, ran the hardware test cd... but when System Profiler says No Modem Found, I think you're pretty much shafted.