June 2003 Archives

Key:
$ = purchased item
- = giveaway/pickup item
d = demo reward item

- America's Army install cd
$ Battle of the Bands card game Backstage Pass expansion, Third World Games
- Battle of the Bands card game promo cards (5 different cards), Third World Games
- 2 Best of Dork Storm Convention Special comic books
$ Boba Fett convention exclusive action figure
- 4 BreaKey demo sets, Upper Deck
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer promo card "Ripper", Score
- Chrononauts promo card German Cake, Looney Labs
- Coin Creatures sample game
d Creepy Freaks figures, WizKids (four different figures)
- 2 Creepy Freaks stickers, WizKids
- 2 Crypt cards, from some kind of trading card board game
$ dice: 4 d8, 2 wooden d6, 1 massive d20, 2 vertebrae-shaped d6, 1 kanji d6, 1 hit location d6, 1 cat d6
- 6 dice cubes from some kind of dice-based RPG
- 2 Diceland Zorg Usha sheets, Cheapass Games
- Dragon Ball Z promo card "Jewel", Score
- 4 Fluxx promo cards "To Sleep Or Not To Sleep", Looney Labs
- 4 Games in Education booklets, GAMA
- GameTableOnline.com button
- 2 Gaming Herald newspapers
- 2 Incredible Hulk collector cards poster
d- 5 Initial D demo decks, AEG
- 2 Knights of the Dinner Table Origins Special comic books
- Legend of the Five Rings card "Firestorm Legion", AEG
- 2 Looney Labs tuckboxes, handmade and designed by Rhonda
$ Loco card game, Fantasy Flight Games
- 2 Lord of the Rings card game oversized One Ring schedule cards, Decipher
$ Lord of the Rings Trivia Game, Fantasy Flight Games
- Magic: The Gathering 8th edition oversized card "Savannah Lions", Wizards
- 3 Magic: The Gathering magnetic poetry/picture frames, Wizards
- Magic: The Gathering pen, Wizards
$ Monkeys on the Moon game, Eight Foot Llama
- 3 Nanofictionary promo cards "The Game Master", Looney Labs
$ Pokemon plastic jewelry, Pikachu & Bellossom necklace and Ditto ring
d Pokemon EX Ruby & Sapphire booster pack, Nintendo
- Pokemon EX mini poster, Nintendo
$ Portable Adventures card game - 8th Grade, Third World Games
$ Portable Adventures card game - Lair of the Rat King, Third World Games
$ Quicksand board game, Fantasy Flight Games
- School of Duel Beginner DVD
- The Simpsons card game mini poster, Wizards
$ SpongeBob SquarePants card game starter and 4 boosters, Upper Deck
- StrikeZoneOnline.com calculator
- StrikeZoneOnline.com mini-pocketknife keychain
- StrikeZoneOnline.com pen, ridiculously over-patriotic
$ Testimony of Jacob Hollow card game, Third World Games
- Ultra Pro clear sleeves, 50-pack free with SpongeBob purchase
- Ultra Pro opaque sleeves, 5 orange, 1 red, 1 purple, 1 gold, 1 silver foil, 1 orange foil
- 4 Upper Deck miniature pen and notepad sets
- Warlord card "The Quest Beast", AEG
- Wizards of the Coast keychain (probably our seventh in three years)

Plus tons of brochures, catalogs, and miscellaneous paper handouts.

The Penny Farthing ended at 1:30am. Woof. None of our lads won it.

Sunday is just a mop-up day. Scott and I loaded the minivan, then we trekked back for one last jaunt 'round the vendor hall.

Bought a "convention exclusive" Boba Fett action figure. Said some goodbyes.

(L-R) HeroClix demo waterfront, odd metal dinosaur, convention food court, leaving the convention

Tired. On the road home.

Bit of a late start to the morning, but we made our 10am Chrononauts event. All eight of us were in it, but no one won enough to move on. No worries though; Chrononauts is fun enough to play and not win.

Off to the vendor hall for our last big tour. Last year I felt like I didn't spend enough time in the vendor hall because I was always running out for some game event. This year I purposely underfilled my dance card so that wouldn't happen. Rhon opted for a quick nap back in the room, so I did some demo rounds with Mike. We did Creepy Freaks and Crimson Skies at WizKids. I had already bought into Crimson Skies, but a professional demo is always appreciated.

Creepy Freaks looks very nice. Sort of a Garbage Pails Kids version of Chess. It's aimed squarely at young boys, but demographic intentions just don't scare me.

I also tried out the Neopets TCG from Wizards. I have a strange feeling every time I see Neopets merchandising. It just seems weird to see real-world extensions of what I've always experienced as a mildly diverting Poke-inspired website. I mean, bully for them, they've found the one way to make a profit online: take it offline. The TCG itself is cute and simple, but I have difficulty seeing it having much impact... Except among existing Neopets fans.

Once I rousted Rhon from her nap, the two of us did Creepy Freaks again... and then AEG's upcoming card game Initial D. It's based on a little known (at least here in the US) anime/manga property about street racing teens and their hot cars. Think Fast and the Furious meets Yu-Gi-Oh.

The game plays very quickly, following a you-raise-me, I-raise-you kind of format. Although I think the cards look nice graphically, the layout seems a bit confusing given that all you're really doing is comparing numbers. The gamble with this game is if the anime takes off. If the kids don't embrace the show, it will be all the tougher to sell the card game, especially since the bulk of the cards are game-driven, not character-driven. What I mean is that you don't have the easy collectible angle of catching all the Pocket Monsters.

Tonigh's big event was the Doomtown Penny Farthing, another ultra long event. I chose not to play; Scott and Mike were in. It's called Penny Farthing because you have to use a bicycle deck, meaning your deck's poker values much match up exactly to a normal deck of cards. It ends in a massive nine player game, which is absolutely insane. Too many cowboys spoil the watering hole! I disappeared for a nap but by the time I got back Rhonda and Shannon were roped into playing.

The Penny Farthing is only two games, but they are very looooong games. The whole thing started at 7pm, and at this writing it's still going on. The prize is an art print of quite possibly the sexiest Doomtown cards around, see below.

(L-R) Rhon and Noelle in Chrononauts, Lab Rabbit Hamtaro, stormtroopers at the gate, Creepy Freaks

(L-R) Neopets billboard, Saruman's trenches, Pride Parade, Nintendo booth GBA display

(L-R) Penny Farthing: Scott, Mike, Rachel, Wendy

Today was the 2003 Doomtown World Championships. Started at noon and runs forever, so it kinda blows out your whole day. Rhonda and I hustled to the vendor hall around 10:30am so we could get a little pre-tourney shopping in.

Picked up a starter and a couple boosters for the Spongebob TCG. I've been through the rulebook but haven't actually read it yet. It was cheap. That might not be a good sign.

Also finally demoed Portable Adventures and Testimony of Jacob Hollow. Our demos were delivered by former Doomtown World Champ Jason "The Kid" Jung; Rhonda had him autograph her outfit card sleeve for good luck. PA and JH were pretty cool. Third World is quickly becoming a much-trusted game designer in the Fourhman world. PA is so much like Battle of the Bands that you can get into it fairly quickly. There's some new intricacies and some better design and the coolest bit is that the game decks are uniquely themed yet entirely compatible. The initial releases are Lair of the Rat King and 8th Grade, so you can mix a fantasy realm with cutthroat junior high. Or you can opt not to.

Jacob Hollow is very much in the genre of Resident Evil or Eternal Darkness. Everyone plays a supernatural investigator fighting nasties and exploring dank unpleasant locales. Again, the demo was great... we bought all three games plus the Bands expansion set. Whoo. One hour in and already out $$$.

Doomtown. Here's why it takes so long. First everybody plays five games, each timed to roughly an hour. So you know you're in to sixish no matter what. Then the top eight players go to quarterfinals... four games, two games, one game, presto, one new World Champ. Last year my Whateley deck went 3-2 in the prelims and was blown out in the quarterfinals.

This year: after the five rounds, here's how we did:

Rhonda, Blackjacks, 2-3
Mike, Sweetrock GLR, 3-2
Scott, Law Dogs Mob Justice, 0-5
Shannon, Texas Rangers, 1-4
Joe, Whateley Extended Family, 5-0

Yes, that's right. I was undefeated in five rounds of play. The only undefeated player, out of twenty-some participants. And thanks to a complex scoring system, your opponents always get better throughout the rounds, to ensure a continual challenge. I'm awfully proud of my showing! Now, Mike would say I'm playing a pretty cheap deck, but it is tweaked pretty hard so it's not what the normal Doomtownie would expect from a Whateley deck. I know you probably don't play the game (WTF) but here's a layman's explanation of the Trading Card Game set in the Weird Wild West. The deck's central card is a location called Lord Grimley's Manor. (I hear any Doomtown players out there grumbling already.) The game works that you have to have more control than your opponent has influence. Control translates to property and physical strength, and influence indicates the power of the cowpokes in your gang. Grimeley's yields a vertiable shitload of control, and there's next to no way for your opponet to take it from you. Mike calls that cheap, and he's probably right. Tellingly, if I get Grimeley's out, I probably don't even need any people. In fact, my last two rounds here ended with me having no dudes in play, but winning anyway thanks to Grimeley's.

The balancing factor for my deck is that I try to make it shoot well, which is slightly unusual for the Whateleys. (This being a western card game, there's plenty of shootouts at high noon.) Several players today were kinda surprised to see me fight back so well, which was gratifying in a small way.

So, like wow. Undefeated. So I ended up ranked the top player, and Mike placed number five. One of Mike's losses was to me in round three of the preliminaries. It sucks to have to play against your pals, but it's bound to happen sometime.

After a dinner break, the top eight players reconvened for the quarterfinals. My first match was a picture-perfect play for my deck. I got nearly everything I needed in my starting draw to get Grimeley's out right away. So I won that one. Six wins in a row.

Top four players: Me, Mike's Sweetrock GLR, and two Sioux Brawler decks (a popular deck type involving Indian warriors and a nearly unstoppable shootout combo.) The placements were chosen: Sioux vs. Sioux and me vs. Mike.

It's a less than ideal situation. Mike and I play Doomtown quite a bit, and often these exact two decks against each other. Obviously one of us will not walk away a winner. It's unfortunate; neither of us want to be responsible for knocking out the other.

Mike won. He genuinely outpaced me this time, pushing out a ton of cards in the first turn that weakened me to the point of no return. I also pulled a pretty bad opening hand, giving me next to nothing I could utilize right away... and it goes without saying that I didn't get Grimeley's into play. But if I had to be knocked out of the finals by anybody, I'm glad it was him!

So Mike faced a Sioux deck in the final game... actually he was facing a past U.S. Doomtown Champion, Charlie Hooks. Kind of an interesting battle, since the Sioux are bred to fight and Mike's Sweetrockers really don't want to fight... and the Sioux probably aren't going to play much control at all, while Mike will drop a bunch on the table before the end of the first turn.

And so Mike did. He won, beating back a Sioux tide. My buddy Mike Fell is the 2003 Doomtown World Champion! He received a trophy plaque in the shape of a tombstone, a shiny gold sheriff's badge, and an authentic 1887 edition of Hoyle's Book of Games. (Which actually is quite apropos, given the timeframe and nature of the game.) In years past, major event winners also got their own card added into the game, in the form of a dude card with their name and a painting of themselves in full Weird Western gear. But since the game is no longer being produced, Mike isn't likely to get that anytime soon.

So way to go, Mike! I'd have rather it was me, but I'm glad it was you. After all, that Hoyle's really ought to be in the hands of a hex-slinging Whateley.

All eight of us (Meg's husband Raff finally joined us) went out to dinner in uptown Columbus at a diner that had exactly one employee for most of our stay. Then back to the convention center for more late night gaming and watching our numbers dwindle as people bailed out for bed.

(L-R) Rhonda in one of her Doomtown games, the prized edition of Hoyle's, Desparado Pikachu, Mike is his championship game

(L-R) Icehouse pieces, Scott playing Brainstrain, one of the gaming halls, convention trash can

And no, I have not been forgetting about Animal Crossing during this trip. It's in the hotel room. Every day, just as usual.

Rhonda and I wandered down to the tabletop gaming hall around 10:30am. Scott and Mike were already in a half-assed Spades tournament where only four players showed up. So everyone advances to the next round!

We were supposed to demo Portable Adventures, but our game organizer stayed absent (plane trouble, we later learned), so we tagged our tickets for a refund. An inauspicious start.

Lunch. North Market. Aloo Mutter.

The vendor hall opened at 1, so all of us dived headlong into the sea. Rhonda and I walked the entire show floor before buying anything... casing the joint. Our first game demo was Monkeys on the Moon. Very funny concept: technologically advancing monkey tribes and launching them into outer space. We bought it shortly after we learned one of the monkeys is named Rhonda.

Fantasy Flight Games has that Lord of the Rings trivia game I mentioned, so we veered back to their booth (after an great two-on-two Pokemon demo from the Nintendo booth... Eon Tickets coming to Toys R Us in July, by the way.) Rhonda and I demoed Loco, a cute little card game, and Mike showed up in mid-session. The three of us then tried out the LOTR trivia game, which I think my family will love. Rhonda took a trip, so Mike and I demoed Quicksand, a cool board game. By the time Noelle found us, I had committed to buying all three.

Scott and Shannon found some nice art prints, which the artist even added further sketching to. And as for Meg, I'm not sure exactly where she was during all this! Spending makes me spacey.

Took a little time to try out some of my purchases... So while Scott and Mike trampled through a box of Doomtown they'd gone halfsies on, we broke out Monkeys on the Moon. Unfortunately, there's way too much math involved, and a rather steep learning curve. The kind of thing where the first time playing just blows because there's too much structured weirdness to handle all at once. And forget about strategy. But I can see the game's charm once everybody at the table has the flow mastered. And as long as Mike is playing, I don't have to worry about the math.

One of my tasks for the evening was to deliver the Doomtown banner I made for the convention's Doomtown events. The first such game was Luck o' the Draw, a sealed deck/draft event. I hooked up with Andrew Davidson, former Doomtown World Champion and current Doomtown Council chairman, and set up the banner to draw in all the incoming players. Took some pics of the scene, with the players gathering under my banner. Last year, we had folding chairs and cinder block. This year, a flag to rally around. Tomorrow is the 2003 World Championships.

By 7, Mike had disappeared to try out Tile Chess by Steve Jackson Games (rescheduled), and Rhon, Noelle and Meg went to Looney Labs headquarters for some game-related crafting. Scott, Shannon and I watched the beginning of the Luck tourney before heading off to join the other half of the group. Which brings us to now, where Mike is holding a conversation with Andrew Looney himself, the game madman behind Chrononauts, Fluxx and lots of other goodness.

Plan: find a little something to eat, then bed down in one of the open gaming halls for some serious pre-tournament Doomtown.

(L-R) the convention center, spider attacking Columbus, recruiting for America's Army, playing Spades

(L-R) North Market, Pokemon demo, Gollum at LOTR card game booth, the Inflatable Hulk

(L-R) Looney Labs booth, demoing Quicksand, demoing Loco, Rhon in event ticket line

(L-R) DBZ card game display, Doomtown banner, same, making a Looney card box

(L-R) uncut Chrononauts sheet, SJGames, Mike and Mr. Looney, Rhonda finds a wireless network

LIVE FROM I-83. We're on our way to Origins, our gaming convention of choice. Just hit the PA Turnpike. This is the fourth year for me and Rhonda; and every year we bring more friends! This year there's eight of us, with a potential seven participating in the Doomtown World Championships if everybody who knows gos.

Although we'll play a lot of games, of course, my favorite bit is the vendor hall. Because I like buying things. And it's fun to interact with famous game designers, get demos of new games, and pick up free stuff. Here's what I'm checking out at this year's show.

• Third World Games impressed me last year with Battle of the Bands. This year there's a new Bands edition and an expansion set. Their new games Portable Adventures and Testimony of Jacob Hollow look interesting as well.
• Lord of the Rings Trivia Game. Apparantly a very well done game; not the usual simplistic question-and-answer bit.
• Crimson Skies from WizKids, a clix game of aerial combat. I've already bought the core rules and one pack of planes, and we liked what we saw so far... particularly the mechanism for mid-air collisons.
• Steve Jackson Games has Strange Synergy, a card game of customizable super heroes.
• A couple years, Pinnacle was trying to re-establish Great Rail Wars in the miniatures market, but I don't think that caught on as well as they had hoped. So I'll be looking for some good sales. Plus Rhonda and I tried out the Deadlands RPG for the first time a few weekends ago.
• This is Wizards last year with the Pokemon license, so the new owners will be at Origins to start their show of support. The new owners just happen to be Nintendo, by the way. So while Nintendo is on the show floor hawking the new generation of Pokemon, Wizards will be unloading giveaways and promo cards like a Water Blast from a Blastoise.
• There's a Spongebob TCG out. Could be fun.
• And this might be the year we finally buy into Looney Lab's Icehouse.

Wish us luck. Send money. More updates to come through the convention.

Rhonda has begun her own Pokemon Ruby adventure, so I'm getting to see the other side of the coin. She chose the Torchic for her starter, and she's currently working up her low-level pokemon before she guns for Roxanne, the first Gym Leader. Once she gets a few cities in, I'll be able to report on the Ruby/Sapphire connectivity.

I ventured back into the Battle Tower. As I've learned since my last Sapphire Diary post, there are some nice prizes awaiting, even if you score no experience and no pokedex entries. Particularly appealing is a couple of ribbons that are probably exclusive to Battle Tower winning streaks.

Unfortunately, my streak ended at 26, so I haven't seen too much in the way of fabulous prizes. My team of level 50 Mightyena, Sceptile and Sableye will be forced to give it another go. Someday.

Nintendo is readying the release of more Pokemon eCards... with dot codes that unlock new trainers for Battle Tower (so that's why their dialogue is so stilted!) hand out hidden ribbons and perhaps unlocking the missing R/B/Y/G/S/C pokemon. Pokemon Aaah! has some details, but it sounds like a separate set of cards than the familiar TCG series. Fine with me, I'm all for more.

I was lucky enough to catch a male and female Pikachu in the Safari Zone, and their sweet union at the Day Care has already brought forth an Egg. Can it be anything but a Pichu? And given that I'm hording a Thunderstone, one of those proud parents will soon evolve to a Raichu.

In the meantime, it's back to that pokedex. (And with Rhonda's help, we both stand to benefit from a couple trades and tradebacks... especially for getting the types that evolve only when traded.) I have a Wailmer that I'd like to see turn into a Wailord so I can attempt that whole unlikely process of unlocking the Regis. But first I need to locate a Relicanth...

Time: 72:38
Badges: 8
Pokedex: 85 (seen: 160)
Party: Metang lv38, Tropius lv26, Golduck lv47, Rhyhorn lv31, Wailmer lv32, Egg

We finally saw X2 last night. (Or am I supposed to call it "X2: X-Men United"? And is it "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or just "The League"?) I had a coupon for one free admission that came with the X2: Wolverine's Revenge game... and since that game sucked so hard, I was eager to gain something out of it. I wasn't expecting much from the film, but it honestly blew me away.

I hate going to the movies. Now, you probably know me well enough to guess that I don't actively choose to see crappy movies. So it generally isn't the content that I despise, it's the company. People always manage to ruin the experience for me. Like my gaming, in my movie-going I like to fall deeply and completely into the film. I want to let myself become fully involved and totally concentrated on the movie, so the constant distractions of people eating and walking and talking and laughing at the wrong parts and being fat and kicking over cups and getting paged just drive me nuts. To get me in a movie theater these days, it has to be a movie that I abso-fucking-lutely just have to see.

Or have a free coupon.

X2 was honestly the best movie experience I've had in a long time. And it was all in the timing. The Moron Populace has already seen the movie, so there were only six people in the theater. Six quiet people. We went to the 10pm showing on a Tuesday night, so there was no crowd anywhere. We walked in during the previews and got to sit wherever we wanted. And the movie was pretty damn great!

Comics fans are used to being shit on. Most of us remember a time when any non-comics adaptation of comics material unequivocally sucked, whether it was a tv show, a movie, a game, or a cartoon. But in the last decade, we finally got some comics fans tucked in behind the scenes to start quality-controlling the flow. X2 is a giant French kiss to all the comics readers in the audience. So many character cameos and quick references... and the very last shot is an image that only a fan would get: the shape of the Phoenix.

I mean, you show me a guy with a ruby-quartz visor over his eyes and I instantly know him. I know his childhood nickname. I know his family. I know his history of costumes. I know his legacy. I know how he and the other original members of the team gawked out of the second story window when a teenaged Jean Grey walked up the path to the mansion's doors for the first time. You show that same guy to Rhonda and she thinks of him as one of the last-ditch cast additions in the final years of Ally McBeal, but in this movie he shoots lasers out of his eyes.

It is downright weird how they got all of these actors to agree to X2, though. Anybody who isn't Wolverine has about two pages of dialogue. This movie probably has the smallest Oscar winner-to-screen time ratio ever. And although Sir Ian McKellen seems to be adoring his role as Magneto, I can't imagine Halle Berry keeping this up for another movie. Hopefully they already shot some X3 scenes with her, or else she's going to become the mutant equivalent to Chuck from Happy Days.

Some of my favorite bits: Wolverine smoking his cigar. Colossus armoring up. The opening Evil Nightcrawler scene with all the acrobatics and teleporting. Dr. Hank McCoy on television. Magneto's jailbreak. The brief, bloody Logan-as-Weapon X shots. Shadowcat and Siren among the younger students.

Least favorite bits: Professor X's ability to freeze people. (Come again?) Nightcrawler's scar-tattoos and tacked-on "faith." (Yes, I know it was a counterpoint to the movie's heavy evolution asthetic, and to illustrate that even hideous mutants can be human.) Stryker building a second Cerebro. (Wouldn't it have been simpler to just appropriate the original?) Wolverine taking a bullet in the forehead and surviving.

And some hoped-for bits that didn't happen (yet): Wolverine calling Nightcrawler "Fuzzy" or "Blue Elf." Iceman in full body ice form. The Wolverine-Colossus Fastball Special.

And some stuff I hope they never cover: Empress Lilandra, the Shi'Ar Empire and Prof. X with healed legs and that stupid jumpsuit. Mystique revealed as Nightcrawler's mother. Cyclops's perennial loser brother Havok. Cyclops's dopey loser father Corsair.

And the Blob. Keep him out.

This past Saturday night I completed my collection of K.K. Slider songs. I've been working on it pretty diligently since January when NESJoe moved into town. Just so you know, the game offers no additional bonuses for collecting all 52 music files. Having a fully stocked jukebox is apparently reward enough.

This actually finishes one of NESJoe's assigned tasks. Helping me collect K.K. songs was one; creating a venue for all the NES games and Mario items is the other.

Thanks to series 4 of the AC eCards, I now have Ice Climber and the original Mario Bros. I found the Ice Climber card in a pack, but I had to snag the Mario Bros. card from eBay. I don't like Ice Climber, but Mario Bros. is one of my all-time favorite classic arcade games. This version - the NES version - isn't as nice as the original coin-op game, but it's more or less equivalent. Jumping isn't as tight as I'd like, and many of the graphics were dumbed down for the NES... but, heck, it's easily one of the best 2P NES games going.

I'm decided I'm done with buying AC eCards from retail. My last purchase - six packs of series 4 and 2 of series 3 - contained exactly two cards I needed. That's a pretty good sign that I've achieved Maximum Rarity Yield. So from now on, it's only eBay browsing for me. I'm only missing 40 or so cards from the entire run, so it's a very achievable goal.

And on that note, I'm selling some lots of cards on eBay. Three auctions, a small, medium and large assortment of my dupes. I don't really care what they go for as long as they go; I just don't have the space for multiples of cards that I only need one of in the first place. So if you're just starting out in AC, that's some good auction meat there... usually people sell eCards as singles and try to get $1.00 or $2.00 per card. I don't imagine they hold a ton of rare cards - these are my leftovers after leaving myself two of every card - but the rarity scheme for AC cards is subject to extreme questioning anyway. So you never know. I could have just the card you're looking for.

Sometimes you get lucky.

We were in Toys R Us this afternoon (to pick up Pokemon Ruby for Rhon) and happened to see a stack of GameCube Preview Disks laying unguarded by all the flip-tags for GBA games. Our local TRU isn't EXTREME enough to incorporate an R*Zone, so we have to deal with flip-tags and purchase slips.

Those Preview Disks are something of an urban legend. Everybody was really excited about them when they were first announced, but shortly thereafter Nintendo decided you could only get one if you bought an entire GameCube system. I had a brief chat about this with the gal who runs the York EB stores (she totally rocks, by the way... she can answer any question you have. I wish she would fire everyone else who works at EB and work there 24-7.) She was pretty disappointed with the whole thing... here's Nintendo actually keeping interested fans from getting the damn $10 disk, yet tossing it in for nothing in a bundle pack.

TRU had three of them. Now I don't know if Nintendo relaxed the restrictions now that a month has passed, or if my TRU decided to offload them anyway. But when we scanned the disk on one of the omnipresent Price Checkers, it said "GEOFFREY HAT DEAL."

Nintendo: We've heard you're selling those Preview Disks despite our explicit instructions.
Toys R Us: Oh no, Nintendo-san. Those were Geoffrey hats.

So before the Mario Gestapo could rappel in on a beanstalk hanging from a happy-faced cloud, we grabbed a Preview Disk and drove straight home.

There's five playable demos and a bunch of movies... plus two GBA game downloads. I haven't tried the GBA stuff yet (Wario Ware and Dr. Mario) and the movies are nothing too amazing (the compressed video does not help Star Wars Rebel Strike at all.) One of the demos is Splinter Cell, which I already own and didn't really like all that much anyway.

Sonic Adventure DX looks pretty lousy. It looks like it has not been improved one bit: some weirdo camera problems and lousy character animations (the robot raises his gun arm in two frames!) That's pretty sucky considering I remember playing it as a Dreamcast kiosk demo and having to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Billy Hatcher will probably be fun. I'm not quite getting the entire schmiel, but you have to collect eggs to roll around as your weapon. If you feed the eggs (?) you can hatch them to produce little helpful critters. A gimmicky platformer to be sure, but it's big and bright and has great music.

Soul Calibur 2 has already caused me much soul-searching. I don't generally care for fighters, but the characters looks terrific. And it will have Link in it. Definitely on my Maybe list.

Viewtiful Joe is the disk's showstopper, though. It's a side-scrolling beat-'em-up with some cool twists and a very distinct look. The neatest bits the demo displayed were some mini boss fights that required you to throw it into slow-motion mode, making for some wild looking attacks. Joe himself is a kicking, punching Power Ranger dude. The only thing I don't like about the game is Joe's civilian identity: a goateed grunge band reject. I've already played through the VJ demo twice and I imagine I'll do it again tomorrow.

The two-and-a-half good demos (Billy Hatcher is way too short) are easily worth $10. Hell, knowing that Sonic DX is crappy is worth $10. I hope you can find one too.

Follow this chain of failure: Atari Lynx, Sega Saturn, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nokia N-Gage.

Talking about their upcoming ultra-weird game/phone hybrid, the N-Gage, Nokia boss Ilkka Raiskinen said "Game Boy is for 10-year-olds. If you're 20 or 25 years old, it's probably not a good idea to draw a Game Boy out of your pocket on a Friday night in a public place."

This quote has been up and down the gaming website world, notably trashed on Slashdot Games and Penny Arcade. Mid-'20s Game Boy players have had no trouble speaking out against the insult, offering up example after example of bringing out their GBAs in public locations. The N-Gage is doomed.

The N-Gage has some classic hardware problems. Confusing button layout, small screen... and to insert a new game cartridge, you actually have to remove the unit's battery. But the marketing problems are only now coming to light, as shown inside Ilkka's misguided quote.

Ilkka's tact here is to demean the competition. Nothing new about that. But his statement begs the question, Why would a 25 year old pulling out an N-Gage be any cooler than a GBA? He can't be saying that playing video games is uncool for 25 year olds, since that's the whole point of the N-Gage. He can't be saying that the GBA plays immature kiddie games since the N-Gage's lineup includes much of the same stuff: Sonic and Super Monkey Ball, to start. Hardly M-rated material. No, the N-Gage is cooler simply because it isn't a Game Boy.

Despite the apparant interest in the 20-25 demographic, Ilkka's quote (and the N-Gage's atrocious, cliched marketing) are positioned directly at pre-teen males.

Pre-teen males are one of the easiest groups to market towards. All you have to do is make your product look better than what their kid siblings are using. There isn't a 12 year old boy in the country right now who wouldn't rather have an Xbox than a Nintendo, and it's because of the perception that "Nintendo was what I played when I was a kid. Now I need to play what the big boys play." This is why Super Soakers keep getting bigger and bigger, why Yu-Gi-Oh is currently riding atop Pokemon in both card games and video games, and why Burger King and McDonald's now both offer "Big Kids" meals.

Real 20-25 year olds aren't fooled by sexy pictures of Rad Skater Dudes playing an N-Gage in an Extreme fashion. Hell, 16-20 year olds aren't fooled. But 12 year olds are. I'm generalizing, obviously - there are plenty of sophisticated 12 year olds and sheeplike 20 year olds out there. But by and large, a generation raised on Simpsons-era sarcasm just isn't buying stock photography of uber hipsters who grind *and* game to the max. We know when we're being falsely marketed to. Our younger friends aren't so savvy.

And since 12 year olds don't buy $300 cell phones, you're left with the N-Gage failing mightily. In future editions of Cell Phone History, you might well see a sentence like "Nokia gambled millions on the multi-purpose N-Gage... and lost it all."

In their defense, this is precisely what happened between Sony and Nintendo circa 1994. Nintendo was unbeatable; a new console would never work; Sega is barely hanging on. But Sony rode the better system (PS1 vs. SNES) into a huge lead, and when Nintendo finally got to the field with the N64 it had already lost the game. So Nokia is likely expecting to repeat history by rallying gamers against Nintendo's image... except they don't have the hardware to back it up (Jackass of all trades, master of none.) Sony's PSP might, but we won't know until they get around to actually building the damn thing. And Nintendo is already getting ready for a major handheld battle - shopping around a new FX chip for the GBA - so it will not be a pretty fight.

Ironically, it is inevitable that a future phone/game device will work. That's just technology progressing. So you could call the N-Gage ahead of its time... it's just so poorly designed that it will never get the chance to make an impact.

I have mixed feelings about sleep. I love staying in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, but I despise feeling myself fall apart sometime between the hours of 1am and 3am when I'd much rather continue doing something fun. I hate being sleepy but I like being asleep.

I usually have trouble falling asleep anyway, because my mind will start racing as soon as I hit the mattress. I don't blame my mind for all the bouncy thinking; it's my body's fault that I had to shutdown for the night. In an effort to control the process, I try to confine my slumberbrain to well-laid paths - like further development of my TaleSpin card game, or ideas about a story I'd like to write. The purpose there being to limit my brain to something I've already thought about, so eventually my body can drop off and let the mind shift over into dreams.

Deep sleep, for me, often brings additional issues. I see bugs a lot. For whatever reason, I'll open my eyes at 4am - I don't know if I get disturbed by a loud noise or a house creak or what - and I will see a spider.

Sitting here fully awake, I can blame the "spiders" on shadows and darkness and my blurry vision. But in the throes of it, I see fucking spiders walking across the wall, or scuttling behind the poles of the bed, or at the very worst, crawling across the sheets. Generally, the fog of it all means I just stare at the area where the spider was... because the little bastards always hide after a second or two. Then I start ordering my limbs into absolute idiocy: running my hand along the sheets or feeling along the bed frame to flush them out. Occasionally I will leave the bed entirely... still completely convinced I saw a large spider in it.

I had one of these episodes in a hotel room while I was sharing a room with a fellow conference attendee. I don't recall if bugs were involved, but my roommate Jose woke up in the middle of the night and saw me staring at him from my bed across the room. I was kinda propped up on one arm, just staring. Because he was also half-asleep, he starting talking in Spanish to me. Que, Joe? Que?

Lately, Rhonda has joined in the fun. A couple nights ago she reached over and pulled my hair. Like, hard. Then she screamed an apology, all without ever waking up. But her finest moment is when she recited a 911 call. She stated her name and address and then said "And I have every reason to believe someone has just been kidnapped." Actually, she did say somebody's name, not "someone." I was still half asleep, so I missed how she identified the vic. I laughed out loud and then watched her for a while waiting for any updates - maybe she got the license plate number or something - but she fell back into deep sleep. I'm just glad she wasn't holding the phone at the time.

CARRY-ALL - There's something reassuring about putting all your rechargable-battery consumer electronic devices on the charger for the night. It's like tucking them into bed. I know you're down to one bar, little pal, but by tomorrow you'll be ready to go all over again. In preparation for a weekend visit to Mike and Noelle's, I put the iPod, the Hiptop, the iBook and the GBA SP on their respective charging cables. Then I tucked the GameCube into its custom backpack and prepared two additional totes, one for the GBA gear and one for Doomtown stuff. Carrying that and the iBook case makes me into some kind of mobile gaming arsenal.

I've always been a packrat. If I could carry everything I own around with me all the time, I would. On the obsessive side, I like knowing where everything is, and that it hasn't melted in a fire or been burgled and re-sold to GameStop. On the attention-deficit side, I like have entertainment options wherever I happen to be. And I tend to prefer options I have pre-approved.

THRONE OF BONE - Matt and I have come to a Gentlemens' Agreement to each get the WarCraft 3 expansion when it comes out in a couple weeks. Not that we became huge WC3 freaks... my initial disappointments are well documented and we just never played it as much as StarCraft (although Matt definitely played WC3 more than I did.)

The expansion has all the normal upgrades: some new units, new maps, new skills... and I quite like the Mechanical Critter, a robot sheep you can use to spy and scout. There's new heroes as well, but I was never sold on WC3's dependence on the hero system, so I'm not much interested in those.

BLACK AND WHITE - Adult Swim recently debuted a new graphic look. Or actually it's more like the absence of a look; it is nothing but white text on a black background. (You can get a feel for it on their site, just imagine what it looks like on-air.) It completely sucks. I understand their desire to be arty and position these shows towards a discriminating adult audience, but you still have to sell it. The androygenous anti-graphics suck all the life and fun out of the programming block.

The onscreen text is supposed to give Adult Swim a voice. They change it (nearly) every night... but it's always full of staff in-jokes and if you miss the first couple slides, you have no idea what arthouse rambling they're referencing. I just turned around to face the TV at the end of one text bit and all I saw was something about somebody named Dave wanting his house wrapped in rope lights. See, now I'm just annoyed.

PRESS START - I'm reading "Game Over," a history of Nintendo. I think Game Over is a pretty lousy title, because it intimates some kind of failure or oncoming doom. It was originally written in 1993, pre-N64, so everything is *really* rosey. And although it is primarily about Nintendo's founding, the company's presidents and board members, and their sometimes devious business practices, it also tells a great deal of video game industry sidestories. Like the fall of Atari and the rape of Tetris. As someone who grew up during the '80s, it's astonishing how much of our contemporary kid culture was connected. From Donkey Kong to Chuck E. Cheese to Apple computers to Cabbage Patch Kids to Teddy Ruxpin, there were backroom deals and unusual partnerships all across the board.

The end of the book has a slapdash addendum written in 1999... this time anticipating the GameCube, but it reveals nothing especially new about Nintendo's current state of affairs. It doesn't even mention Pokemon, which is widely credited with reviving the slumping Game Boy and bringing millions of gamers back to Nintendo in general.

One thing that does project into the video game wars of today is the cutthroat and stoic nature of Nintendo in the NES days. They ruled the scene and they knew it; so you played by their decisions or you didn't play at all. That attitude is why - when other companies finally emerged - Nintendo was/is slow to respond. They have never liked direct competition because they're accustomed to no competition. But as you read of ex-President Yamauchi-san's amazing risks and payoffs, you have to respect the choices the man made and the success he was able to predict.

Oddly, the book refers to Apple several times... including one great quote about multimedia where the author suggests that Apple "will probably launch a CD-ROM playing machine - a unit containing a Macintosh computer processor and operating system that will, presumably, hook up to televisions, much like a VCR."

And get this: Nintendo tried to create the internet. No shit. Yamauchi's plan was to network NESs all across the world through modems and phone lines. They actually started it in Japan... where you could pay bills, bet on horses, get airline tickets, type-chat and play games through your online NES. That's why your NES has that mysterious unused port on the bottom. A functional internet in 19-goddamn-89! On NESs! I mean, all we had on computers at the time was crappy BBSs and DOS interfaces. That is absolutely astonishing.

For years now, we've had a running conversation about a long-lost Soundwave toy of Rhonda's. Apparantly some dopey cousin left the famous Transformer at their house, and Rhonda and her sisters adopted the toy as their own. I never had Soundwave myself... although I do recall friends who did, and, like most Transformers, the general crappiness of the toy just didn't live up to the cartoon version. But the ability to store and eject mini-transforming cassette tapes was/is undeniably cool.

Rhonda's folks never throw away anything (much like mine), so I've been counting on Soundwave to show up some day. And I fully anticipated inheriting it.

The latest ToyFare ran a picture of the Decepticons' communications expert, so I pointed him out to Rhonda and reminded her that we need to locate him on some future visit. (The following excerpts may be somewhat paraphrased, and may have been extended for dramatic weblog purposes.)

Rhonda: Oh. I don't think that was the one we had.

Joe: What? I thought we talked about this! He turns into a tape player, and has little tape robots inside him. He's super-cool. (I cover my mouth with my hand and try to talk like Soundwave.) Ravage, eject. Rumble, eject.

Rhonda: Huh? (She considers.) Ours wasn't that big. It was just a tape, not the whole player.

Joe: OOOOOH. You just had one of the tapes. So which one was it?

Rhonda: What?

Joe: Did it turn into a cat, a bird, or a *sigh* little man. (I specifically avoid the code names, as well as the difference between Laserbeak and Rumble and the color-shifted clone figures Buzzsaw and Frenzy.)

(L-R) Ravage (cat), Laserbeak (bird), Rumble (little man)

Rhonda: I don't know. I don't remember unfolding it that much.

Joe: WHAT!? It's a Transformer! It transforms! So, educate me here, how exactly did you guys play with just a cassette tape?

Rhonda: With our dolls. We used to play store a lot, and the tape would be at the store for the dolls to buy. It was always their favorite tape.

Joe: ----

Rhonda: The sides would kinda fall off a bit, so we always had to push it back together.

Joe: ----

Rhonda: And I have no idea where it ended up.

Joe: Well I still want it.

Based on the comment about the sides falling off, I'm ruling out Ravage because his transformation was more along the top and bottom. Also, I think if the girls knew it could be a cat or a bird, they likely would have kept it as a pet for the dolls... so Laserbeak is out too. That leaves Rumble (or Frenzy.) So somewhere on the old homestead, a forgotten Rumble lies. Probably buried in a box of old doll clothes, unless one of Rhonda's younger sisters traded him off or lost him in the backyard.

Rumble. He always was the least trustworthy of the three.