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.