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.