After every Origins Rhonda and I discuss the games we demoed and/or bought and quietly confer upon one of them the Fourhman.com Best of Show Award. In our previous vacations, we've given the accolade to 7th Sea CCG (2000), Chrononauts card game (2001), and Battle of the Bands card game (2002).

This year, our favorite game of the show is WizKids' Creepy Freaks. WizKids is making their bank off their patented clicky dials, the low-bookkeeping basis behind Mage Knight, HeroClix and just about every game in their library. Creepy Freaks uses a similar click base, but it is streamlined to illustrate only one statistic: your figure's health. It's being marketed towards kids who are too young to grok the higher-end click dials of Mage Knight, but Rhon and I think the game itself is solid enough for any age.

Rise of Nations has a great team behind it. The same guy who worked on Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri worked on this game, and, well, it’s as you’d expect: It’s Civilization lite. You’ve got your wide and varied civilizations, you have your progress and technology research, you have your peons making buildings, and you’ve got your varied military units which progress through the ages. And, that’s it. That’s all you get. It’s a gussied up Civ 2 for the 2000’s.

Seriously. That’s it. It’s a military conquest game at its heart, but unlike finer RTS games, there’s little or no tactics involved in this effort. You throw your unit piles at the other team and watch ‘em die. Units have no special abilities, so beyond a ho-hum collection of strengths and weaknesses, there’s really little more to it than flipping armies around the map. Kinda disappointing, particularly when Warcraft has been doing this for a long time and the WarCraft III expansion came out a mere 2 months after RON…

We've already seen all the fireworks I need for the night, in our respective towns of Adamsvil and Holliday. Mayor Tortimer handed out fake bottle rockets, and Crazy Redd set up a booth by the lake. He's like those seedy carnies who hawk calamine tubes and knockoff Spider-Man balloons at state fairs.

And he has regionally diversified his stock this visit. In Adamsvil he sold only balloons - a crappy choice since you can get balloons for free at every Nook sale. In Holliday, Redd had an assortment of freaking paper fans, a rare series of items you can only get during the Fireworks Festival. You can be assured that Adamsvil and Holliday will engage in some sort of balloons-for-paper fans trade arrangement shortly.

I've been hunting a genuine OSX webcam ever since switching to X over a year ago. And now that Apple released the iSight, I finally have one. For some weird reason, OSX webcams are stupidly rare; pre-iSight, you had to buy some third-party driver to get X to see the cam... and even then the drivers only worked with random, hard-to-find cams. And the very concept of "drivers" just doesn't belong in the Mac world, folks.

Up until today, our home webcam was an old eBay find: an rca-input cam, if you can believe that. I've been running it off my PowerMac 7600, a machine on the verge of a hard drive breakdown if ever I've heard one. Having rca inputs built-in to the 7600 is a selling point that you never heard much about in those days - this was well before Steve Jobs decided that Making Stupid Home Movies was to be the primary purpose of consumer Macs. I certainly gave those ports a lot of use over the years, grabbing video freeze frames for my card games chief among them. The 7600 is still active - for the moment. She's holding my old SCSI scanner and even older laser printer.

I'm playing Eternal Darkness again. It's a bit of a slow time for new games, and I always intended to run through the game for the full 3x sequence, so I'm finally making good on my internal monologue.

I'm struck again by how damned good this game is, and how terribly it sold. As many have said before, Nintendo is cursed by their own success. By and large, Nintendo owners buy only Nintendo-made franchises. Third party games typically undersell on GameCube, while the recognizable Nintendo name brands outsell just about any game for any system. Your Mario, your Zelda... hell, we've even formed a thirst for the second tier Nintendo games, your F-Zero, your Metroid. Fanboys are already drooling over stinking Earthbound and Fire Emblem, two Nintendo franchises that (former) haven't been seen since the SNES, and (latter) have never had a US game release, but are scheduled to appear in new GBA games.

Evolution update:

• Hatched my Pichu.
  
• Used a Thunder Stone to turn my highest level Pikachu into a Raichu.
  
• Evolved a Magikarp into a Gyarados.
  
• Hatched a second Pichu because I forgot to remove the parents from the Day Care Center. Those randy electric rats!
  
• Metang evolved into Metagross.
  
• Hatched an Igglybuff from an egg, after leaving a Jigglypuff and a Skitty at the Day Care Center.
  

I caught a Latias. I was wandering around the green areas SE of Fortree City, when a Latias jumped me in the bushes. After some heated mental arguments, I tossed my Master Ball at it. My friend Matthew later told me "that was a waste of a Master Ball." I don't know if this is standard issue or not, but my Latias has a naughty nature, knows Water Sport, Refresh, Mist Ball, and Psychic, and she isn't holding any items.

I remember liking the original PS1 Ape Escape game. You run around, catching rampaging chimps in your net. I never completed it, because I ran into some tough bits near the end and other games came along... but I still harbor a fond feeling toward monkey incarceration of all kinds.

The sequel is much the same. More monkeys, same idea. The Ape Escape series uses a cool dual-fisted control setup that precious few PlayStation games attempt. The left analog stick is for movement and the right analog stick is for your weapon attacks. This makes any given monkey-spanking session an exercise for both thumbs. You switch between your weapons using the X-square-O-triangle buttons, which pushes your jump to the slightly awkward R shoulder buttons. (Although if your right thumb is on the stick, there's really no where else for jump to go and still be instantly useable.)

Today we checked out the EON Ticket / Toys R Us summer tour. Two Poke-representatives (one in a red shirt and one in a blue shirt!) had a tent sent up in the TRU parking lot, right beside one of the famous Pikachu-styled Volkswagon Beetles. I snapped some tiny pictures, and Rhonda and I grabbed some cool freebies. I'm guessing the swag was mostly NYC Pokemon Center overflow stock. Check Nintendo's pokemon games website to see when the tour is hitting a town close to you.

The first thing I did was link up with the tour official and receive the EON Ticket item in my Sapphire cart. When we noted that Rhon is still too early in her Ruby game to activate the Mystery Events feature, he commented that I could share my ticket with her when we mix records.

There's fresh rumors of console prices being cut again as we heard into Shopping Season 2003. As the financial world pays more and more attention to the video games industry, we can now expect to hear claims like this every couple weeks. The usual price points are $150 for PS2 and Xbox and $100 for the GameCube. Currently, the PS2 and Xbox are locked at $180 (with an online-ready PS2 bundle at $200) and Nintendo staying at $150.

We've long held consoles to the "give away the razor but sell the blades" scheme. In fact, Microsoft gives away so much of the Xbox that they reportedly lose $100 to $200 on each Xbox sold. So the quickest way to drive Microsoft out of the video game race is to buy a ton of Xboxes... and no games. Hell, go buy Halo. Then you're only costing Microsoft $50 to $150.

Largely on a whim, we decided to go camping tonight. So here we are at Codorus State Park sort of faking camping for a night. We're pretty lousy campers, so most trips are marked by what we forget. For example, plates. Still, it's only one night so we don't care much. It's the price of the impulsive camper.

We've never been to this particular campsite before, but it's been cool so far. Our plot is right on the edge of a treeline, so we get the benefit of shade without the gritty floor of dirt and leaves. We're a tad exposed here, but it does afford a great view of the camping pros in the open field nearby.

I really hate fishing.

When you're searching for a particular fish, the whole process can be exceptionally frustrating and lengthy. Since you can rarely tell what kind of fish is lurking below the waves, it's a lot of trial and error to catch them all. Compare that to insects, where you can see exactly what type of bug you're about to catch. The tradeoff is that more fish sell for more money than insects.

But I'm happy to report that I have very little fishing left to do. Namely, the hunt for the jellyfish that appears in late August. I finally snagged a piranha, and I fully expect that to be the last difficult catch. I must have put in ten to twenty hours just in fishing for the piranha. Ugh.