All I really need is a long list of unlockables and I'll play any game you hand me. So it is with Soul Calibur 2, a game I probably would have skipped were it not for the list of hidden weapons and costumes and other such junk. I don't play a lot of fighting games, but I believe the equation went something like this: unlockables + Link + unanimous gushing reviews = purchased. If you're going to buy a fighting game, you might as well buy the best one around.

Our neighbor kid came over to play SC2 the other night, and he kicked my ass. He even cranked down his life % and he still beat me around. Ah well, he has a Dreamcast, so he's probably well-versed in mad Soul Calibur skills. Plus his part time job is to haunt the store game kiosks whenever his mom takes him shopping.

The other day Rhonda asked me "What are you doing humming showtunes?" I stopped in mid-walk. I was humming something from Les Miserables; who knows how I got that stuck in my head. I did have to do an internal double-take though, because I never really considered Les Mis showtunes. I guess it is, by definition. I've always thought of showtunes as the simple, silly, dippy musical songs. Like from freakin' Oklahoma, or The Music Man. Where the corn is as high as an elephant's eye indeed.

So in my little brain category cubbyholes I ranked Les Mis over and above that sort of thing. I guess it was mainly a matter of content... the melodrama of love / justice / war winning out over the likes of Big Trouble in River City. Dead Orphan Gavroche over Little Orphan Annie, if you will.

Either way, I never considered myself as a guy who hums showtunes.

You may have noticed the text ads over in the sidebar. They're from Google AdSense, a relatively new pay-per-click ad service. If fourhman.com delivers X amount of clicks on those ads, I will eventually receive X dollars.

But what I find interesting about it is the kind of ads it creates. It's supposed to "read" your content and select ads based on what your page is about. I actually kinda respect the concept here, because at least the ads are trying to be relevant to people who are reading the site... people like you. It's not like going to a TV station's website and seeing ads for refinancing your mortgage.

So on fourhman.com's video games page, you'll see ads for video games for sale. Perfect. On the card games page, it's currently generating links for Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I guess that's more or less okay.

Nothing happened.

Today marks my one year anniversary of playing Animal Crossing. I've played every day since September 17, 2002. I was hoping that something cool would happen today, but nothing did. I can't say I'm surprised; that would be a pretty awful way to hide a secret in the game, wouldn't it? Very very few players would hit that goal. But it would have been great to get Super Mario Bros. in the mail this morning. I would have went straight to the message boards and posted in all caps.

So let's reflect on what I've accomplished after a year living in Animal Crossing.

• Catalog completion: fossils, stationery, K.K. songs.


• Completed the fish and insect collection screens.


• One painting to go, and my entire museum is finished.


• For several weeks, I had every single villager wearing the Noble Shirt.


• Collected the complete Harvest series, Jingle series and Igloo item sets.

We've come to the point where we don't expect Toys R Us to have anything in stock within a week of the release date... much less when the week includes a hyped-up hurricane. But mysteriously and happily, we found Simpsons: Hit & Run; in fact, the last GameCube copy available.

That's not to say it wasn't a Geoffrey-sponsored scavenger hunt. My first pass of the racks came up empty, so I checked the PS2 side of the aisle. The PS2 stock is much better organized. Alphabetized, even. When Hit & Run appeared in PlayStation format, we figured the Nintendo edition must just be well-hid.

It was. The slips were part of a spastic mess of identified tickets attached to a support pillar in the middle of the GameCube display. I was so excited I completely forgot to look for Boktai, that GBA game with a built-in sunlight sensor.

I don't know why these sorts of announcements always shock and surprise me; we've known about a Kingdom Hearts sequel for some time. It's just nice to know that somebody somewhere has been working on it, since Kingdom Hearts meant so much to me as a gamer / Disney fan. Here is the first official info (from the Tokyo Game Show)... KH2 for PS2, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for GBA. Yes, GBA!

Chain of Memories will take place immediately after the events of the original PS2 Kingdom Hearts. KH2 is reportedly several years later (note Sora's slightly older look). That artwork is also teasing Mickey himself in KH2... although draped in some kind of ninja hoodie.

I remember my early excitement for Kingdom Hearts, a game I was tracking well over a year before release. And despite my storied misgivings while playing the game, that excitement is back. Even stronger, since the natural inclination is to believe that Square Enix has ironed out the ugly wrinkles.

I bought a PSX for Soul Edge and Castlevania: Symphony of Darkness alone, so the opportunity to play a sequel to this nifty weapons fighting game on a console that's still supported was too good to pass up. Soul Calibur apparently is regarded as the best weapons fighting game out there (as opposed to what? The fighting games where combatants rock paper scissors each other to victory?), so the sequel had a lot of goodness paving the way for it.

I got the version of Soul Calibur 2 for the GC, but excepting the legacy character on each version, I'd imagine they're all more or less equal. Rumor has it that the graphics are sub par on the PS2, and insert tired, overused joke about the heft of the Xbox controller here. That, and c'mon. Link!

The recent OTA update to my Hiptop contained an interesting little addition: Terminal Monkey, a SSH/Telnet app. I know jack-all about SSH, but I do have a history with Telnet.

Years 2 through 4 of my college experience (and real world Year 1 thereafter) involved a lot of MUSHing on TinyCWRU. A MUSH is a variant on the well-remembered MUDs of the early internet. Essentially, shared text adventures. In MUDs you trawled dungeons, fought monsters, gained experience, all in the D&D fashion. In MUSHes, the emphasis was on socializing and building. TinyCWRU had no theme and no limits to how many objects you could create, making it open season for anybody who wanted to code... I'm not explaining this very well...