I usually have several projects burning at once, but it's pretty rare for me to actually finish one. TaleSpin: the Card game has been one such project. Thanks to plenty of recent playtesting help, I think it's ready to hit the 'net. As with my other two games (Red Dwarf: the Card game and MST3K's Mitchell: the Card game), TaleSpin will exist publicly only as a website. If you want to read the rules and print out the cards, you can go ahead and do that. Also, my game bears no support or endorsement from Disney.

TaleSpin has been in the works for over two years. I can't imagine this is interesting to you, but here's the process thus far. Circa mid-2001 I began mulling over the broad concepts of the game: I wanted to do it in card game format, and somehow incorporate dogfighting and shipping cargo from location to location. I also wanted to include the cartoon's wide cast of characters and enable players to recreate the show as part of the game. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted it to feel like a collectible card game without being collectible. IE, a single game deck from which all players draw... but with card interactions and abilities closer to Magic than to Uno.

In the spirit of the tag-team, cooperative nature of Double Dash, both Joe and I are collaborating on this one. As usual, the bulk of the vinegar is mine, the more sensible reality check on the game is Joe’s. Sweet and sour, or tart and tangy, you decide.

According to Planet GameCube, Pac-Man VS. is now shipping. That's funny, since I got one last Friday, four days ago.

After once again getting screwed by Toys R Us (even though I pre-ordered Double Dash, I didn't get the *!&@% demo disc), I ventured over to the GameStop at the mall. As a rule, I hate buying from the mall chains. The employees are usually smug, uneducated assholes. I do have a local EB that I don't mind, but I actively avoid all the nearby GameStop/FuncoLand hellholes; they just seem to be a haven for the poseur Matrix "mature" crowd. And I break out in hives when I see people selling back old games.

I just did a search for the number of times I've bitched about Toys R Us and it's an unheathy number. So I'm hesitant to go this route again, but what is a weblog if not an infinite recursion of boring true-life stories?

Went to TRU to get Pokemon Channel for GameCube - which is only marginally a game, more like one of those click-and-click Putt-Putt Reader Rabbit Spy Fox shinolas they mass produce to prove that games still come out for Macs, but my lust for Pokeproduct will not be sated.

Glory be, they have it. But for $50.

Pokemon Channel has a MSRP of $30. EB, GameStop, even TRU's own website all list it at $30. Nintendo is being very honest here; they know this isn't a full-featured video game. It's a $30 holdover for the faithful and the very young. I would swear that even the TRU presell tickets from a month ago said $30.

EA's action-oriented Lord of the Rings series began with last year's The Two Towers, an impressive hack-and-slasher that combined elements (and film clips) from Peter Jackson's first two LOTR movies. Return of the King picks up the Gauntlet and adds the most-missed component, co-op play.

These are not overly deep games... they're primarily old fashioned games of endurance. Can you outlast the onslaught of Orcs and Easterlings and Trolls at Sauron's Black Gate? Can your thumbs live through the frustrating zig-zag goal looping of Pelennor Fields? Sure, there'll be a couple times where you have to activate a switch to continue the level, but for the most part you're dropped into an angry sea of baddies and expected to fight your way through. Even the so-called "stealth" levels of the hobbits hold a generous amount of sword-to-pike thrashing.

The streak is over.

Yes, I finally missed a day after playing for over thirteen months straight. It was a Friday, I worked late, we had some running around to do, I came home and passed out. Woke up and realized I had forgotten to play Animal Crossing. Hey, I did the entire year. Got nothing for it, but I did an entire year. The experiment is still a success. So it's not a big deal at all, just the first chink in the armor against inevitable obsolescence.

I have found several missing catalog items since the last Log Entry. I now have no further need to talk to Saharah or Gulliver. I'm missing four Wendall wallpapers and nine Gracie shirts, a handful of Redd items and Island items, and fifteen Gyroids. Once I find the Basic Painting I'll completely finish up the Museum, and then there's the Post Office items and a couple of Camper items. Not much, really. Most of these items aren't tradable or I'd give you a list.

The N64's Paper Mario was easily one of the best games of the last generation. In fact, I'd place it above Ocarina of Time, the Zelda game that most everyone else says is the best N64 game ever. In Paper Mario, the infallable and eager Mario led a team of Mushroom Kingdom heroes into the usual fray against Bowser on a search for seven missing stars. (Luigi was largely unseen, spending the entire time at the Bros. home.) Using a lightened RPG format, Paper Mario was completely accessible yet customizable and challenging. Superstar Saga picks up the substance of Paper Mario and evolves it for the GBA.

In every Bookmarks file a few duds must fall. Here's a couple of sites that I used to visit but now avoid, and why.

PVP Online. In the online comics world, this is one of the biggies. I visited regularly until I realized that it's not funny, and it never was. I like Scott Kurtz's style, but his writing is just incredibly average. The strip that did me in went something like this...

Panel 1. Guy: Boy, sure glad I made cookies!
Panel 2. Guy: Hey, who ate my cookies?
Panel 3. Guy: Fatty, did you eat my cookies?
Panel 4. Fatty: Mope. (Mouth gummed with cookies.)

Plus Kurtz is a complete schizo, liable to fly off the handle in one newspost and then start bawling about how lazy he is in the next.

Mario Party 5 is definitely a step-up from last year's edition. If you're considering buying one or the other, go with 5... and anyway, I don't think MP4 has hit the cheap Players' Choice line yet.

The single player mode of MP5 is much more tolerable. MP4 basically made you play the normal 4P game with three CPU opponents. MP5 pares down the experience considerably, giving you three Koopa Kids that all move at once... plus the game boards in single are half the size of the boards in multi. And instead of the whole coins-for-stars dynamic - which made MP4's single player mode radically difficult - you just have to beat the Koopas down to zero coins. It's pretty interesting to play, since most of the mini-games turn out to be 1 on 1 duels, which are rarely seen in multiplayer games. Although this year's boss sequence at the end of the mode isn't as cool (or as long) as last year's. The pics here are from the credit roll when you beat 1P mode.

It's hard to describe seeing your imagination opened up in front of you and knowing you had nothing to do with it. "The Return of the King" is the final piece in the visual penumbra that has lurked in my mind for years. Not just my mind, obviously. The Witch-King. The Army of the Dead. Shelob. Shagrat and Gorbag. The pyre of Denethor. The Grey Havens.

The Lord of the Rings has been a touchstone for most of my life. My father discovered the books when he was in school and eventually passed the novels on to me. If you knew my father, you might consider this story an odd thing for him to take a passionate interest in. He spent almost 25 years doing mindless, physical dock work for a freight company. He's been a lifelong motorhead, having personally driven, fixed, scrapped and re-built hundreds of cars throughout our family's history. (The whole car thing never quite made it to me.) But if you knew my father, you might have uncovered this fascination with J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece of fantasy.

I'm still stupefied at how CDDB can average at least one mistake per CD. This weekend I popped the second Harry Potter soundtrack into iTunes, and good ol' CDDB had the track "Dobby the House Elf" spelled with one 'b'. So that means that the entire known world (or at least the subset that has inserted the second Harry Potter soundtrack into their computer) has the song "Doby the House Elf." I visited the CDDB website to learn a little about their process, and it's just as stupid as I thought: normal users submit track listings to the database, rather than any sort of near-competent employees. I guess you get what you pay for. It is striking that CDDB - whoops, they're trying to build a brand name now: 'Gracenote' - pulls all this Important And Inspiring bullshit on the site, as if CDDB is on some kind of vanguard of musicality in the new century... when all they are is a goddamn database of typos.

Finally picked up Fatal Frame 2, but I doubt I'll start it for a couple weeks. I'm really enjoying Ratchet & Clank 2 right now, and I have The Hobbit already started as well.

The One Ring.net has a link to a roundtable discussion on the spiritual dimensions to the Lord of the Rings movies. As usual, the Christians fall all over each other in their rush to justify their illogical, fairy tale beliefs. Tolkien was a devout Catholic - and although he initially resisted it, his own conservative religious upbringing did seep into his story - but does that mean that the entire saga is meant to be viewed as a representation, or worse, an endorsement of Christianity?

I'm going to criticize the article in general here... the actual full-length discussion shows several different opinions, but I'm painting them all with the same brush. And, yeah, here there be movie spoilers. Interesting that you can still have spoilers for a book that's half a century old.

You have to hand it to J.K. Rowling. How many people are able to write about an imaginary fantasy world and have in accepted not only by millions of children, but also their dollar, pound and lira providing adults? How terrific is this: people can bring up Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy or Quidditch in conversation and she knows that it was all made by her. Truly a very cool thing. Probably the only thing I will be long remembered for after I am recycled will be the time I threw up on David Kiernan on the school bus in fourth grade. Such is life. So she has me there.

However, after that glowing introduction, I must be frank and say that the fifth installment of the Harry Potter series simply is not worth your time and effort.

We are the Fourhmans that saved Christmas.

We just unlocked everything in Mario Kart: Double Dash, having finished All Cup Tour / Mirror Mode with 146 points. The thing about All Cup Tour (which is all 16 races in a row) is that it should end up being academic. As long as you keep placing high, and your next two opponents keep switching off wins, by the last track there should be no possible way you can lose in the overall point total. Our first attempt was an unfortunate failure, mainly because we seemed to have only *one* chief rival, and that team would consistently NOT get wrecked by the other players. On our second try, things went more to plan... we actually clinched the Gold Medal going into the second-to-last race, meaning that even if we got 0 points on the last two tracks, we'd still end up with the most points. It's always nice to go into Rainbow Road knowing that simple math is on your side, because that track is terribly unforgiving.