In retrospect, it was fairly risky to plan out an 8-person week-long trip to upstate Pennsylvania in winter. Boy howdy. But thanks to an exceptionally mild and pleasant week of weather, our mini-getaway to the Rough Cut Lodge in Gaines, PA, was lots of fun. Of course, our kind of fun is of a very distinct brand: playing games. In essence, that's all we ever do, and it's only the venue that changes.

The Rough Cut Lodge is a cabin rental outfit, situated in beautiful mountains and forests and creeks... as well as a complete cell phone dead zone. Hence no Hiptop pics or mobile weblog updates! The cabin didn't even have a phone, so my plan to fabricate a temporary AOL setup was abandoned. Sort of ironic since the Pennsylvania College of Technology was right down the road, but maybe that was just somebody's idea of a joke.

So jeez, where have I been? I've started about a dozen weblog entries over the past week, but ended up trashing them all. I intended a rant about EGM/MTV's recent "Top 15" video games special, but I think it would have quickly degenerated into me complaining about Splinter Cell.

As far as gaming goes, I just beat both I-Ninja and Ratchet & Clank 2. I-Ninja is actually a pretty incredible game. Although it's mainly a platformer, there are several departure levels/scenes to vary it up... where you control missiles, roll a giant ball, box with giant robots, mid-air DBZ battles, etc. What sold me on the game in the first place is the Sonic-esque bits where you run through big swooping loops and you have to use your chain to keep you from running off the tight corners (just like how the Batmobile cornered in the first Batman movie, incidentally.) There's a couple bonus levels where you do nothing but zip around corner tracks like that, and those made me very happy. Somewhere around 75% done, I realized that the baddie variety is terribly low. There's only about three enemy types, but somehow you never notice. The environments are the true enemies here, and the little evil ninja men are largely just to delay for time.

I know I said I wasn't going to bother listing my missing items for you, but what the hell. What follows is everything I need to complete my catalog (according to the Nintendo Power Player's Guide anyway) and my level of irritation with it: Minor, Major, Extreme, and Suicidal. If you want to help me out with some trading, toss me an email, but be warned, I don't cheat and don't use universal codes.

Furniture
Blue Tartan, Dump Model, Museum Model
These are just some items I missed last year. The tartan shirt is entirely tradeable; I just either forgot to buy it last summer or never saw it. The Dump Model and Museum Model are untradeable, but easy enough to get... although the Museum Model does ride on me getting Crazy Redd's damn Basic Painting first.

So Nintendo's actually going to launch a third piece of hardware.

On the face of it, that's what's wrong with their recent announcement. Not that there's no pictures of the mysterious new "Nintendo DS." Not that there's only the vaguest notions of what gameplay this device will enjoy. The problem is that Nintendo is throwing resources towards the wrong front.

The Nintendo DS is a Dual Screen portable. Like I said, nobody outside Iwataland knows what it will look like, but I imagine it to be a largish GBA with stacked three inch screens. Each screen gets its own processor, which is intended to provide two ways for the game to display itself. For instance, bottom screen shows inventory while top screen shows action. Or rear view and front view in a driving game. Although it's said to run off a completely different data device - IE, not the familiar GBA cartridges or the GameCube half-size discs - nobody is saying if it will offer simultaneous two player gaming (I bet it won't) or if it will somehow run existing GBA games (I bet it will, but only with some kind of add-on) or if it will connect with the GameCube (I bet it will.)

I've been hating my iSight camera for months now. It's just not designed for what I want to use it for, and it's rather overpriced for what it does do. See, I want a friggin' webcam. Before the iSight, getting a webcam to work with OSX was a bloody nightmare. After the iSight, well, it works... but the design and lack of software support heads it directly towards a single laser-focused purpose: a camera for iChat AV and nothing else.

But I've been trying to use it as a webcam, uploading images from my den every five minutes. In addition to the $150 price tag on the iSight itself, I had to spend another $20 for FTP camera software (not from Apple)... and that's a function that really ought to have been included in some way by Apple.

That was all fine if I welded the damn thing to the wall and forgot about it, but I like to move my webcam around. Point it at the cat, some new toys, out the window, that sort of thing. Positioning the iSight in any direction other than front is an impossible task, because it has a terrible range of movement and doesn't come with a fucking proper positionable camera stand. The acrylic stands that come standard are these bizarre tilted modules that require you to thread the cable inside of a central firewire cuff. So any time I wanted to move the camera, I had to fight the built-in unmovable nature of the plastic stand.