All right, we've got some games in of the discouragingly-titled Marvel DC Vs. so it's time for some initial reactions to the gameplay. You might recall we were blown away by our demo at Origins 2004, but now we had to test the game in the mean streets of the Fourhman.home living room.

First of all, the name sucks. Nobody knows what to call it. The way it works is that the overarching rules is called the "Vs. System," which is a generic card game design that has been painted with the IP of DC and Marvel Comics. If Upper Deck wanted to, they could make a Vs. System game featuring the cast of Hamtaro. Although it is, at heart, combat-oriented, the Vs. System is intended to act as the GURPS of CCGs, designed to fit and intermingle any license(s). (Somebody did this before and it flopped, didn't they? I vaguely recall an anime card game that used different anime properties in one game, and didn't the Hercules and Xena and something else games all work the same way? Was it StormWatch?)

The cats went to war this morning. I'm still not real sure what happened, but it went down like this:

Both Annie (older, gray) and Zoe (younger, black) are in the basement by the sliding glass door. I head outside to empty the dehumidifier water, and, as usual, I let Annie slip out with me to enjoy a minute of eating grass. (Zoe is still too young to get to go outside.) After I'm done with the dehumidifier bucket, I haul Annie back inside. As soon as I put her down, she gags a little - which is pretty normal after she's been chewing on grass. But while she's doing this, Zoe goes into full alert: ears flat, back arched, tail fluffed. She's staring right at Annie, and she starts doing that scary alley cat yowl. And not the I'm-in-heat yowl... the feral, violent yowl.

I start telling Zoe "Knock it off, snap out of it" but Annie leaps for her and the two go at it. Suddenly it's a full fledged catfight, complete with that horrible human-sounding scream cats can pull off in times of duress. You can tell this is much more than the usual scrapping that goes on; this is serious. Although I can hear my Mom telling me "Don't bother trying to separate fighting cats" I dive in anyway. They break it up, but Annie chases Zoe upstairs.

Pokemon Box is essentially free... unless you already have five GBA/GameCube Link Cables and don't need another Memory Card 59, no matter how much translucent colored plastic they used to make it.

That's one of the problems with Nintendo's new $20 special-order-only GameCube release, Pokemon Box. The other is that the Box is largely useless.

Box is for the devout only. It's merely a pokemon storage tool, providing additional space and sorting options for all the creatures you've collected in your copies of Sapphire and Ruby. To really appreciate Box, you would have to have filled all of your existing in-game storage boxes, which totals to over 400 captured pokemon. The Box can store an additional 1000. I don't think there's a huge call for that. I pretty much just caught one of each species and was done with it. (Although I did move my 40-strong collection of triple-damned Horseas off the cartridge and into the Box, just to be rid of them.)

For a couple weeks now, we've been playing my TaleSpin card game over lunch. It's been awfully cool. As a rule, I'm extremely hesitant to mix my work life and my real life... but I seemed to step into a fortuitous melding of the two worlds when it came out that my co-workers also watched TaleSpin back in the day (to varying degrees, I'm sure.) I considered that invitation enough to bring in the game.

I'm sure it's slightly weird when someone in the office says something like "Uh, I made this card game based on a mostly forgotten decade-old Disney cartoon. Want to play it?" I probably took some strength from the fact the game has already been well received back in my non-work realm. Regardless, after those first fitful starts, we've had some great three- and four-player games... and it has been invaluable to me as a learning tool, in terms of game design, rule tweaks, and graphic layout.

Sad to say the cat situation hasn't improved much. The early morning freakout of the other week is not an isolated incident.

The causes remain mysterious. For seemingly no reason, Zoe will stare at Annie and launch into red alert. She's scared; ears flat, back arched, hellish feral crying. We have no idea what scares her, because most of the time, the cats interact as normal. Annie is just as astonished as we are. When Zoe goes into her routine, Annie just stares, shell shocked. If we don't intercede, that's when the whole operation steps up to Rush's seminal album "Moving Pictures." Because Annie will then go into her own defensive mode... and two cats in defense mode inevitably reduces down to two cats in attack mode.

For reasons unknown, Mike and I played a bunch of Neopets this weekend. We haven't played that one in a while, so I guess we finally lapped back around to it. I have two decks for the game, neither of which have been touched since the game first came out... so I took a couple minutes to re-work them with cards from the various expansion sets. It was sort of a pop culture convergance moment: I was tuning Neopets decks, while Mike flipped through an Onion book and watched Sealab on DVD.

Anyway, we changed up the rules a bit to punch the game up. Neopets has this crazy "Neopet stack" thing going... which is a separate mini-deck comprised only of your selected Neopets. This is done to guarantee that you fill the table with 'pets, which would be awfully hard if they were shuffled into your main deck. But the way the game runs, the first three turns of the game are almost always total non-events, because each player has to draw and place a single Neopet on each turn. So we accelerated that by placing three Neopets before the game starts... facedown, so as not to encourage the slower player taking advantage.

I just finished attending this year's Camp Hyrule, and it was just as expected.

Every year, Nintendo offers up this "virtual online summer camp" for a week to a limited number of entrants. If you get in (and it's first-come, first-served) you gain access to a cutesy web-based camp experience, driven by Nintendo marketing and teen chat rooms. That's really all it is, and for what it offers it is good enough.

There's a map of the grounds, where you can click around to read blurbs on upcoming games (which you probably already know about), daily contests between the 10 Cabins, and a preponderance of message boards and chat rooms. This year we had live chats with Nintendo spokeperson Reggie Fils-Ames, the Nintendo Power "Krew", and the Nintendo localization team (which might have been interesting; sorry I missed that one.) At the end of the week, the Cabins with the most points get some exclusive internet trinkets - wallpapers, graphics, whatever.

When you hear about FOX going after Simpsons websites and Viacom going after Star Trek websites, you tend to feel apprehensive about making your own fan-sites with Other People's Intellectual Property. Happily, I've ran several for years without trouble. My latest site is the one that worries me the most, since it marks the first time I've tackled the IP of a truly huge corporation.

But then I run across the truly blatant offenders and I wonder why I ever worried about my stuff. The story begins - as so many do - on eBay...

Although my guess was for a camera, Nintendo has revealed that the New Peripheral for use in Mario Party 6 is in fact a microphone. In typical close-lipped Nintendo fashion, a couple months ago they announced that the new Mario Party "would be playable without a controller." And then waited until now to tell us exactly how this would occur. Although realistically, if you're not using a controller, you're left with pretty much only two senses to exploit. Until Nintendo releases Mario BrainTap.

(This isn't the first mic, Nintendo packed one with the sad Hey You Pikachu back on the N64. And Nintendo has already done cameras with the Game Boy Camera, which was supposed to work with Perfect Dark at one point.)