August 2004 Archives

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.)

I am a huge Mario Party fan, so I'm curious how this will play out. Will this mic have a pass-through port on it... because I don't much like the idea of the mic stealing one entire controller port and thus limiting MP6 to 3-player games. And exactly how much gameplay is it going to provide? Will multiple players be able to use it simultaneously during one game? It would be awesome if MP6 could differentiate between four individual player voices, but I suspect that technology hasn't been invented yet. I foresee a lot of clapping and screaming. I doubt we'll have very many "real" words in our vocabulary; the PS2's Lifeline game proved how flaky that crap is.

Nintendo should be warned: voice is one of those things that many players feel is beyond the call of acceptable social duty. You need a group of pretty confident gamers to bust out Karaoke Revolution, and inevitably even some of them will get all squirmy about it. It's just one of those things - like DDR or EyeToy - that some people just simply aren't going to do. My sister wouldn't even play the "Listen to the Doctor" segments of WarioWare Mega Party Games, where you might be randomly required to yell your mother's name, or keep one eye closed, or squat on the floor while playing the minigame. (My favorite doctor instruction: Play without touching the controller.)

While we're on the topic, I have to recommend the PS2 version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Not for the game itself - I've barely played it - but for the bonus EyeToy games. I think this little collection blows the doors off the EyeToy: Play disk that comes packed with the EyeToy itself. For one thing, these minigames come along with a sensical, competitive tournament feature... something the Play disk stupidly stupidly stupidly lacks. When you get a bunch of people to Play, you just Play forever until you see people start drifting out into the kitchen for soy nuts and not coming back. The Potter games offer up a mini-Triwizard Tournament, irrepressibly cute for fans and accessibly entertaining for Those Who Must Have Been Under A Rock For The Last Five Years.

You get sorted. Honest fuck, the game sorts your ass into one of the four Hogwarts houses... by putting the frigging Sorting Hat on your actual head. I love that. It's random, sure, but I love seeing the Sorting Hat chewing its thought cud on my head and delivering me unabashedly into Slytherin. Once all players are in, you churn through a bunch of the usual EyeToy-style games... lots of clapping and waving arms. And at the end, the House with the most points wins (they even show off the House points bean counter thing!) See, the game ends and someone wins. EyeToy: Play developers take note. For further anti-Play sentiment, the Harry Potter games look much better, they don't waste everyone's time slowly reading off the rules, and they utilize the EyeToy's built-in mic so you can scream at wandering ghosts.

Although my quibble with EyeToy remains: I want games where I don't have to stare at myself to play them. If this requires day-glo armbands, I'm okay with that.

I'd also be impressed if the new Metal Gear would use the EyeToy cam to allow Snake to watch you playing the game on a monitor screen somewhere. It sounds like the kind of mind-bending fourth-wall arthouse neo-gaming trick that Kojima would enjoy. (I'm playing Twin Snakes for the first time and just got to the bit where Col. Campbell explains that Meryl's codec number is "on the back of the package" and I'm still super-pissed about what package he's referring to. Damn tricky Kojima-san!)

And back to Nintendo, this microphone (I can't believe they don't have some kind of hip brand name for it yet) won't be the only bizarre peripheral on the racks this fall; coming up soon is Donkey Konga and the wonderful Konga Drum Controller. It's a good thing my entertainment center has plenty of space available.

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...

Owing to my recent TaleSpin cultural rennaissance, I've been all over eBay looking for old licensed junk. So far, I've scored a Disney "12 Months of Magic" TaleSpin pin, a box of the die-cast metal McDonald's TaleSpin Happy Meal toys, and another partial set of the Kellogg's TaleSpin PVC figures. (I was unhappily outbid on a plush Baloo and - more importantly - a plush Don Karnage.) Amid all the VHS tapes and Genesis games, I saw an auction for a (nearly) complete TaleSpin DVD set.

There is no DVD set. Disney never released these shows on DVD, and they likely never will. So any DVDs on eBay must be over-the-air dubs, completely unofficial and low-fi... no matter how many times the auction description uses the words "official" and "broadcast quality." Nevertheless, I've been watching out for them, because, you know, who gives a fuck. I'd like to have all 65 episodes on hand, and if some jerk dubs and burns them, it's all coming out of Eisner's bottom line anyway. And who cares about him.

I notice one DVD set for around $90 and another for $30. Figuring that they're both going to be sucky Toon Disney recordings anyway, I bid on the $30 one. I am quickly outbid. Feh. But then I get this email (preserved in its entirety):

Dear stocdred,

YOu really do more research before you bid on this thing dude - I have the only real Talespin set, it's on 13 DVDs and goes up tomorrow night. This guy's set is on only 5 DVDs...that = low quality, despite that he claims they are a 9 out of ten. MINE are a literal perfect 10/10 - you could not tell the difference between it and digital broadcast TV. I guarantee you he cannot say the same. My feedback speaks for itself. YES, mine is definitely more, but the quality is more than worth it. This guy has just basically shrunk down what I did meaning that his eps have lower bitrate encoding and that equals significantly reduced picture quality. PLUS - I also guarantee you that you've never seen better menus on any DVD you've ever seen than what you would see if you saw mine. Just wanted to educate you with this info - do with it what you will. ~!Ryan

Thank you,
agassi2000atp

I'm not sure that kicking off your email with a vague insult is the way to go in rustling up auction business. I also question the comparison to digital broadcast TV. I suppose he could be upsampling it, but that's always a smokescreen when the original source is totally analog. And then there's the line about "you've never seen better menus." I don't know, but I do some pretty nifty TaleSpin-related design work myself.

But what astonishes me the most is how illegal this all is. This choad (several choads, it seems) is trying really hard to rape fans with his fan-dubs, and I can't believe how obvious he's being about it. There's a progression of fault here:

DANGER LEVEL (from 1 to 10)
5: Dubbing off TaleSpin episodes and selling them on eBay.
7: Claiming that the fee is for the physical DVD media, not for the content, because charging for the shows themselves would be illegal. They really do say this!
13: Actively pursuing potential bidders and boasting about the quality of your production.
38: Explaining exactly how you burned the shows while you denigrate other illegal DVD rippers.
500: Running a dedicated website (with custom URL) to sell such DVDs, encompassing the products of multiple companies.

A couple days later, I get another email from another seller. Remember, I'm still not the top bidder on the auction. I am so not making this up, not even the Thundercats ref at the end:

Dear stocdred,

hi, you are GETTING RIPPED OFF ! on that Talesping dvd set, its NOT complete he says 64 !! because i got the same set from this seller such a ripoff real peace of crap that i emailed him back and asked for my money back, he wouldnt give it to me the episodes are so poor you cant even see anything !. there is a MUCH better set COMPLETE AT ALL 65 EPISODES ! with full menus, from this site where i got my talepsin set AND ITS MUCH CHEAPER plus the Thundercats www.TransformersCDs.com/ENTER --Linda

Thank you,
lovekids69

Holy Zan-in-a-bucket, I've stumbled into a DVD ripper's online business war! One point in "Linda"'s favor: this set does include all 65 episodes, including one that Disney stopped running because it contains a vague terrorist theme. (The Thembrians put a bomb on a plane, or something.)

Again. I live every day in fear that I'm going to get a cease-and-desist over my completely free, completely honorable TaleSpin card game, and these techo-pirates are aggressively pushing their junk onto any email that will have them. Suppose I was a Hyper Robot Disney Lawyer Force Team Go in disguise? Amazing chutzpah.

That said, all 65 episodes is looking pretty sweet.

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.

Most campers are 12-14. I know this because in every chat room I monitored inevitably someone would ask "HOW OLD IS EVERY1?" You have to walk in prepared for this. They're all on summer vacation, they're all video gamers, they're all painfully adolescent. It's best not to get too involved and let them have their fun. I rarely jumped in, although once I did feel the need to properly explain the DS's wireless capabilities.

It would be nice to have some kind of age verification system, and have some chat rooms open to 20+. But, short of using AdultCheck or a credit card, I don't know how Nintendo would accomplish that, and I don't think they'd care anyway. Camp Hyrule isn't for us.

So why did I (and Rhonda) join the fun this year? Because Nintendo was giving out 5 free Nintendo DS systems. We did not win.

But we played, to an extent. Every day there's these stupid activities that I would probably really get into if I also had the summer off. Write a haiku, Photoshop up a funny picture of one of the counselors, draw your favorite Pokemon. Simply attempting the activity earns a point for your Cabin, and when these kids get their competitive adrenaline up, nothing matters more than points for your Cabin. GO CABIN 3!

It took less than two days for news to spread that one of the counselors had "cheated" and rigged his Cabin hundreds of unfair extra points. This news was hotly exchanged in every chat room, and plenty of complaint messages were fired off. Oh, kids and their love of petitions. What I never understood was exactly how this guy cheated; that was never explained, the accusation was proof enough. His Cabin did win first place in the end, and he spouted off plenty of smack talk about it. Lame. I really hate giving in to that juvenile blood-boiling; I hated that in my own school days, where we were supposed to vilify the opposing team and win-win-win. But again, this is a show for the 12 year olds, so I kept to myself. I just wanted the damn DS anyway.

Of course, you could go Steve's (of N-Philes) route and purposefully enter Camp Hyrule to grief the other participants. That's sad, especially coming from a normally respectable Nintendo fansite. I guess N-Philes is making a bid to be the Bad Boy of Nintendo fansites. Interestingly, Steve thinks that Camp Hyrule was so much better four years ago... which is probably when he was 14. And now it's just internet newbie chatting and pointless busy work. Yes, it is. If you're at all offended by juvenile message boards and chat rooms, you should stay away from Camp Hyrule. Signing up just so you can go make trouble and annoy people is pretty pathetic.

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.

The whole Neopets stack bugs me for one reason: if all Neopet cards are to live in a separate deck, why don't they have a differentiating cardback design? It just seems like they were intended to be shuffled into the main deck, but Wizards wanted to avoid the traditional spells-to-mana deckbuilding ratio problems. I fully support finding ways around that - Marvel/DC Vs. has a great solution - but the standalone mini-deck feels like a last minute patch.

We also noticed that you never drill into your deck very far, so we started drawing two cards per turn. That helped... although we still didn't see even half of the 60-card decks I built. The manual says custom decks have to have at least 40 cards. Sounds like a good plan. Or else we play to 50 points instead of the assigned 21.

Neopets has a fatal flaw in its design. On your turn, you can do one of two actions with each available Neopet card: you can tap it to attempt to score points to win, or you can tap it to do something else. It's almost always better to go for the points than to do something else. I shouldn't even have to italicize that; it seems terribly obvious. Playing equipment cards, moving Neopets around, switching out Neopets, tapping to play specialty cards... all of these effectively cost you the chance to score, which can keep you behind in the race for points. We found ourselves only choosing the "something else" option when one of our 'pets was hopelessly sucky... which is more the fault of a lame draw than anything.

We can't imagine the intended purpose for the Hero cards, aside from a surprise reaction to a Villain card. To play a Hero, you have to tap a Neopet... but then the Hero has to attack in that specific 'pet's arena, and the Hero goes away at the end of the turn. Given that your Neopet should already be strong in that arena, it seems overkill to have him blow his turn just to bring in a Hero to do the attack. Unless, of coure, you're attacking a Villain and you need to extra-ramped-up stats... but who knows when and where Villains will appear. If Heroes are meant to be a "reactive" type card, they're pretty poor ones.

Maybe we'll come up with a better purpose for Heroes too. Our existing modifications made the game work better, in our opinion. I usually balk at changing the rules like this (Mike doesn't), but as long as we keep to the game's flavor, I can deal.

It's not a bad little game at all, but given Neopets.com's target demographic of Girls 9-14, I can understand why it plays a smidge tame. I guess we're working on the Adults 18-35 edition.

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.

Last Sunday morning, we had probably the biggest incident to date in terms of post-scuffle cleanup. It's around 6am, and I hear the unholy screaming. Instantly I'm out of bed; both cats are at the bottom of the stairs. It's dark and I don't have my glasses on, so the picture is fuzzy. They're not fighting, just yelling... so I stick my hand between them, and I feel a warm mist. Zoe is hissing, so I initially think it's some ferocious spitting. It's not.

Rhonda is right behind me, scoops up a trembling angry Zoe, and announces that she is wet. Somebody sprayed. Rhonda takes Zoe up to the tub for a bath (of which Zoe was actually very appreciative) and I inspect the area. Judging from Rhonda's report, whoever did it, most of it ended up on Zoe. There's some small little puddles on the floor, a lot of collateral damage to our pile of shoes. Suspiciously, none on Annie.

Although I'm not convinced Annie is the guilty party. It's extremely rare for a spayed female cat to spray like that... it's conceivable that Zoe did the deed and then sat in it herself because Annie had her cornered and I was barrelling down the steps. Either one of them could have sprayed, a natural reaction to the stress of the situation.

So we're back to locking Zoe in the back bedroom while we're away, because this kind of thing just can't happen when we're not around to play Benvolio. We're awfully lucky that they chose the bottom of the stairs as their battleground, because it's an area entirely devoid of carpet, comic books, electronics and other items that would be better served without a dousing of cat piss.

Since then, we've had a couple other near misses... Zoe goes into alert for no reason, then I pick her up and get her away from Annie. She calms down quickly enough, but it's such a mystery why it happens in the first place.

Zoe is getting spayed at the end of the month. It's entirely possible that her burgeoning sexuality is the culprit, and being fixed will smooth her out. We're hoping.

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.

Unlike my usual group, these guys are not pro card gamers. That's not a slight at all, it just means that these folks haven't been playing Magic Etc since 1994. What's great about that is that it forces me to break through all the preconceptions I have about card games and think about how to make the rules clear and concise. Essentially, I'm overtrained. Example: Playing one of my cards on an opponent's turn is nothing to me; I've done it hundreds of times under tens of different game environments. That's the kind of thing I would take for granted, but somebody else needs that explained lest they overlook an opportunity to play a card. And once they get that, then it becomes part of the structure and something they can look for while going through their hand. Several times during the demo sessions, we'd get a couple hands in, somebody would ask something, and I'd say "Oh, I should have pointed that out." And I'd feel stupid for it, because I'd let my long-standing gamer conceit color my instruction.

Now, though, this team is battle-hardened. They know the rules, they know the cards, they know the combos. Speaking as the monkey who designed the game, this is a treat to watch. When somebody throws down a good play, it's like finding a surprise $5 bill hidden inside a cassette of Dire Strait's "Brothers in Arms." We've had lots of really great, back-and-forth games lately (except for one day when Molly won on the second turn)... the only problem being how it eats right out of the lunch hour and into the actual workday. I'm costing my co-workers right on their timecard, so I feel pretty sheepish about that. But we're having fun, right?

Several cards have been altered because of this ongoing playtesting, although I have not posted anything to the website yet. Working on it. We're playing with the initial cardset plus the 20 card expansion. The expansion isn't online yet either; it adds in a bunch of slightly more-complicated cards (as well as a spiffy solitaire variant.) I was sort of thinking this expansion would be the final addition to the game - I spent a lot of time making this set even out a bunch of in-game card ratios - but the continued play makes me want to do more. I have plenty of screengrabs that have not been used, plus there's some great websites out there with more resources. It also helps that Toon Disney is currently airing TaleSpin at 11:00am (and 3:00am) weekdays, and we sometimes flip on the 11am run at work. (For the first time ever, I used the sentence "I should be Tivoing this.") So it's all very inspiring.

And flattering. I mean, I like it. I'd play it all day. But the guys behind Killer Bunnies probably say the same thing, and their game is lousy. So it's rewarding to see others embracing my game. Do I sound like a egoist schmuck yet? I worry about that. I don't want to force this junk on them and be the lame guy at work who makes us play his game and we don't know how to blow him off. But they like it, they understand it, they're good at it... and that's all I need to get a little lift.

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.)

So that's why Nintendo has bargain-priced it and included the free mem card and link cable... although if you're in deep enough to want Box, you most likely already have plenty of both, thanks to pack-ins and pre-order bonuses from other games.

The tragedy is that all the features of Box should have been included in Colosseum, which would have gone a long way towards making that game more palatable.

Aside from the unnecessary largesse of the storage containers, Box also lets you play Ruby and Sapphire on the TV. This feature was present in the N64 Stadium games, disturbingly absent from Colosseum, and already available to anyone with a Game Boy Player. The word is that Box will only play Ruby and Sapphire, however, not FireRed and LeafGreen... although I would hope they include Emerald on general principle. Box also lets you take snapshots of anything and use the pictures as box wallpaper, which is marginally nice if that strikes your fancy.

Then there's this asinine showcase option, where you can build 3D displays of your Boxed pokemon. The whole thing reminded me of a lamer Smash Bros trophy collection. It's a cute, Colorforms sort of idea, but what kills it is that the "trophies" are nothing more than 2D GBA sprites tacked onto some weak mounted display. If they had included the full-on 3D figures from Colosseum, and gave you total control of placement and cameras, this could have been a lot of fun... especially when coupled with the photography feature. I would have liked creating 3D battle scenes with dramatic camera angles. A Roselia facing off against a Torkoal! A horde of Mightyenas ripping into a school of Horseas! But no.

One benefit, we do have sexy Brigitte as the host of Pokemon Box. She possesses about three frames of animation and gives you an egg.

Only new Sapphire accomplishment: evolving up an Aggron. Still no Dragon Scale, even after catching another handful of Bagons. Here's hoping they're easier to find in LeafGreen and I can trade one over.

Time: 153:46
Badges: 8
Pokedex: 191
Party: Metagross lv69, Tropius lv30, Egg, Snorunt lv33, Golduck lv57, Feebas lv20

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.

By the time my bipedal frame can get me after them, they're circling like West Side Story. And Zoe has literally had the shit scared out of her: there's a couple little fresh cat turds dotting the kitchen floor. Both cats are growling and hissing.

I manage to scoop Annie up, although that doesn't stop the growling. I am now completely afraid, because I have no idea how this started or what to do about it. I carry Annie to the living room and return to see Zoe, but she's still deep into instinct... now hissing at me. Annie runs back in and spooks Zoe to dash into the laundry room, so I lock her in there.

I'm already late for work - and there's no way I can leave them like this. I quickly set up an emergency bivouac in the upstairs bedroom for Zoe: litter, food, water, toys. After a couple minutes, Zoe lets me ferry her upstairs. Shut inside the back bedroom, Zoe calms down and starts purring with me. But before I head out for work, I open the bedroom door - Annie is lurking on the other side - to see what happens. They lock eyes, Zoe falls back into alert, and they both do that dangerous low growl again. Door shut!

When you see your cute little pets act like this, it brutally reminds you what they're capable of. Your pets are not just mobile, toy-like, eat-and-shit machines. They are animals, built with innate abilities and cruel instincts that you or I can't imagine. "Domesticated" really just means "taught to eat processed factory leftovers from a bowl."

My guess is that Annie brought in some crazy scent from outside. Rabbit piss, feral cat piss, gorilla piss, I don't know. Whatever it was, it tossed Zoe into a full-body scare... which Annie interpreted as a dire threat. I have rarely been as frightened and upset as I was this morning, watching my girls try to kill each other. Threw my entire work day off. New rule: Annie no longer gets to sneak outside during the dehumidifier ritual, at least not until I can scour the area for dead moles or other clues.

I rush home as soon as I can. I open the deck door to hopefully let in more outdoor scents. I spring Zoe from her bedroom, and she seems normal, happily chirping as she trots down the steps. She walks right by Annie. No reaction from either feline. In fact, both are more interested in my smelly sandals. Status quo re-established. Hours later, they're both resting near me as I type this... Zoe doing some lick-bathing on the iMac desk, and Annie passed out on the PC desk.

So that was frickin' nuts.

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?)

So anyway, the games just plop a Marvel or DC logo atop the Vs. System logo. Do we call it Marvel Vs. and DC Vs.? The Upper Deck site limply refers to the games as "Marvel Comics" and "DC Comics." This is bad news for marketing. What they should have done is come with a great generic-yet-appropriate name for the comics-related releases, subtitled with 'Powered by Vs. System" or somesuch. (But still use the nice blankish Vs. cardbacks so you can mix all sets.) I hear the word "OverPower" might be available.

I'm currently referring to both games as "Marvel/DC Vs." although I could see myself shortening that to just "Vs." in the future.

Anyway, there's a lot this game gets right when it comes to being comics-faithful. Especially when compared to previous comics-based card games. Let's go back to OverPower, a common foil for CCG pundits. OverPower's notion was that you pre-select four heroes... and your deck consists of the cards that represent their powers plus a ton of lame-o cards with numbers from 1 to 8 printed on them. You had to buy a shitload of cards to get the good super-power cards for the four specific heroes you liked. And I should know. And then once you built your deck, you invariably got to a point where you realized OverPower was just classic War with modifier cards.

Vs. puts the heroes in your deck and puts specific powers directly on them, more along the lines of creatures in Magic (they even have the expected Attack / Defense numbers.) Each hero has a cost, which you pay with resource points... which are generated by playing any ol' card facedown (Hey! Are they ripping me off?) This is actually a smart way around the decade-old Magic Paradox: you have so many cool cards to play with, but half your deck has to be stupid Land cards. Playing any card as a "resource" means you'll never be mana-screwed. Bonus: Even though you'd expect the best-of-the-best characters like Batman or Spider-Man to be mega-expensive, there's actually several different versions of most heroes. So there's a cheap Batman, an average Batman and an uber-rare pricey Batman, all with different powers. So you don't have to wait until the end of the game to drop a Batman into play. And, unlike OverPower, if one of your heroes gets knocked out, you can just play another copy of him next turn.

I'm currently testing out a Fantastic Four deck with six cards for each of the classic Four members. Since you can only have one unique character in play at a time, six might be too many and I risk clogging my hand... but you can discard an extra hero card from your hand to instantly "power up" (+1/+1) an identically-named card in play. So that might help. Hey, I'm new to this.

There's two ways to pay for cards... which can be confusing to newbies. Characters and Equipment must be paid for ("recruited") with resource points, which is exactly what you think. You have 4 points, you can buy 4 points worth of stuff. Locations and Plot Twists, on the other hand, have a threshold cost instead. You just need to control X resources to play the card... so if you have 4 resources, you could conceivably play six different Plot Twist cards with a cost of 4 or lower. Bad Design Note: there is almost no visual difference between the recruit cost on a hero and the threshold cost on a location. They probably should have tacked a tiny cutesy icon by those numbers to remind you which is a recruit cost and which is a threshold cost; it would make learning the game much easier. Bad Design Note #2: Calling the action cards "Plot Twists" is terrible. It breaks the fourth wall and talks down to comics fans. Plus, how will that translate to a Hamtaro set?

The worst part of the whole game is the math. Totalling your combat damage can really slow the game down, even though it looks simple on paper. Let's say I attack your 3/4 character with a 6/2 character. Assuming nobody plays any Twists to jerk the numbers around, my guy does 6 damage to your guy - "stunning" him - and sending 2 points of breakthrough damage to you personally. 6 (my attack) minus 4 (your defense) equals 2 points breakthrough. But you also have to take damage equal to your guys recruit cost since he was stunned. Plus, your guy does 3 damage to my guy, stunning him... so I have to take damage from the stun (although no breakthrough... only attackers cause breakthrough.) Counting up all that can get really tiresome - especially if there's a lot of bonuses and such flying around - so try to play with somebody who can run fast mental math for you.

So, you know, math is tough. It's a necessary evil. But I maintain that any equation with more than one operator makes a game seem slow and overly complicated.

At the end of the turn, you get to untap everybody who is tapped and resurrect one stunned chracter. All other stunned characters are discarded. Whoops, not "tapped"... Vs. uses two terms to cover the much-loved act of tapping. Exhaust(ed) and Activate(d). They mean the same thing, they just have situationally appropriate shades of meaning. The dude is tapped regardless. Another subtle moment of confusion, but not a game breaker.

I like it; I'm ready to invest. The card design is nice... both the backs and the front templates are identical across both sets, so you can mix Marvel and DC characters without messing up your visuals. Although odds are I will never do that, being the slavish fanboy that I am.