Why is no one talking about the damn-near-secret two player mode in San Andreas? I must be the only person impressed by it, because I have yet to see any review - online or off - that bothers to talk about it to any detail. Even Google is turning up crap on this one.

Me and Chris checked it out the other night. And no, I'm not talking about playing 2P pool at that bar down the street... I'm talking genuine dual-GTA, albeit slightly crippled.

I've only found one 2P icon in Los Santos. I would bet there's one in each city, perhaps more. The one I found is inside a fenced up hacienda. Start at the Johnson home and drive straight out the cul-de-sac. The area I'm talking about is just past the second bridge, on the right. You have to scale some fences to get to it.

Given the closed-off location of the icon, I figured it was some kind of enclosed paintball-esque arena dealie. But it's not! Once you activate a second controller and let Player Two choose a skin, you trigger a Free Roaming mission. So climb the fence and go nuts. If either player dies, you both are sent back to the hacienda.

Obviously the presidential election was a disappointment. I can only remind myself of several facts: My home state Pennsylvania went for Kerry, so my vote actually did count for something. 51% of the popular vote going to Bush is hardly a mandate, regardless of what FOX News would have you believe. And lastly, damn near half the country still hates Bush.

It sucks and it hurts and it's difficult to understand how so many people can continue to be enchanted by this man, given the unacceptable spending, the thinly veiled bigotry, his persistant incoherence, and the unbelievable right turn away from al Qaeda and into Iraq. So, in memoriam, here's some quotes from other Kerry-supporting weblogs:

I still feel like I'm outpacing the game a little bit, and Koga's gym was another easy go. His dojo has those famous invisible walls, but if you stare hard enough at the tiles, you can see where they are.

I actually tried to get through Sabrina's gym before heading down to Koga, but her battlers were definitely above my level. I did manage to clean out Silph Co. of the Team Rocket hostile takeover, and I grabbed a free Hitmonchan from the Fighting Club. Suckas.

I took the northward route up Cycling Road, wiping out all the bikers I could find. Not a lot of pain there, just a bunch of Weezings, mostly. At the top of Cycling Road is a Scientist with an Amulet Coin for you. Now I'm working to catch the Snorlax blocking the path east, just because I want to snag a couple of the brutes.

Since Sunday night I have been in the Baltimore area for a work conference. I've been to seminars like this before - both for work and not for work - and they are all much the same. The day starts too early, the sessions run long, the lunches suck, and the ratio of good info to silly rah-rah runs far too even.

The accommodations are in nearby Towson, which is weird since they then have to shuttle our asses for an ugly congested commute to the seminar locale deep within the Baltimore Sun newspaper compound. I like the hotel setup, since I have had good time to play Pokemon on the shuttle, and the hotel adjoins the regionally famous Towson Towne Center, a mega-mall I quite like.

Although the seminar organizers today committed the egregious error of asking those of us who drove to Towson Sunday night to now drive to the newspaper building for tomorrow morning's final event day. What the fuck. So now I get the brilliant pleasure of having to navigate through Baltimore morning rush hour. Way to fuck up the whole conference for me on the last day. They'll be hearing about that on my comment card.

I love things like this (thanks lileks.com) because they showcase how fearful some groups can get... to the point where they're searching for invisible demons in everything. It used to be that we'd just attack video games for endorsing violence; now we're offended by their plotlines too.

That article suggests boycotting Halo 2 because of a quote that the storyline could be read as a "a damning condemnation of the Bush Administration’s adventure in the Middle East." Now, I don't care much for Halo. I don't own an Xbox. I don't like Microsoft. But I encourage anyone who would be interested that said article was written by an asshat and that you should totally buy Halo 2. Not that any Xboxer is going to need further convincing; the Xbox has about five good exclusive games and two of them begin with "Halo."

OK, so I got one.

I wasn't planning on it, but the combination of demo units at Target and G4TechTV's bizarro DS day event forced my hand. Last week the DS kiosks began to pop up... our East End Target hid theirs in the video game accessories aisle, where it could hold court over third party memory cards and an infinite assortment of pretty GBA purses. I buzzed through the Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt offering without truly grasping the two-handed control setup. It wasn't until we left that I realized I hadn't tried out the stylus-based control scheme.

So we visited the West End Target (Yes, we have two. We're blessed.) Their DS demo was more happily located by the Locked Software Atriums... but this one did not have Metroid in it. It had nothing. But while the stylus-testing mission was scrapped, firing up a cartridge-less DS does get you into the system settings and PictoChat, so I played with that instead. I typed IMs to an empty chat room.

So Venomoths cannot learn the Fly HM? Insane. They fly, don't they? My designated Flyer is now a Fearow, an ugly bird with a nasty disposition. Well, I wanted something different than the Pidgeots and Butterfrees I've used before...

After rampaging through Sabrina's Gym (thanks to Gengar), I realized I never found the Surf HM. I did a ton of backtracking and talking, but I could not locate any clues on its whereabouts. So I did what anyone should do in that situation: I asked an eight year old. "That's in the Safari Zone," he told me. Oh, yeah, right. When you first walk in there, you read all these signs and convos about the great gift you get if you can make it all the way to the farthest corner of the Zone. I thought that was just a stupid sidequest! They even tell you the prize you get "will make getting around much easier." I was really hoping you'd get a fighter jet or something... but it's just Surf, which is completely necessary to continue in the game.

I'm just not ready to leave Los Santos yet.

I'm right at the mission that kidnaps you from home and leaves you for dead out in the boonies. I know this because I triggered it once already and bailed out to the last save. I decided to go back because there seemed like so much left undone in Los Santos... chiefly, pushing out the area's rival gangs.

This weekend I finished clearing out all the purple Ballas and yellow Vagos locations. Every available territory is now a jaunty Grove Street green. However, I received no hidden bonus for completing this task, which makes me think that there will be more gangbanging to come. GTA is so bonus-happy that I can't imagine a player taking the time to control the map and not receive something cool for it.

Judging from the "Purchased Music" playlist in my iTunes, I would guess I'm about $100 in. That's not much at all, but it's completely found money on Apple's part, because I doubt I would have bought any of that music otherwise.

121 songs. 7.4 hours. Only six full albums; the remainder all in singles. And about a dozen of those were free grabs during last year's Pepsi promotion. Most of the playlist is stuff Rhon wanted, but it also includes some They Might Be Giants rarities, some newish Weird Al... and then there was that crazy week when they first added the Disney catalog.

Being mostly isolated from current music, my impulse purchases have been sparked by video games. So listen up, marketers, getting your band's songs in DDR did pay off. Here's the songs I bought on iTunes and the games from which I know them. As far as I'm concerned, these songs don't even exist separate from the game.