I've been wanting to start regularly discussing about my weekly comics load, but have never found the time. I think it started way back in that issue of Fantastic Four where they go to meet God and God turns out to be Jack Kirby and he fixes Reed's melted face and it was so stupid and annoying. I really intended to write up how much I hated that issue. How they cleaned up an ongoing plot crisis (Reed's face) with the ultimate deus ex machina but cloaked it in a nice homage to the King so you couldn't wholly hate it. I did anyway.

I had three weeks of books waiting for me at the store, about $50 worth. I have an informal rule on comics pickup: if the amount goes over $30, I don't pick up any extra Pokemon boosters. Usually I don't run up against this restriction, but three weeks is kind of a long time to not pick up my books. In contrast, our latest grocery run was a full cart totalling $80 after coupons. Gives you an idea how things get budgeted around fourhman.home.

Fatal Frame: the Card Game is getting dangerously close to completion. The game is currently being tested with a 90-card deck, which is up from the initial mix. I'm wondering if it won't hit an even 100 before I feel it's ready to debut.

It's had some interesting developments; new rules have been added, old ones removed... some new rules have already been tossed out. The toughest goal to attain is to keep the game balanced. Since all players draw from the same deck, there's always the risk that Player A gets lucky enough to draw all the "good" cards while Player B continually gets shafted with crappy cards. One solution to that is to have lots and lots of good cards, or at least self-balancing cards, but that's easier said than done. TaleSpin has self-balancing cards in the form of the randomized die roll effect on the character cards. Fatal Frame at the moment is leaning towards lots of middle- to high-level cards... cards that are almost always useful. Or at least situationally useful. There are no weenie cards that allow minimal effects - say, Draw 1 Card - because cards like that are just waste. FF's action cards are pretty much all really good stuff.

LEGO Star Wars for PS2 is adorable. It cannot go unsaid.

I read the reviews. It's too short, they said. It's too easy, they said. I'm sure they're right, but at the moment those are not even my concerns. Two-player co-op, check. Lots to unlock, check. Faithful reproduction of beloved franchise filtered through LEGO worldview, check.

This is a game you should budget. Any competent gaming pair could blow through it in a night, endangering your purchase value. It's like playing mini-golf. Adults take their time and enjoy the foibles and whims of each green, while kids whack the ball as fast as they can so they can get to the next putt. LEGO Star Wars requires a tempered pace.

Lorne Lanning is leaving the gaming industry and taking Oddworld with him. And you know what? Good.

I remember an early Oddworld magazine article, circa the release of the first game, where Lanning was described as some kind of storytelling genius. The story - which may be apocryphal and just a marketing bullet point - went that Lanning had this vision... the years-in-the-making, years-in-the-telling story of the saga of Oddworld. And he excitedly told his story to someone (wife? business partner? both? I forget) and the two of them were up until dawn drafting the overall plot, the delicate character interactions, the subtext and the literary themes.

I have seen the future. Or at least, the first new episode of Family Guy since the whole cancelled-DVD release-Adult Swim-unprecedented success-uncancelled thing.

I won't say anything specific about it, for fear of jeopardizing any trade secrets, but I will say that I laughed. I wouldn't worry about the Family Guy crew having lost the touch or about all that hair mousse, earrings and contact lens going to Seth MacFarlane's head, because it felt just like any old Family Guy episode... as if nothing happened over the long break, and the long break really wasn't all that long.

The only thing I noticed was that it seemed weird to see the characters reffing something recent (say, Passion of the Christ), since we're so used to watching five year old reruns where they bust on old forgotten stuff like Ben Affleck.

I like the Zelda games, but I don't love the Zelda games.

I'm well versed with the series' staples - your empty bottles, your Lon Lon Ranch, your Gorons and Octoroks and such - so I do feel the nostalgic gush when those recurring elements are re-invented for each new game. And of course I enjoy the music, a quest's soundtrack that instantly identifies the shopkeeper, the fairy fountain and the dungeon. In each game, I want to fill up the inventory screen, collect all the heart pieces, and, of course, follow the threads of plot towards the annual goal of saving Princess Zelda.

But I usually find that the game works against me. As a concept, I think the Zelda franchise could use some smartening up. Once upon a time, Zelda was the vanguard of innovation in adventure games, and it ought to push a little harder rather than recycling many of the same old gimmicks.

Minish Cap is (hopefully) a transitional Zelda game. There are some clever and exciting changes to the formula... but also a whole lot of what irritates me about the Zelda series. There's a spark here, but not a brushfire.

Mark Evanier (whose weblog I regularly visit and enjoy) has requested an apology from everyone who lives in Pennsylvania...

I feel like everyone who lives in the state of Pennsylvania owes the rest of the country an apology for making Rick Santorum a Senator. And don't write and tell me you didn't vote for him. You should have tried harder to keep this guy from getting into office. This is the man who compared consensual homosexual sex to someone having sex with a dog. This is the man who is taking outright bribes from Wal-Mart to push legislation favorable to a company that already thinks it's above the law. This is the man who tried to gut medical malpractice awards even though his wife recently won a large one. His latest gambit is that he wants to block the U.S. Weather Service from making its weather data available for free on the Internet. This is the weather data that is paid for by our tax money. Santorum has introduced a bill -- and apparently, a vague and sloppily worded one, at that -- that would stop that because it cuts into the profits of private services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel. Do I even have to explain what a rotten, unfair-to-us idea this is? Hope he got paid well for this one.

OK, I like the PSP. I don't like the price and I don't like the overall fragile feel and I'm not all into the games for it yet... which is why I don't have one. But I like it, in pure theoretical terms. However, I don't get the commercial.

First of all, I bet that no one is more surprised than Sony that the two PSP launch ads ("POV" and "Blender") are still running. According to this article, the ads were only scheduled to go until mid-April, covering just under a month in which Sony no doubt fully expected the PSP to sell out across the country. The big sell out didn't happen; every retailer I visit has piles of them still available, and I still have $250 in my wallet. So the ads are still running.

After approximately five months of work and lots of playtesting (particularly from folks at the office; thanks guys!), Fatal Frame: the Card Game is online and ready for your perusal.

I probably would have had it all up sooner - in fact, I've had the website fully built for over a month now - but I spent far too much time working on the damn PDF files and tweaking rules and cards at the last minute. When you do something like this, creating a game from scratch, the internal idea is always that somebody else is going to play it. I could make games all day that only me and my select group of friends would understand, full of absurdities and in-jokes and complicated rules that would all but require my presence to explain (which reminds me of that awful Killer Bunnies card game, actually)... but part of the fun is releasing the game into the wild and seeing how it survives.