August 2005 Archives

I like InuYasha. I mean, I've never really gotten into watching it absolutely every night, but if I happen to catch it I'll usually stick around. I like the characters, I like that the action is impressive and fun without getting into absurd DBZ-levels. So I figured an InuYasha card game would have a lot of potential.

I picked up the learn-to-play 2-player InuYasha starter set, where you get a hero deck and a villain deck. My first impression was that the cards look pretty nice... I like borderless artwork. Although, just like Zatch Bell, they don't make the card types obvious enough. The color of the text box at the bottom of the card indicates character, item, event or location. Identifying character cards is pretty easy because they have additional stats on them, but you need to think a little harder for items and events (there are no location cards in this starter pack.) Also, the rulebook is distressingly tiny... a trifolded rectangle 3.5" by 8". With a panel devoted to a splash of artwork and almost two additional panels for glossary and rules lawyering, that doesn't leave much for actual gameplay explanation.

We gave it a shot at work and it failed miserably. The whole time I'm thinking "I have got to be missing something, because this does not work at all." Stick close on this one, because it's stupid dumb. Each character has three color stats on it, pulled seemingly randomly from five unexplained attack types. So li'l Shippo has 3 in black, 3 in red and 4 in green. Mega-baddie Naraku has 3 in black, 5 in purple and 7 in green. Here's how the starter rulebook explains the attack process:

1. Choose who attacks who. We'll say Shippo attacks Naraku.
2. Choose an attacking color. We'll choose red.
3. Make sure no effects prevent a legal attack. OK, none do.
4. Expend (tap) your attacker if there is a matching color. Tapped, they share black and green.
5. Use any effects blah blah blah. No effects to play in this example.
6. Compare the color values. Shippo has a 3 in red, Naraku has 0 in red.
7. Defeat the defending character if the attacking value meets or beats the depending value. BOO-YAH SHIPPO BEATS NARAKU!!!111!!
8. Steal a shard if defender was defeated. At the beginning of the game, each player antes 5 cards to act as shards and the first to 10 shards wins. Shippo gets a shard!

Each turn you're allowed to play two characters, so in a two-on-two battle phase, it is sadly easy to simply select a color your target doesn't possess and score an instant kill / shard get. Every time. Defeated characters are turned facedown (which the rulebook doesn't mention until you get to the glossary) so whoever goes first each battle phase is going to net one shard (P1C1 defeats P2C1, P2C2 defeats P1C1, P1C2 defeats P2C2), and over the course of the game, that would reduce to the shards equalling out every other turn. Unless one unlucky player gets behind on dropping two characters a turn.

So most games aren't going to win off a shard victory, they're going to end on the secondary victory condition, whoever runs out of cards first loses.

Seems like a flaw, eh? So we made riotous fun of the game and lamented the waste of a cool license like InuYasha.

Then, when I decide I'm going to publicly web-flog the game, I head over to the official site to gauge the level of support the game has... and I find the starter rulebook has things completely backwards. According to the online rulebook, you tap your attacker no matter what to start the attack, and you can only attack a defending character that shares a color with the attacker. So in the above example, Shippo would have to choose black or green... giving Naraku a fighting chance. In this epic Shippo vs. Naraku confrontation, Shippo ought to select black (3 to 3, ties favor attacker), but at least Naraku has a value in black that he could pump with a surprise card play.

What a huge cock-up. Was that intentional to give the starter set gimped rules? As provided, the starter decks are worthless as a game... it's just an exercise in drawing cards and trading jewel shards back and forth. And as a marketing tool, my interest in the game just dropped to a 0 in black.

We may try it again under the more sensical ruleset, but I still don't think this will be the Next Great Trading Card Game. To play cards, you have to pay their cost by discarding cards off the top of your deck. On an average turn, you're drawing three cards but dumping four to five from the deck without even seeing them! That encourages fluffy deck building, because you wouldn't want to lose your few big linchpin cards because you paid two to drop Kagome on the table. Also, at the end of your turn, you "save" any defeated characters by discarding identical character cards from your hand... so, again, your deck is going to be stacked with multiple versions of the characters so you can keep them in play. InuYasha decks are going to be loose and boring, full of duplicates just so your own deck doesn't screw you over.

I've identified a major personal deal-breaker in card games. If a game is based on a license, I want said game to respect the license and treat the characters as important elements of the gameplay. I love licensed games because I want to re-create the action of the show/movie/whatever... so I want the game to duplicate that. So I have a real problem - and I touched on this before when talking about Marvel/DC Vs. - when games turn the licensed characters into mere commodities at the mercy of the game.

My example before was with Batman. A card game about Batman should always have Batman in it. Batman should start the game in play. Batman should never leave play until he has been killed by your opponent, and then he should never return unless something really amazing happens. The game should treat Batman as the main character that he is, not as an interchangeable part of the overall game engine. The way Marvel/DC Vs. works, you can have a Batman deck (the Gotham Knights faction) that may actually never field Batman himself... or at the least, you have to slog through a couple turns of nobodies and second stringers before you can get Batman in play.

In the Case Closed TCG, you don't start with Conan or Rachel or Det. Moore in play... you just have to hope they show up. In fact, the game has an uncountable number of background characters who can investigate crimes just as well as Conan can (Conan just has better stats.) Where's the fun in a Case Closed card game where you're playing with Innocent Suspect #3 from episode four?

In the Lord of the Rings TCG, we have the exact opposite problem: each player can have the same characters in play. Frodos all around! It's the same lack of immersion as having none of the lead characters in play... having too many of them!

And in InuYasha, you just play whoever you have in your hand, picking fights according to color values, tossing the losers at the end of the turn and playing them again a couple turns later... there's no interpretation of the wandering-band-of-heroes-against-the-demon-world like in the cartoon.

In all of these cases, the game violates the atmosphere of the source media. I'm sure most gamers don't care, but it's a huge bugaboo for me. I like to connect with my deck and the personalities in it, because, from my view, the story of the game is just as important as the play of the game. I don't want to wait half the game before Batman shows up and then lightly toss him aside as a meaningless casualty in his first battle. Your average Magic creature sees more play than most Vs. super-heroes.

I suppose my first hard rule would be making characters unique across all players. One person gets Frodo. Player two can have Fatty Bolger. Then I'd want a starting posse of main characters - maybe not all of them - and some pretty strict rules about killing them off. I can only think of a couple games that operated like this, and none of them are still in business (again indicating my minority viewpoint!) Middle Earth had severe uniqueness rules and the posse asthetic. OverPower allowed character dupes across the table, but at least kept your starting heroes in play until your opponent knocked them out. Doomtown and 7th Sea both had highly immersive character-based rules, but of course, didn't use licensed characters. I'm sure there are more games out there that would fit the bill (like the old Decipher Star Trek and Star Wars games, L5R), but the toughest criteria is that it has to fall under a license I already like.

Conversely, if the license allows it, a good game can break my rules. In Pokemon, the card game simulates exactly what happens in the video game. You collect pokemon by drawing them from your deck and send them out to fight each other. By definition, pokemon are not unique, so it doesn't wreck the atmosphere if both players have a Growlithe on the table. And with persistant HP per creature, it feels like you're dealing with actual wounded monsters over time, instead of the once-hit-kills of Vs. or InuYasha. By stepping closer to the first-person storytelling of the Game Boy games and away from the specific story told in the cartoon, the card game avoids any issues of both players having Ash cards in play. It's a good representation of the Pokemon universe, albeit concentrated on the battling/evolving aspect of it. Rather than, say, berry blending or furniture collecting. The crux is that the license works within the game, instead of the game taking liberties with the license.

I guess it's been a couple months since anybody thought about Pat Robertson, because he decided it was time to say something powerfully stupid again.

This time he encouraged the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His quote is hilariously impotent, the meandering ramblings of a blind, deaf and dumb pseudo-patriot whose kill-all-foreigners mentality has been frustratingly buried under decades of enlightened thought. The background for his statement is that Chavez is paranoid about secret US-led assassination attempts: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."

Nice job, Christians. Another one of your elected media leaders managed to embarrass himself and the entire country once more. Oh, I know, Christianity is so fragmented and compartmentalized these days that he doesn't speak for your church. And yet, somehow he sits atop a media empire - worshipped by millions - at the forefront of our nation's craziest of crazies, the Christian Coalition.

And lest we forget, this is the same small-minded ass who, along with Jerry Falwell, announced that God didn't just "stop" the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a snap of His Mighty Fingers because He had decided to punish the US for, among other things, homosexuality, material pleasures, and taking the Bible out of the classroom.

He's even taken to repeating himself: he made a similar pro-assassination comment on the 700 Club, that bastion of free thought and civil discourse, back in 1999... so don't buy his lame apology that he spoke out of frustration or out of context. This is what this jerk actually believes. In 1992 he suggested that white South Africans' votes ought to count more than black South Africans' votes. In 1997 he turned the entire recorded history of the United States on its ear by claiming that it was the Muslims who captured Africans and sent them to the States as slaves, not the good white Americans of the time.

And, just to make absolutely sure that he alienates at least 50% of the American population: "I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."

After 9/11, I recall a lot of public opinion that Arab-Americans and all other wonderful, beautiful American citizens with ties to the Middle East ought to "call home" and tell their friends and family over there that Americans aren't all that bad. That the average American has no interest at all in their country or resources or traditions and we just want to capture those responsible for taking down the World Trade Center. The gist of the argument is a plea from the common man to the other common man: do something about the few fanatics in your country, stand out against them, let's work together.

Somebody needs to tell the Christians of America to stand up against bigoted, hateful maniacs like Robertson, Falwell, Pat Buchanan and the rest. Stop propping them up. Stop listening to their rhetoric. Stop letting them speak for you from the biggest bully pulpit in the country. Stop letting them influence our politics. Are there no Christian leaders to rise to the top that aren't frothing with fearmongering, racism, and insensitivity? Are there no Christian leaders who live in this century?

Saturday was our second biannual yard sale for the year. We made almost $40. Most of what I contribute is old VHS movies that I have vowed to never watch again. The only VHS I'm holding onto is what I would consider collector stuff, like the Twin Peaks box set, Red Dwarf series 1 through 7, and my extra rare copy of The Compleat Weird Al. VHS offends me.

This being Clark's first yard sale, I imagine he was mightily confused. Why are we all in the front yard? With all this junk? Isn't this where we keep the car? He took his naps like a champ, though, so we were able to manage the yard sale business and entertain regularly scheduled Clark guest appearances.

Well, Rhon was. I spent most of the time playing Magic with Matt, my gamer next door. He's going into ninth grade, I think, and he occasionally gets down to the comic store for Thursday night open Magic tables. After having playing Magic hardcore for a couple years, it's fun to see the game again from the outside. Matt shows me all these crazy cards that just came out, most of them far more complicated and feature-packed than the 1995-1998 era I'm familiar with. In those days, we were thrilled to have a creature with flying AND a pumpable attack. Today, you get jerks like that for nothing. The big guns today fly, don't tap to attack, come back to play even after they die, plus give you life every turn.

Matt's current deck is a white life-gaining affair. At one point he had himself up to 50-couple life. I played a pair of my old decks, my Goblin deck and my black/blue Vampires and Air Elementals deck. They're quite old; you'd be hard-pressed to find a copyright date within the last five years on these cards. We played about a dozen games, probably a third of which were really good, even matches.

That game where he got up above 50? I did 70 damage to him on the next turn. Mogg Infestation + Fork (on the Infestation) + Mogg Infestation again + Kyren Negotiations. 70 Goblins. He doesn't pull out a lot of cards that protect against direct damage... I don't know if his usual playgroup concentrates on creature damage instead or if the game itself does these days, but it leaves him wide open for my Negotiations, Goblin Bombardment, and/or Goblin War Strike.

My Goblin deck has a Coat of Arms in it and two Mana Flares. Both of those can get risky since they help your opponent as well, but it's usually better for me to play them than to avoid them. In our final game, I had both Mana Flares and a ton of Mountains on the table... so I only had to tap one land to generate a fresh Gobbo with the Goblin Warrens. He actually had me on the ropes on this one because he had some big 5/5 flying artifact dragon thing, plus some awful enchantment that taps all red creatures and keeps them from untapping. I was down to 3 life before the math turned in my favor and I could generate enough Goblins to feed into the Bombardment to kill him.

Midway through the day, he changed his deck and added a bunch of those little goons that have Protection from Goblins, so that was good fun to figure out ways around them. He also has this cool double sided fox wizard dealie, who starts out as a cheap creature, but when you hit 30 life, he flips around to become an enchantment that prevents all damage done to your creatures. Hilarious, but that guy earned a big red target on his chest whenever he showed up.

My black/blue deck didn't fare as well, but it's sort of a slow starter. It uses the old Nettling Imps... either in conjunction with Twiddles and an Icy Manipulator to kill enemy creatures, or as forced food for the Sengir Vampires. Probably needs another Icy in there somewhere. For some reason, I kept a Nevinyrral's Disk in that deck for years, but it's out now.

As intrigued as I am about the new cards, I just don't think I could buy into Magic again. It's still a good game, but there's so many other games out there that I'd rather sample from the rest of the shop. And I just can't care about the Magic storylines. I know it's been a while since I last looked into it, but for years they kept pumping out generic fantasy nonsense, and the new cards don't look much different. (Plus, I hate the new card templates.) Certainly, I still play games that also have average theming and plot - Pirates, for one - but I think I would be forcing myself to enjoy what Magic offers. Also, the card pool is intimidatingly enormous... I have trouble deckbuilding as it is, I really don't want to have to think about a decade of cards. The alternate is to pay attention to the current tournament scene and only build decks with the latest couple expansion sets, but I don't really want to keep track of that either. I'll stick with smaller, failing games, I guess.

Speaking of that, I bought six boosters of the new Marvel Vs. expansion, the Avengers and quickly realized that is enough of that. I do not care about any of the teams included in this set. I guess I would build an Avengers deck or maybe a Kang Council deck, but Masters of Evil? Squadron Supreme? I had the same issue with the Marvel Knights set. More dopey teams featuring minor league characters. With the Green Lantern set, I went straight to singles and bought enough cards for a GL deck... no Anti-Matter goofs, no stupid gormless Manhunters. The Vs. team needs to stop digging up new awful obscure teams and return to the name brands that have characters people know and like. Once they do a Justice League team, who's left of any importance across both universes? The Watchmen? Doom Patrol? Speed Force? Vertigo? Infinity Watch? Starjammers? Howard the Duck?

Nintendo's Camp Hyrule 2005 ended tonight, and my cabin won. So in a few weeks I'm going to receive a presumably awesome free t-shirt.

This was my second year at Camp Hyrule, which isn't really a camp but more of a limited time chat room and message board. It's mainly silly, but they always give away something so why not enter. This year the camp's theme was the new Legend of Zelda game, Twilight Princess... so on Day Two they announced that Twilight Princess has been delayed from November '05 to sometime after March '06. That sent SHOCKWAVES through the camp, I can tell you.

In addition to the overall Zeldiness of it all, other recent and upcoming Nintendo games pop up as sponsors of locations on the map. This year we had a Mario Sports Complex that talked about Mario Baseball, Mario Strikers and Mario Kart DS. Kirby Canvas Curse sponsored the mess hall, DK King of Swing had a treehouse, we had a Pokemon Center, and there was a Nintendogs kennel out back. There were associated chat rooms with all of these, as well as a couple of short flash games to play. To keep things interesting, there's a plot that develops over the course of the week that makes changes to the camp map. The map began the week in darkness but was gradually lit up as campers completed minigames. Each day, we saw animal footprints circling a different section of camp, which was a clue to let you know where to go to play that day's minigame. In a surprise move, about two hours before the closing ceremonies, the entire map was set on fire and the buildings were all destroyed, the result of a Moblin raid.

I was assigned to Cabin 9, which was named (by my fellows) as the K-9 Kennel. The naming process requires that campers hash it out inside a chat room, which is a predictably shameful affair. Generally, you're going to see cabin names that reflect the number of the cabin and a Nintendo pun. So Cabin 8 is ALWAYS going to be 8-Bit Something, Cabin 10 is going to be NinTENdo something, and Cabin 7 is going to include the Seven Stars somehow. Luckily the looming release of Nintendogs overshadowed the knee-jerk reaction to have Cabin 9 be NINEtendo Something. Although, truth be told, my suggestion was to name ourselves the Ninetendawgs XD, as a badassier Nintendogs pun with the "Nine" emphasized. I also lobbied to add "XD" to whatever was chosen, to make fun of the sure-to-be-awful new Pokemon non-RPG cash-in battle game, Pokemon XD.

Every day, the camp counselors put up a list of tasks, and every task you submit earns points for your cabin. Cabin 9 took an early lead in task completion, so when it looked like we had a chance of winning, I jumped in and did all the assigned tasks for the last two days. Last year I was in a dunce cabin that was bottom of the pack right out of the gate, so it was nice to have been randomly seated in a motivated cabin that started strong and continued to dominate. At the end of the week, we were several hundred points ahead of the second place cabin.

The tasks are generally dippy Photoshopping projects or middle school level creative writing assignments, like "compose a haiku about Camp Hyrule." Here's what I submitted for Wednesday and Thursday's tasks:

They always do face painting, where they post a pic of one of the Camp admins and you're supposed to wreck it somehow. This one is of Shaun, who has a reputation for being an ass. You know there's always one camp counselor who's all gung ho for his cabin and talks trash about everybody else? Shaun is that guy. There's also some kind of stupid pickle in-joke about him, but I'm not about to hang out in a chat room long enough to have the joke explained to me. So his face painting picture was actually of an inflatable pickle. The pickle reminded me of Burger Time.

The other art project of the day was to design a faceplate for the upcoming overpriced Game Boy hardware iteration, the Game Boy Micro. Although I love the idea of changeable faceplates, there's no way I'd pay $100 for this. Old tech made pretty does not make it worth more than an SP or only $30 under the price of a DS. Keep your Apple-based pricing away from this one, Nintendo. Get that price down before the holidays. Anyway, I did a Pikachu theme. This one actually made the display page as being the best submission from Cabin 9.

The other task for Wednesday was a crazy internet scavenger hunt, but the admins dropped it because it was too easy to cheat on it.

Thursday's face painting was at least a real person, Jack. I took the opportunity to make a sort of Animal Crossing editorial cartoon. WE WANT ANSWERS, NINTENDO.

Then there was a DK King of Swing art project, to prove that Nintendo hasn't forgotten to release games for the GBA. You just had to do something based on Donkey Kong, so I turned it into a clever pun on Katamari Damacy. That makes two non-Nintendo games I included in my artwork.

The creative writing project for Thursday was to write a theme song for Camp Hyrule, Weird Al-style. I'm ashamed to say I wrote a song based on "This Fire" by Franz Ferdinand. If I could reproduce it here, I would, but I typed it straight into the submission box so it is now lost forever. All I can remember is that I wrote the lyric "If any camper gets out of control, we're gonna ban that camper, ban that camper." Oh yeah.

Realistically, this represents about 15 minutes inside Photoshop. But that turned into 8 points for the K-9 Kennel, which, as I said, we didn't need anyway. Regardless, I'm getting a damn t-shirt. A playable demo of Twilight Princess would have been better, but I'll take the t-shirt.

I don't really know a thing about manga, but somehow I stumbled into picking up a few, which quickly snowballed into a ton. Actually, for years I unilaterally hated manga and anime, and I should probably apologize to Shawn about now, since back in high school he was into all of that way before it became mainstream cool. We're talking 1991 here; I don't even know what was available back then. All I knew was that the animation on Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors sucked, and that was good enough reason for me, unfair as that is. About that time, I started seeing imported comics show up in Previews (the comic store distribution and ordering catalog), and most of the anime and manga back then was of the creepy pre-teen upskirt variety. A decade later, Cartoon Network started showing DBZ late night and I began paying attention. And now with Adult Swim, I'm right there with all the rest of the fanboys. So, uh, sorry Shawn. You were right.

Much of my collection is media-driven, which I'm sure would make true manga fans scoff. If I like watching it on Adult Swim, I'm usually interested in seeing the original manga the cartoon was based on. I'm avidly collecting Case Closed and Fullmetal Alchemist at the moment. Case Closed is cool because it looks like a kids show but constantly deals with adult level murder mysteries. And as for Fullmetal, I never seem to be around to catch the show running in order, so I'm reading the comics to get the proper story. I also have a couple Lupin III books, which are wildly different from modern manga because they date from the 1960s and have kind of a classic Playboy comic strip feel. I have the five Cowboy Bebop books, and Baron the Cat Returns (which I picked up because I liked the animated movie.) Started picking up Inital D, which I first encountered as a medicore TCG a couple of Origins ago. I also have the first three books in The Ring series, but I refuse to buy the fourth because they want $12 for it and it's half the length of any other $10 manga on the shelf. The hell.

As far as non-media empire properties go, the ones I've glommed onto seem to me to be just shy of hitting the US bigtime. Love Hina is a great series (14 books) that drags out a Will They / Won't They young romance. There's a certain amount of titillation in Love Hina, but it's always played for laughs or as pure innocent love. For example, the main male character is always accidentally falling through doors and seeing the various female characters nude. It strikes me as distinctly Japanese, because there's a great deal of embarrassment associated with the nudity, whereas the American equivalent would probably be something like Porky's. As the series goes on, it does flail about a bit into ridiculousness, but it always comes back to the poignant center story eventually. Love Hina is a pretty popular title, so I'm surprised we haven't seen much of the anime series it spawned. Either the cartoon version totally sucks or it takes M-rated liberties with all the girls-covering-themselves-with-towels bits, because I don't know of any US channel running it. You can buy it for $100 at Suncoast, and even though I'd love to see it, I'm not dropping that on a show I haven't tested out first on cable.

Here's one that I would love to see take off, Sgt. Frog. The premise is that a race of frog-like aliens have invaded Earth. Their plan is to take it over, or, failing that, blow it up... but the small team of frogs get distracted by general Earth life and never really get around to pulling off their master plan. There's a subtle Pokemon vibe in that each frog primarily hangs out with a human kid they've become attached to... and that just screams of the monster/trainer relationship seen a dozen times over. (Where's my Sgt. Frog card game!?) But overall, the series is much more sitcommy and never dives down as far as the never-resolved, always battling structure of Digimon, Zatch Bell, Pokemon, etc. It's funny stuff. Sgt. Frog also bails out into the same type of crazy-stupid action that burns Love Hina, but here it fits better since we're talking about aliens... when Su from Love Hina starts building giant turtle mecha, I start reading faster.

Once I started buying manga semi-regularly - which corresponds exactly with manga showing up in droves at major booksellers - I made a beeline for Battle Royale. This one had somehow penetrated the clueless fog of my pre-manga mind, no doubt due to a fairly longstanding legacy of being one of the most twisted and gruesome comics ever made. This is serious Over 18 stuff, far removed from the cutesy sex allusions of Love Hina. It takes place in an alternate-reality police state Japan where every year one school class is chosen at random to get dumped on an island with the instructions to kill everyone else before they kill you. Last kid standing "wins." This book pulls no punches. It's probably the only manga at your local Border's that is shrinkwrapped and there is a wealth of good reasons why that's so. I love it, but it is a tough book to read at times. A lot of the time. But it definitely makes you think about your old school classes and your circles of friends and wonder what you would have done.

So those are my recommendations. Manga books feel like a good value... you usually get 180 pages for $10. But you have to remember that the Japanese value silence as much as we value noise, so you can easily flip through page after page of establishing shots and wordless panels. Initial D is a major dealer in that. After years of reading American books, I did need some time to train myself to read in the other direction... and I still screw it up from time to time purely out of gaijin habit. But one cool thing is, even though some series are absurdly long, most of them do actually end. Imagine if Superman just ended after 20 issues.

I keep forgetting to mention this, but there's a really awesome cut on the Minna Daisuki Katamari (We Love Katamari) soundtrack. It's a medley of songs from the original Katamari Damacy, but sung completely by animals. Dogs, monkeys, cats, cows, sheep, frogs, pigs... and you can pick out a horse, elephant and hawk near the end.

It's like all the animals in the world, so taken with the beauty of the first game and the magnificence of the King of All Cosmos, simultaneously lift their heads in song and tribute. It is wonderful.

Day of Vengeance #4 Detective Chimp handles most of the narration in the issue, which gives him a chance to relate his secret origin. And Jim Rook decides on the team's name: the Shadowpact. Now: would I buy a Shadowpact book? Maybe. I dig team books. I get almost all of DC team books. And I like most of the characters involved, particularly Blue Devil, Ragman and the Chimp. If the ongoing book would keep the same sardonic, self-aware vibe that Day of Vengeance has maintained, I would definitely try it out. Although, looking forward, I can't see it sticking around long. DC has done this before: use a major event miniseries to launch of team of nobodies into their own book that no one buys. Want to talk about Primal Force?

I am a little concerned that an amped-up Enchantress can be taken out just by a punch to the face, though.

More pressing is that freakin' She-Eclipso escaped. But I guess it's nice that our team managed to keep Spectre from killing everybody. Although I knew that Eclipso couldn't be so easily dispatched last issue (stabbed in the gut by BD's spear - er, TRIDENT!) I hate the character so much that I'll take anything. They could fly in G'Nort to kill Eclipso and I'd accept it as canon.

Lori Zechlin is now Black Alice, which is presumably her badass hero name. She's the new IP on this team of recycled nobodies. They haven't yet said what her powers are, but she's going to be the key figure set against Crazy Spectre. The scene were Nightshade and the Chimp recruit her by talking to her father was highly amusing

OMAC Project #4 See, this is why I don't think Max Lord is our Max Lord. Because he's dead already. He's been established as a psychotic shadow crimelord for exactly 4 issues now - despite years of continuity as a super-huckster - and now he's dead. The only good bit stemming from his involvement in this big summer event is that we get the Giffen JLA back in action... sans Beetle, obviously. In this issue, Booster and Guy find Fire, continuing the thread that this League wants to find out the truth without begging for scraps at the current League's heels.

Max's death has triggered a built-in command to Brother Eye and now the OMAC sleeper agents are waking up and going apeshit. Although snapping Rocket Red's neck elicits only the merest of shrugs from DCU fandom, I'm sure.

Rann-Thanagar War #4 There's nothing left to say. More boring, overwrought space opera.

Villains United #4 Maybe we can put the Catman/Deadshot homosexual gossip to rest now, eh? Both lads drool over an undressing Scandal - who finally seems to have developed an identity more interesting than chaperone. Although her new costume choice is very typical: blades, chrome, facemask, tribal tattoo, bare midriff.

Had some other revelations in this issue: the purpose of Lex Luthor's "secret society", even a nice reason why they chose the word "society." Prior to this, the Secret Society of Supervillains was just a stupid cartoon bad guy team name. I like it when somebody tries to add contemporary relevance to something from the past that was dopey.

And Dr. Psycho trying to clandestinely nudge Luthor into doing what he wants! Hilarious! I suspect he's critical to Luthor's big mindwipe plan, or they'd stick him down with the junior grade dorks like Captain Nazi or Knockout doing guard duty.

Firestorm. Luthor is using Firestorm as his power supply. That's great. Unfortunately for Firestorm, he's far too powerful for most writers, so he either gets written as a simp or he's locked up somewhere. Looks like we chose the latter on this one... but he's free now, and pissed. His costume continues to be embarrassing... and since Catman is wearing a special night-time version of his terrible outfit, that makes Firestorm the Worst Dressed Character of Villains United #4.

I enjoyed seeing the Royal Flush Gang reduced to a bunch of gang cliches. In the past, they always seemed more, I don't know, militaristic? This RFG is all street. Here's hoping Firestorm killed that obnoxious female Parasite they have working as their Ace these days.

The kicker was the finale... where Catman confesses his midlife crisis to Cheshire after they do it. Now, given that Cheshire's daughter Lian (to Arsenal of the Titans) was the blackmail reason keeping her in line, do you suppose her plan is to have another child simply so she can afford to ignore the blackmail and go ballistic on everyone? She's always been opportunistic... if a strong child to continue her legacy is all she wants, the product of her and Catman would fit the bill. Poor Lian!

And in non-Infinite Crisis news, I picked up House of M 1 through 5. The impetus was, sadly enough, that #5 comes packed with a free exclusive art Marvel Vs. card. I am a sucker. The good news is that the story is worth reading... although I'm not picking up all the damn House of M crossover miniseries. House of M is an alternate universe story that spins out of our universe when Scarlet Witch goes nuts. Somehow, her powers create a world where mutants are the overclass and Magneto is the President of the Earth. And it's nice, peacable and nothing really wrong with the world! Of course, Wolverine somehow is the one guy who wakes up realizing something isn't right, so he hooks up with the non-mutant resistence (led by Luke Cage, who has had more page time in the last two years than he had in the last twenty) and starts convincing other heroes that the shiny, happy world isn't as it should be. I'm glad I picked it up, but I'm worried that Marvel is going to take the opportunity to stick me with follow-up series after follow-up series, like when they convinced me I should get Warlock and the Infinity Watch.

I just finished reading Life of Reilly, a fascinating investigation into the Spider-Man Clone Saga storyline. Actually, it's taken me most of the week to get through it, because it's 35 pages long. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the sort of thing that's going to live online much longer, so if you're interested, get to it before the domain reg finally expires.

The Clone Saga - where Marvel declared that Peter Parker was not the one true Spider-Man and was instead a clone of the original - has gone down as one of the worst moments in comics. What's amazing is that is never started out as the mess it became and that all involved had far different aspirations for the storyline... but marketing and ego and money turned it from a three month saga into an interminable train wreck. Life of Reilly goes into great detail about the individual episodic comics themselves, but I found myself scanning the synopses and jumping straight into the behind-the-scenes commentary.

The initial outline was that, yes, another Peter Parker would show up - Ben Reilly - and after the usual stunning revelations, Ben would be declared the original and Peter the clone. Then we'd have a month of Ben running around as Spider-Man, reclaiming his lost life, until the triumphant "Return of Peter Parker" storyline where we flip-flop back to Ben being the clone and Peter being the real deal.

This sort of thing happens all the time in comics. It's typically a fun little shake-up, somebody gets to design a new costume, and the fans get all sweaty with questions and anticipation. The most recent example - immediately prior to Spidey's Clone Saga anyway, was the Death of Superman story and Batman: Knightfall. Superman died, then replaced with four different guys all calling themselves Superman. And in Knightfall, Batman gets his back broken and is replaced by Azrael. Those were both massively popular events, so the idea was for Marvel to mimic that with their #1 guy, Spider-Man.

And yeah, the first wave of the Clone Saga was popular... so popular that Marvel's Marvelous Marketing department kept forcing the Spider-Man creative teams to extend the concept. So instead of the Saga wrapping up inside of a few months and returning Peter to his status quo, they kept having to find new ways to extend the plot, adding in new twists and characters. This worked for a time, and Ben Reilly - as the Scarlet Spider - became a fan-favorite character in his own right. So then the idea comes to stop pussyfooting around and install Ben as the real Spider-Man and send Peter Parker (and his pregnant wife Mary Jane) off into the sunset.

And that's where things went wrong.

If you read the article, you can watch everything explode out of control. Marvel - which was heading through one of its lean years - reorganizes the editorial staff several times. The final Clone Saga resolution gets forcibly delayed another six months because the new Marvel editor-in-chief doesn't want the Clone finale competing against the end of the X-Men's Onslaught story. The more months pass by, the more complications arise as the writers try futilely to keep things intriguing for the readers... all the while raising more continuity questions than they solve. And it all ends with the impossible notion that the long-dead Norman Osborn was behind the whole thing! Deus Ex Goblina.

I wasn't reading the Spidey books at the time, but I was aware of what was going on. The feeling I always had was that Marvel was desparately fishing for attention for Spider-Man in the face of DC's immense Superman and Batman mega-events... and even under the shadows of Marvel's own X-Men books. (Although we all know how Heroes Reborn ended up, don't we?) Since then, Marvel has clawed back out of that pit of clones and Liefeld and stunt covers... but back then, man, we didn't see any way for Marvel to get off the sinking ship. Thanks to the Ultimate universe and a bunch of successful movies, Marvel's bank accounts are no longer an industry joke.

I've found some other great comics sites lately, a bunch of weblogs that have made it into my weekly rotation:

The Comic Treadmill has done some great MSTifications on classic DC Silver Age stuff, including a ridiculous book where the superheroes and the supervillains all play a game of baseball. (Spoiler: the heroes win.) The Treadmill is also working through the big hardcover DC Encyclopedia with commentary.

The Absorbascon and Seven Hells also do a lot of funny stuff, including some hilarious bits where they examine which crappy characters in the DC Universe would fit better in the Marvel Universe. The basic requirements for a DC character getting shipped off to Marvel include having a pun-based name that completely describes the power, having undefined "energy blasts" as a power, and having unresolvable personal issues using the adjectives "tragic" and "tortured." In the post where they donate second-rate Bat-villain Killer Croc off to Marvel, they say "In a universe where killer clowns massacre innocents using poisoned fish, the DCU has little use for a super-powered pimp with a rash." Also this: "The cops of [Gotham Central] are the best [Gotham] has and being a Gotham cop is hard. They [operate] in a city where Killer Croc is not considered a major player and that is creepy. I love Marvel but honestly, if you set DC�s rogues loose in The Marvel Universe for just five minutes, they�ll come back to The DCU drinking Pimp Juice from Spider-Man�s jewel encrusted skull." That made me laugh hard.

The Shrew Review concentrates on reviewing current books, and she reviews them like you're reading a New York Times book review. It's that serious; it's that good. I have made it a rule never to visit the Shrew Review until I have bought the week's books, because I want to enjoy this site without spoiling anything.

Comics Should Be Good's coolest bloggy feature is an ongoing feature about comics urban legends revealed, tackling the true and the false in comic book rumors. Yes, in Armageddon 2001, it WAS supposed to be Captain Atom who had turned into Monarch!

I'm at the very end of my Clark-inspired FMLA and I'm sick. Sort of a mild, non-vomit fever. It seems to be about over, but it's been miserable for a couple days. Unfortunately, it peaked during my sister's wedding, so I was in too much of a haze to enjoy the wedding cake. I always find it fascinating that, when you're sick, it becomes impossible to remember what it was like to not be sick.

Other than that, it's been a great vacation, a huge opportunity to get to know Clark without the stress of work in the way. We've been lucky in that Clark has taken to us right away. They say that babies don't actually start identifying and remembering faces until the fourth month, so we picked him up at a great time. It's thunderstorming right now and he's watching the rain through the window.

One curious aspect of being off work is seeing my neighborhood's natural daytime activity. At the beginning of the summer, we had a white trash family move in across the street. They have plenty of kids, all the same age (preteen). The preteens are always up at 8am skateboarding around the development. Don't these kids have video games? Other adults are constantly showing up and ferrying off different combinations of the kids and parents (several times we have witnessed the parents simply leave for the day, lock the house, and let the preteen skaters roam wild and free.) And they're always yelling at each other. When they leave, they're yelling. When they return, they're yelling. The parents don't seem to have jobs, or they could be teachers with the summer off, OMFG. It is pretty obvious that they are just renting - renters always have a giant middle finger attitude about them - so maybe they'll be gone before fall.

Clark had to have blood taken for some tests, which was a nightmare ordeal. We let him get butchered by a local lab annex before going to the area hospital and getting it done right. It was a stupid decision on our part - between the two of us we know about a million nurses who could have told us that you can't get 10 vials of blood by heel-sticking a damn baby - but we thought it would be easier to avoid the monolithic, perennially under-construction mega-hospital. Wrong!

In other big news, my car is finally dead. We can remain a single car family for another two months, but by the time Rhon goes back to work, we'll need to have figured something out. My Dad and I went around to a couple dealerships and looked at some Neons, some Rios and some Ions. Most of the cars had stupid unnecessary "sports" packages, with spoilers and pinstriping. The Ions all had dedicated AUX-INs on the stereo, which is nice. Everyone should be doing that by now.

Took the iMac down to the Apple Store on Thursday. We were planning to go anyway to look at the Shuffle accessories, and that very morning the iMac started making noises. Like a turn signal, almost as if the superdrive was trying to eject but failing. So I initiated a panic back up, which couldn't finish because the noise would get worse and eventually cause a performance slowdown. So we threw it into the car at headed for the mall.

Thinking ahead, I made an appointment for the Genius Bar, which pissed off some people who had been waiting when I walked in and was talking to a tech almost immediately. It sat on the Bar for over two hours, during which it made no noise at all. We even did the back up DVD burn that I had failed at home (and they let me keep the burned DVD for free.) It has stayed noise-free ever since we got home, so maybe a cat toenail got stuck inside it and shook loose during the car ride.

Imported the soundtrack to the Katamari sequel, We Love Katamari. Don't know what to think of it yet, since the game isn't out yet for me to hang experience on. There's a lot of fun variations on the Katamari theme, plus some crazy cacophonous stuff that actually isn't that easy to listen to.

Also received Koe, the CD single of the theme to Fatal Frame 3 by Tsukiko Amano. She did Chou, the theme to Fatal Frame 2, which has become a massive favorite of mine. Likewise, since I haven't played FF3 yet, I don't have the emotional connection to Koe as I do for Chou... but Koe is similarly moody and dark. Fatal Frame 3 is a must-have game this fall for me.

Started playing Urban Dead, a browser-based online multiplayer game. It's a text-based zombies vs. civilians battle, but you get a nice clickable map and lots of buttons for your items and actions. So it's not like you're typing "WALK NORTH" like in the old days. The quirk is that you only can perform 50 actions each day - which you can easily blow in a 15 minute session. So there's no way for diehards to sit at their machine for hours and eat everyone in sight while you go to work. I kinda like that, but it's weird to have to budget out your moves to make sure you get back to a safehouse before you run out of action points.

In fact, this week Urban Dead has been undergoing server problems because some jive-ass website linked to it and caused unexpected bandwidth strain... so I was actually caught outside during an overload crash and killed by some level 6 zombie jerk before I logged back in a day later. So now I'm a zombie. I just killed somebody myself, because it's about the only thing you can do when you become a zombie.

I finished and reviewed God of War. I suppose I was hard on it, but I really didn't feel there was much to it.

Since there's not much going on in the world of video games, I went back and finished Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban. Yes, it was awful. I only bought it (a year ago!) because it has a collection of EyeToy games on it. But since I have it, I thought I might as well play it. We're reading Half-Blood Prince right now anyway, so I'm in a Potter mood, which made the game more bearable.

I'd like to be playing Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, but I don't know how Clark will take the noisy bongo banging. That's the sort of thing you judge carefully when you have a baby around.

Periodically I check out the fourhman.com saved search data that Movable Type tracks. This is the hilarious junk that people type into the search box at the bottom of the main page. Most of the time it's perfectly sensible search strings - I get a lot of Pokemon vocabulary, for example - but often it is just absurd nonsense. I can blame a bunch of barely-functioning search engines for misleading people to fourhman.com... there are still portal sites out there linking to me for content that disappeared over five years ago. Duke Nukem maps, for example. The internet is still living the legacy of those crazy days when Yahoo's stock smashed through the ceiling and inspired every moron out there to register his own search portal site, most of them stealing their database from somebody else.

So anyway, before I blow out the data, here's some real live search terms I particularly enjoyed.

"Jetboat" - Don't I wish.

"Phillip Jeffries" - This is a cool one. The only Phillip Jeffries I know is the enigmatic FBI agent played by David Bowie in the Twin Peaks movie, something I don't believe I've ever commented on. Considering the bizarre nature of the character, it's pretty cool that his name would mysteriously appear in my MT data.

"garbage pail kids buddy icons" - Really?

"how to heal bee stings in Animal Crossing" - Yeah, they're nasty. I hope this guy is healthy now, since my site couldn't help him.

"EMINEM" - I think I busted on him once. And now his career is gone. Coincedence?

"dragon ball z porno mag" - Buddy, if I had one of these, I sure as hell wouldn't let you borrow it.

"super robot monkey team hyper force go" - I'm just impressed they got the title exactly right.

"DOOM GAME MANUALS" - I see this a lot too. You see, somebody just got done downloading an illegal version of Game X, and then realized he didn't get the game manual! Damn! Now how will he know which button pushes the crates?

"kairi nude" - Aw, dude. She's like, 13.

"Luigi swearing" - Swearing to uphold Nintendo's NDA on Revolution specs and details, I guess.

"Ernest goes to camp" - I actually think this one was a plant from the guys at work.

"vice city nude patch" - This guy is probably beside himself with joy now that Hot Coffee came out. Or tissues.

"resident evil outbreak" - Hopefully this searcher was able to get some info on this game here at fourhman.com. That info being that the game sucked.

"spllintercellcostmuesforkidsandsplintercellgunsforkids" - I call this one "The Essence of What's Wrong with America."

And then there's a sub-group of searchers called the Clarifiers. When they fail to pull up any meaningful hits, they re-search with a subtle correction:

"usha yeah" - What?
"usha yeah the song" - OOOOH. No.

"how to open the Eight GYM in pictures"
"how to open the door to the Eight GYM in pictures"
"how to open the door to the Eight GYM on pokemon sapphire version in pictures"

"gta vain city" - Vanity is a vice, so you're very close.
"gta vain city mac osx" - Well, that explains why you don't know the game's title: You're a Mac user and therefore have never heard of "games" before.
"gta vain city mac" - But you will take a System Seven version, if available.

"yosemite sam in asaloon" - NO MATCH; DOES NOT COMPUTE.
"yosemite sam in a saloon" - PLEASE WATCH "LOONATICS," COMING THIS FALL TO KIDS' WB.

"how to hack" - Well, of course, I can help you out, I'm quite the hacker...
"how to hack cartoon orbit" - Oooh, actually, yeah, I can't hack that one. Sorry.

"Kingdomhearts soun trak songs"
"Kingdomhearts Theme song"
"Kingdom hearts" - This guy is in secret a Reverse Clarifier.

"THE BRAVE LITTLE TOATSER" - That reminds me of an animated movie I really liked.
"THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASER" - That one too.