"God of War is fuckin' rad."

That's a quote from "The Making of God of War," a nicely done documentary included on the God of War disk. Yes, they drop the f-bomb in it. Twice, actually. But this is an M-rated game after all, and I rather enjoyed seeing a video game documentary using swear words.

And the speaker is correct, God of War is fuckin' rad. Although I wouldn't necessarily consider the word "rad" a compliment, since, to me, there's a linger of lameness, a pall of poseur on the word "rad." Guys who say "fuckin' rad" are the guys who sit in the back of the classroom etching middle fingers and swastikas on the desks. As it happens, a goodly portion of God of War is directed squarely at those guys. Fuckin' rad indeed.

God of War is a third person adventure, exclusive to Sony. It's sort of a brand new IP for them, if you can call a game based on public domain Greek mythology "brand new IP." My estimation is that Sony was looking for some new mature exclusives and their tact was to darken both the Ratchet and Jak series... and create God of War. God of War is very much like Devil May Cry, a fast and gory linear killfest through lush environments.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.