Sometimes you get a really interesting PS2 demo disc with your OPM, sometimes you don't. Issue #97 had the famed Shadow of the Colossus demo, which I thought sucked. I was disappointed because we really liked Ico and Colossus comes from the same developers. A good demo, first and foremost, ought to convince you to buy the game... the Colossus demo convinced me not to bother. It looked cool... although the main character's running animation was bizarre and unnatural, something that ought to be long beyond fixed in this day and age. There is lots more of that good pure-white lighting that made Ico so drenched in atmosphere. One of the talking points on Ico is that, when every other game was creating atmosphere through darkness (because it's easier to do it that way), Ico did it through light. You can see that attitude in Colossus. However, the gameplay was a mess. You're supposed to be scaling a giant walking monster - like Sweetums of the Muppets - and finding certain stab points to bring it down. I never got higher than his shin, because the controls are lousy and if you screw around too long he shakes you off. Eh.

We're now entering the good time of the year, when games start coming out again. Summer and fall are like hibernation months for video games. You can always count on October and November and December for plenty of AAA releases. Of course, there's a lot of rushed crap that hits the shelves to scam their way onto holiday gift lists, but let's consider that an unhappy side-symptom of the general awesomeness of the season.

Just off the top of my head, I have a ton of games that I'm watching for. Here are my absolute First Week grabs. There is no discussion, simply purchasing.

Animal Crossing: Wild World - DS, 12.05. Duh.
Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented - PS2, 11.01. Duh again.
Trapt - PS2, 10.18. It's the PS2 iteration of the Deception series, which is long overdue. However, we'll cut the creator some slack, since he made the Fatal Frame games during his time off.
Trauma Center: Under the Knife - DS, out now. This is one of the conceptual reasons why I wanted a DS... a surgery action game!

Upgraded to Tiger this weekend. My iMac was getting flaky, so I opted for a complete erase-and-install... which is the sort of dicey proposition that gives me fits, because I don't trust myself to not forget to backup something and risk losing it forever. And yeah, I did screw some stuff up.

I had several problems I hoped Tiger would fix: that clicking noise I've had for a couple weeks now (longshot) and a screwed up display setting that has been blooming out the whites on my monitor for a year. I had made attempts on both issues before, with a trip to the Apple Store on the HD noise and many nights poking through settings files trying to isolate the monitor problem. No luck on either.

This is where I get pissed off at Apple: when they - the company that crows the most about elegance and standardization - fails at having elegance and standardization.

Rhon did some research into my missing email problem. Turns out you can't just dump your old Panther Mail library into your new Tiger Mail install and expect it to see everything. Despite that iTunes and iPhoto both work that way. No, for Mail, I had to open up an Import Mailboxes command and show it my old Mail library. Then it resurrected all of my email fine. Except that, for some reason, Panther stored Inbox email in a different location than your custom mailboxes, so I had to direct Tiger Mail to another nearby location to find my actual Inbox email. Before I did that, the only Inbox email it saw was ancient 2002 Jaguar mail!

Day of Vengeance #6 You may think this was a stupid plan, but it pales in comparison to the All Time Stupid Plan: throwing the surviving Marvel heroes at an omnipotent, Infinity Gauntlet-wielding Thanos in order to distract him while the Silver Surfer zooms in from across the universe to yank the Gauntlet off his hand.

One thing I didn't fully realize until this issue. it's nice to see Classic Spectre back in action. Visually, anyway. For the last couple years, it's been Hal Jordan clad in a cutesy amalgam of the usual Spectre togs and a GL uniform. I look forward to him cleaning up his act, getting re-bonded with Jim Corrigan, taking his old chair at the JSA brownstone and returning the status quo to circa 1951.

Speaking of hometown kids making good, it's nice to see Jean "Mrs. Eclipso" Loring safely set up for resurrection by any future villain with a spaceship. Talk about a leaving the door wide open.

Cheers to Penny Arcade. I know I have sort of a love-hate relationship with them... I visit every Monday/Wednesday/Friday and I love when they do actual funny video game-related strips, and I hate when they spend weeks lost in self-indulgent high school crap that has nothing to do with video games (see: the Cardboard Tube Samurai).

But big cheers for today's events. (And click backwards a few days for the buildup.)

See, the other week that ambulance-chasing anti-social freakshow Jack Thompson issued a challenge to the video game industry. If anyone made a video game detailing a father's vengeance against the video game makers who inspired a young gamer to kill his son, he would donate $10,000 to charity. Apparently, Jack specifically wanted the game to include violent acts taken against game retailers, game publishers, etc. The idea is that no game developer would want to make a game wherein they themselves are the victims, and Jack happily would issue a future press release crowing about hypocrisy and whatnot.

Last year's DS Christmas was pretty lame - essentially the launch titles plus lots of hope and promise - and I recall telling people "Nah, I wouldn't bother getting one just yet. Wait until Animal Crossing comes out."

As I look over my latest purchases and the future games on track for November and December, it's obvious that the time has come. This is the DS's First Big Holiday Season. If you've been fence-sitting, feel free to jump in... may I suggest the Mario Kart DS Bundle, a flame red DS plus Mario Kart DS (online play!) for $150. (And if you still don't have a GameCube, Nintendo's 2005 holiday bundle is absurdly good. GameCube plus Mario Party 7 w/mic plus two controllers... all for $100. $100! You can tell this is the last GameCube Christmas!)

This is fourhman.com version 7.0. And that's an honest tracking number too, not some made-up bullshit. I consider each full graphic redesign to be a new number, so that's seven complete renovations since 1995. I get bored easily.

Lately I'd been wanting something more "webloggy" for fourhman.com, since the weblog has become the driving force behind this site. (Compared to 1997, when it was all about Duke Nukem maps and Magic decks.) This is actually my second attempt at a more modern look; the first try died unwanted in Photoshop sometime last spring.

This is my opportunity to jettison some of the lesser-travelled sections (good bye, dedicated card games page!) and scuttle all of the little widgety things that I have grown weary of updating. Like the "recently played songs" and the list of games I want to buy.

I've been forcing myself to think about stuff to weblog this week, but, as is usual, the more behind-the-scenes website work I do, the less inclined I am to actually write something. It's like, jesus, anything but the effing website.

I could talk about the big Bush administration indictments, but, really, what the hell do I know about that. I know it's funny, I know it's typical, I know it's overdue. I know it's ridiculous for a grown adult government official to be consistently referred to as "Scooter," and of course every media source lies down and does it. Scooter? The weakest of the Go-Bots? To date, I've found one article that talks about Lewis Libby, not I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. "Scooter." What a choad.

That image to the right is Clark's dojang, sometimes referred to as a "chop." It is a personal stamp, as good as a signature on any official document, and the use of such seals was once widespread across China, Korea and Japan. Chops are a bit of a relic these days in East Asia, but they are still common enough that you can roll them up in Katamari (they're labelled under the Japanese word, hanko, and are usually found near an inkpad.)

Through Rhonda's many connections among other adoptive families, we placed an order to have one made and sent to us. The actual dojang is the bit in red; the light green portion is the sample display card and presumably contains the mark of the vendor who made the chop. Probably says "thank you for your business" or something! The Hangul characters in the center spell out Clark's Korean name. The stamp itself is a hand-carved wooden cylinder, about four inches tall. The carving shows a tiger in a bamboo forest and it is just as cool as you could imagine.

William Hootkins, the Joe Don Baker of Star Wars, has passed away.

As Jek Porkins, the fattest of all X-Wing pilots, he was a huge favorite among my usual group of Star Wars fans. Because Porkins, perhaps more than any other Star Wars character, captured the epic ridiculousness that makes Star Wars such a great film.