October 2005 Archives

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.

It's just silly, that movie. Ben saying "And these blast points, too accurate for sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise." Threepio tossing jawa corpses onto the fire. "I'll be careful." "You'll be DEAD!" That one Stormtrooper that cracks his skull on the rising door panel. Leia's bizarre accent. Young whiny Luke and his chores that keep him from wasting time with his friends picking up power converters at Toshi Station. The looped Tusken Raider footage. "Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?"

And after all of that, we're delivered a fat fighter pilot, hilariously named "Porkins," jowls pouring out from under his helmet. After the hunky, aquiline features of Biggs and Wedge and even Mr. Gold "Stay on Target" Leader, Porkins is obviously the team's comic relief. You can feel his backstory just from simple inference. He was always late to classes at the Academy, huffing and puffing to make it in before bell. During lunch, he'd have a plate piled high with food, the result of which would be BBQ sauce on his cheek for the rest of the day. He probably had a similarly ample girlfriend, but entertained a hopeless crush on the school's hot Corellian health teacher.

And yet he gave us time for a quick laugh during a tense scene when his friends tell him to eject from his failing ship into airless space. Let's remember William Hootkins' contributions to the Star Wars Universe with a final dramatic reading of his lines:

"Red Six standing by."

"I'm right with you, Red Three."

"I've got a problem here."

"I can hold it."

"No, I'm all right, I'm all right!" BOOM.

Fin.

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.

One thing I forgot to mention about my day off with Clark... I was playing the PaRappa soundtrack because I rightly guessed it would amuse him. During the first rap - Chop Chop Master Onion's rap - I would act out the motions while holding him. Kicking, punching, ducking, posing, etc. He giggled so hard that we of course had to run through it several times. And I have been in severe leg pain ever since. Before Clark came home, I was doing 75 sit-ups a night. Now that he's here, I can barely high-kick it through a martial arts rap.

Good job, PaRappa. You can move on to the next stage now...

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.

The point is - and I wish the American public would pick up on this - is that all policiticians are thieving, asskissing, holier-than-thou, incestuous liars. Every one. You can't get into politics without being like that. It's like how you can't become a mechanic without knowing how to fix cars. The city council member who is pushing a new ballpark to help his brother-in-law's construction firm will be the state representative who votes for a pay raise at 1:00am and will be the senator whose voting record is determined by his personal investments. The only legitmate checks and balances system that we have is the hope that enough politicians on Team B will be persuing backalley porkbarrel legislature that is directly opposed to the backalley porkbarrel legislature being shoved forth by Team A. That's it. The whole notion that Democrats are better than Republicans are better than Democrats is naive, dangerous idiocy. Our sole solution is the revolving door method of voting 'em in and then voting 'em out (and, sadly, that's only applicable to the jerks in electable positions.) Anybody in there longer than a decade is a criminal.

Or I could talk about yesterday's Daddy Day with Clark. Daycare was closed but Rhon still had to work... and she is out of vacation days so I took the day off to be with him. Nothing noteworthy occurred. We watched Peep and the Big Wide World, ate breakfast, napped for an hour, played, ate lunch, napped for three hours, played, and then Mommy was home.

I have recently noticed that I still have marks on both of my ankles, where my new dress shoes were biting into me during the entirety of our trip to Seoul. See, knowing that sneakers or sandals would make us appear too casual, and that we really wanted to pack super-light since we were going so far and coming back with so much more, we decided to semi-dress up for the whole trip. Shoes, slacks, light-but-reputable shirts for gadding about. Not my usual Hawaiian shirt plus Nintendo t-shirt plus jeans plus sandals affair. Of course, me being a slob, I didn't even own dress shoes. So we had to run out to Target and buy me brand new dress shoes, like, the night before we got on the plane. Naturally, new shoes need to be broken in... and I can tell you that walking around the streets of Seoul is no place to break in new shoes. My ankles were a bloody mess by mid-trip. And now they very well may be permanently scarred where the skin ripped apart horizontally.

But I don't mind these scars at all. I sort of hope they do stick around forever.

However, I'm not looking forward to the next time I have to wear dress shoes. (Which, if I have my way, won't be until Clark's wedding.)

So there's two topics I suppose I could blog about.

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.

Also disappearing is the Quick Reviews portion of the video game section. It's a good idea in theory - succinct takes on new games - but it always felt like I was forcing myself to write them. Not fun, so sayonara. Astute DredPage fans will note that this is the second time I've started and stopped posting Quick Reviews.

There's still some work to be done... the video games section is MIA, the revamped Clark section is only sparsely populated with pics, and I want to shake out a bunch more "weblog features" to make some of the neater, older weblog entries a little more prominent. So don't mind the odd missing image or broken link for a week or two. I am happy that v7.0 is much less graphics-heavy.

I also scrambled deep under the FTP hood and cleaned out three years worth of old graphics that I'm no longer using and therefore ought to be no longer storing. That was fun. There's still some old Movable Type-generated templates and archive pages that I'd like to trash, but skittering amongst MT files always makes me nervous. Jenga, jenga, jenga.

Then there's the always grating issue of browser capatibility. I checked the following browsers: Mac Firefox, Mac IE, Safari, Win98 IE, WinXP Firefox, WinXP Netscape and WinXP IE, and I was reasonably happy with all of them. It's always some stupid spacing or sizing issue. I'll do some additional investigating, because I know what sorts of browsers you folks are using and I want things to look as nice as possible.

Added a live comment shoutbox to the main page. I'm sure that might be entertaining every now and again. Ever since the site was getting comment-bombed my robot spammers and I stripped comments from almost everywhere, I've missed that slight bit of interactivity (the only remaining areas with Movable Type-based commenting are the AC and Pokemon diaries, which are easy for me to monitor). I was even getting spammed in the ping-controlled Recent Songs include, which really pissed me off and was the nail in the coffin of that mostly-uninteresting sidebar feature.

So enjoy the new look.

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!)

We had a long DS Dry Spell for the first 2/3rds of '05. Wario was great, Pac-Pix was cool, Yoshi was fine, Kirby was merely okay... I'm sure I would have enjoyed Advance Wars Dual Strike and Nintendogs had I picked them up. But that's less than one worth-it game a month. And many of those are pretty low-end games. Sure, Pac-Pix was fun, but how much work do you think really went into it? And Yoshi Touch-n-Go should have been an unlockable bonus in Mario 64DS.

My DS buying season began with Lost in Blue a couple weeks ago. I like it, but it can get terribly cumbersome. The button controls are all over the map; the X and A button usage gets very confusing... for example, X is used to access the in-game command menu for inventory / rest / build / scrapbook. Select, say, build with the A button, the A again to select the items you want to build, then X to actually build the item. It's stupidly non-intuitive. Meanwhile, the shoulder buttons both sit almost useless. BOTH OF THEM cycle through the three upper map status screens, which is a complete waste. The left shoulder button could have handled the herculean task all by its lonesome, and the right shoulder could have easily pulled up the command menu. Very strange function-mapping decisions.

Also, and this is probably meant to duplicate the difficulty of surviving on a deserted island, the game never helps you out when you need it. You'll be told simple stuff - like how to fish using the A button - but finding out how to add more shelves to your cave hideaway is a mystery. You'll be told that you have to gather spices to give to Skye (your castaway partner) but not be told that you don't actually have to give them to her; she'll just invisibly take them as she needs them. Never mind that Skye comes with a Give command that I have yet to use correctly. She refuses everything I offer her.

Then there's the gibberish number screens that pop up when you store firewood, bamboo or rope vines in the cave. It took me days to decipher what those unexplained numbers meant. (Top line: X number of items stored out of a possible Y. Bottom line: X number of items in your inventory out of a possible Y empty slots. Use D-up and D-down to transfer items between the two lines. Was that too hard for the game to explain? And why do these storage areas use mere numbers when every other similar storage area uses the normal inventory visuals?)

Interface issues aside, it's a fun little game. Spear-fishing! It comes off as a freeform sandbox type of game - a survival-based Animal Crossing - but there actually is a goal in sight, a la Harvest Moon. I wonder how much neater it would have been had they made the game play out in real-time (or, as my sister suggested, include 2-player co-op play). The unfortunate truth is that they erred on the side of making it too challenging simply by obfuscating the goals and controls.

Much more direct is Trauma Center, which is very much like an arcade version of Photoshop. (In fact, I'm going to throw that out as the next bizarro DS game: Action Designer. Given a scaled-down suite of Photoshop tools, you have to meet the design demands of various clients before deadline! Mr. X wants an edgy logo! Ms. Y needs a newsletter layout! Organization Z has to present a slideshow for the board of directors in ten minutes!) Each level presents a body on the operating table, and you have to switch between the tools at your disposal to perform major invasive surgeries. You have to learn various techniques as you go - how to remove a tumor, heart massage, etc - and the fun comes from pulling off your learned skills under the time limit of the patient's vital signs.

The game takes place in the future, so it gets into a wonky sci-fi killer micro-organism vibe... and I do detect a whiff of anti-euthanasia politics... but the game itself is a fast-action blast. I'm enjoying it more than Lost in Blue simply because it's better suited for a portable system: you can pick up and play a level without worrying too much about what you did before or what you have to do next. The storyline is pure melodrama but still fun, even if some conversations go on forever. I'm at the bit where you have to save the little girl from dying, and her brother is forced to re-examine his pro-euthanasia viewpoint.

There's a trilogy of sleeper DS games out now, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is the hat trick. I don't have it yet, but I expect it soon (probably as soon as I get off that damn island.) All of these games have squeaked out from major publishers (Konami, Atlus, Capcom) as proof-positive of the DS's strengths. Over the next few weeks, the rush of first-party titles hit the racks (Metroid Prime Pinball, Mario & Luigi, Animal Crossing, Mario Kart) and then the DS will have really hit the big time.

In contrast, the PSP doesn't have much going for it right now. Sure, Liberty City Stories is huge - the first game that makes an argument for the system, in my opinion. Infected is a good PSP concept title, since it makes interesting use of the wi-fi play. But what else? The release date lists don't present a very strong lineup for the holiday. To be fair, this is the PSP's first Christmas... but to be equally fair, it has been out since March. And no price drop for the holiday! In fact, Sony plans to relase a PSP bundle that's even more expensive than the $250 stock unit. Pretty ballsy moves from a company expecting to sell three million more PSPs by the end of the year. Note: Sony has only sold 2.3 million PSPs in North America in the past five months. So good luck on that.

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.

Jack don't know jack.

Because he is so fundamentally unconnected from the pop culture he is trying to shut down, Jack doesn't know that kids these days can make video games like that (:snaps fingers). Several folks did make his game, in scales large and small, most notably one group who created a San Andreas mod. Faced with this info, Jack has now claimed that his challenge was satire and that gamers are too dense to understand irony.

Note that his satire also seems to include the $10,000 for charity.

Asshole.

So Penny Arcade, an online comic strip that has, to date, collected six digits in donations and cash for kids in hospitals around the holidays, today announced that THEY are going to donate $10,000 to charity, in Jack Thompson's name. Tycho included this in his daily posting:

You know what, Jack? We're going to be the men you're not. You said that your insulting, illusory ten thousand dollars would go to the charity of Paul Eibeler's choice. We've got a good guess that he'd direct your nonexistant largesse toward The Entertainment Software Association Foundation, a body that has raised over six point seven million dollars over the last eight years. We've just made the donation you never would, and never meant to. Ten thousand dollars' worth. And we made it in your name.

The links above go to Penny Arcade and Joystiq.com, and both show quoted emails from Jack himself threatening them to remove these articles "or else." This man is truly a grandstanding shitbag of the highest order.

Well done, Gabe and Tycho. I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this, but if you guys hit any fallout from that prick, you will have a world of gamers at your back. This year's Child's Play charity drive will be huge.

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.

If the Shadowpact graduate to their own title, my only request is for a better regular artist. Justiniano has an unfinished, scratchy style that lacks characterization. I could not read him on a no-end-in-sight monthly. His style reminds me of when Adobe Streamline 2.0 would over-vector your art and take all the detail out.

OMAC Project #6 I'm really over the OMAC computer text that invades almost every panel in this series. I get the feeling that it's hiding clues that I'm too stupid to decipher.

I'm amused that Evil Max Lord's plan was scuttled by the US Postal Service. According to Batman, Max broke into Beetle's warehouse to steal an EMP generator - the only thing that could wipe out the OMACs - but he didn't find it because it "hadn't been delivered yet." Has Max never used online package tracking before?

So we still have plenty of OMACs out there, plus Times Square is endlessly looping the footage of Wonder Woman killing Max Lord in another book. I would have enjoyed this series better had it not been balanced on one single unbelievable concept: that Max Lord was a secret supervillain all this time.

Rann-Thanagar War #6 This has been $15 I will never get back. Want a summary? Hawkwoman is dead. Another one of those B-movie outerspace megavillains showed up and was killed by being drawn-and-quartered with teleporters. And at the very end - the very smegging end - some giant white hole popped in out of nowhere and started eating planets.

That white hole will be the only meaningful plot point taken from this abortion of a miniseries into Infinite Crisis, you watch.

Villains United #6 I just loved the hell out of this series. And about 10 pages in, it raises the stakes even further with the multiverse discussion between Pariah and Luthor. Now we have to find out which Luthor! Let's see... Earth-2 Luthor was killed in Crisis and he was a small-minded gang shlub anyway, not really worthy of the name. Same with the heroic Earth-3 Luthor, but that really has no bearing on the revamped Antimatter version of the former E3 Crime Syndicaters. I completely forget how the Superman books handled the transition from Fat Kryptonite Poisoned Luthor to Australian Michael Bolton Luthor to Skinny Bald Luthor, so maybe there's some good old fashioned Earth-1 Clone Luthors still hanging around.

Again, there's just so many great lines. This has been the best component of the Infinite Crisis wind-up, no question. It also ends indeterminately, but does set up Catman and Deadshot as the DCU's new Starsky and Hutch.

Infinite Crisis #1 After the spotty quality of the prequels and the unceasing hype associated with it, Infinite Crisis has been taking a beating on most comics-based weblogs I read. Well, I enjoyed it. I liked the George Perez-inspired layouts. I liked the introduction of the four crisispoints spilling in from the prequels. I liked the argument between Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. I even liked the tortuous takedown of the Freedom Fighters.

I've seen a lot of complaints that this series is going to require too much previous DCU knowledge to read. At first I was inclined to agree - after all, this issue's narrator walks directly out of pre-Crisis continuity! (Confession: when I first saw the narrator thought balloons, I suspected it was Barry Allen talking. It's not.) But then I thought back to my own entry into comics, and how one of the first stock superhero books I collected was none other than Crisis on Infinite Earths. I didn't know who half the characters were. I had to learn the multiple Earth concept on the fly. I had to forage through those densely packed Perez panels like a babe in the woods. I had not read (at that point) much of anything from DC's superhero library; my familiarity with the main characters came from Super Friends.

My point is, as a kid, I stepped into Crisis on Infinite Earths with only a random selection of Who's Whos under my belt and I totally got it. I adored it. I memorized it. It added a dramatic weight to comic books that carried me into the hobby. It was a maxiseries positioned to reward longtime readers while still making sense to new ones. Of course, reading it now, it comes off stilted and neutered... but maybe this new iteration, this heavily marketed sequel Infinite Crisis, will do the same for the new kids out there... looking, as I was, for a big story featuring characters I already knew. There are prospective readers out there who know Superman from the 90's animated series, who know Batman from the movies, who maybe just discovered Teen Titans and Justice League... and they're browsing through comic shops wondering if the books can be just as good as any of that. Any one of them can pick up Infinite Crisis. Don't hold it back from them because they don't know who the Freedom Fighters are (were). I had no idea about Earth 3 when I saw the Crime Syndicate die in Crisis #1, but I still understood the drama, I still saw the story.

I'm sure the next issue of Infinite Crisis will explain the four characters who are finally revealed in the final page. New fans will be brought up to date.

I know who they are, but only because I took a chance and read Crisis on Infinite Earths 15 years ago. Nobody back then was out there telling people not to buy Crisis because you had to have read 50 years of National Periodical Publications to understand it.

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!

So out of the four items I was concerned about, my music came over perfectly, my photos were a total pain, my email was almost written off, and my documents were of course no problem. The utilitarian view would be that, sure, it's all fine now.

Now about the new Apple product announcements.

New iMacs. Although I still consider the lamp design far and away the best computer casing yet invented, I like the features on the new iMac. Having iSight built into the monitor is great... but it does seem to prove my early assertion about the iSight camera: it is nothing more than an $150 accessory for iChat AV. Having the camera stuck into the frame is even more useless than the non-positionable external gunbarrel model they've been pushing for a year and a half. Well, "useless" is a strong word, maybe more like "non-versatile." Apple is telling you: you will use this camera for video chat and nothing else. At least now you're not paying extra for it.

Oh, and PhotoBooth. Jesus, what a waste of company resources that was.

I like the Mighty Mouse standard. I like the remote doohickey in theory (can it control iTunes?). If my lamp iMac dies tomorrow, I'd get one of these.

Video iPod. We all knew it was coming, but it just doesn't seem ripe yet. The new screen is nice, the black casing is nice, the concept of buying TV shows through iTMS is nice. However. The battery life for video playback sucks as much as the PSP's battery life for video playback. And $2 for an hourlong 320x240 TV show that can't be burned off to DVD is terrible. That aspect is definitely undercooked.

Oh great, I can pay to download one of the half-dozen overrated Pixar shorts that have been included as bonus material on every single Pixar/Disney DVD made since the dawn of time. Come on.

But we're definitely on the road to something cool. I like the cheapie GBA video carts, which look far crappier but never made any grandiose claims of quality like the Digital Lifestyle (TM) junk we regularly get from Apple. If Apple could give us a wide selection of TV shows to download, a reasonable output quality, the ability to burn off to a playable DVD, battery life that could support any one of the Lord of the Rings movies, and they will have entirely changed the home entertainment business.

NOT RELATED: Dreamhost upgraded my webserver's Debian to 3.1, which cripples Movable Type. What happens is you can't login because MT thinks all your users are dead. There is a quick fix, as explained in this MT support forum thread. It's a one line shell command that upgrades your MT database. I used OSX Terminal and it was super easy. So far, everything seems back to normal, so if you're a frustrated Dreamhost / Movable Type user desperately googling for info on why your weblog suddenly died, this may help you out.

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.

The big backup: I tossed my entire user folder onto an external drive, as well as some small apps and corresponding prefs/data files. The main concern is to save the photos, music, email and Photoshop files; most everything else could re-constituted one way or another. Once all of that was offline, I allowed the Tiger disk to wipe my drive. It makes some nice buzzing sounds just so you know that you're destroying years of work.

When it came back up from the restart, the first thing I did was replace the user folder stuff. I only ever have one user on my home Mac, so it was just a matter of repopulating the Music/Pictures/Movies/Documents folders. Then I let Software Update grab some recent Tiger-era improvements and rebooted.

Shortly thereafter I realized that, like an idiot, I had now re-inserted the exact same troubled display settings from before the wipe. The screen, despite being freshly Tigerized, went bloomed out again. So this time I pulled out every setting inside the user folder except for a bunch that I knew had no relevance to the monitor and restarted. Fine, fixed, bleah.

Then I started booting apps and seeing how they survived the transition. Safari had all my precious bookmarks but of course needed to be re-taught any login names and passwords. iTunes slurped up the old music library in short order. Mail was a problem... it retained the POP account info (which is great, because I have no idea what that is anymore) but didn't have any of my saved email. So that's a definite loss, both in important passwordy type emails and in a pile of really nice fan mail from all over the world, most in response to Fatal Frame: the Card Game. I still have the whole user folder on that ext drive, so the mail has to all be there somewhere, right?

But iPhoto was the biggest disappointment. I dumped my backed-up photo library back inside the Pictures folder, then booted iPhoto 5. It happily recognized that I had a passel of pics in there and warned me that it had to update the library. Then it sat there for hours without doing anything. No matter what I tried, iPhoto 5 would not open up my iPhoto 2 library. (I guess I didn't try letting it sit for more than 4 hours, but come on.) I ended up having to re-build the library by hand dragging all of the photos into 5. And as of June of this year, we have A LOT more photos around here than usual. Ugh.

Of course, had I not gotten inventive and tried to erase and install the new OS, I'd've had exactly no problems. But it is a good idea to wipe an old drive clean every so often, and it feels good to have a freshly responsive system again. Is "gotten" even a word?

Dashboard. It's a cute gimmick, but nowhere near as immediately useful as Panther's Expose. It reminds me too much of the crazy days of System 7 when people would download all sorts of system-crippling nonsense extensions and control panels. I was a major offender; I took pride in my Performa 430's eight minute startup sequence because of all the crap icons loading in a row onscreen. One look at Apple's Dashboard Widget download page is like stepping back in time. I certainly haven't thought about such extraneous trinkets since OSX came along. Looking over the website of available downloadable Widgets, I found barely five that I was even remotely interested in. Two of which (one that displays daily comic strips and one that shows your eBay auction bids) didn't even work. And for as much as Dashboard returns Mac users to the time when we could personalize and trick out our machines with harmless silliness, it also brings along the general messiness we had back then. That Dashboard screen is a disaster, floatable panels all over the damn place (I'll grant that's more of a problem for us smaller-screened folk.) I don't think Widget management is all the way there yet. (Don't worry, Windows users... you'll know what I'm talking about when Vista comes out with "Vista Gadgets." There's that Redmond, innovating again! It must be awesome, they changed the first two letters!)

But I was happy to see that Tiger's iChat now has a smart folder view on the buddy list. Just like AIM had five years ago, sheesh.

Also, I love the iTunes album art screensaver. Which, in my case, is mainly a TMBG and video game soundtrack screensaver.

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!

This group is games that I'm sure I'll get, just not in that initial release week. Unless there's a sale.

Chibi Robo - GameCube, 11.15. Not sure if this one will actually show up; this release date could be completely bogus. However, it looks like a nice bizarre little Japanocentric game, and I tend to like those.
EyeToy: Chat - PS2, 11.01. IF this arrives and IF I can get other pals to buy it, it will be a fun way to video chat and play chess simultaneously.
Gun - GameCube, 11.08. A Wild Western game that I of course must have. Terrible title. "Red Dead Revolver" was a silly title, but at least it had personality.
Lost in Blue - DS, out now. I'm going out for Trauma Center this weekend and if they don't have it, I'll get this instead.
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time - DS, 11.28. Loved the first one, loved the Paper Mario series that (sort of) inspires it. The big trouble with this game is that it ships right before Animal Crossing... and Animal Crossing casts a big gaming shadow in my house.
Mario Kart DS - DS, 11.14. I'll probably get it just to see Nintendo's all-free no-hassle wi-fi network, but, honestly, I'm not too excited about it. My trouble is that I have bad memories of the mostly average Mario Kart Super Circuit on GBA, and that is probably unfairly coloring my perception of this one.
Mario Party 7 - GameCube, 11.07. Noticed something about the Mario Party games: we play each one less and less (with the notable exception of the worst game in the line, #4) even though each version gets better and better. So that keeps this from being a Week One title, even though we're big proponents of the Party series.
Odama - GameCube, 11.15. Like Chibi Robo, this is another screwy title that may never actually come out to play. Historical pinball combat is, however, a genre that I just can't play enough.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - DS, 10.15. Another DS concept game, but I like the notion of a video game based on lawyering, so I'll snap it up.
Sly 3: Band of Thieves - PS2, out now. By rights, I should already have this one. Not exactly sure why it hasn't happened yet, but I can heavily blame We Love Katamari.

This group consists of games that I'm fairly certain I would like, but for whatever reason I rank them lesser than the above list.

Metroid Prime Pinball - DS, 10.24. Going to need to see more of it in action to decide if it's worth it. If Odama comes out, I may feel pinballed out.
Ratchet: Deadlocked - PS2, 10.25. I thought the last Ratchet & Clank game was mostly phoned in, and this version is all about online play which I can only take in small doses. So I don't know.
Soul Calibur III - PS2, 10.25. I love the character creation mode, but I would really hate to buy this after Namco snubbed a GameCube release.
Super Mario Strikers - GameCube, 12.05. In video game terms, I consider Soccer to be pretty much Hockey... so I could see this being fun. However, there is so much else out there that I don't see me making a sports game a priority, no matter how Mushroomed up it is.

In looking over that list, I have to ask myself if I've already bought my last Game Boy Advance game? (WarioWare:Twisted, if you're keeping track.) There's not really anything I'm looking forward to on the GBA release lists... and despite the superior form factor of the SP, I pretty much use my DS for portable gaming these days. Is the era over? A sad thought.

Also, where's Kingdom Hearts II? Pushed into 2006, but very definitely a Week One purchase. This new screenshot seals the deal:

Dude, they're in Steamboat Willie World. Is Kingdom Hearts II trying to hit on me or something?

And if you're thinking that Young Master Clark Jae Fourhman has been having an adverse effect on my gaming habits, that is just not the case. Since his wonderful arrival into our lives, I've finished Kirby: Canvas Curse, God of War, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Paper Mario 2, We Love Katamari, re-played most of Resident Evil 4 and Luigi's Mansion, and damn near finished my pokedex in Pokemon Sapphire. It's just a matter of organizing one's time better. I haven't been to sleep in weeks.

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.

That was last disc. This one has some better demos on it. The big one is Soul Calibur III. I'm far from a fighting game connoisseur, so even though the magazine article crowed about how different the game is from previous Soul Caliburs, it still felt the same to me. Which is to say, fun, because I loved Soul Calibur II on my GameCube. Unfortunately, III is a PS2 exclusive, which means it looks crappier than it would on the Cube. Although I remember when Splinter Cell was an Xbox exclusive and Resident Evil 4 was a GameCube exclusive, so I'm not going to worry overmuch about it. If it comes to GameCube, I'll get it. If it doesn't, the world will probably still keep on spinning.

One super cool feature - and the main reason I feel the urge to buy it - is the new character creation mode. They actually did include a sample of this in the demo, which is awesome because usually with demos you get one lousy timed level and a marketing fullscreen loaded with bullet points. It would have been really easy for Namco to simply say "Make Your Own Fighter With Amazing Character Creation Controls!111!!!11!!" but they went the extra mile and put it in the demo for you to play with. Have I mentioned how much I love Namco? So I made a female ninja character in a kind of barmaidy outfit and proceeded to get my ass kicked by the CPU player. It was fun.

Star Wars Battlefront II. Big eh. I was never much impressed with the first one, which I felt took the awesomeness of the Star Wars universe and watered it down to yet another Counter Strike clone. If this one services the brand any better, they didn't demonstrate that in this demo. I ran around as a Clone Trooper and pretended I cared about shooting Battle Droids in the face.

Crash Tag Team Racing. These guys really ought to be ashamed of themselves for copying Mario Kart Double Dash so fiercely. I guess if you don't have a GameCube this is better than nothing. The major "enhancement" over Double Dash is that the gunner has automatic weaponry instead of a Koopa shell. EXTREME! Regardless, it looks like a typical waning-days PS2 game: dark, pixelly and mediocre.

Indigo Prophecy. You have to give this game the award for Most Ambitious Game That No One Will Ever Buy. It is clearly one of those video-game-legitimacy bids; it's the kind of game that could get quoted in a counterpoint argument when somebody starts attacking video games as being all violent and worthless. It's interactive fiction and if that phrase doesn't give you the screaming shakes by now, you haven't been into gaming very long. Every couple of years somebody gets it into their head that we can raise the bar for video game standards with interactive fiction. They pop out a game with high production values, pour their soul into it, whip up movie trailer style commercials, and then no one buys into it. Oh sure, they get cult recognition, but what does that get you? Lots of people are all abuzz with rumors of Shenmue 3 in the next generation, but do you really think that it's going to be a system seller?

Back to Indigo Prophecy. It is interesting, that is undeniable. The demo begins with a virtual version of the game's designer telling you how it works, which is amusing... then you're on, playing as a man who just murdered a complete stranger in a diner bathroom. When you walk near stuff in the room that you can act upon, a control menu pops up with your options - and this is the strange part - you make your selection by flicking the right analog stick in the direction shown. So when you stand by the sink, if you flick up you look in the mirror and talk to yourself, and if you flick right you turn on the tap and wash the blood off of your hands. It's novel, but I'm not sure how much better it is than just hitting the X button. It certainly doesn't help with immersion any more than a button press.

The goal of the demo is to clean up the mess and get out of the diner before a cop wends his way into the bathroom and discovers the body. If you're still in sight when the police arrive, the game ends with you arrested for the crime. (And obviously there is more to the story than you being a random murderer: you're being controlled by some faraway psychic baddie. I assume the game's plot revolves around you discovered just what the hell is going on.) On my first run through the demo, I messed around too much in the bathroom taking unnecessary pees, so the cop walked in on me: end of demo. Second time through I cleaned up the body (wash hands, mop up blood, stash victim in a stall) and calmly walked out of the diner... until the waitress reminded me that I hadn't paid for my meal, so I had to walk back to my table and pick up the check. Then I hustled out of the store and ran around a small city block until I found a cab: end of demo.

Here's one of those cutesy interactive fiction touches. When the cop makes his approach to the bathroom, the game goes into a splitscreen so you can still work while watching him walk into the bathroom and discover the body. If you're still in the bathroom at the time, it's nicely harrowing.

But this is why I won't buy it: I hate trial and error gameplay, particularly when the wrong turn ends the game. "Do you want to restart from the last checkpoint?" Thanks for breaking the illusion with all this rewinding time bullshit.

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. SPIDER-MAN versus JOHNNY OHM! Who? Just who thought it was a good idea for EA to fabricate their own hero characters to duke it out with the established Marvel characters? What a tremendous waste of resources. Just give us a big Marvel brawler with a ton of people we know and actually want to play. There are enough no-name losers in the Marvel U available for work without having to manufacture new ones. Or here's an idea, make the game Marvel vs. DC. I liked this game better when it was being referred to as Marvel vs. EA and we all though we'd be able to face Wolverine against Madden.

Even if you assume that Johnny Ohm is just as worthwhile a character design as anybody in the cast of Soul Calibur, the game itself is lame. Run at each other, punch and kick. It's just silly to make games with super heroes when they don't get to do much of anything super. There's also a hilarious opening movie where we're supposed to accept that Team EA has spaceships that are infinitely more awesome than any Marvel character.

Sly 3: Band of Thieves. I love the Sly games, but my single point of pain with them is well publicized: I hate playing as anyone other than Sly. Sly's moves are so fluid and fun, his thief tricks are so clever... that anybody else just seems like forced busy work. So guess what, Sly 3 has even more non-Sly playable characters. Knock it off already. Bentley and Murray were great as limited-use mini-game fronts, but they totally suck as leads. Whenever you play as them you just look at all the environmental obstacles you could easily clear as Sly and get pissed off that you can't.

By the way, Bentley is in a wheelchair now, which makes me roll my eyes so hard up into my skull that it hurts. What is this, the Burger King Kids Club? "His name is Wheels and he is totally rad!" I was really hoping that the crippling of Bentley at the end of Sly 2 would lead to an all-Sly-all-the-time #3. Not the case.

The Sly 3 demo is nicely packed. You get an arena brawl level that shows off how annoying it is to play as Murray and Bentley, a flying level, a level showing another new non-Sly character (a koala with possession powers that I couldn't pull off no matter what I tried) and a 2P Sly vs. Carmelita level.

The brawl level is okay, the flying level (dogfighting biplanes) is cool, and as I said the koala level was miserable. The 2P demo is very nice, although the split screen is awfully small. So, 2 for 2, really.

Urban Reign. I think it's some kind of hip hop Street Fighter, but when I tried to load it it instead reset the PS2. So there you go.