Today's religious-metaphor-busting quote comes to us from "Malcolm in the Middle":

Dewey: Like Pastor Roy said, how God’s so much bigger and wiser than us. And trying to see what he’s thinking would be like an ant trying to see what I’m thinking.

Teacher: Yes, exactly. But we can trust in his wisdom and we can have faith that he is watching over us.

Dewey: Like me with the anthill in my backyard. I spent days watching the ants, trying to figure out which ones were good and which ones were bad. But they all just look like ants. So I started smiting all of them. I was smiting them with the garden hose, and with lighter fluid, and with the lawnmower. And to be perfectly honest, I think I went a little crazy with the shovel. Those ants could have been praying to me all day; I wouldn’t have heard ‘em. There was nothing they could do about it. Really, it’s the same with us. There’s nothing we can do about anything, either. So why worry about it? Hey, this is making me feel better. I guess all we can do is live our lives with as much kindness and decency as possible and try not to dwell on God standing over us with that giant shovel. Bye!

I'm still enjoying Urban Dead and have even tiptoed into Advance Wars By Web, but here's two more web-based games, albeit of the entirely flash-based variety.

This one is just plain awesome visually. In celebration of Resident Evil 4's European PS2 release, they're running this slick flash game. If you're visiting from the future, it is probably long gone since the accompanying contest is over. As you can tell, the game is done in the style of Nintendo's classic Game And Watch LCD handhelds of the early '80s... which I remember first discovering under locked glass display case at Best many years ago. The deeper layer of amusement here is that RE4 was originally touted as a Nintendo GameCube exclusive, before Capcom got sick of the Cube's relatively low sales and found a way to cram the game into the PS2's final holiday shopping season. So seeing them obviously riff Nintendo here sort of comes off like a big middle finger. (via kotaku)

We took Clark to his first Disney on Ice show tonight. Not that an eight month old would have any idea what was going on, but we figured we'd give it a shot and the tickets were free.

Unfortunately, the theming was centered around "The Incredibles." However, to make it more palatable, the Disney on Ice people twisted it so the Incredibles were interacting with classic Disney characters at Disneyland locations, rather than having the ice show follow the movie directly, as many of these tours do. Every year, they have several of these shows that travel the country... usually one show centers around the most recent movie, but ones based on the Princesses or Mickey & Minnie are always a safe sales bet. In the Incredibles' case (Disney/Pixar's least universally beloved film), they must have realized that they couldn't fill a stadium to watch the movie plot play out on an ice rink for 2+ hours... so they married it to Disney Proper. Remember, these are really ugly characters, and they make even uglier ice skaters, so having Mickey come out to puncture the awkward tension is welcome relief.

Pat Robertson must still be working on his quota of batshit things to say before 2006.

This quote from the other night is in reference to the nonsense going on right in my own backyard, the tossing-out of the Dover School Board.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

Actually, the game is called Trapt, which isn't much better.

It's been over five years since the last game in the Deception series, and that was on PS1, so it feels like it's been even longer. In the meantime, the folks behind Deception - Keisuke Kikuchi and Makoto Shibata - went on to create the mega-superb Fatal Frame series on PS2... so for a while there, it was looking like we'd never see a new Deception game.

I'm kinda bummed that they didn't retain the word "Deception" in the title. I would hazard a guess that it was Marketing who decided Deception 4 would be dubbed "Trapt." Since A) it's been five long years and one entire console generation since "Deception 3: Dark Illusion", and B) once you get above a "3" in your series, people start to ask tough questions about the quality of your franchise.

That gigantic brick in the lower left is the Xbox 360's external power supply. It looks to be roughly one third the size of the 360 itself, unless impotent rage is clouding my judgement. Is this really the best they could do? Is that thing converting to 220 as well? You do not get to claim a nice new compact form factor to your console when you ask gamers to dump that monster in their living rooms.

Out of the four miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis, the most interesting story wasn't even one of them... it was the four part Power Girl tale from JSA Classified #1 through #4. DC should have pumped that story up a bit and made it one of the hyped minis... it would certainly have been a better choice than that terrible and pointless Rann-Thanagar War.

PG's big problem is that she has never been a marquee name; therefore, no new mini. Post-Crisis, her widest fame came during the JLI/JLE years, when she was largely used as a one-note "bitch" character with a pet cat and a diet Coke addiction. She's had several origin revisions since then - which is why the Classified story was so good, because it directly referenced the confusion surrounding her. Plus the art was great, super-heroics with an indy vibe. I thought it was a fantastic fresh take on the character, because she hasn't exactly been well-used in JSA since she joined a few years ago anyway. In JSA, she's just another token strongman. In JSA Classified, we saw her as a person, which was, for me, the first time since, well, ever.

I was cleaning up some junk in the basement when I uncovered a small box full of items from, oh, let's say childhood. The range probably goes from the late '70s to the late '80s. Here's the overview pic of what was inside.

Mario Kart DS is great. Not super-mega-awesome, merely great. Even when Mariofied, racing games just generally ain't my thing. They either have to be super-arcadey, like Burnout, or super-gimmicky, like Double Dash. MKDS is more or less both, hence the great. You know, I still can't see "MK" without parsing "Mortal Kombat."

Mario Kart goes a long way towards appeasing the non-racing gamer with plenty of unlockables and extra modes. I can get behind that. So far, I've unlocked all the GP cups, Daisy, Dry Bones, and the third tier of karts. Bowser's third kart is one of his hilarious clown-faced airplanes. I like that, when online, you can see the bonus stuff even if you haven't necessarily unlocked them... the other night I saw Dry Bones for the first time in an online match, and he was in a tank. Gawrsh.

Today I buckled down and started bagging and boxing my way through the immense pile of comics building up downstairs. Usually I do this once a year, but somehow 2004 was skipped... so I have over two years worth of books to sort and file away. I'm already out of bags and I'm only into the G's.

Since I'm at a forced pause, here's some of my favorite comic covers within this storage cycle. All these images were stolen from the Great Comics Database, a site that is attempting to index every comic book ever published. It's a great place to burn some hours leafing through cover galleries.

There's some hilarious meta-fiction going on at Penny Arcade, by the name of Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. It started out as yet another one of their grating high school in-jokes, but Tycho and Gabe managed to find a way to make it relevant to their fans: hand over the keys.

To understand this link, you have to bring along several culture-underground touchstones. You have to know what a Wiki is, foremost. You have to have somehow been in gaming in the last twenty years. And it won't hurt to have been annoyed by one or both, because that makes the whole concept funnier.

Stop sucking.

This is about your "Monthly Rag" news section. I know that it is difficult to write articles about upcoming toy lines. I know that almost every article in your old "Buzz" section was either "Toy Line X Announced" or "Look at these Protoype Figures from Toy Line Y." I know that every time you asked the brand manager for a quote, you always got the same inspid "We are SO excited to be able to bring these beloved characters to the fans" crap.

But that was all a damn sight better than this terrible Onion bullshit you've been doing since issue 95.

At first, you wonder why nobody ever did this before: make a video game set amid the tension and action of high-stakes surgery. The answer is probably because it just wasn't possible to put the player so directly and tangibly inside the surgeon's viewpoint. To pull this off, you need a stylus (or a mouse, as the concept was attempted by some old PC games fifteen years ago, but the stylus does a much better job of physically mimicking the toolset). The stylus becomes your forceps, your needle, your scalpel. Using icon palettes not unlike Photoshop, the stylus becomes a multipurpose tool as you determine the most efficient way to save your patients' lives.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife is a DS proof-of-performance title. Yes, stylus games work. Yes, the DS has inspired a new wave of games that take advantage of a machine with non-standard features and hardware. This game just could not be done on a Game Boy or a PSP. It would be miserable on the GameCube or PS2. And as a PC or web-based game, it would never stand a chance of punching through the craposphere. It's DS by definition, the only system that can deliver both the specific hardware to run it and the eager gamers to play it.

The comics catalogging continues, although I am out of bags again as I hit the U's. I've been through 600 bags since I started and I would estimate about 100 more to go (lots of Uncle Scrooges and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories). So, ballpark that at 700 comics in a little over two years. A comic a day! That's not a bad lifeplan at all, if only I could guarantee that there wouldn't be any days that suck.

So here's six more cool covers that I re-discovered this week.