Ultimate Fantastic Four is a title on the bubble. I'm really closing to dropping it. The recent zombies storyline did nothing for me and now we're in the middle of introducing Ultimate Namor, who, shocker, may not actually be identical to Regular Namor.

Part of the problem right now is Greg Land's art, which is stunningly good. It's far too good for this sort of work, which sounds like a stupid "comics-is-lower-art" type of condemnation. The issue is that, because of his soft, photo-realistic style, the characters never seem to interact on the page. Everybody looks like he used an issue of Cosmo for photo reference. They're all pin-ups. Land is an excellent pin-up artist, but not a convincing sequential art artist. His characters are all impossibly beautiful (even Reed!), so beautiful that you get lost in a sea of good-looking faces that reduces down to visual static. Drawing gorgeous faces all the time makes it difficult to portray a wide variety of expressions, which is where Land's skill truly falls short in a comic format. His characters look great when all they have to do is pose for a cover. For comparision, Alex Ross paints in a photo-realistic style using plenty of live human references, but he can pull off the subtle characterization that Land lacks. Not that I'm putting Ross on a pedestal, because I think that guy is criminally over-exposed these days. All things being equal, I'm glad to have two such gifted artists working full time for "our side," rather than doing commercial art hackwork in a greeting card chopshop somewhere.

The teaser for X3 is out, and I'm going to run a little mini-review here as I did with the teaser trailer for Fantastic Four.

That initial FF trailer was the big sucky, although it did do a great job of lowering my expectations enough that I actually enjoyed the movie. Man, what a terrible trailer.

The X3 teaser is not so terrible, but still offers plenty to get snarky about.

I'm standing in line at EB at the local mall at 1:30pm. There are three of us there and only one clerk. It's the manager and she knows her stuff, so I don't mind the short wait. Better than waiting in line because one of the goths who usually mans the register is making weekend plans with the Hot Topic staff across the hall.

In front of me is a 18-25 year old male, dressed in what I would consider the Winter Thug Collection. Wool hat, big puffy jacket. All in dark colors. Stocky dude, mumbles his way through his order.

"But you know what the funniest thing about Animal Crossing: Wild World is?"

"What?"

"It's the little differences. A lotta the same junk we got in the GameCube version, they got in Wild World, but there it's a little different."

"Examples?"

I discovered three new cool things today about ACWW. Plus I had some fun using the game's online system.

1. I don't know what kind of creature Dr. Shrunk is supposed to be, but he reminds me of the Heffalumps from Winnie-the-Pooh. He's a random visitor, like Saharah or Wendell (how are we supposed to know when these folks are showing up?!) and he gives out emotions. Today, I received shyness.

What that means is that your character can perform the same silly visual emotion animations that the animals can do. I hope that you can eventually get some of the cooler ones, like the horwf-horwf-horwf laughter or the bit where the single leaf blows across their heads. Compared to emotions like that, blushing isn't that impressive.

Veteran Animal Crossing players know that nothing stays the same. "Everything changes," as the song goes.* So since my Nookstore is closed for remodeling today, I thought I'd snap some pics of Adamsvil in the early days. Maybe I should have sepia-toned them, that would have been funny.

So here's my modest home with my custom icon doormat. That's me in my current favorite gear: cow skull + SARS mask + poncho. That jerk Lyle is walking around; he ambushed me as soon as I walked out of my house this morning. He claims to sell insurance, but he wouldn't say exactly what the insurance means, and his name makes me think I shouldn't trust him. He initially asked for 6,000 bells, but he cut it down to 3,000 bells a minute later. Unfortunately for him, with Nook's closed for the day, I don't have any way to generate that kind of money. (I travelled to see John H. in Beantown, but even his Nook's was closed today!)

I was completely expecting this game to suck: WizKids' High Stakes Drifter. But ever since Doomtown, I've developed an affection for Wild West gaming of all types. So Mike and I checked it out. He expected it to suck as well.

It's a betting game, which is damn close to me calling it off entirely. A betting game? Who thinks that makes a fun CCG? You start the game with $100 in poker chips, which you use to buy various dudes facedown. Then you choose an attribute (there are three - smarts, skill and luck) and you issue a challenge. Everybody antes in, and then you go through betting rounds where you toss in chips based on what you know about your (secret) dude and what you think you know about your opponents' dudes, based on what they bet.

There's no story, no board gamey specific table zones, only three card types, and most of your cards are facedown for the entire game. So it's not the sort of game I like. At all.

Here's where I throw you the big switch and say "Wow, damn, I really liked it!"

That ass Redd sold me a forged painting!

Tonight I saw Redd's tent for the first time. (It seems like every day you get one of the wanderers... so far I've had Lyle, Shrunk, Redd... and Blanca three times, more about her in a bit.) Redd's joint is now members only, so you have to figure out his password from one your villagers, which is a pain. Inside he had a desk lamp, a fire hydrant, and a famous painting... the one that looks like the Mona Lisa. I bought them all for about 1500, 2500 and 3500 bells. I don't know which, if any, are Redd exclusives, because I'm trying to avoid online spoilers and strategy guides for as long as I can. (Took about two months on the GameCube version. Frowny.)

So I'm kinda excited about the painting, because that's the first one I've seen and I'd like to donate it to the museum. But when I take it down to Blathers, he informs me that it is a fraud! Like, Shroud of Turin fraud! He refuses the donation. And now the painting's title in my inventory comes up "forged painting" instead of "famous painting." I decided to display the contraband in my house - the knuckleheads who live in Adamsvil won't know it's a fake - but I wonder if Nook would spot that it is phony and deny me any good money for selling it. I went back to Redd to bitch, but he wouldn't talk about it, the lying thief.

Started Fatal Frame 3 tonight. Already severely creeped out.

I've had the game since the day it was released, but just didn't have the right time to start it. It came out too close to Trapt (stupid Tecmo!), so I had that locked up in the ol' PS2. I usually only like one game on deck per system. Trapt is now a thoroughly cooked goose, having been through the storyline several times... so now FF3 gets awarded primary status.

The Fatal Frame games are also a highly personal experience for me, which means I need to choose my time investment very carefully. I know that this game will haunt me - I want it to haunt me - so I like to finely tune the environment for maximum impact. To begin, the game is always played at night. It has to be so quiet that I can hear Annie snoring in the kitchen, and so dark that the shadows of the house around me almost seem as part of the game. When I quit for the night, I want to still be jumpy and sensitive. I also don't want any other serious gaming distractions, hence the recent polishing-up on Trapt and Gun. They are out of the way now. Playing Fatal Frame concurrent with something like GTA would be unthinkable. (Only Animal Crossing: Wild World, a game about as diametrically opposed to Fatal Frame as possible, remains... but AC exists on its own astral plane.)

I was never into the Narnia series. By the time I discovered it, I was already old enough to realize when I was being pandered to, and anything that held the theme of "small children escape from the adult world and accomplish great and amazing things" was very easily dismised. I was the kind of kid that thought Jungle Book would have been a much better movie without Mowgli in it.

If I had been of age when Batman introduced "the sensational character find of 1940," Robin, I would have felt the same way. Oh, so because I'm a kid I'm supposed to care more about Batman because now he has a kid like me hanging around? Wonderful. I didn't like Robin until DC grew him up and took him away from Batman.

As I mentioned last time, I've been getting into seeing how I can get ACWW to pimp my website. So this morning I thought I'd try some more custom patterns to advertise the various goings-on at fourhman.com. First up: Fatal Frame: the Card Game. I chose one of my favorite shots from the game, a big frightened closeup of Mio, and got to work.

I first heard about this waaaaay back on IGN's Animal Crossing board... when some guy posted a couple of great screenshots of his own picture used as an in-game pattern. I was annoyed I hadn't thought of it myself, since I'm in Photoshop all the damn time. The trick is to take an image and get Photoshop to pixelate it until it hits that 32x32 resolution and grayscale it so you can use AC's grayscale palette. I suppose you could have Photoshop approximate one of the other palettes, but sticking to grayscale is far easier. I believe that somebody eventually created a Windows app that does the same thing, plus that gave online AC user groups an easy way to share the pattern design ideas.

ADAMSVIL, ANIMAL CROSSING - Intelligent Design proponents in Pennsylvania have launched a new campaign to get the controversial theory "equal time" in the county's education system, this time targeting the Adamsvil Museum's fossil exhibit.

Members of the former Dover School Board, recently ousted by a meager majority of voters in the November election, have formed a private citizens' group in order to further their message. Having been forced to abandon the struggle in the Dover school system, the group has now turned their attentions to the Adamsvil Museum, a popular field trip location. The Museum became a target shortly after Joe, a relatively new resident in the community, unearthed and donated a fossil of the prehistoric human known colloquially as "Peking Man."

Thanks to Nook's stupid pigeon brain, he chose Adamsvil's first Open Gate Night to renovate his store. I really hate how fast Nook goes through his store upgrades. At the least, the progression of Nook's Cranny to Nook-n-Go to Nookway to Nookington's should run over a couple months... not two weeks. His upgrades are triggered by how much you spend, which must not be much because I haven't been buying him out every day. I would have added a time frame requirement as well, like you have to have each Nook variant around for a full month before it accepts the money trigger. Everything else in Animal Crossing takes an eternity to happen, so it's weird that Nook barrels through his subplot in record time.

Therefore, I had the unfortunate task of telling all of my guests tonight that Nook was closed. Jerkstore.

The guestlist tonight included Eli, Cutter, Grant, Gregory, Marci and Mr. Snap. That's Cutter, me, Grant and Gregory in the picture. Cutter was building a fort in Adamsvil's little south-central island, hence all the holes you can see in the screenshot.

I knew there would be trouble when the DVD began with John "Pixar" Lasseter eagerly telling me how much I would like this movie. This wasn't in any bonus feature, this was chapter freaking one of the movie, popping up as soon as I clicked Play... Mr. Pixar gushing about how he thinks this is "[his] friend Miyazaki-san's" best work and that I am really lucky to have the opportunity to watch "Spirited Away."

What the hell kind of desperate hard sell is that? Dude, I already bought the damn DVD. I listened to him for about twenty seconds and then said "You know what I don't need? You." and clicked to the next chapter so the movie could start. I really did say that.

Spirited Away is a critically acclaimed film, has all kinds of awards under its title, including the Japanese Best Picture Oscar-equivalent. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are legendary names in the animation industry. But I didn't get this film.

When I drove back from picking up this week's comics, all I could think was "I'm about to read a new Zoo Crew story."

I was a huge Zoo Crew fan; hunting down the issues I had missed consumed a lot of my first trips to the comic stores in the region. I know this won't surprise anyone, but I have some notes about a Zoo Crew card game locked up in my brain attic.

So I was really excited to see news about the return of Captain Carrot tucked inside all those convention panel discussions on Infinite Crisis. And it was scheduled to appear inside the current Teen Titans book, which is classically appropriate since the very first Zoo Crew preview pages were in a random issue of New Teen Titans. This interview with Zoo Crew papa Scott Shaw! tells much of the story behind this surprise resurrection.

I had a Disney DVD in while Clark and I were playing this afternoon. One of the metal tin series, the Silly Symphonies one. I thought Clark might enjoy seeing some 80 year old cartoons, I guess. When it was over, I parked the PS2 on that goony screensaver dealie it has on the options screen. Mainly because it makes a pleasant ocean waves noise, like it's some kind of relaxo thing, which is preferable to cable TV by any measure.

There's no better way to celebrate the Christmas season than by slapping a group of self-righteous tyrants right across the puss.

Every day I talked to her, I got a little closer to Sable. When you first enter the Able Sisters tailor shop. Mabel does all the clerking while sable just grunts at you. She's busy, she doesn't mingle with the customers. Gradually, you can get her to open up... and she tells you about the difficult time the Able girls had growing up.

It's an unexpectedly sad story. Sable shares some maudlin memories and winds up treating you quite a bit nicer since you're such a good listener.

I only made three custom patterns, so I'm reasonably sure this is attached simply to your efforts to communicate with Sable.

Hey Clark.

This is what happened on your "Adoption Day," the day we formally and legally finalized your place in our family. Yes, you've been our son since June, but America and Korea have to do a little political handshaking to finish things up. It's really for their benefit; your mother and I have considered the deal finished since we first saw you.

We all had to get up and out the door early, because it was a two hour drive to the courthouse where our ceremony was scheduled. You actually slept until almost the last possible moment to get us out the door on time. Mom gave you your breakfast in the car. Once you had eaten, you slept until we got about twenty minutes from the courthouse. Well done!

Here's what it looks like when you reunite the lost kitten with her equally lost mother. Grant and I were happy to arrange this delightful scene, although it didn't net us any super-rare Lost Kitten furniture series or anything. The next day, I received a Lily Pad Table in the mail, which was about the third most common item back on the GameCube.

I wonder how often this is set to happen. I've been meeting up with people online pretty often, and I would hate to have to go through this every month, despite it being really cute.