January 2006 Archives

I enjoyed the original PS1 Medal of Honor. It wasn't a franchise worth obsessing over, but I respected the dramatic vibe and it was a functional-enough FPS. Frontline continued that tradition of acceptably so-so gameplay, but with a huge graphics upgrade.

The thing I remember most about this game isn't the show-stopping D-Day opener, but the weird flayed skin thing you could do to NPCs. If you got a grenade to go off near somebody without killing him, the game would peel back the skin around his mouth and leave a grinning rictus of the kind that early Robert Jordan always went on about. And remember, they'd still be alive, talking to you, with this hideous death metal album cover jawline. Creepy. And since the characters in this game always crooked their heads to stare at you during live cutscenes, it could get really creepy.

I don't think I ever finished this one. I think I just got tired of it. And seeing how the MoH series petered out, I don't know if it was a good series gone lame, or if it was always mediocre and we just never noticed.

Memory Score: good night, Medal of Honor, and all the sequels you see

You're talking to a big PaRappa fan. Big enough to have enjoyed UmJammer Lammy on sheer osmosis. Big enough to still have the PaRappa soundtrack in regular rotation on the iPod.

But when the early reviews came in and declared PaRappa 2 a sequel of no equal to the original genre-creating, PlayStation-making masterpiece... well, I'm sorry to say it put me off. I didn't pick this one up until it hit the $20 pile. (Which, looking back, really didn't take that long.)

What killed it for me was the near unanimous assertation that the songs weren't as memorable or catchy as the first one. That's a totally subjective comment... but it turned out to be entirely correct. I can't name a single song from PaRappa 2, but I could sing the whole PaRappa 1 rock opera while drinking a glass of water.

PaRappa 2's catchiness was not helped by its length. When the game is so easy that you can beat it in one night, you're simply not hearing the songs often enough for them to even have a chance to become catchy. Too easy, too forgettable.

Here's my free gift for developers Nana-On-Sha: take PaRappa to the PSP and allow players to download new levels based on Sony's online Connect catalog (or they can give up and partner with iTunes once Connect does the inevitable and dies.) Or import your own MP3s - the damn thing is more of a media player than a game device these days anyway. Figure out how the game can create a rhythm matching game based on beats and tempo, rather than the listen-and-repeat rappin' voice samples. It would be like the cell phone ringtone hysteria, but something that you could only get on a PSP.

Memory Score: PaRappa deserves better than to go out on a low note

Look at the dates here: this poor game came out after the world was done with Crazy Taxi, and, even worse, after the very Crazy Taxi concept was relegated to mini-game status in Grand Theft Auto 3.

So I need to point out that I got this game for free through work.

I guess you have to reluctantly call this game a step up for Simpsons games, but given a baseline of Simpsons Skateboarding and a hundred terrible Game Boy games, there's not much fertile soil from which to grow. I mean, there's plenty of sound bites from the show, and driving around virtual Springfield was fun, briefly. But the simplistic repetition, screwy physics and license abuse turn this into an embarrassment. Of course, two years later Simpsons Hit and Run comes out, which does everything Road Rage does, plus is actually fun. So history isn't likely to treat this one kindly.

I'm sure a lot of these were sold just on the strength of "3D Simpsons Game!!11!", but that 90% were traded back in for store credit.

Memory Score: not quite the worst game ever, but trying

This was such a huge game for me. As a Disney fan, the mash-up of movies and characters was like pulling one emotional ripcord after another. Sure, we've had Disney-based video games since forever, but never one that treated the entire Disney catalog with such seriousness and respect. This was not just a simplistic save-the-princess movie walkthrough; this was a worlds colliding, doom courting, epic struggle against futility and entropy.

Which is, of course, what Square brought to the table. Kingdom Hearts is a duet between the two companies, with Disney instruments set to a Final Fantasy melody. And somehow, they managed to turn the combat into a real time arcade battle, far removed from the typical turn-based RPG stylings.

I can gush about Kingdom Hearts for days, but the game wasn't without problems. The camera would go berserk in battles, some puzzle areas couldn't be solved unless you gave up, real time item management could be rough, and the game's first few hours are quite obviously weaker than the rest. But weighed against the pleasure of a complex story woven with classic Disney properties, I'm willing to overlook quite a bit.

Memory Score: I fought shadow demons alongside Donald and Goofy. Bring on the sequel!

Next week: one of Sony's trinity-of-new-IP games debuts, some hobbits, a superhero who just can't break his way into a decent game, and a PS2 exclusive that isn't even a game at all!

Yes, I do think the new DS looks great. I'm already hoping for a small list of color choices.

We've already seen the prelims on the Revolution hardware look, and this new DS Lite falls right into line. Was anybody doing this white thing before Apple? Man, imagine if that old Dalmatian iMac color scheme had exploded like this.

Given that the Revolution and the DS are going to connect up in some way, and further supposing that Animal Crossing will make its way to the Revolution in some form, I hope there's some sort of interplay between Wild World and Secret Unnamed Animal Crossing Revolution Project. At the least, I'd like to be able to move my character from one game into the other. I think it'd be the ultimate lifelong virtual pet... essentially a save file that you'll be able to take with you from game to game across decades. It's not so farfetched; if they had done this with the first AC, some of us would already be playing with avatars over three years old. Figure a new AC game every three to five years, it could be Nintendo's idea of a MMORPG: with no monthly fee and a guarantee that players will buy an entirely new game to get their beloved alter ego inside all the new content.

I'd also like to see a Game Boy Player-esque feature on the Rev that would turn it into a DS. Since so many DS games allow multiplayer with only one game cartridge, your Revolution would let single-DS / multiple-gamer households get in on some of the fun. It would be nice if this hypothetical add-on did not require additional hardware (just stick a DS slot around the side somewhere!) and did not run off a separate game disk (build it in!), because neither of those attributes did much for the Game Boy Player. Sure would be an easy bullet point for the Revolution's launch, wouldn't it? "Also plays all your DS games!"

Going from a successful next-gen handheld system to a not-so-successful handheld system, the GTA people seem to be planning to release the PSP exclusive title GTA: Liberty City Stories on the PS2 by May. Well done, lads. Now nobody has any reason at all to buy a PSP. Unless they really want to watch the Family Guy movie with a d-pad. Now, what assurance do we have that this will live up to the hallowed GTA3 trilogy, and not just feel/look like a GBA game ported to GameCube? Sure, it's an eleventh hour band-aid for a company that's bleeding money... but if it's as good as any of the GTA3 games, damn right I'll get it.

Of course, it could just be a really early April Fool's gag. Friggin hell I hate those.

An Urban Dead update: I've only been checking in sporadically as of late, because I have well over 1000 XP and nothing interesting to spend them on. I've pretty much been waiting for the game to add in some new features (like the recent NecroTech upgrade). So I've been just hanging out in the Calvert Mall, leaving occasionally to stab at some zombies.

This week, I noticed some chatter about a big zombie incursion, an organized mob picking its way from mall to mall... because malls are typically huge human strongholds. Now, I've heard this for months; nearly every week somebody in the room would run in all panicked about the giant zombie attack that was coming within a day or two. But this time, it wasn't just crying wolf...

One explanation before I continue: Urban Dead happily records all chat in your location when you're not actively playing, so when you return to the game, you get this big page of conversation. Typically, there isn't much text, since the act of talking costs action points and most people spend their points on killin' before chattin'. Here's what greeted me when I logged into Urban Dead tonight:

� Cronzor said "Maybe I should drop some guns and make some syringes?" (01-26 07:27 GMT)
� Azombie said "OK guys, the Tour will be here any day now. For those who haven't been in a mall seige, priorities are 1) Barricade, 2) Heal and 3) Kill zeds inside. Don't make forays outside, it's pointless. Barricades are the best weapon, followed by first aid!" (01-26 09:31 GMT)
� Cronzor said "Sounds like a blast. No pun intended." (01-26 15:53 GMT)
� Alexis Storm said "Bale Mall has fallen, zeds inside just finishing up the stragglers." (01-26 16:38 GMT)
� Link02129 said "Would anyone like to set up an official revive point?" (01-26 19:42 GMT)
� BiggyP said "theres one just north of here actually.dunno if its official but ive revived a few zeds there." (01-26 20:52 GMT)
� Richard Tanner said "Fellas, I (as well as my friends) have been talking to the four corners of the mall and advocating relocating to Caiger before the Tour can get here, thus avoiding dying here and strengthening Caiger for the final fight" (01-26 22:08 GMT)
� Richard Tanner said "A few people have insisted on staying and fighting, and to them I say good luck, but they simply can't win, they lack the numbers and organization, Caiger however, does not and would be the place to go" (01-26 22:09 GMT)
� Nukem said "22" (01-27 00:16 GMT)
� Nukem said "22 zeds outside SE corner. Bale mall 17 clicks east of here has been over by zeds. i believe they are moving towards this mall." (01-27 00:16 GMT)
� Dark Truth said "22? what?" (01-27 00:17 GMT)
� A flare was fired 2 blocks to the south. (01-27 00:34 GMT)
� deadified said "there are 48 on the SE corner of the mall" (01-27 01:59 GMT)
� deadified said "48 Zombies that is" (01-27 01:59 GMT)
� A flare was fired 3 blocks to the east and 2 blocks to the north. (01-27 02:51 GMT)
� Shirtman said "The revive point a few north at Boait Monument is an official point organized by ClanBOB. I regularly rez two or three zombies a day there." (01-27 04:01 GMT)
� Mr Jack23 said "Anyone alerted the BOBs? I'm sure they'd be interested if they don't already know." (01-27 04:02 GMT)
� Cronzor said "I helped reinforce barricades at the southeast block. Can't seem to get it to extremely heavy though." (01-27 04:19 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 04:28 GMT)
� brett maas said "SE corner needs help, 28 zombies!!!" (01-27 04:42 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 04:43 GMT)
� A flare was fired 8 blocks to the east and 5 blocks to the north. (01-27 04:53 GMT)
� Cronzor said "SOUTHEAST UNDER MASSIVE ATTACK, GO GO GO!!!" (01-27 05:03 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 05:19 GMT)
� A flare was fired 11 blocks to the west and 2 blocks to the south. (01-27 07:20 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 07:34 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 4 damage. (01-27 10:08 GMT)
� The zombie's bite was infected! (You'll now take 1HP damage for every action you take, except speaking. Infection can be cured with a First Aid Kit.) (01-27 10:08 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 10:08 GMT)
� A flare was fired 13 blocks to the west and 1 block to the north. (01-27 10:47 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 12:35 GMT)
� Enormous Genitals said "Southeast needs reinforcements fast!" (01-27 12:49 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 13:16 GMT)
� Tiberias said "took out 3 zeds to the se, ran out of ap, running out of ammo, need some help to keep the mall." (01-27 13:18 GMT)
� You heard a low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 13:35 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 14:09 GMT)
� You heard a low groaning 1 block to the east and 1 block to the south. (01-27 14:19 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 14:20 GMT)
� rshadarack2 said "RETREAT!! FALL BACK TO CAIGER" (01-27 15:53 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east. (01-27 15:55 GMT)
� NEO VVL said "Priorities: 1=Barricades 2=Healing 3=Kill the zeds FIGHT FOR CALVERT!!!" (01-27 16:14 GMT)
� Kenji Asaka said "waaah, sorry Kokkelipiima, i wanted to kill a zd =(" (01-27 16:19 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 16:20 GMT)
� Kenji Asaka said "shiet, man, didin't mean it this time too" (01-27 16:20 GMT)
� Thorsen said "ove 150 zeds pouring in through the SE" (01-27 16:32 GMT)
� You heard a loud and distant groaning 2 blocks to the south. (01-27 16:34 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 16:35 GMT)
� deadified healed you for 10 HP. (01-27 16:38 GMT)
� Mymmeli said "C'mon people, fight back!" (01-27 16:45 GMT)
� A flare was fired 12 blocks to the south. (01-27 17:50 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 17:53 GMT)
� A zombie said "GRAAAAAGH! AH AHM hra ZGARRAH ZAMBAH! AH AHM HAR ZA GAH GRAAAAGH AHN HARMANBARGAR BRAHNZ! HAR HAR HAR!" (01-27 18:51 GMT)
� A zombie said "ZAMBAH GANNAH GAH HARMAN BRAHNZ!" (01-27 18:52 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 19:01 GMT)
� james swelstad said "GET OUT OF HERE!" (01-27 19:34 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east. (01-27 19:36 GMT)
� A zombie said "ZAMBAHZ GANNAH HABBAH HARMAN BRAHNZ! ZAMBAAAAAAAAHZ! AGAAAAAAGH!" (01-27 19:46 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 19:51 GMT)
� A flare was fired 14 blocks to the west and 10 blocks to the south. (01-27 20:02 GMT)
� You heard a low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 20:20 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning 1 block to the east. (01-27 20:22 GMT)
� You heard a low groaning 1 block to the south. (01-27 21:17 GMT)
� You heard a loud and low groaning from somewhere nearby. (01-27 21:17 GMT)
� A zombie said "ZAMBAHZ GAHNA ZMAZH HARMANZ!!!" (01-27 21:31 GMT)
� A zombie said "GRAB HARMANZ ANH ZMAZH MAZH ZMAZH!" (01-27 21:32 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 4 damage. (01-27 21:34 GMT)
� The zombie's bite was infected! (You'll now take 1HP damage for every action you take, except speaking. Infection can be cured with a First Aid Kit.) (01-27 21:34 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 21:45 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 4 damage. (01-27 21:58 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 4 damage. (01-27 21:58 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:08 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:15 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:15 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:15 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:15 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:15 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:17 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:17 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:18 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:18 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:18 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:18 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:18 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:19 GMT)
� A zombie attacked you for 3 damage. (01-27 22:19 GMT)
� You heard a loud and distant groaning 2 blocks to the south. (01-27 23:31 GMT)
� You heard a loud and distant groaning 1 block to the west and 4 blocks to the south. (01-28 00:25 GMT)
� You have been killed.

I thought that was pretty funny.

This entry is dedicated to Snake, pictured at right. I always wanted him in my GameCube town but never saw him. He did briefly live in my DS town, and I was grateful for the short time we spent together. Had I bothered to visit him every day, maybe I would have seen him packing and urged him not to move. But I did not, and so now there is a sheep living where Snake's dojo once stood.

The week's excitement in ACWW is not one, but TWO massive game glitches. Kotaku has blurbs on both: the "red tulip" plague starts with a bogus letter in your mailbox, containing a screwed up red tulip item that becomes an invisible, immovable block if you drop it in your house. Further rumors suggest that this was actually a numbskull move from Nintendo - they let an All Players letter slip out before it was ready - and that Nintendo will soon offer restitution to any players affected by the glitchy tulips. Rare furniture please, Iwata-san!

The other one is being attributed to nefarious players, where your town gate suddenly becomes a museum, thus blocking you from heading up to see Copper and go online. The articles that discuss this are all really vague, which doesn't help anyone much at this point. So there's your warning.

Pictured: me, Taylor, Cameron, Daniel. I'm wearing my Village People Tribute gear.

I've had a ton of visitors to my Animal Crossing diaries lately, thanks to some very nice mentions and writeups on memepool, Game Set Watch, Clickable Culture, and Kotaku. My offline Friend List is now beyond full, so I've been juggling codes around to try to give the new requests a chance at getting in to Adamsvil. And it's not because Adamsvil is awesome, not at all. It's because a common refrain I hear in these emails is "I don't know anybody else who has this game, and I don't trust most of the message boards out there."

I take that as a very serious compliment, because I'm in the same boat. First of all, I'm happy to appear as a trusted Animal Crossing commentator... and I agree that the high traffic message boards out there probably have just as many jerky griefers as they have genuine cool players. I wouldn't visit IGN or wherever and beg for Friend Codes. And secondly, were it not for these diaries, I wouldn't have very many people to visit either. It's not like I'm in high school and have a wide circle of DS-wielding friends with which to trade Snowman furniture. There are three names on my Friend List (online and offline) that belong to people I know in real life.

And as we've learned, the fun of Animal Crossing Online is in the sharing. Showing off new items and decorations and patterns. Discussing the strange things that go on in this game. Seeing how each player makes the game his or her own... growing at his or her own pace, creating designs, collecting favorite furniture sets. So the more people you know, the more of the game you get to see.

Speaking of that, what was up with La-Di-Day and Yay Day? Are these non-events supposed to replace all the awesome holidays we had on GCN? Not bloody likely! Instead of collecting special seasonal item sets offered by Jack, Franklin, Jingle and others, we now have regular holidays where no one gets anything. La-Di-Day is pitched as the day to choose a new Town Tune, and all the animals talk to you about it, hoping their tune will be selected. And yet, there was no voting, no discussion, you couldn't even see the tunes the animals were supposedly working on. Did I miss something?

Yay Day was even worse. Everybody just had something nice to say. New built-in text balloons does not a holiday make. What a waste! Where's Tortimer with his special holiday items?!? I'll be interested to see if the Official Nintendo Strategy Guide has any insight on these two events - but it's precisely the kind of thing that Nintendo will never explain, other than to yammer about how much fun it is to compose a new Town Tune. Spare me.

A much better start than issue three's Atlantis Attacked! motif. Last issue, with the Atlantis and Themyscira bits, reminded me of a Funniest Home Videos interview I read in TV Guide back when I was, like, 15 and considered TV Guide something I ought to read each week. One of the folks who held the job of choosing what videos make air said that they receive a lot of tapes with stuff that is Only Funny To The Relatives Of The People In The Video. There was a much more interesting acronym, but I don't remember what it was. Well, seeing Atlantis smooshed and Themyscira erased are Much More Meaningful If You're Already A Fan.

BUT... seeing the Society dump Chemo onto Bludhaven (killing millions, by Nightwing's count) was more powerful to me than Atlantis and Themyscira combined. And I don't read Nightwing's book.

The reason is simple: Atlantis and Themyscira are silly, fantasy-world locations. Bludhaven, although fictional and a bad clone of Gotham, is, at the least, a "real" city full of real people. Any writer in the world can bring back Atlantis and/or Themyscira with some mystical magical whatever... but Bludhaven? I'm thinking Bludhaven just got wiped from the DCU map for keepsies. I can identify with that much more readily. Plus, Chemo smells like laundry detergent!

Yes, I teared up when Batman - still vulnerable and reeling from last issue - asked Nightwing if "the early years" (his Robin years) were a good memory. And Nightwing says "[they were] the best."

Remember all the Infinite Crisis prequel miniseries? This issue explains a bunch of the leftover dangling threads, like the one from Rann-Thanagar War about how the center of the universe changed. Of course, everything involved with Rann-Thanagar War sucked... and this portion of Alex Luthor's plan is the fuzziest and and most comic booky part. I can easily see him wresting control of Brother Eye and the OMACs. Absolutely can he impersonate Lex Luthor and build a Secret Society. Kidnapping various representatives of the former alternate Earths would be simple. And yeah, with the help of the Psycho-Pirate and Eclipso, I can even see him sending the Spectre off on a madhouse killing spree. But having Superboy Prime move around planets so he can metaphysically split the universe in two with his own hands? I'm going to have to nod dumbly on that one. As ever, the leftover Rann-Thanagar elements are the weak link in the comprehension chain.

But back to good stuff, speaking of Superboy Prime. Holy shit, the boy is nuts. Naturally, the characters he kills - kills! - are a bunch of third-rate nobodies that we readers would kill ourselves given a locked door and a barbed wire baseball bat. But still. This is the event I predicted in issue 3: the visceral revelation of the corruption of Superboy Prime. Somehow, Golden Age Superman will get wind of this, and it's going to be time for the "How could I have been so BLIND" monologue.

The fracas with Superboy leads into the other big emotional moment: the disappearance of the Flash. This week, Flash #230 also dropped, which is the last issue in that numbering sequence. I've been getting that book for years, and I have just about all 230 issues. Unfortunately, #230 is pretty bad, the culmination of a truly lousy storyline. Not a great issue to go out on. It also has very little to do with Infinite Crisis... suspiciously similar to how Barry Allen's last Flash issue had very little to do with COIE.

Could this be another tidying up of the DCU? The way I see it... minimizing things like Atlantis and Themyscira takes away some of the larger "suspend your disbelief" stuff. They are both the kind of things that you come across, roll your eyes, remember you're reading a comic book, and move on. And as much as I love Wally West, his origin is exactly the same kind of thing.

Barry Allen had a reasonable origin story. He's standing by a rack of uncorked and unprotected dangerous chemicals when he is struck by lightning and turned into the Fastest Man Alive. Wally, on the other hand, got his Flash powers when, as a kid, he has Barry show him that origin. Barry, like an idiot, stacks up the very same chemicals by the very same window, and goddammit, lightning strikes twice. Young Wally West becomes Kid Flash, the Fastest Kid Alive, because DC marketing decided that Barry needed a kid sidekick. That's just stupid, even for the Silver Age.

Since then, we've had lots of retconning to add some layers of sense (the Speed Force) to the dual origins of Barry Flash and Wally Flash, but that's still pretty much the canon version. And looking back over my years of buying DC books, Wally's origin is typically shoved under the rug because of it being so silly. We get almost monthly retellings of infant Superman's historic escape from Krypton and young Batman's Crime Alley post-cinema murder scene. But Wally? Not so much.

It's apparant that DC wants a new Flash, and I'm not naive enough to suggest that Wally's Silver Age origin is the chief reason. But let's look at the origin of Bart Allen, Barry's grandson, initially known as Impulse but currently running around as a modern-day Kid Flash. Which I've hated because Impulse is by far the better name and his Impulse costume was undeniably a better design.

Recall that Barry ended his life living in the future, essentially hiding from a trumped-up murder charge in his present. (For some reason, I don't consider time travel as comic booky a plot device as Atlantis. Probably because time travel always gets explained away in delightful pseudo-science terms, while Atlantis and Themyscira are just old world legends continually resurrected because nobody owns the copyright.) So Barry's heirs were born and raised in the future. Bart, because he inherited Barry's powers, was raised in a VR tank... because that's just how you do things in the future, I guess. So when he comes to our century, he sees everything as one big video game. He's a Flash with ADD. He acts without fear because he's never interacted with the real world before. On impulse, get it?

Well, we lived off a scatterbrained, inattentive Impulse for quite a while. He's done mentoring turns with all the older speedsters. And sometime during his tenure with Young Justice, he grew up somewhat and ever since then he's not quite the naive youth he used to be. But, character development aside, that's a much cooler origin than Mr. Copy / Paste. It only marginally links him to previous Flashes, so when new readers ask the inevitable "How did he get his powers?" question, DC doesn't have to shuffle their collective feet and point to a shot of nerdy Barry Allen stacking poison on a bookshelf while Wally looks on in anticipatory amazement. Bart's origin can stand on its own. And when DC wants to re-connect him with his heritage, the Speed Force will be there, ready and waiting. The worst thing about Bart is his name, which always struck me as a dopey one-off Simpsons joke.

So will Bart become the new Flash? Will Barry come back? Will Wally just be reinvented somehow? I don't know. At this point, I'm just enjoying the ride. Because, regardless of what happened in the Silver Age, I've grown to think of Wally as my Flash. It will be sad to see him go.

The PS1 GTA series was pretty hit or miss in the minds of critics before October 2001. I considered myself a fan... enough to have actually bought the London 1969 expansion disk. So I was already interested by the time those first few screenshots and details started hitting the press. We simply had no idea how huge this game was going to be.

When I played the MGS2 demo back in ZOE, that was the first time I thought "This is what a next-gen game looks like." When I played GTA3 for the first time, I thought "This is what a next-gen game plays like."

It really was astonishing. The size of the world, the open-ended mission structure, the sidequests and Hidden Packages, the voice cast, the mix of crazy driving and hand-to-hand action, the radio stations. The sense of being in a living world.

Sure, some will see nothing more than a reprehensible crime simulator, with cop-killing and hookers and drugs and gangsters. But with a moral decay standard that ranges from MTV to HBO, it just doesn't strike me as the kind of thing to worry about. Society at large is fine with Grand Theft Auto.

GTA has earned every bit of praise, and very little of those accolades are overly concerned with content. This is a damn fine game, and it reinvented a franchise that only got better.

Memory Score: I know more about Liberty City than I do about my own hometown

The one big drag to every GTA game is that it means I don't play much of anything else for a couple months. Although I was there for launch day for the much-anticipated MGS2, I didn't get into playing it until January.

It was the ZOE demo that sold me, because I never had a very high opinion of the PS1 Metal Gear Solid. But that demo sold me hard. It looked amazing, it was a hoot to play, and it revealed the edge of a storyline that you just had to experience.

And right from the beginning, you knew it was going to be a ride... with that uberlong movie showing Snake ruining his inviso-suit bungeeing off the bridge, spying on soldiers and Russians and who knows what else, and getting the annual cigarette lecture from Otacon. Right there, the game was telling you what was about to happen: you're getting kickass action, long movie interludes, and a bunch of heavy plot points that may or may not make any sense. If you were still surprised/annoyed by the Raiden switch, the Crazy Colonel sequence, Fission Mailed, the mind-warping finale, and all the other weirdo junk Kojima threw in there... well, you just weren't paying attention when the game started.

This is one of the few storyline-driven games that I've played through multiple times. It's that good.

Memory Score: are you people still going on about Raiden? get over it

I initially heard about Fatal Frame through some brief previews in OPM (which is my main defense of print gaming mags: you're more likely to see info on games you wouldn't normally consider yourself interested in, especially little games like Fatal Frame, simply because you're physically turning pages and you're forced to see everything they cover. Online gaming sites are great, but it's too easy to limit your reading habits to what you already know you're going to like, rather than taking a chance and clicking on info that you've already pre-judged and rejected.) The description mentioned that it was to be a survival horror game with a camera as your only weapon.

A camera? That's exactly the kind of oddball mission statements I look for in my gaming.

I had been burned by Code: Veronica and largely turned off on Silent Hill by this point. So I was looking for a new horror franchise... and the camera hook was all the impetus I needed.

Despite some cosmically bad box art, Fatal Frame became a continual talking point in my PS2 life. I've been back and forth over Resident Evil and Silent Hill (and others) since, and I still haven't found anything that comes close to the Fatal Frame series for genuine terror. It's the camera that does it: you're accustomed to the third-person viewpoint for exploration, but when the game forces you to stare into the eyes of a killer spirit, in first-person, so you can take its picture... well, it's brown trousers time.

And the story? Haunting. It's Alfred Hitchcock telling a love story from beyond the grave, set amid the gory rural legends of traditionalist Japan. And the way it unfolds, in little awful bits and pieces... spectral flashbacks here, lost audiotapes to play there, so much more interactive and engaging that all those diary entries found in RE.

Memory Score: Kirie, poor girl... why did she have to become so attached to this world?

Another off-center choice. Mr. Mosquito was part of the Fresh Games label, which was supposed to kickoff a line of alternative, budget-priced niche games. To my recollection, Fresh Games lasted through exactly two releases: Mr. Mosquito and Mad Maestro (a music conductor rhythm game). You see, games like this come out in Japan all the time. Usually, nobody even considers a US/UK release because they're "too Japanese." But the surge of anime hits in the US around this time (Pokemon, Digimon, Dragon Ball Z, etc) opened the doors just a crack to allow some of this stuff to sneak through and hit that thirst for Domo-Kun style weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun.

And, yes, Mr. Mosquito is quite definitely Japanese. You can't miss it: the whole game takes place inside one very typical Japanese family's house. As the titular mosquito, you have to fly around the dwelling sucking blood from the family members. It's more or less to scale - although the mosquito is highly cartoonized - so each level (focusing on one room and usually one person to attack) has plenty of space to fly around. Generally you have to do something to distract the person, say, by turning on the television, and then position yourself to dive in on the blinking blood points on any exposed skin. Once in injection mode, you twirl the sticks like mad, trying to get as much blood as possible without getting smacked to death once the human figures out what's going on.

Today, you might be able to do this as a 2D website Flash game in the States. But a full-on 3D video game? Never. Only in Japan.

The flying controls were pretty wonky (you'd think an insect would be more maneuverable) and there was lots of trial and error before you hit the blood spot just right... but on sheer concept alone, this was a game worth buying.

And although the Fresh Games concept didn't live to see another fiscal year, there's more than a little of this pro-Japan movement behind the firestorm success of a certain rolling ball title we'll get to in 2004...

Memory Score: everybody needs a few games in their library to dig out just to watch the room go WTF?!

Next week: it's going to be impossible to follow this batch. We'll take a stab at it with a military game, two cartoon games, and the inter-company crossover nobody expected. Are u still rappin' cool?

Fresh from the fertile mind of Valsu of Trinsic... the upside down Blanca! I actually didn't get this until I hit the zoom-in; before that I thought it was just another dashed-off Blanca head. Cute idea; bland execution.

Hey SolarKid of SolCity: you really need to try harder.

It looks like Ultigon of Heaven duped his own face onto Blanca's. Nothing wrong with that, just seems a little weak.

Now here's a Blanca! At first glance, it seems sloppy... but I'm betting that it was very carefully crafted. The decorated eye, the moustache, the lower lip... this one is almost a Picasso homage. Nice work, Kamil of Vale.

It's cute, it's symmetrical, it's big, it has a splash of appropriate color. That's pretty much your baseline standard for a good Blanca head. This one is by Alex from Loopy.

Another nice one, from Jack of Ireland. The only problem is that the features center around the nose... I'm of the opinion that the eyeballs should be on that center horizon line.

I have had Blanca show up on days where I have another visitor, so I think the idea is to send Blanca on her way as soon as possible. If you can get her out of there quickly, then you still might receive a wandering vendor later on... even if it's only Lyle.

When I saw Apple's new Intel chip commercial, my first thought was that it was made solely for Mac trade shows and would never actually see general broadcast. I mean, as a Mac user, I got it. I giggled on the "dull little boxes, dull little tasks" line. But does the non-Mac user - the non-tech head - understand it?

It's a very nice spot. I love the restrained, hopeful looks on the technicians' faces. Keifer Sutherland is just as distinctive, commanding and measured as Jeff Goldblum was in his VO work.

But I don't think it sells the Mac very well, and I certainly don't know who is the target audience. I've known about Mac switching to Intel chips for a while now, and I still have no idea what that really means. So what does the guy still on Windows 2000 think? The spot wants you to "imagine the possibilities," which is the only disgustingly amateurish line in the whole :30. Guess what, jerkwad: You're the TV commercial. You have to tell me what to think about your stupid product. I don't have to imagine a goddamn thing. Does an Intel-based Mac mean the computer is faster? Better compatibility? Easier to use? To fix? To upgrade? It might be all of that and more, or some of that and less, the spot ain't sayin'.

It also implies that we all hold a certain amount of esteem for the Intel chip prior to all of this. That we should feel sorry that all of its power has been squandered. Do we? Do you consider the Intel chip a brand name as important as the Hemi inside your Dodge, the NBC behind MSNBC? Intel chips are inside just about every PC out there, therefore they are in a lot more crappy computers than good ones. That's not a high-powered, exclusive, upper-crust brand that I can get behind.

Most people could care less what is inside their computers, as long as they have a working web browser, email, and the ability to store family photographs. Most people are going to blink past this spot before the logo fades out. When it comes to the PC userbase created by Windows' years of crappy interfaces, inconsistant behavior and weekly virus crises, "imagining the possibilities" isn't really a priority. They're just happy the damn things boot up each morning.

This is a commercial aimed squarely at tech-heads, to grab the PC fence-sitters out there who might consider buying a Mac now that it has some familiar interior hardware. (Meaning that, at some point, you'll be able to boot both OSX and Windows on these things... but again, only tech-heads give a crap about doing something absurd like that.) And despite containing some of Apple's most aggressive copy points to date, it's chiefly written to spoon feed existing Mac users some shadenfreude and spur them to buy up to the new systems.

And of course, there's no pricing at all. You simply can't mention price in a Mac spot, because the Dell spot right after it will be crowing about a $300 wonder bundle. As Mac fans, we've always been bipolar about the whole pricing thing. Half the time we go to extravagant lengths to prove that a factory Mac costs nearly the same as a comparably built and spec'ed PC box... and the other half we relish pointing out that if you want quality, you have to pay extra for it. You don't expect a Rolls to cost the same as a Yugo, even though both are obviously automobiles. You have to be a diehard Mac fan to understand the logical break there... just like you have to be a diehard Windows fan to accept having to run security patches every three days.

Screw this Intel marketing-speak. It's empty air. The only possibility I'm imagining is when Apple takes the $500 Mac Mini and adds a mini-LCD and mini-keyboard, and backs it up with a spot campaign that assures Windows users that they'll be able to do everything they used to do, only better. Then you've got something that's a lot harder for doldrumized Windows users to overlook.

Adamsvil's Open Gate Nights continue to be a rousing success. Tonight, there must have been a waiting list to get in, because for the first hour, as soon as somebody left, somebody else walked in. I hope that everybody who has tried to get in has found an open slot. I have a lot of friend codes from players who I haven't seen in town yet, so I hope you just haven't been playing at 8pm EST and not that you saw the maxxed population and gave up. Let me know if you've repeatedly tried and failed!

(Pictured: Marci, Matti, me, Biff)

Most of you must be East Coasters, because it's almost 11pm now, and everybody has left for the night. I'm standing all by myself in Adamsvil amidst a sea of free items to touch.

I'm probably going to claim the ACWW strategy guide as my free gift on my yearly Nintendo Power renewal. You always get a free gift whether you renew for 1 year or for 2, so unless you really value the convenience of renewing for a two-year term, it's mad stupid to do so.

I've picked up a second emotion from Dr. Shrunk: irritation. Although it sounds awesome, it's terrible. Your character just leans inward, narrows his eyes and makes a "boink" noise. Nothing special. I was kinda expecting that irritation would be more like the angry face that villagers give you. Boink!

Here's something cool. Biff was in town and let me temporarily display some secret Nintendo items he picked up from a "friend." Who knows how his buddy got them... glitch, cheat, knows a guy who knows a guy. This is the kind of stuff that Nintendo will start to slow-release into the game once the initial sales rush dies off. Like how they released one special Mario furniture item a month for a year in Nintendo Power back in the GCN version.

What you see in the picture is me and Matti gawking over the Green Pipe (complete with rising piranha plant!) and a trough full of pikmin. If you click the pikmin, the flowertips wave and they make that adorable "pikmin" noise! It's just about the most awesome thing ever.

I've started the red turnip mini-quest by giving Wendell a red turnip. He gave me the country guitar, which I am supposed to give to K.K.

Speaking of Wendell, boy did he get a downgrade. Wendell 1.0 was a wallpaper artist and the source of many rare, exclusive wallpapers. In ACWW, Saharah handles the rare carpets AND wallpapers, leaving Wendell 2.0 in charge of new patterns.

Yes, new patterns. You know, the eight pattern slots that you probably have already filled with your own custom-made creations? Wendell hates your artwork and wants you to replace them with his tiles that look like pieces of highway.

Now, I would love to collect Wendell's road patterns and build a cute roadway through Adamsvil. That would be funny. However, I'm not about to blow out MY patterns that I drew with MY stylus out of MY OWN BRAIN to do it. Way to go, Nintendo. Now we all know the true reason why Wendell is always crying when you see him. He's not hungry; he's bereft of purpose.

We had Tony and Josh over last night for some general gaming. Tony brought over Smackdown/RAW for PS2 and we followed that up with some GameCube WarioWare.

We're in the middle of an epic Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures level when we hear a bang from outside. Now, I have these guys parking along the street, so I peek out to see if something terrible and stupid happened to one of their cars. I can see both of the vehicles and there are no obvious signs of a recent accident... stationary headlights, shiny glass fragments, people standing around scratching their heads. None of that. So we make some repo man jokes and get back to Four Swords. This is about 11:30pm.

A short time later we hear big vehicle noises and when I look out the window this time I see a fire truck parked at the end of my driveway, with other rescue fleet cars all down the street. Now we figure we really ought to investigate.

Some choad in the next block has driven his SUV straight into his front door. I didn't see anything when I looked out the window the first time because his house is on the same side of the street and it kinda banks away from my view.

Now there are people everywhere, so the guys go out to make sure their cars weren't scraped or knocked around by this moron who forgot he doesn't own a garage. We're happy to say that no other cars or property were injured, apart from this guys own stuff.

We watched the firemen remove the car from the house (they just drove it back a couple feet) and knock down the brick that was obviously going to fall down anyway. I went to get my camera, but then I felt tacky taking pictures so I didn't bother. These images are from the morning newscast that ran the story the next day, which is why they all say "7:04am" on them.

Of course we had plenty of neighbors out in their housecoats and jammies gawking. I talked with some and learned that this same dude recently drove his motorcycle over the hill in the communal backyard and crashed it in the drainage creek... which explains the fire engines we had on our street a month or so ago. The rumor is that he is "addicted to something," because he is constantly in some kind of trouble.

Tony even got to talk to the crazy old guy who usually keeps to himself but every now and then undergoes a tempestous domestic with whoever lives with him. He informed Tony that "I'm not drunk, I just have a bad hip."

The 7:00am news covered the story in brief. Police officials told the newspeople that "his leg locked up" as he was parking. Bullshit. How the hell does that happen? How does somebody execute the right angle turn needed to enter the driveway, avoid all the cars on the street and the properties next door, get perfectly aligned with the driveway, and then jam a locked-up right leg on the gas with enough force to get over a brick entry platform and into a living room?

Here is a diagram of what happened:

The blue rectangles are innocent cars. Cars 1 and 2 belong to Josh and Tony. #3 is a nearly abandoned SUV that belongs to the trash that live across the street. Note how it is half on the sidewalk. They pulled it up there sometime last November and it hasn't moved since.

So this goon manages to make it into his own driveway - which doubtlessly required him slowing the fuck down to make the turn. Because I saw the car and it wasn't slammed into the door at a weird, hectic angle. It was dead straight. He had that car perfectly aligned with his driveway. Somehow, after running the gauntlet of normal obstacles on a townhouse-packed street, his leg magically locks up at the parking point. Not on his way up the street. Not while he was making the turn (which would have whacked that damn abandoned car, which would have been hilarious... but then probably chained into Josh's car, which would not have been as funny.) Nope, his leg stiffed the pedal after parking. It's either the greatest coincedence in Manchester Township, or this jerk was so fogged on something that he didn't know when to stop his car.

I just can't believe that "my leg locked up" is an acceptable medical defense for some guy destroying his own property and disrupting the neighborhood and wrecking our Four Swords game.

I don't know if there's any credence to the drug rumors. But regardless of whether it's an exotic leg cramp disease or he was strung out on something... here's a guy who needs to get something looked at before his issues escalate.

My first PS2 happy mascot platformer (if you don't count Cookie and Cream.) I was a big fan of the first Klonoa game on the PS1... and both of these titles still pop up on Overlooked Gems lists whenever a magazine editor has a page to fill. So it's become a bit of a cliche to even mention the Klonoa series, although it's nowhere near the lip service that follows another game on today's entry.

The thing about the Klonoa games - and I'm just talking the core 2.5D titles, not the GBA games or that Klonoa Volleyball stuff - is that they are really, really good. The worlds are bright and impressive, the bosses measure up to anything found in Mario64 or Sonic Adventure, the timed puzzles require thought and skill.

So why don't you see much of Klonoa? Despite his own dedication to quality, he's just another unlicensed platformer buried in an avalanche of platformers, licensed and unlicensed. It's a good thing they got this game out the door so fast in the PS2 lifecycle, because within another year he would have been personally choked to death by SpongeBob, Crash Bandicoot, and Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.

Memory Score: it goes without saying that he's much more popular in Japan

I had a serious case of Dreamcast Envy for this one. In fact, I think I only managed to avoid buying a Dreamcast by convincing myself that Code: Veronica was a sidestory and not a true chapter in the Resident Evil saga. And I guess it was, technically... but what's the difference?

So I was all hyped up when they released a PS2 port. They added an X to the title to show you how serious they were about the project.

But here's the truth: I couldn't finish it. I couldn't get past the boss fight against the tyrant dude on the airplane. You're supposed to get him to fall out of the back of the hatch by gradually shoving him towards the end of the plane, but I just couldn't do it... even after trying about a million times.

Code: Veronica was the beginning of the end of the franchise as we knew it. What happened to Resident Evil between 2001 and 2004 was criminal. Although, as we'll see once we hit 2003, I can be more generous than most...

Memory Score: this was the game where I discovered gamefaqs.com

Here ya go, folks. The only sport you're going to see on this entire list.

I like video game hockey because it's fast and it's accessible. I don't need to know plays; there's nothing to stop the action. Anything overly simmy - like changing lines - can be automated. The only "sports" component I need to remember are the various penalties... which, as my college friends can tell you, took some time.

This being my first next-gen hockey experience, I even put an honest effort towards playing a full season. (On my PS1 hockey games, I only ever did multiplayer exhibition matches.) I think I got about nine games in and then had the game simulate the rest of the season.

Memory Score: only bought for when friends are over

I don't quite remember how it happened, but this became Rhonda's game. I only touched the controller for a little bit at the beginning and a little bit at the end. For once, I was the spectator.

Ico is definitely oversold today. It's a great game, yes. It looked great, it played great. It turned a video game into an emotional experience simply by removing all the traditional video game junk... the meters and clocks and hearts and spoonfed Saturday Morning plots. But did we really need 4+ years afterward of reviewers going on and on about how this game is High Art?

Ico was our bid for legitimacy. Ico was the game that was going to take video games out of the basement and into the museum.

So when nobody bought the damn game, it was like a paradoxical punch in the stomach. The reviewers had to make their calls louder, which only further fragmented the audience (ICO RULEZ! ICO SUX!) and didn't help sales in the slightest. And today, Roger Ebert still says games are not art. Hell, Kojima says games are not art. The needle has barely budged.

Regardless, we really enjoyed Ico. Rhonda had no trouble alternating between fending off the shadow demons and leading Yorda through complicated puzzle rooms. That hand-holding thing just makes the game.

And I love the Save Couch.

Memory Score: I keep saying someday I'LL play this one

Next week: the PS2 celebrates its first year with three games that CHANGED MY LIFE. Plus, Mr. Mosquito.

Today we went to Boyds Bear Country in nearby Gettysburg. There are swirling rumors that BBC isn't performing financially, so we wanted to get Clark there before the pink slips fly.

Rising up out of fields that probably still hold the blood and bone of Civil War soldiers, Boyds Bear Country is a classic monument to unchecked consumerism in the grand American style. You go here to buy stuffed animals. That's it. I'm sure there are "Secrit Planz" hidden in the Head Bean's vault with Disney-esque intentions for expansion in the wide green backyard behind the barn... but for now, you're just buying bears. Probably many of the same bears you can get at the craft store down at the shopping plaza. But here, those bears congregate in bulk to form an avalanche of plush that stabs at your senses with furry hand-sewn paws and obnoxious down-home english.

We're into the cats. Not so much the bears.

Unfortunately, the Head Bean hates cats. He only sends a cat out to production when his marketing team swears to him that he can pull a few extra bucks out of the cat-lovers demo. You'll see more chickens and monkeys around BBC than cats. And whenever there's an all-animals mini-line - like little four-inch animals holding embroidered hearts for Valentine's Day - you'll be very lucky to spot a cat in the lineup.

The ongoing cat hatred means that this insulting "Puddy Tat Shack" is tucked away in a corner on the first floor, over by a freight elevator. There's about twenty paces between this area and the nearest non-cat display. But we're not afraid! We'll browse for new cats!

Although Clark began the day in high spirits, he wasn't thrilled with the Boyds Bear Ear headpiece.

One thing you should know about the Boyds Company: they know their goddamn audience. If they can find a license partner to create compatible collectibles, they will do it and do it without shame. The zones of BBC look like a Hot List for the Modern Senior. You collect M&Ms junk? Coke memorabilia? Boyds has bears dressed like M&Ms and stitched with Coke logos. Into NASCAR? Go pick up a bear in the regalia of your favorite driver. Red Hat Club? Patriotic jingoism? Military heroes? Christian inspirational quotes dumbed down into bear puns? All available in force. Even celebrity lines designed by the Miracle Worker.

I gotta tell you, Patty's bears look like every other bear in the place.

Another thing: the Head Bean is wildly paranoid and greedy to a McDuckian scale. When your local craft/collectibles franchise has storewide sales, you can bet that Boyds Bears are excluded. Because you should always pay full price at all times for Boyds Bears. And you'll find the following slogan everywhere... even on the receipts in the food court:

You know what that means? Don't buy Boyds Bears from eBay. Because the secondary market money doesn't flow back to Bear Country. It's downright creepy how pervasive the corporate iron fist is in the Boyds world. And yet, simple presentation skills often escape them:

Is the Seaso for somebody to walk around on quality control.

There's another common slogan that annoys me: "Bears and Hares you can trust." (It's even found painted on the barn's giant silo.) Even sidestepping another subtle message demanding you keep your money funnelled straight into the Head Bean's wallet, what's with the rabbit mention? There are less rabbits here than cats, and that's saying something.

The heavy hand of corporate greed aside, what we like about Boyds Bear Country is the unapologetic pomp of it all. Everywhere you look there's another complicated setpiece with bears dancing or bears camping or bears driving cars. Clark enjoyed the little river where the bears are banned from fishing.

Here's Clark realizing that he will never find his name on any of those "Buy THIS with YOUR NAME!!!" displays.

Those bears (and moose?!? Moose!?! Where are the cats?) flanking us go for over $100 apiece. It made us uncomfortable to be allowed to sit near them.

On the top level, there's a bear nursery where they spend a lot of energy pretending the bears have just been born and want to go home with you. Note the "naughty bear" in the top row giving us his ass end. It was shortly after this that our heads exploded.

After two hours, Clark had seen enough. We're hoping this expression means he has developed the same detached irony that allows his mother and father to enjoy something so patently absurd and cloyingly commercial as Boyds Bear Country.

That's one of the ugliest things I've ever seen.

There's a Nintendo survey going around that gauges opinion on the concept of a virtual console... the fancy name for the Nintendo Revolution's downloadable catalog of games from the NES, SNES and N64. The survey comes complete with some mocked-up images that show how such a service might work. And they're incredibly, amateurishly ugly. Had I three wishes, I would consider using one to go back in time to kill whoever it was who invented the font "Impact."

They were created by the survey people at Nintendo's behest, so in no way should we assume these atrocities are your advance look at the Revolution interface. Nevertheless, these screens will be all over everything since we're all so desperate for Rev news. It's classic Nintendo: do/say/release something horribly stupid and then pretend that nobody is going to talk about how horribly stupid it is. Like when Iwata said that gamers only have time for one or two big games a year.

The screens show the catalog organized by console, which made me start thinking if that was truly the best way to go. The way the survey shows it, this thing is marketed directly towards retro-gamers, towards longtime Nintendo fans. Which is directly opposed to every marketing quote Nintendo has dropped in the past twelve months: that gaming needs to expand past gamers, that we need to attract more non-gamers, that game culture has alienated people who might otherwise be interested in it.

Non-gamers aren't going to know WTF they're looking at when the screen says "CHOOSE YOUR CONSOLE: NES, SNES, N64." They're not even likely to know what "console" means. These are insider terms. They're certainly not going to be conscious of any overall differences between the choices. And if they had a passing experience with a Nintendo system fifteen years ago, can you even expect that they would remember which one it was, so they can quickly find a game they vaguely recall enjoying? It could have been a Sega Genesis and they might still remember it as a "Nintendo."

I'd probably list the games according to genre (which will be confusing enough) and add icons to the titles to indicate the console... and after a few purchases, non-gamers will grow that delightful little brain lobe that you and I have, the one that contains buzzwords like "8 bit" and "Mode 7" and "Z-trigger." Or offer a sorting feature so you can browse by genre, console, alphabetical, etc. What I'm saying is, they'll catch on, but you gotta have it make sense to them from the start, or they'll never click that menu button.

Or else you might as well make it look like this:

Because that kind of PopCrap is all non-gamers are going to want anyway.

The survey goes on to toss out possible pricing plans... maybe $15/month for unlimited access... $3 for NES games up to $20 for N64 games. Straight off, that's too much for N64 games. That might even be too much to ask for GameCube games once the Revolution gets rolling. I'd go $3 / $5 / $10 / $15 for NES / SNES/ N64 / Cube. With regular discounts on the loser games like Clu Clu Land or NES Pinball. And where's the Game Boy games?

The subscription rental plan will bomb. Unless they offer up a truly massive library (like, every game ever made) and they throw in exclusive rare titles in that only monthly subscribers can play... like Japan-only games or never-released games. People will pay for special stuff or for bulk stuff, but a mere 100 games - including a lot of crap judging from the list - is not worth $15 a month. How's GameTap doing?

Or, they could make you buy Nintendo Power and you get this service for an additional price. A year of NP goes for $20 and that already includes a free strategy guide or t-shirt (I usually go for the t-shirt.) I'd probably do $40 a year for NP, t-shirt, plus unlimited Virtual Console access. But even then, I hate the idea that I'm only renting the games and that they will disappear should my subscription lapse. I'd still rather pay the money to download a permanent copy.

Not that I'd buy a lot anyway. The survey has a list of potential catalog games, with the expected (Super Mario Bros! Metroid! Starfox 64!) and the unexpected (Sin & Punishment! Kid Icarus! Wario's Woods!). There's not many I would feel the need to revisit. Between Animal Crossing and the NES e-Cards, I have pretty much all the NES stuff I need. I would buy Super Mario Bros just for historical reasons. There's some SNES classics I would grab, simply because I never played them: Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Super Metroid and what the hell is "Yoshi's Hunting"? On the N64 I would get Pokemon Snap because we loved that game beyond all reason.

So that's approximately $30 you're getting from me, Nintendo. And that's if you follow my pricing scheme.

My biggest fear about the Revolution (aside from the notion that non-gamers are effectively in control of whether or not Nintendo hardware exists five years from now) is that Nintendo will use the Virtual Console as an excuse to make less games. "You don't need any marquee releases this month; you've got all these great games waiting for download! Don't worry about yet another generation with anemic third-party support; you could be playing the game that started the Metroid franchise!"

For me, backwards compatibility is a bonus, not a feature.

Although I enjoy seeing Blanca designs from around the world, I'm considering turning her off (you can do so with the phone in your bedroom.) I have a sinking suspicion that her appearance in your town takes the place of any other given daily random wanderers... so every day that I get a Blanca means another day that I don't get Wendell or Shrunk or Pascal, etc. I hope I'm wrong about this. Blanca is nice and all, but I don't need her interrupting my ability to get all the rare Saharah items.

So, as promised, here's the FIVE Blanca heads I've seen in a little over one week.

From monkeu of Funktown: Reasonable, simple freehand number. Everybody likes a nice silly face.

Looks like a big clown head; unfortunately makes heavy on the drawing tool's meager stamping features. I do respect the choice of palette #4, one of the stupid color schemes that nobody ever attempts to use. And I like the username: Raven of Azarath!

A bludgeoned Blanca. Unless that's supposed to be red hair; I'm seeing it as blood since the nose has bloody rivulets streaming from it. Peter of Zernushu must feel as I do when he gets Blanca instead of Somebody Awesome With Rare Items.

This one came along with the phrase "im a nerd. deal" which I thought to be nicely passive-aggressive, Luke of Peanut. This is a SpongeBobian design, and as a bonus includes hair. Most people don't bother with hair.

A little too simplistic for my tastes, W3K from Mianus. Not really understanding proper feature placement at all. Also... yes, we get the joke about your town name, you cad.

I'm still sending Blanca on her merry way with a red-and-green Dred Head and the message "www.fourhman.com". I wonder if Nintendo clips that before my Blanca gets to see anyone, due to the questionable URL. I'm sure it's somebody's job to watch Blanca heads fly across the wireless and edit out anybody who draw a wang on the screen... so it doesn't seem like much of a stretch that Nintendo would block a cheap .com message.

Then again, they let Mianus through.

You remember this game for exactly one reason: it came with a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. As I'm sure was the case with most people, I played that demo more than I played Z.O.E.

Not that it was a terrible game - I recall lots of explosions - just a stupidly short one. I was also bitterly let down by the cliffhanger ending, which was either intended to spark a sequel or to get me to buy whatever anime/manga that the Z.O.E. franchise came from/vanished into. Not something I'd play today, just because the flashy graphics have been surpassed and there wasn't enough level or enemy variety.

I bought this for the MGS2 demo. So did you. And that's a game I actually would play today.

Memory Score: really, there was a game included with that demo?

Here's one you didn't buy. To your everlasting shame.

This game shook the foundations here at fourhman.home. A game like this hitting so early in the PS2 lifecycle gave me high hopes for the future: two-player simultaneous cooperative play that was more than just Final Fight-esque street thug bashing. Five years later, they still don't make enough games like this.

The gimmick was that each player travelled vertically on half of the playing field, flipping switches and pressing buttons that would help the other player continue. Screw around or work against each other and it was game over. The two-player co-op led to some inventive boss fights, and the crazy level design required some serious platforming chops by the game's final stages. It also had great music and some really nice, sharp cutscenes. The only downside was some less-than-accurate controls.

This was such a happy, unique little game, and it remains criminally overlooked. With so many splitscreen deathmatches on the racks, Cookie and Cream was a blast of fresh air.

Memory Score: yes, it was about rabbits

I was moderately excited to pick up Crazy Taxi mainly because it was the first Sega game on my PS2. This seems all so quaint now, but for a while there it was 500% weird to see the Sega logo showing up on non-Sega hardware. Crazy Taxi was also the last arcade game I can remember lusting after, and it was a big Dreamcast game... so it was sorta cathartic to finally own it.

And it was still super fun. It was fast and silly and had more advertising than the Today Show. You could play it over and over again, each time pushing it just a little further into that gigantic, circuitous gamemap. That Crazy Box mode sucked ass though.

Crazy Taxi was in arcades since 1999 (and it's probably still in many of them) and enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight as a Major Games Franchise. There were toys and sequels and releases on every gaming system known to man. And then the clones arrived... but even worse than that, games like GTA started including Crazy Taxi-esque modes as optional sidebar mini-games. The sun has set on Crazy Taxi.

Memory Score: at one time, we thought this was enough for one entire game

There's this one part in this oddball FPS where there's a prison breakout and you see revolutionaries running around yelling "Rrrrreeeeed Faction!" It's just stupid enough that I occasionally still quote it today.

It's hard to believe that the world had seen enough FPSs by mid-2001 that Red Faction had to hype itself as "the one with destructible environments." I mean, here we are still drowning in them today, and we don't often hear many good reasons to separate them from one another. That "geo-mod technology" was the main reason I bought Red Faction. It worked sometimes. If you were in a cave, you could blast chunks out of the walls. That's about it.

The theme? Underclass uprising! The motif? Lots of caves, then lots of space stations! The setting? Sci-fi! Red Faction didn't do much differently than other FPSs, but at the time, it was enough. I think it ended with the Death Star exploding.

Memory Score: it majored in Half-Life with a minor in Wood Carving

Next week: a forgotten PS1 hero, another Dreamcast port, the only sport I'll ever buy, and that game that everybody still refers to as a major work of art!

Happened to notice some new Justice League figure packaging at Target last weekend. It's orange and has the new DC logo, so it caught my eye. But what stopped me cold was the Superman figure...

I know it's tough to see in a 400x312 jpeg, but that is the friggin' Black Mercy taking up the accessory slot. Like most action figure accessories, it's an unpainted hunk of raw plastic straight out of the mold, but still... that's the Black Mercy. Finally, kids everywhere have the means to slip Superman into a psychic coma wherein he lives out his greatest wish while the other heroes work to snap him out of it!

Here's what it looked liked in the JLU episode...

I am so glad that they changed up the Superman model to this more personable version. The first season Superman looked awful.

And here's a detail from the cover of Superman Annual #11 (1985), "For the Man Who Has Everything," one of the greatest Superman stories ever told.

From comic to cartoon to toy.

I'm also happy that we live in a universe that grants us Booster Gold (plus Skeets!) action figures, although it's a shame that we likely won't see a proper Blue Beetle to accompany him.

I liked it.

I know that it is super trendy to hate it. Dial B for Blog - the same comics weblog that spent an insensitive week gushing over Christian messages in comics, and pathetically attempted to convince readers that the first Silver Surfer/Galactus appearance in Fantastic Four was a Jesus story - went absolutely bonkers over Infinite Crisis #3. (And I grabbed some of Dial B's scans for my use, bleah.) Like, f-bombs everywhere bonkers. And when I pointed out on the comments boards the irony that, not one week earlier, Dial B was all sugary-sweet for the Savior, I was admonished for assuming that every story with Christ guest-starring in it was a Christ-is-LORD story. Sigh.

So here's the major plot points and what I thought.

The Secret Society unloads onto Aquaman, and the Spectre destroys a healthy portion of Atlantis. I'll agree with the prevailing sentiment that these pages were difficult to parse. You have two undersea battles here - one with Aquaman in San Diego (Bay? I assume.) and the other with Spectre vs. Tempest and the collected mages of Atlantis. The scene change isn't that obvious since everything underwater is blue-green in both arenas. The biggest comprension issue is when the Spectre smashes one of Atlantis's bubble dome biosphere cities with his hand... it's hard to tell exactly what is happening in that panel because it is small, it straddles the page crease, and there's one of those annoying pre-made sound effect fonts covering much of Spectre's arm. It's a big event and should probably have been given a much bigger panel and at least better page placement.

My overall feeling on Atlantis is a big Who Cares. It's not a place my comics take me very often.

The OMACs invade Paradise Island; the whole place vanishes at Wonder Woman's request. Diana's PR lately has been lousy since Brother Eye keeps replaying her snapping Max Lord's neck on every channel, and the OMACs are furthering the problem by broadcasting the Amazons' retaliatory war. (They have some kind of special purple OMAC-killing cannon now.) Diana figures this out and asks the entire Amazon culture to retreat into some un-named plane away from man's world. There's some talk about how Wonder Woman will never see Paradise Island or the Amazons again, but come on. I don't buy that grave prediction for a minute and neither should you.

Similar to the war on Atlantis, this is just a patented life-changing, holy-crap-the-stakes-are-high moment... and if I was a big Wonder Woman fan, I probably would care more. There is a very nice symbolic page where Diana watches the Island disappear and, yeah, that got me a little bit. I do think that maybe she should have asked Athena to banish the OMACs instead of yanking Paradise Island away.

Batman feels despair and is offered the chance to start over by the Superman of Earth-2... which he declines in grand fashion. This was total kickass. Batman is always the jerk in the corner figuring everything out before everybody else gets their capes out of the closet. He's the smartest guy in the room and he knows it. But this time - with his creation Brother Eye out of control - he has majorly screwed up. Seeing Batman, alone in his cave, fall to his knees having a minor panic attack... that is powerful. And at that moment, when the Batman is weakest, then The Original Super-Hero (capital letters all well-earned) strides in from on high. He's come to enlist "our" Batman in his cause: restoring Earth-2 to dominance. His recruitment speech is impassioned and well-delivered. Superman G1 genuninely believes that the Earth-1-ers have bungled their chance, but by the end of the book, it's apparent that he is being played by his cohorts... which is nice because it means that this Superman won't end up being the true antagonist of the piece.

Batman returns to form, recovers from his brief loss of faith... and whips out his kryptonite ring to keep Superman away from him. There's a panel and a line here that I love... Earth-2 Superman is looking at Batman with a philosophical disappointment (because he knows he won't be able to change Bruce's mind on the matter) and, after pointing out that Earth-1 kryptonite won't affect him, he says "It doesn't hurt me... physically, at least." Ooooh, Bats. You just hurt the Golden Age Superman's feelings!

While the Shadowpact are helping clean up fallout from the Rock of Eternity explosion, a new character is introduced as a probable new Blue Beetle. The scene where this Jaime fellow finds the first Blue Beetle's mystical scarab is eerily similar to the Old Name / New Person scenes that regularly show up in mega-events like Infinite Crisis. Typically, the young unknown adopts an established heroic persona and somehow manages to turn up to help before the story is done. Like in COIE when Yolanda Montez overhears that Wildcat's legs are broken so he can no longer be Wildcat, so she vows to be the New Wildcat. Well, Yolanda, Wildcat got better and you got dead. Jaime, best of luck to you, because Ted Kord was a stupidly popular Beetle. Bringing Ted back would be an unseemly feat - he was shot in the head at point blank range, for crying out loud - but, you know, I think I've seen worse.

What is most interesting about this scene is that Superman (our Superman!) gets a full page pin-up shot. It's one of those bits where he swoops in to save the day, so it's meant to remind us that he truly is selfless and heroic.

Some junk happens in outer space. The Rann-Thanagar War miniseries was so bad that every time IC flashes to a space scene I tune it out. I'm sure something really important is going on at the center of the universe, but I couldn't tell you what it is.

The Flash is happy, therefore he must be doomed. All I can say is, Barry Allen had finally found happiness with Iris before DC put the screws to him in COIE. I already miss Beetle, I'm going to miss Wally West more.

We finally learn why there are two Lex Luthors! I really liked this bit as well, although it starts with a confusing scene where you don't know which Luthor is doing want until you get a page in and can piece it together. Just like in the underwater scenes, the panel layouts are trying so hard to mimic what George Perez did in COIE that they simply mess it up every now and then. What's actually happening here is that our Luthor (in that ugly-yet-iconic green and purple armor) is listening in on the transmissions between Black Adam and the fake Luthor... but it sorta looks like our Luthor is participating in the conversation.

The faceoff between the dual Luthors is great, although it is peppered with more of those lame clip art SFX. Seriously DC, stop splooging them all over your books. The stunning reveal is that the Luthor who has been running the Secret Society is actually Alex Luthor of pre-Crisis Earth-3! Whoo! Alex finishes off the battle by calling in his trained attack dog, the Superboy of Earth-Prime (whose story, as I said before, I've never fully understood.) Our Luthor teleports out before Superboy can kill him.

So finally, the big question from the end of Villains United is resolved.

Power Girl stumbles into Alex Luthor's true plan. PG, fresh off her star-making turn in JSA Classified, has been recruited by the Earth-2 Superman and accepted into his inner sanctum where Alex Luthor and Superboy-Prime have been watching over the dying Lois Lane-Kent of Earth-2. Even though she now believes their story that she is actually a long-lost remnant of Earth-2, she is still unsure about joining up because she does feel kinship with her Earth-1 friends... after reading Lois's journal, she makes the same choice that the brainwashed Captain Marvel makes in Kingdom Come: she chooses life. She thinks maybe they can find a way to save everyone, not just resurrect Earth-2 at the expense of Earth-1. But since everybody (but Lois) is off in other plot points, she is alone and free to stumble into a room where she finds a classic COIE Anti-Monitor shadow tower, complete with the missing heroes shackled to its side and the corpse of the Anti-Monitor himself jammed inside of it! Holy crap, that's cool.

This scene is intercut with Batman watching the final survelliance cams from the destruction of the JLA watchtower (which happened months ago), which is the last time anybody saw Martian Manhunter.

In fact, he's one of the poor saps strung up to the tower, along with Black Adam (betrayed!), Lady Quark, the Ray, Breech... each character representing a different potential Earth!

I'd like to see a study done on how many times Martian Manhunter gets abruptly sidelined like this because the writers don't know what to do with him. He's a strong and durable as Superman, nearly as smart as Batman, can shapeshift, and he's a freaking telepath! And yet he continually gets wallflowered, mostly so his presence doesn't detract from the other characters.

The last page shows Alex and Superboy standing over an unconscious Power Girl. The look on Superboy's face is hateful and grim... a shocking counterpoint to one of the last times we saw his face back in COIE, when he timidly requests to enter oblivion with the Kents. There he is hopeful and innocent, now he's destroyed the Watchtower, taken down Manhunter and several other big characters, and spitting jealousy and bile every step of the way. His secret transformation will be a major part in changing Earth-2 Superman's attitude... when he sees how far Superboy has fallen, he'll have to accept that things aren't as simple as he wants to believe.

This is a top-of-the-stack book. It's having fun with all of the untouchable sacred cows of the post-Crisis DCU and taking a lot of risks with the characters. Will a lot of this be undone five years from now? Of course it will. But I don't read comics to imagine what will happen - or even what did happen - I read them to see what's happening now.

We have a huge problem with WalMart. The ugliest people in America regularly shop at WalMart and that's a group we would prefer to avoid. We are constantly out shopping (mostly at Target and Toys R Us) and we never see the kind of filthy scum out 'n' about that we always always always see on the off chance we need to venture inside a WalMart. Why is this? Is it really the cheap prices? Is it the No Questions Asked return policy?

We have a nearby super mega WalMart, the kind with a grocery store, McDonald's, photo center, and a nail salon inside. It was probably the biggest WalMart in America (for a month) when it was built.

It is also the only place in town that stocks bricks of fake cheese. The groceries around here will have the shredded fake cheese and the wrapped single slices of fake cheese, but never the brick. WalMart has it.

WalMart also has Pokemon-decorated card sleeves. I'm sure my comic store could special order them for me, but here they are, just sitting at WalMart for any old ugly so-and-so to grab. (Although the jerks that make these only sell them in packs of 50, even though they goddamn well know that Pokemon decks are built to 60 cards.)

Then there's Pocky. I cannot imagine any reason why fucking WalMart would stock a silly Japanese candy pop culture item, but they do. And it's usually sold out.

Every time we go in there, I feel like we're failing Clark in some way.

But I need my Pocky.

Launch days are always filled with crappy sports rehashes and proof-of-concept titles like Fantavision. The early games are all about the graphics push. Smuggler's Run was hyped as being both beautiful and expansive, and even though I generally avoid car games, it sounded good enough to me.

And in the year 2000, it was a revelation. First, it looked great. You could see all sorts of little details on the cars... the engine rumbling under a mangled hood, the smoke pouring from a burnout. And second, you could go anywhere. You didn't have to stay on one boring circular track! The blinders were finally off; I could have fun zipping around a world in whatever stupid, mud-spraying, car-tipping way I liked. If you could summarize the PS2 generation in one word, that word would be exploration.

When I wanted to show off my brand new PS2, this was game I popped in because it was easy to control and conceptually accessible. After a few months, the novelty wore off - it is, after all, merely a car game - but it was an important groundwork-laying game. Open world, multiplayer mode, varied level goals. Smuggler's Run was developed by a smalltime outfit known as Rockstar Games... I wonder if they ever went on to anything else?

Memory Score: not a bad start

By the end of 2000, I was still playing a ton of Unreal Tournament and the like on my PC and I hadn't really played many FPSs on a console. But I was really excited about this one, since it had great reviews and the art style seemed slightly goofy. TimeSplitters's hook revolved around time travel... you could be in an ancient tomb in one level and in the Roaring '20s in the next. That struck me as more interesting than the post-apocalyptic sci-fi junk that was all over FPSs of the day.

And for a while, TimeSplitters was THE console FPS. I remember doing a lot of team multiplayer co-op, particularly the bank vault level. TimeSplitters also had a level editor, which was one of those features that sounds better than it actually is. They did a couple of sequels, but by that time I had already fallen off the FPS bandwagon.

Memory Score: good stuff, but still showed a PS2 pretending to be a PC

You know, these days the Dynasty Warriors franchise is something of a joke, because they keep crapping out barely-upgraded new versions every year like a sports game. But back then, DW2 had a lot of good press... all based on the absurd number of enemies that the game could get onscreen at the same time.

And they weren't kidding. You could run around slicing up Three Kingdoms grunts by the hundreds. Back then, that was pretty impressive.

Plus, DW2 had a kickass ending theme. I beat the game multiple times just to hear the rockin' j-pop credit music.

Memory Score: probably not substantially different from Dynasty Warriors 5

OK, I was desperate for a Star Wars game. Everybody was. Unfortunately, what we were all desperate for was a classic trilogy game... and instead we got this as our first next-gen Star Wars experience. Ships we never saw before (I'm sorry, but Naboo ships are stupid looking) and a cast of Expanded Universe losers. This game was purely a holdover until Rogue Squadron came out for the GameCube.

In fact, having that game has obliterated all memory of Starfighter. All I remember is an overdose of Phantom Menace-era imagery, Assara Til, and some lousy audio dubbing throughout.

Memory Score: didn't take long to pass by this one, did it?

At this point, I should mention two games of this era that I sold back for store credit. I rarely, rarely do this. Offhand, I can think of maybe three times I sold games back... I tossed a bunch of old PS1 games back when the PS2 launched, I returned the PC version of Quake 3 because I absolutely hated it, and I sold back Silent Scope and Oni. Silent Scope was a PS2 launch title that I impulse shopped on that fateful Day One. It was terrible, an arcade port that suffered greatly from the lack of a giant coolass sniper gun peripheral. I had high hopes for the other one, Oni (reviewed here!) but it was a mess of a different type and not really worth anybody's time. I certainly wasn't ever going to play it again, so back it went. I don't recall what I bought with my credit.

Next week: a killer demo, another gimmicky FPS, an arcade port, and one of the best multiplayer games of all time!