Lizzie (from the town of Fantasy) gives us this I-Just-Ran-Into-Tammy-Fay face. It actually looked better on Blanca than it does flat, which is the opposite of the ways things usually work

Tomorrow, March 2nd, 2006, Clark turns one year old.

At least, according to US East Coast time.

You see, since he was born in Korea, his March 2nd, 2005, happened fourteen hours before "ours" did. So, in actual chronological fact, his birthday is now.

What I find most interesting about all this is that for the rest of his life, assuming he lives somewhere in the EST zone, he will always actually be fourteen hours older than we think he is.

Yeah, see, it's a card game. Feel free to bail out now if you thought I was suddenly into some kind of bloodsport.

I recently picked up the Penny Arcade UFS boxed set. The UFS family of games are slated to hit later this year, featuring Street Fighter and Soulcalibur, and for some crazy reason they decided to debut the game with a learn-to-play 1 on 1 set featuring Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade. I liked the presentation - two custom deck boxes, one for your Gabe deck and one for your Tycho deck - but I think $30 is a bit much. Most games sell one-player starters at $10, or a two-player set with a pair of half-decks for a maybe a buck or two more. But two full decks at $30 is well beyond the curve, even if you add in those spiffy deck boxes. $25 probably would have been a fairer price, but I gather this is intended to be a low print run collectible.

While we're talking about Penny Arcade, check out Friday's newspost and comic.

I've been reading them for years, and they've always thrown off a more or less anti-Mac vibe. They've kvetched about the iPod's price (which I wholly agreed with until Apple started giving the iPod more to do, like the photo integration, color screen, slideshow output, and now video). Gabe has openly asked Mac fans to explain what makes them so great, because, as an artist, he's about the last one alive that still uses a PC for design work. And as I recall, that convo also ended with a sour note about the price. There is a recurring character who is a Mac fan and was originally this spacey, ADD hippie... but lately has morphed into an angry, screw-PCs beatnik.

But there has been a sea change. From Tycho's Friday newspost:

Today's edition of Stupid Panels of the Silver Age comes to us from "The Brave and the Bold" #29, May-June 1960, DC Comics. The story is entitled "The Challenge of the Weapons Master."

This is an underappreciated title. It's easy to pick up, unashamedly silly, and has plenty of replay value. You're sent into various themed worlds looking for errant monkeys, which you catch by stunning them with a light saber and then scooping them up with a net. The gimmick is that all your weapons are controlled off the right analog stick... which will probably be the first time that you aren't just using the right stick for camera control.

There's plenty of unlockables, great voice work, lots of variety... and I still would bet that you won't find more than six people in your lifetime that have heard of it, much less actually bought it. I'm not saying it's the greatest game in the world, but if you're still wasting money on Crash Bandicoot and the small army of licensed mascot platformers... well, it is possible to find fun games among all that drek.

I wonder if the Monkey-With-An-Uzi on the cover did them more harm than good.

Memory Score: It's not a franchise I obsess over, but I know a good game when I play one.

We rented a facility that is part of a small local park for Clark's birthday party. It's actually kind of a weird building, because it was plainly somebody's house once upon the '70s and is now on county park property. There's two largish rooms and a kitchen. We set up a receiving table, a food table, and a Clark table in the main room... and used the other room for eating seating and to run the looping slideshow.

Yes, I used iPhoto + iMovie + iTunes and made a Clark slideshow. I'm not proud of being some kind of Apple iLife toady, but it happened. More on that after the pictures.

After reading Monday's Penny Arcade post - where both lads speak about their burgeoning love affair with Tycho's iMac, I had a nasty thought.

Suppose they're just working up to a month-long April Fool's Joke.

I've been slowly playing Metroid 2 lately, mainly because there's not much else going on right now. I have every intention of picking up Chibi Robo, but I feel like I ought to finish Metroid 2 first.

Thing is, Metroid 2 isn't exactly gripping me. Part of the problem is that I've been jumping into it a little too late at night and for play periods that are a little too short. Since there's so much backtracking - and so much travel back and forth between the light and dark worlds - I usually end up wasting the first half of any given session trying to remember just what in the hell I was doing.

Comics fans, we're truly in a Golden Age. I know I mentioned this before back when I picked up the Booster Gold figure and the Superman + Black Mercy... but when I can walk into Toys R Us and find a three pack of Green Lantern Corps members...

The opening scene of Infinite Crisis #5 shows a slew of heroes attending a religious service, presumably seeking solace in the face of the Earth-shattering cataclysm going on around them.

Almost by definition, this is a stupid thing to include in a super-hero comic, particularly inside a fictional universe as broad and detailed as the DCU. Number one, there's an awful lot of concentrated power wasting time in Gotham Cathedral that would be better utilized out there stomping Alex Luthor's mad scheme.

But number two, how can any of these guys consider themselves religious, given what they do for a living?

I watched the Ultimate Avengers DVD over the weekend. I think I picked it up just out of sheer curiousity, since I'm not a huge Avengers fan. The Avengers are, quite frankly, a haphazard collection of b-teamers. You have the core three - Captain America, Iron Man, Thor - and then a bunch of hangers-on. And actually, I don't think much of Thor either. So there you go. My point seems thoroughly proven in that Marvel's current New Avengers book has added moneymakers Wolverine and Spider-Man to the team.

But I wanted to see just how Marvel would handle a direct-to-DVD animated feature. Plus it was cheap, $13.

It's not horrible, I'll say that. It certainly suffers from Too Much Setup, but you can't really fault it for that since it's the first damn movie. The animation is fine, better than standard TV fare but nowhere near a theatrical release.

The big news is out: Sony just might maybe sorta definitely have a date for the PS3 launch. Kotaku says November 11th, which is one of those days that's great for marketing reasons. I can see the television ads now, where some stupid Matrix effect turns a PS3 logo into 1 1 / 1 1 or vice versa.

In Japan, candy giant Glico owns 11/11 as Pocky Day, since it looks like a bunch of Pocky sticks standing upright. Can you just imagine the business meeting with all these staid Japanese executives from Sony and Glico coming to terms on this?

ToyFare #105 is the annual NYC Toy Fair coverage issue. It's easily the best issue of the year, every year. The cover shouts "Over 286 pictures!" So, does that mean 287 pictures total? Morons.

Anyway, here's some stuff I liked that's coming to the toy aisle.

I knew that as soon as I put the Chibi-Robo disk into my GameCube, it would be the last time I played Metroid Prime 2.

In light of the theoretical PS3 launch date, I'm going to artificially extend the regular Farewell to the PS2 feature. Starting next time, we're going to switch to bimonthly and only cover three games an entry. This should get us into August or later!

We enjoyed several DDRs back on the PS1, but I'm not sure why I waited for MAX2 to get one for the PS2. It's not like there is a great deal of change between versions.

This game sparked a serious DDR-as-exercise phase, to the point that I set up a permanent DDR area in the basement. This series will kick your ass, even on the "low impact" exercise setting. The game tracks your burned calories and such, which looks pretty impressive in rather short order. You might recall the media suddenly realizing that DDR exists about this time, and half-assed stories slugged "a video game that IMPROVES your HEALTH?!?!?1//1/1/!??!?1" all over the place.

I'm looking forward to DDR morphing into more of a lifestyle thing, where you can use your own music and regularly download new songs and dances. It could become a huge exercise tool if they would evolve it outside of pure video games.

Favorite track: "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue. Yes, it's in iTunes.

Memory Score: You have to get two dance mats. It's a given.

So say you're a guy who drove his SUV into his living room, let the property sit untouched for weeks, then decided to continue to live in said property despite township ordnances suggesting otherwise.

And spring has officially sprung, with several nice weekends already under your belt with plenty more on the way.

What would you do?

This is a bit of a downer for me, because I was a big fan of the series that spawned Trapt: the Deception franchise on the PS1. Despite the uber leet name change, Trapt is the fourth game in the series. Starting with the unrefined Tecmo's Deception in 1997, the series hit stride with 1998's Kagero: Deception 2, and kind of limped through 2000's Deception 3: Dark Delusion. And in 2005, we have the half-assed next-gen edition, Trapt for PS2.

Why the long break between games? The Deception team was kept very busy on a new and justifiably awesome franchise, the Fatal Frame series. Obviously, poor Trapt did not get the attention it deserved.

Execution aside (pun intended, you'll get it in a minute), it's a fabulous concept... its nearest cousin is probably the Dungeon Keeper series (1997 and 1999) for PC. You have the run of an old castle, and you set booby traps to kill the various invaders. Of course there's always some grand plotline of dubious morality and a fair amount of existential hand-wringing... but at the core, you're setting up traps in order to kill people in the most spectacular way possible.

One of the nice things about playing Tetris DS online is that nobody is out there cheating at it. I mean, what could you do, set it to only give you the long pieces?

Tetris DS is actually about the easiest version of Tetris I've ever played anyway. Not only do you get the "ghost piece" function, which obliterates any need to shift your penetrating Tetri-gaze anywhere away from the crucial bottom half of the dropfield, but you also get to see the next six pieces that are coming. Not to mention the hold feature, where you can stash a piece for use later. I don't know when these ideas became standard, but it sure beats the original B&W Game Boy bust-yer-ass-blind Tetris. I sure hope Nintendo threw another token check at Alexey.

Just read the unedited version of Nintendo President Saturu Iwata's GDC keynote speech. He starts out with a clever switcheroo, where you think he's talking about the Nintendo-Sony rivalry but he's actually making a point about Pepsi vs. Coke.

Then he tells the story of the upcoming Brain Age DS game, which is based on a mental exercise fad currently gripping Japan. He has this to say about the initial meeting he held with the professor who kicked off the brain improvement fad:

I’m sure some people at Nintendo wondered how I could spend so much time on the kind of meeting on the very day of the DS launch, but I think it turned out to be a good idea.

On the day of the DS launch. Can you imagine Peter Moore or J. Allard or any other Xbox tool saying that? Blowing off a launch day just to do some fact-finding research on a quirky-ass non-game game?

I've been into comics long enough to distinctly remember the days when Marvel was king and DC was for queens. Er, kids. In fact, DC used to use the highly pathetic slogan of "DC COMICS aren't just for kids!" as some kind of sissy self-defense slapfight.

So why is it that when I pick up any given Marvel Comic today, these are the ads I see inside: