I usually find time for a little AC:WW every weekday morning around 9am. On a few mornings, I've noticed a small flock of white birds that takes to the sky as soon as my character steps outside the door. This adds to the Goofy vs. Pluto puzzle begun in the first Animal Crossing: we have animals that are "people" and animals that are animals.

The most blatant example was the frog. You can catch "animal" frogs in the ponds, yet you can have "people" frogs living in your town. Then there's the birdcage item, but I always saw the bird inside as a toy, not an actual bird. But this flock of doves heralding the dawn makes me wonder.

The Flower Fest is on now, where you're supposed to grow a magnificent garden by week's end. Then Tortimer judges which villager has the best garden and hands out a flower trophy. You'd think Nook would jack up the price of seeds this week.

Here's something that pissed me off. Check out the promise in this email I received from Nintendo: "Gardening tips galore in the official player's guide!"

Here's your warning. And who would know better than Space Pirates?

Today's edition of Stupid Panels of the Silver Age comes to us from DC Comics' "Justice League of America" #2, December 1960, "Secret of the Sinister Sorcerers!"

This sort of thing used to happen all the time: Justice Leaguers invited to attend gala luncheons thrown by piles of rich old white men.

Chibi Robo is Nintendo's Grand Theft Auto.

That's a bold statement, and I don't want you to make any great leaps of comparison here, so I'll spell it out.

It's not that Chibi Robo is destined to be as successful or as deep or as groundbreaking or as genre-defining as GTA. I'm talking about gameplay. Chibi Robo is Nintendo's happy, family-friendly sandbox game. Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine have similar GTA parallels (among others, I'm sure), but their emphasis on linear levels (Zelda's dungeons and Mario's platformer worlds) breaks the pattern. Chibi Robo seems to be the closest Nintendo-exclusive GTA-clone I've yet played.

Back during those four months when the Dreamcast was popular, I wanted this game. Space Channel 5 was the kind of oddball title that seemed to represent Gaming In The New Century. Even though I never owned a Dreamcast - and never played this game - I had some Space Channel 5 magnets on our fridge for years.

So I was pretty excited when this PS2 Special Edition came out, compiling the original game and the never-released-in-the-US sequel. I knew going in that the graphics would be crappy, but I still wanted to pay homage to a brief envy of years past.

Turns out, it's not that great a game. Almost every other rhythm music game out there is better than Space Channel 5, including the PaRappa / UmJammer PS1 games that preceded it. I'll agree that the style is fun - sort of an Austin Powers meets Star Trek on the Laugh-In set vibe - and that the characters are cool... but the gameplay itself is weak. I played it, but I never really enjoyed it.

Memory Score: Space Michael!

OMAC Project Special This was a nice little spin-off book. It's a total sidebar story, following up on a detail of Infinite Crisis #6. If you just read IC, you see the Brother Eye satellite explode and that is fine. If you pay out the $5 for this special one-shot, you see that the satellite needs additional pounding in order to stay dead. That's a fair trade.

Couple of major purposes here: a return of focus on Sasha, arguably the main character of the original OMAC Project miniseries... and the re-establishment of Checkmate. Yes, a new Checkmate series is coming, but I'm here to tell you that it won't last, as usual. DC keeps trying to make Checkmate more than just a pleasantly interesting shadow organization, and it never works. You might as well try to make a series out of S.T.A.R. Labs or Cadmus. It's great as occasional background material - a la Bones and Chase and the DEO - but as an ongoing series, forget it.

We can only hope that this book was the sole purpose behind Sasha's hideous OMAC-makeover: a convenient plan to remove it and get her back to normal.

Can you believe there are still tools like this out there? PC guys who are still writing angry, toothless articles making fun of Macs. Didn't this kind of argumentation die out sometime in 1999?

Andrew Kantor's tech article in USA Today just took Apple's Boot Camp to task. His column is embarrassingly called "CyberSpeak," which neatly nails two computing cliches: the use of the word "cyber" and having a gestalt title with a capital letter in the middle. How out-of-touch can you get.

Anyway, here's what he gets wrong:

So the ol' iMac isn't looking so good. The clicky noise that has been going on for months seems to have finally hit the limit... the iMac is not definitely no longer accepting CDs and/or DVDs. And last weekend, it refused to boot up.

A hardware failure is a hardware failure, and an awesome OS can't do a thing about that. It is struggling mightily, however. It's on right now, despite being declared dead by the Apple Store Jerk Bar this afternoon.

Everybody is linking to this right now, so I figured I may as well weigh in too.

Keita Takahashi, he of the world-famous Katamari series, had some off-the-cuff remarks about the new Nintendo remote-olution controller. First, he says he's "not interested in it," and then:

"I see what [Nintendo is] trying to do, but they're putting such emphasis on the controller; 'Woah, this controller lets you do this!' and I'm thinking - are you messing with us?"

Takahashi is already taking a lot of flak about this comment... but I say that's exactly what we all thought when we first saw the magic white wand. In fact, most of us that aren't game designers with dev kits are probably still thinking it right now.

JSA Classified #11 I like Vandal Savage.

I'm a fan of the contemporary version that shows him as a giant beast of a man barely contained inside his suit, yet always poised and controlled. He's like the Mr. Hyde to Lex Luthor's Dr. Jekyll, if both Jekyll and Hyde were utter bastards with great tailors.

I mean, this guy is the world's first murderer. He's an immortal caveman who has been killing and conniving for centuries. He has seen the whole history of humankind (and he's probably the first guy Mr. Terrific should go talk to). He's got a great origin, and a name that sounds like it comes from the Awful Early '90s but actually first appeared in 1943.

But he is rarely done well. I guess his rather narrow villainous focus makes him too predictable to write. That final Flash storyline with Savage running a super-powered orphanage of brainwashed Stepford kids was terrible.

This JSA Classified storyline is a great idea, and touches on all the little things that make Vandal Savage sort of a one-man Ra's al Ghul. What happens when you take everything away from the man who has it all.

But boy, I cannot stand Paul Gulacy's artwork here.

So the Flower Fest was a complete bust.

Let me give you two truths about Animal Crossing: Wild World.

1.) If it involves tools, it sucks.

2.) If it involves a holiday, it sucks.

The Flower Fest involves both, so it doubly sucks. I planted a million flowers around my mansion, organized by species so as to promote natural hybriding. I used my Golden Watering Can every day.

I lost to Queenie, who had eight flowers, no hybrids, and considered moving out of the village mid-week. So no Flower Trophy for me. And when's the next time I can get a Flower Trophy? At next year's Flower Fest. And what did the game teach me about growing a better garden? Absolutely nothing.

OK, OK, it's the Wii.

That's the name of the new Nintendo system, formerly known as the Revolution.

I'm not going to do much to defend it. In fact, that seems to be Nintendo's raison d'etre: do whatever it takes to make it impossible for fans to defend them. "Gamers don't want online play." "It will be a third pillar for our company." "We're calling it the Wii." "We think our relationship with [Squaresoft/Rareware/Silicon Knights/pick any third party developer] has reached its limit and we're parting ways."

But before we forget, just about every video game system ever made has had a terrible name. Can you think of a single system that didn't make you twitch when you first heard the name? Granted, there hasn't been a name as pretentious as Wii since perhaps the Genesis... but then again, at least Genesis is a word. Technically, I guess Wii is a word, "we," but that's not going to do much once you step out of Perrin Kaplan's Reality Distortion Field. (The whole thing is veeeery Apple, isn't it?) But look at what history shows us: