[LIVE ON THE ROAD from Origins 2006] In one corner, they were running seminars on foam weapon combat. This is not one of America's finest moments.

Speaking of general skeeviness, Mike and I bailed on the Doomtown tourney. By day's end, we were just kinda not that into it. And since the event organizer was absent the day before, we figured there was a real chance that we'd stick around until 7pm and get left at the altar a second time. Plus, our man Chris showed up for the con, and he was not playing Doomtown, so that would leave him abandoned for 5+ hours. So, no tears were shed. Maybe next year.

This was a pretty big deal, getting a Resident Evil game on a Nintendo system, even if it was a fancy dancy remake. Plus, Nintendo got to fightin' with a little M-rated cred.

It did look great, but then, it damn well better... it's pre-rendered backgrounds. Unfortunately, by 2002, the world was pretty much bone-weary of the weird old RE tank control scheme. And, although the first Resident Evil is a museum-quality classic, it ain't because of the high-end plot. So combine a very familiar (albeit remixed) premise with Clinton-era controls, and you don't end up with a title that moves GameCubes.

I stopped playing when I got to the first Lisa fight... because you can't kill her, as I later found out online. Which ticked me off after spending hours trying to shotgun the monster down.

Memory Score: I probably didn't give this one a fair shake.

Some final thoughts on Origins 2006, the year that was.

There was weirdness: no Wizards booth. Not that you need to demo Magic, but it surprised me that they didn't even bother with a booth for all of the other games. I don't think it's a healthy sign that the industry's leader has abandoned this con, even if they don't have the unabashed success they once did.

Also: no Upper Deck booth, meaning nowhere to demo Marvel/DC Vs. and nobody for me to beg for a comprehensive online rulebook. Doubly strange, that.

Here's a brutal runthrough of the major games we experienced at this year's show...

I have only played this game twice. And not even at home. And not really me.

You see, we've been going to an adoptive families party for the last two years, and we volunteer to bring a PS2 as one of the kids game stations. (WTF? Ninty is 4 teh kiddies!?!/111?!?!1) So far, the top games to set up are the Harry Potter EyeToy stuff and this version of DDR, because it also uses the EyeToy for a bunch of silly minigames.

There's nothing quite like having ten kids all jumping on a dance pad while they watch themselves shaking virtual coconuts off a tree. It's a riot.

Adding the EyeToy stuff to DDR is the biggest addition I've seen in years of DDR games. Unfortunately, at its peak, DDR turned into the Bemani Madden... yearly releases with new songs and not much else. This title was a nice upgrade. Extreme, even.

Memory Score: Everybody always likes the game where you have to feed animals.

Last time I discussed Kingdom Hearts 2, I had revealed the quasi-embarrassing truth that I had spent about six hours just tooling around in the Gummi Ship levels and editor. I think I put in another couple hours on top of that. It actually got to the point that I forgot what the actual game was, because I was so into the space shooter segments. Since the editor is actually easy to use this time, you have more of a reason to re-play the shooter courses to completion, since you win all kinds of crazy new Gummi pieces for shipbuilding.

I did get some upgrades that enabled me to work up a nicer version of the Air Pirate wingman ship. It is very impressive, for an old TaleSpin geek.

Eventually, I realized that I would have to go back and play more worlds, if only to open up new Gummi Ship routes. So, off to Port Royal!

We went to Dutch Wonderland today, which, up until a few years ago, was noted chiefly for being a really crappy local amusement park. The big turnaround came when the ailing park was bought by somebody much bigger and mutated into a higher-rent version of its former self. Which is actually kind of nice. The downside being that the new owners also saw fit to install those awful pay-to-lose carny games every five feet, which dampens the "family friendly" vibe that the park's marketing dangles in front of your nose.

Yesterday we drove out to the King of Prussia Mall (just west of Philly) for the Pokemon Journey Across America mall tour! For the non-fans out there, the mall tour is a regular goodwill event, where Nintendo gives out free poke-junk and solicits people to compete for slots in a national Pokemon video game tournament. This tour also celebrates Pokemon's 10th Anniversary.

This year, the key event is the free download of certain types of Pokemon into your cartridges, Celebi being the super-rare one. You can also select any two from a list of twenty, the "Top 20" chosen from an online poll.

We didn't know what to expect, in terms of attendance. Turns out, it was a freaking zoo. But it's cool to see hard, irrefutable evidence that the "fad" is far from over. Pokemon still rocks.

If you'll recall, I mentioned some crazy martial arts fantasy film that we watched when we were in Seoul. Well, I found it at an Asian film store at the King of Prussia mall in the middle of the big Pokemon day.

Of course, I'm an idiot. I had pretty much assumed it was a Korean film, which is why I had no luck finding it a year ago. Turns out, it's actually a big budget action blockbuster from Hong Kong. This is what you get when you live in a country that does not typically offer television from other cultures; you start thinking that every country sticks to only showing local stuff.

So I'm at the store (kiosk, truthfully) and I'm looking over the racks for this mythically Korean action movie. The clerk (and probably owner) asks if he can help, which is the kind of shopping request I usually brush off... but I thought I'd take a shot. I was running on Pokemon adrenaline, remember.

I watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children a couple weeks ago and really enjoyed it. But it was a weird kind of enjoyment, since I've never played a single Final Fantasy game.

No, I don't believe Crystal Chronicles counts.

Being a video game fan, sheer osmosis has given me more than a passing familiarity with the characters... but there is a definite advantage to having played FF7 before viewing Advent Children. Although I thought the movie cool as hell, I'm sure I would have felt a far greater emotional attachment had I personally lived through Cloud's initial adventure. As it was, I was largely watching Advent Children for Advent Children's sake.

I did watch the entire "Reminiscence of FF7" featurette, which hits all the main story points of the game by slapping together edited sections of cutscenes. And even though it is painful to watch old PS1 era footage, I did appreciate the effort. It's funny how FF7 managed to become such an emotional flashpoint game, with its weird super-deformed art style and inconsistent visuals between gameplay and cutscene. Just goes to show how far we've come.

Just cleaning out some photos off the ol' Sidekick 2...

Here is my son reading a Chibi-Robo mini-magazine while at Toys R Us.

Finally, an answer to the question of When Will We Get More Secret ACWW Stuff?

At Toys R Us, in an ill-conceived and under-promoted and all around Far Too Late good idea.

Ever since the spring ticked by with very little free WiFi gifting by Nintendo, I've been consumed with the notion that Nintendo just does not care about living up to the game's promise. At every turn, they screw it up. You can only have eight patterns (and then one character shows up trying to get you to use his pre-made designs). You're maxed at four emotions. Tool usage is cumbersome. The holiday schedule is boring and unrewarding. The Player's Guide is embarassingly devoid of actual information. Item distribution (via travelling vendors) is even more random than in the GameCube version. The Flower Fest is distressingly unfathomable. There is almost nothing to do during online multiplayer except obnoxious one-line no-scrollback chat.

Banking that this would just be a tennis variant with bikini gals, Beach Spikers become one of the very few sports titles to grace my library.

This was about half a year before Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball came out for the Xbox, but this little GameCube exclusive did absolutely nothing to steal any heat from that game. The fact that Beach Spikers had no franchise tie-in (aside from a few Sega references) probably did not help.

Man, it is crazy to think of how games advance during each generation. If you dropped a volleyball game today with limited tournament options, a lackluster create-a-player mode, weird unplayable minigames, and a stilted CPU-controlled camera... at $50... it would be like printing a formal request for bankruptcy. During each cycle, we expect more - and we get more - from our games as time goes by. It almost makes you want to not buy anything until the midway point. Almost.

Anyway, Beach Spikers is a cozy, fun title... faithfully leaping into the Cube's early multiplayer must-haves list. Takes a round to get used to the timing on your button presses, and occasionally the camera will choose the wrong angle (so you get used to keeping an eye on the overhead player position radar map), but overall a worthy party game.

And it is far classier than the infamous DOA game, choosing to use realistic (if attractive) female volleyball player models, rather than over-the-top anime cheesecake. Which, in the end, didn't help sales.

Memory Score: Some of the worst voice over editing in this generation.

As I mentioned last time, attending the Pokemon Rocks World Forever Blitz Reunion Tour inspired me to finally make good on "beating" Pokemon Sapphire. IE, it was time to Catch 'Em All.

This required two Ruby reboots (because my original Ruby game was already way past the starter types). Luckily, you can trade pokemon between games after about 15 minutes of play, so it was short work to generate a Mudkip and a Torchic.

Somehow, I already had the final evolutions of both of those. This was probably due to some trade finagling with fellow trainers - trade me a Swampert and I'll trade him right back! - that sort of trick. So I just had to run the young Torchic and Mudkip around in my party for a bit so they would evolve into their middle level monsters.

Then came the disappointment.

Although I was planning to get to Toys R Us on Sunday to try out the ACWW download thing, I decided that, for once, I did not want to be the first guy in the door asking all the tough questions. Like when they didn't bother to put Metroid Prime out for sale, or when they asked me to tell the aisle clerk to put Pokemon Pinball on the racks or the time they bungled my Double Dash bonus disk pre-order, or tried to sell Pokemon Channel for $50, or when they barely participated in LeafGreen/FireRed Trade and Battle Day... and don't forget how they all but buried the original DS launch. These guys are great.

So we went Monday night. Give them a day to have somebody else be the insistent asshole. On the way there, I was mentally preparing myself for dejection. "They're not going to have this," I said in the parking lot as we strapped Clark into the Ergo carrier. "They don't even have a Download Station." The only small hope I held came from this week's sales flyer, which mentioned a "free Animal Crossing download" in small print. Of course, a sales flyer doesn't have to mean jack at the local level.

I did not stop at the customer service desk, although it did occur to me that they might have hidden the Download Station there so that they could answer questions about it. I went straight for the video game section.

Going up the game aisles (no R'Zone at this store, just old school flip tags), nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The best I could find was a promo to get some terrible ATV game for free with your DS purchase. So I circled around to the glass case zone, where they have been putting all the really expensive equipment since the 32X launch.

And there it was.

One corner of the glass case held the Download Station and was covered in signage. Happy! But, this being MY Toys R Us, the poor thing is exposed to the elements; the secret white case was cracked open for all to see. It's not especially classy to display an old fat DS with DOS text on the screen, but I guess my TRU enjoys taking the mystery out of life.

As do I. There's going to be some pretty substantial spoilers coming up, so you might want to back out now if you enjoy MEGATON surprises and have faith that your TRU will have some kind of clue that this is happening.

I'm about to go see Superman Returns, which means I'm about to start live-blogging it. To be frank, I'm not expecting much from this movie, because I've heard some insanely stupid things about it. Plus, the comics community hasn't exactly been bowled over... there's none of the giddy buzz like you got when the Spider-Man movie started leaking shots. Hell, comics fans are more excited about Spider-Man 3 than they ever were about Superman Returns. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to nail precisely why after I see it. The general consensus is that Superman deserves better.

10:09 I am way early. There is no one else in the theater and I wonder if that will change. Should have brought the DS. Walking down the hallway, I seriously considered jumping screens and seeing Clerks 2 or Pirates 2 instead.

Background: Some gamers have the completely ridiculous notion that the PS2 has so many JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games, like Final Fantasy) that it therefore doesn't have enough games from other genres. I have no idea what crazy evidence makes them think this, because I debunked their prime theories in this Slashdot comment war. The thread begins with an entertaining tete-a-tete between me and some guy. Complete original discussion here.