August 2006 Archives

This was a four player game of TaleSpin, with a goal of four cargo. I was Baloo, Josh was Karnage, Tony was Kit, and Whitney was welcomed into the ranks of TaleSpinners by playing Molly. (The hilarious picture is from this Photoshop contest page and was created by a fellow called Majordano.)

ROUND ONE
Don Karnage kicks off the game by playing Becky and Ignatz as passengers. He rolls low, so he can only move to the Cliff Guns (which he shot at Kit) and play cargo.

Kit sends pilot Mad Dog after Karnage (who bows out with a Strategic Withdrawl). Then Kit plays one of everyone's favorite new cards, The Press (the fourth estate lets you name a card at the end of your turn, and if anyone has that card in their hand, they must discard it. Yeah, I know it relies on the honor system, but it's still fun.) Kit ends his turn by moving to the Air Platform and playing cargo.

Baloo attacks Kit, who amicably refuses to dogfight so Baloo draws his two free cards. No passengers to play, so Baloo moves to the Loading Dock and played cargo.

Molly has what is probably her best turn of the game (unfortunately.) She sends Ace London after Don Karnage and opens his sole (fake) cargo. During all of this, Kit plays I Got Your Shot All Lined Up and grabs Strafing Run from the discard pile. Molly ends her turn by moving to the Cliff Guns (Baloo takes the hit this time) and playing cargo.

ROUND TWO
Don Karnage fishes Ace London out of the discard pile with We're Sure Glad To See You, but tucks him away for later use. Instead, Karnage attacks Baloo... who cheerfully accepts but then bows out with You Hear Something? Karnage ends his turn by moving to the Iron Vulture, killing The Press, and playing cargo.

Kit plays Crazy Edie against Karnage. Despite Karnage playing two Lucky Shots, Kit wins and takes out Karnage's fresh cargo. Kit uses Edie's reward to steal two cards from Molly. Kit moves to the Air Circus and plays cargo.

Baloo adds Khan's Board of Directors to his passenger chain, and then calls upon the poacher McNee to attack Kit. Kit surprises McNee by playing Better'n You Thought to up his Pilot skill, but McNee wins anyway. Kit then throws down a further surprise by playing It's All Part of the Show to turn his damage into draws, but that does not stop McNee from stealing one of his cargo to give to Baloo. Baloo moves to the Air Circus and plays cargo.

Molly plays At The Current Rate of Exchange on Baloo, who had been loudly declaring how much he liked his hand. Then she goes after Kit with a Surprise Inspection (which was one of the cards she received from Baloo). She ends her turn by moving to the Air Force Base and playing cargo.

So at the end of the second round, Karnage has no cargo, Kit has one, Baloo is leading with three, and Molly has two.

ROUND THREE
Karnage plays Ratchet as a passenger, then sends Ace London after Baloo. Baloo wins and decides to take Ace into his hand (Ace has seen a lot of action this game!) Karnage then strikes vengeance upon Baloo with Monkey in Your Tank, which causes Baloo to lose one cargo and expose another cargo as real. Karnage plays the Street Pirates to his passnger chain, then moves to the Pirate Cave and plays cargo. Ratchet's moving effect sends Karnage back to the Iron Vulture, which is no bad thing.

Kit drops some serious Shipping fatties with Katie and Torque... plus the Cape Police for some extra cargo protection. Then he plays The Mayonnaise Went Bad on Baloo (loses another cargo!) and Molly (reveals a real Cargo!) Everything looks great for Young Master Cloudkicker until Don Karnage sticks him in a Death Trap and ends his turn prematurely.

Baloo plays passenger Hacksaw, then sends Ace London after Kit under the added threat of a Pirate Rush. Kit, feeling a Pilot disadvantage, concedes the dogfight, so he loses his only (fake) cargo. Baloo then plays Pilot to Navigator, Where the Heck are We? to skip around the map a little bit, and ends his turn by rolling the die. He doesn't like the result (which would discard Hacksaw), so he uses the Board's ability to re-roll... and gets the same thing. So he moves to Air Circus, plays his cargo, and discards Hacksaw.

Molly moves to Cape Suzette and plays cargo. Where are all the passengers?

At the end of round three, Karnage has one cargo, Kit has none, Baloo has two, and now Molly is closest to victory with three cargo in play.

ROUND FOUR
Don Karnage uses It Is I to fetch McNee from the discard pile, and he quickly dispatches the poacher in Molly's direction. Molly - with her Pilot value of merely 1 and a handful of low cards - refuses the fight, so McNee steals one of her cargo for Karnage. But Molly manages a small measure of revenge when she plays Cornered on the pirate captain, which stops him from playing cargo on this turn.

Kit plays Crowd of Admirers and lures the Board of Directors away from Baloo. Then he plays Stand Aside on Don Karnage and removes the Prototype Jet Engine from the game! Out of options, he moves to Higher for Hire and plays cargo.

Baloo attacks Kit, who accepts the dogfight but ends up losing his cargo. Then Baloo grows his passenger chain with Shere Khan, Gibber and the Red Robed Thugs. He moves to Higher for Hire, plays cargo, is forced to bring Khan back to his hand, and has Gibber pull the Pirate Mob out of the discard pile.

Molly moves to the Cliff Guns and plays cargo.

At the end of round four, Karnage has two cargo, Kit still has none, and Baloo and Molly both have three.

ROUND FIVE
Don Karnage unleashes airborne hell on Molly by attacking her Head On, doing three damage to her at the end of the fight. Molly is now busted down to one cargo. Karnage plays Wildcat, then moves to the Cliff Guns and plays cargo.

Feeling mired in last place, Kit plays a desparate Mayday on Baloo, which opens one of Baloo's (real) cargo. Then Kit steals Wildcat away from Karnage (I neglected to note how) and ends his turn by moving to the Air Circus and playing cargo.

Baloo sends Covington after Karnage, and further complicates the battle by making Karnage Asleep at the Controls. Karnage loses the dogfight and one of his played cargo. Baloo plays Shere Khan (again)... and then is stuck in Kit's Death Trap.

Molly moves to the Air Force Base and plays cargo. Are we having fun yet?

At the end of round five: Karnage has two cargo, Kit has one, Baloo has three, and Molly has two.

ROUND SIX
Karnage adds to his impressive Shipping ability with Trader Moe, but has little else to do. He moves to the Pirate Cave and plays his cargo... but the roll forces him to discard both Becky AND Moe! A sad day indeed.

Kit plays Takin' the Day Off for some free cards and announces that he absolutely must do something about Baloo's potential win. So he attacks Baloo directly... and Baloo wins the dogfight. But not so fast! Kit plays Sky Scramble and resurrects Crazy Edie for another shot at Baloo. Kit even plays You Got That Right for additional cards... but Baloo still wins. Discouraged, Kit moves to Higher for Hire and plays cargo.

Sitting in the catbird seat, Baloo could simply opt to roll the die and take a shot at the win, but he decides to field Ace London one more time... at Karnage. Ace wins the dogfight, dropping Karnage's threat level down a peg just in case somebody has something to stop Baloo from winning. Fortunately for the best pilot in Cape Suzette, no one does, so he moves to the Air Circus and plays his final real Cargo for the win.

I'm way behind on Comics Commenting (I used to call this feature Word Balloons, but that sucked) so I'm just going to catch up with some broad swoops through the books I picked up last week.

52 - I have to admit, I'm not giving this series a very close reading. Until browsing the excellent 52 Pickup weblog, I didn't even notice that Booster Gold had committed that old time-traveller's standard: unwittingly making your own history. I guess I'm relying on other DC fans (with weblogs) to do my analysis for me. The current theory is that the Booster we've been seeing in 52 isn't even the Booster we saw in Infinite Crisis - which would make sense, because he seemed so capable and mature in IC - but I can't honestly say that that occurred to me.

In practice, though, I'm noticing that the whole "real time" thing doesn't mean very much. Yeah, I guess it's neat that each week in the comic is a week in real time... but who really cares? It's just a good read, very Robert Altman-esque in the way it weaves between so many B-grade DCU characters.

So don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it. It's a "save" book every week... one that floats to the bottom of the pile after I read the books that are either A) so good that I have to read them first, or B) so mediocre that I have to read them first to get them out of the way. It's a complicated system.

Ultimate Fantastic Four - I am so glad that Greg Land is leaving the book, so I won't have to stare at any more soulless tracings of supermodels from Cosmo. Although this means I pretty much have to keep getting the book for a while - I was thinking of dropping it - because if I bail now, Marvel is liable to interpret that as a reader who left because Greg Land left.

After the super-crappy President Thor storyline, Frightful was comparatively great. It's hard to tell; the art is so distractingly empty. I liked seeing Doom return, and the final resolution of the Marvel Zombie-verse plot was far better than the end of the actual Marvel Zombies miniseries.

UFF Annual #2 was quite good - a comedic Mole Man riff - and the art was great.

The Flash - Back in the day, I loved the Flash book, but like a lot of formerly cool DC books, the wake of Infinite Crisis has turned it into a mess (see also: the new Green Lantern series and the last issues of JLA). You can tell that the new writing team comes from tv/movie screenwriting, because they suck. In issue 1, Bart's randomly new "best friend" is shown to be a cliche self-absorbed jerk. In issue 2, the friend is caught in a horrible accident that inspires Bart to reclaim the mantel of the Flash. In issue 3, the friend announces his super-heroic identity, and a suite of powers gained from said accident.

Give me a fucking break. Want to bet that the friend goes rogue and becomes Bart's GREATEST ENEMY in issue 4? Or that he is tragically killed due to amateur grandstanding, causing Bart to recognize that the world needs trained heroes such as himself? This guy isn't a friend; he's a crappy plot device. The is a good example of the worst use of One Year Later: inserting brand new characters that our heroes supposedly met and become awesomely tight with, inside of one year, for the sole purpose of a faux introspective moment by the end of the first story arc.

Were the sales on Wally's book so lousy that DC thought they'd give the guys who wrote Trancers a call?

Green Lantern Corps - I like this one because they've turned the Corps - which is, first and foremost, an excuse to laugh at silly aliens in Lantern uniforms - into an outer space "Law & Order." I hope they keep that vibe going. This first story has been more like "Criminal Intent," because the reader (that's you) knows which doofish alien is responsible for the murders and you're rooting for Guy and the rest to figure it out.

Plus, there's the superb concept of a guy who is so intent to get into the Corps that he'll kill for it. The gritty artwork really works well, and helps to offset all the reality-bending non-human characters. It's hard to believe this was written by the same guy who crapped out that terrible Rann-Thanagar War series last year (and illustrated Watchmen, incidentally). He must have dictated Rann-Thanagar over the phone during a cab ride, and GLC is what he can do after DC bought him a desk.

JSA Classified and JLA Classified - The two-part Amos Fortune thing was astonishingly bad, and it provides ample excuse for me to kill off both books. These rotating creative team books are a mixed bag in the best of times, but there's no way I could reduce it down to just buying the storylines that are worth a damn... it would be hard to define that as proper collecting.

***after thinking about them some more*** Wow. Those were some truly awful books. The Detroit-era JLA is officially beyond repair now, and the idea of villains running a secret underground Fight Club with brainwashed heroes is so trite that any editor who okays that should be fired immediately.

Shadowpact - I am as suprised as anyone that this book is any good. It's nice and light, and it reminds me of Giffen's Justice League in that it doesn't take itself very seriously. I love the notion that Blue Devil lives on a street where all the old neighbor ladies bug him for super-powered favors, fix him up hot dinners and nag him about his careless lifestyle. I am a big fan of books that develop a nice even pacing between Cataclysmic Word-Ending Epic Sagas and Thoughtful Dialogue-Driven Character Pieces. And I'll always take more of the latter over the relentless onslaught of the former.

Justice League of America - Speaking of that, that's exactly why I hated Morrison's JLA... because every arc was some ridiculous mass extinction event that faded the heroes themselves into mere scenery.

After reading issues 0 and 1 of Brad Meltzer's League, I am a fan.

Issue 0 is entirely a literary montage of various meetings between Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman over the years. It ends with them tossing a pile of photographs onto a table and asking each other "Who's in?" Issue 1 continues that scene and intersperses it with bits from the potential Leaguers as they gather towards one point or another. It is fantastic stuff. Meltzer looks to be turning JLA into a comic with the heart of a novel... something with more substance than just having a band of ruthless [insert villains here] fly into Earth and the League has to come up with a clever way to stop them.

I know there is criticism about the book reffing a lot of prior continuity and therefore turning off new potential readers. I say that is hand-wringing bullshit from a bunch of Silver Age apologists. You know what my entry into the DC Universe was? Crisis on Fucking Infinite Earths. If you're the type of person who would be scared of jumping into a comic book series because you don't know what happened in the previous six billion issues, then you're not likely to remain a comics fan for long anyway. Man up.

Buy the new Justice League. It is smart, intriguing reading.

Art kinda stinks though.

After enjoying all three N64 Mario Party editions, I was psyched for the sub-franchise's next-gen debut. I was imagining the cheerful board game fun combined with visuals at Super Smash Bros. Melee quality.

And I really didn't get that.

The board game worlds - which formerly explored fantastical 3D terrain themed to birthday cakes and pirate ships - were flat and abstract, with SNES-style tiled backgrounds. The mini-games were what they were, but there simply was not enough of them... and the board game itself introduced this confusing "mini-mega system," where you had to shrink to take path A, and grow to take path B. Which meant I had to waste fifteen minutes of playtime explaining the concept to players who just wanted to roll the die and get to a mini-game match.

The only good thing about Mario Party 4 is that the end of single-layer mode faces you against Bowser in a private challenge that was quite a leap for the series.

Ya hear that? The only good thing about this *Mario Party* is a small portion of the *single player mode*.

That's worse than a Sonic game where you have to constantly stop running (which we'll get to in January of '04).

Memory Score: The worst Mario Party ever.

Man, there was such a stink about this when it was announced.

THERE MAKING TEH METROID 3D OH NOOOOOOES

The fear was that Nintendo has handed off the franchise to an unknown developer (Retro Studios) to be turned into a cookie-cutter FPS in a half-assed bid to generate more "mature" interest in the GameCube, which, in under a year since its debut, had already been dubbed kiddie-ghey by the Sony and Microsoft camps.

My first reaction to the news of Metroid Prime was "Holy shit, there are still Metroid fans out there?" Let's face it: it had been two console generations and eight years since the last Metroid game. Smash Bros. cameo aside, this was a dead franchise. There were people who got into and got out of video games without ever having seen the word "Metroid" on the racks.

And then there was the group, weaned on dual analog control, who were convinced that Nintendo could not pull off a decent FPS with the GameCube's gimped C-stick. (This group was then shouted down by the folks who still say that you can't do FPS games without a mouse/keyboard, period.)

So when the game was finally released, it was to broad suspicion.

Which was quickly turned into massive acclaim, because the game managed to hit on all fronts. It looked great, it played great, it controlled great... and it evoked that classic Metroid feel. What could have been the final nail in the coffin of a forgotten Nintendo property became the catalyst for re-launching Metroid as a modern, dramatic, current-gen marquee name.

For my part, I enjoyed it far more than expected... since, like everyone else, I figured it to be nothing more than yet another sci-fi shooter. That last boss fight was a bitch-and-a-half though.

Memory Score: This was a big gamble, but it paid off

Once Nintendo fanboys cooled off over Metroid Prime, the fight began over Wind Waker.

You know the story: a billion gamers betrayed after the famed SpaceWorld 2000 footage. Miyamoto shocked at the "Celda" taunts. Wind Waker placed under wraps until E3 2002.

So what to do to soothe the rage of fair-weather fans who leap at the chance to despise a game just because it looks "cartoony"?

You concoct the most incredible pre-order bonus scheme in video game history.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest is a re-release of the N64's Zelda game... with the added bonus of the only-in-Japan Master Quest, a kind of Ocarina remix. Nobody hated Ocarina. So give them Ocarina. Hilariously, most of the same people whining about Link's new look pointed to Ocarina - a low-poly N64 game - as being realistic-looking.

And although I was happy to snag a rare piece of Nintendo history on the pre-order, I never played either Ocarina adventure on the disc. I was still playing Vice City and Animal Crossing.

Memory Score: I'm sure it's great

Next time: Celda hits the waves, Wolverine hits the skids, and an Xbox "exclusive" hits the Cube.

The latest OPM demo disk has the long awaited LEGO Star Wars 2 demo... which is the first time there's been something worthwhile on that disk for months. Rhonda and I played it for two hours last night, unlocking (I think) all but one thing. We're really excited for this one to hit stores.

The demo purports to be level 3 of the A New Hope section, covering the moment Luke and Ben drive in to Mos Eisley until the point when the gang takes off in the Falcon. So if that's level 3, what's 1 and 2? 1 could be a rehash of the secret Episode 4 level from the first LEGO Star Wars, perhaps done from Princess Leia's point of view. And I'll bet 2 is some kind of Luke-searching-for-R2 level.

Once you beat the level, the demo lets you Free Play it with a full roster of playable characters... including a Womp Rat! This is Star Wars history here, folks: a playable Womp Rat! The demo even includes a build-a-character feature, which I'll assume is pared down from the full version. As you can see from the phone screenshot, Rhonda put the Slave Leia head on Han's fashionable vest. And I made a Jedi Bith with Boba Fett's torso and Greedo's arms.

There looks to be a lot more sidebar type junk to do in LEGO Star Wars 2, most of which is just increasingly clever ways to score minikit pieces. For example, there's a pile of pieces on rooftop that you assemble into little mounted swivel guns, which then begins a shoot-the-womp-rat game. In-level vehicles are a Cool New Thing for LSW2, and the demo shows this off with a landspeeder and two AT-STs. And some dewbacks!

The only sad part is that everything that was crappy about the first one has returned for the sequel. If this demo is at all indicative of the final game, you'll still waste a lot of time fighting the constrictive camera in two player co-op. "Move back! Move back! I'm pinned against the screen border and getting picked off by stormtroopers!" Freaking hell. Doesn't look like they addressed that problem at all.

We even found a pair of major bugs. At one part, we leaped from higher ground to opposite sides of a dividing barrier, with no way to reunite unless one of us dropped out while the other one performed the longish sequence of events to build an AT-ST (which you're supposed to use to blow up those barriers.)

And shortly after that, Rhonda's character became stuck halfway between her control and AI control. She could swap and attack, but she could not move; her Slave Leia Solo just followed me around as if she was a CPU player. I had to enter a new zone to fix the problem.

I don't know if that's a demo issue or if we'll see that kind of crap in the main game. I guess I should be happy the demo didn't erase my memory card. Regardless, this game will be more awesome than 97% of anything else that shipped this year, so we'll take it.

If you find enough studs throughout the demo, you get some character unlock codes for the full game - which is out in mid-September, by the way. Here's the total demo spoiler shot:

I would imagine that those characters are fully purchaseable; these codes will just save me some studs.

And that one thing we did not complete? Selling the landspeeder.

It's hard to get excited about Justice League revamps, since they happen with alarming frequency. I wish DC would get over the whole faux reboot thing and just let the title live on. They only have, like, three books that have held consistent numbering for longer than five years. Everything else gets rebooted to #1 constantly.

So, if this cover is to believed, this is the new JLA. Post-Infinite Crisis, post-52, One Year Later. Or, Red Tornado could get blown up by page 13.

First impression: I am so done with Michael Turner pinup covers. The guy is overplayed to the extreme, especially when all he's told to do is crap out an impossible standing/floating group scene. I think I know why Hal's ring is flashing; he's busy willing a set of bleachers. I could go the rest of my life and not see anything by that guy ever again.

But the roster... the Big Three are there, which is to be expected. Batman is throwing his usual anti-establishment non-verbals. Did New Earth get us back to the version of Batman where he never shows up in public and Gotham isn't quite sure if he's real or an urban legend? I always preferred that angle.

Everybody else seems picked because of a link to another important element of the DCU...

Black Lightning, now with bald. OK. Tough to tell, but I'm hoping his costume was upgraded a bit. As a character, he's something of a blank slate at the moment, since he hasn't been seen much in 10+ years. Last I heard, he had retired and returning to the teaching profession, which meant that the few times you did see him, he was in a suit. Which I liked, because then he was like Morgan Freeman in "Lean on Me" with badass electric powers. Didn't his daughter take up the Black Lightning mantle? Like Hal, this is another hero who seems to have been de-aged in recent years. His connection: the Outsiders (?).

Speaking of Hal, yes yes yes to his inclusion. There's almost always a Lantern in the League... but it hasn't been this Lantern in a while. He is important enough that he should be standing in the front row. He'll probably be competing with Arsenal for the position of Team Jerk. I'm sorry that he and Batman made up already, because I really liked the notion that Batman hates Lanterns. Obviously Hal gets us in good with the Lantern Corps.

Black Canary. Yes. I know she's been returned to glory over in Birds of Prey, but I don't follow that title so this is like a happy reunion. I hope that DC delineates what her New Earth legacy is, now that Wonder Woman is back in the JLA charter member club. Man, I hate when they retcon a retcon. Connection: Oracle.

Hawkgirl. Sure. When Zauriel joined, somebody made the comment that there's always room in the League for a guy with wings. I grew to really like her during her early JSA appearances... back before the Return of Hawkman when she was a tortured, suicidal, reluctant hero. Connection: JSA.

Vixen. No. They better have some relevance planned for her, but quick. At least they removed her embarrassing 80's supermodel hairstyle. (Probably because it looked exactly like Hawkgirl's helmet.) Connection: the Detroit League? No, she's in because of her animalistic/spiritual side.

Arsenal. Eh. He's a pretty crappy character with a horrible name, some silly five o'clock shadow, a typically obfuscated Teen Titans backstory, and a Marvel-esque "angry loner" attitude. Back when I was getting Titans (during the Devin Grayson years), the only thing I liked about him was his daughter, Lian... who was five years old and regularly getting kidnapped by her mother, Cheshire. I vote that we give him a new name. And a new personality. At least when Green Arrow was on the team, you got a kickass personality to go with the unnecessary skillset. Connection: the Titans AND the Outsiders.

Red Tornado. Ick. A dopey, poorly defined Silver Age relic. Is he a sentient robot? Is he a wind elemental? Is he both? Who cares, he looks idiotic with that swirling lower torso. Every time there's a major crossover event, Reddy ends up in pieces. He's a bad risk. The only time he has ever been interesting was when he chaperoned Young Justice... and coincedentally, he was kind of a foster father to Arsenal's daughter Lian back in those days... wonder if they'll bring that up? (Do I have that wrong? Am I thinking of Traya?) Connection: assuming he maintains his air elemental status, he's our new mystical pipeline to the supernatural side of the DCU.

The obvious missing faces:

Martian Manhunter, whom I hate to see blacklisted like this. Thing is, there's something of a fanboy backlash against the guy - and writers HATE having him around, because he has Superman-level powers - so he suddenly became dispensable.

Two things about Martian Manhunter: first, the weakness to fire thing is ridiculously awful and needs to go (again). Somebody had a great way out of it years ago... they changed it from a physical weakness to a mental weakness. Turns out the shock of seeing the funeral pyres of his wife and daughter was what caused it, and when he came to terms with that, he was cured. Good work, character development. Fin. Then some choad brought it back (probably the over-rated Grant Morrison during his awful White Martian storyline in the 90's JLA revamp), then some other choad removed it again... with the caveat that he is still weak to "flames of passion." Let's see some future writer try to work that into a storyline.

Also, back at the end of Breakdowns, there was this beautiful moment with J'onn voluntarily leaving the JLA, off on a personal quest for identity and solitude. And then he came back, like, a week later. Unchanged. And leading Justice League Task Force, which was DC's attempt at turning the B-grade ex-Leaguers into the X-Men. This time, he was almost killed in Infinite Crisis (again, writers hate him) and now he's off on his own miniseries with a terrible new costume. I much prefer the former scenario.

The Flash. We'll see him join the League soon enough. Probably as soon as his title settles down and we find out 1) What happened to Wally and 2) Who is the new Flash.

Manitou Dawn. After her appearance in Justice League Elite and the final (terrible) storyline of the previous JLA series, I was expecting her to show up in the lineup. I would have taken her on instead of Vixen or Red Tornado (hell, both) in an instant. She's a new character with good potential, one of the bright spots in League stories over the past few years.

Nightwing. Is this even possible? Can he even be in a team with Batman? Dan Didio is right; nobody knows what to do with him anymore. I would have cried to see him killed in Infinite Crisis (as originally intended) but I would also have have recognized it as an appropriate and moving character arc. (And come on, he would have come back anyway. They always come back.)

Plastic Man. Glad to see him gone. There's a lot of ridiculous super-powers in the world, but "immortal stretchy plastic god" is the worst. One of the reasons I like 52 so much is the - what I'm hoping - is the fall of Elongated Man, DC's other plastic guy. He is far more interesting in the Identity Crisis fallout than he's been in years... and he's no longer stretching. Although 52 is either going to kill him or return him; at this point, I don't know which.

Final note. I really hate DC returning "of America" to the book's title. I understand the name's historical significance, but that was born during a very jingoistic time... it was simple flag-waving back in 1960. Superman and company are charged with protecting the whole damn universe, not just America. I'm sure DC wanted a name change because "JLA" has far less marketing power than spelling it out... but why not just stick with "Justice League"? I'm feeling another batch of needless patriotism here.

First of all, thanks for all the fun. #2 was a hell of a lot more action-oriented (love the addition of the Reaction Commands!) than the original, with more to do and lots of great improvements. The menu commands are easier to use, the battle camera isn't as crazy, and the RPG elements (item synthesis, ability customization) have been streamlined to the point that most humans might actually use them. Not to mention that the Gummi Ship stuff is 200% better and could be the core of its own separate game.

Of course, as a Disney geek, I'm extremely pleased with the inclusion of the Pride Land and Timeless River and all the little Disneyana touches. (The worlds for Tron and Pirates of the Caribbean, although interesting, smell a little much of imposed corporate synergy.) And now I can tell all my friends that I fought beside Minnie Mouse.

But there are some critical flaws here that I need you to address before you venture forth into another chapter. If, indeed, you do intend such a thing. The combined story of KH1 and 2 is so nicely packaged that a third, similar outing might seem superfluous. (Yes, I have seen the secret preview trailer ending - no, I didn't earn it - but I'm reserving comment just yet. It seems very bleak and dystopian and non-Disney... but so did Deep Dive, the secret preview trailer ending for KH2. And looking back, damned if Deep Dive doesn't make sense now.)

Anyway, here's what you should know.

#1) Give us an option to turn off the goddamn subtitles. Everyone is speaking perfect, intelligible English (except for Donald, I guess), so why the readalong text? Does the Japanese version with Japanese voice-over have Japanese subtitles?

#2) Start making sense. I love these games to death, but I'm still not sure that I could confidently tell anyone what the fuck a "Kingdom Hearts" is. Or are. Or whatever. I've read and re-read all the Jiminy's Journal entries, and it's still all feel-good hippie nonsense. Maybe this is why the rumored Kingdom Hearts animated series never got off the ground. And along those lines...

#3) Tighten up the story. I think this is the Square Enix side severely outweighing the Disney side, because the whole Organization 13 bit was nowhere near as captivating as the Disney Villain bit from the first game. KH1 had a fantastic story, and Sora's adventures from world to world all fed into that. In KH2, almost nothing that happens in the Disney worlds has anything to do with the game's supposed center stage story. There's been a huge disconnect here, and it cheapens the entire product. It's like you're playing two different games... one where Sora the eternal optimist goes about solving the problems of various Disney movies, The Fugitive-style, and a second game where you're looking for lost friends amid the apocalyptic dreams of a madman. It never comes together.

#4) No more dropping party members. Seriously. This is 2006. We can have four members in our party. Having to dump Goofy to add in Jack Sparrow, only to have Goofy magically reappear during a cutscene, is just insulting. Oh, and stop talking up the crap about Sora being able to "merge" with party members to temporarily activate a super-awesome battle form. That's bullshit and you know it. What happens is you activate a form and one of your sidekicks simply vanishes.

#5) Give us bonus features outside the game. Like the ability to replay those killer CG rendered cutscenes! And I can't believe we've had two games and still no bonus music video featuring Hikaru Utada, KH songstress and huge Tetris nerd.

But if you do nothing else, do this...

#6) Let us keep playing after the storyline ends. Your game is packed with sidequests and minigames and have I mentioned the cool Gummi Ship stuff. Why can't I go back and continue to enjoy that AFTER having beaten Xemnas to paste? You have just shot your game's replay value to hell by locking me out after the credits roll. Do you know that you have to reset the PS2 after beating Kingdom Hearts 2? Reset! Not even a save-and-try-the-next-difficulty-level option, like every other game in existence. Just this:

That screen doesn't even display my final gameclock hour count (over 45 hours). WTF.

But thanks again, other than that, you're a super-awesome franchise.

Just try to ramp it up a little bit, eh?

The final day of camp means that there is nothing to do but wait around for the Closing Ceremonies, where they announce the final point totals and the recipients of the official popularity contests.

As you can see, it played out exactly as I predicted. At Camp Hyrule, if you're not a strong performer right out of the gate, you might as well stop trying.

Also note that the prizes are all virtual again - which just makes my Stumpy tee from last year all the more special. Once word got out about Nintendo giving out winners' t-shirts last year, there was plenty of sour grapes about the e-garbage from this year.

You know, overall, this was a pretty lousy year. The games they spotlighted were far from major releases, and, as far as I saw, they did almost nothing Wii-related. (Wii-lated?) How about some exclusive gameplay footage? Most people still haven't seen even a third as much as what was publicly displayed at E3, so why not throw up some videos of Wii games in action? They didn't even mention Super Mario Galaxy, and that was ostensibly the inspiration for the whole outer space theming. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Even the patented end-of-camp disaster was weak. A wormhole appeared and turned camp into the 1998 Camp Hyrule layout. Previous years have featured extreme devastation, like avalanches, forest fires and the Majora's Mask moon crashing earthward... so this was lame.

I missed the closing ceremonies, although I hear they were delayed two hours due to technical difficulties.

And finally, the last installent of Sad Cabin Chats. Note that there are no user icons showing up this time; that's because I grabbed these screenshots on a Windows XP machine and Windows sucks.

from the I'm-Beginning-To-Think-Kids-Today-Have-Too-Much-Internet-Freedom department:

from the I-Don't-Think-That-Word-Means-What-You-Think-It-Means department:

from the Too-Late department:

from the This-Is-No-Time-To-Be-Pedantic department:

from the NOT-ANY-MORE department:

from the My-Sister-Is-Ruining-My-Life department:

As predicted, Cabins 8 and 9 moved even further into the lead, although 9 is now ahead 2526 to 2497. We're still in third with 2362 points, and fourth place (Cabin 3) has 2153. Anyone in fourth or lower has no chance in hell of winning the race by Friday morning.

Although today's tasks were all worth double points, I don't anticipate much movement in the top three slots. So even I did technically perform all of the assigned activities, mine were all mediocre efforts.

Pokemon artwork. Like yesterday's Zelda challenge, this is just a callout for anything vaguely Pokemonesque. You're probably supposed to actually DRAW something, but whatever. You might recognize my Pokemon photo from this year's Origins trip. I just added some mysterious Unown text to it.

Face painting. NOA_Rufus is the final victim, and I reverted back to the same political protest that I used at Camp Hyrule '05: bitching about Nintendo never legally unlocking SMB, Zelda, and Punch-Out in the original Animal Crossing. I plan to make this my own little Camp tradition.

Songwriting. I have to admit that I brought in a ringer on this one. I asked Tony to write a song for me, because he is sadly good at this sort of thing. I don't know if he should feel proud of this ability or not.

Chins up, people... this is to to tune of The Beatles' "Come Together":

Don't game on Xbox, don't be groovin' on Sony
We got Gameboy systems that work as controllers
On your sleek, cube purple GC
Play DS with your stylus, try that New SMB

No Grand Theft Auto, we got Crossing Animals
They got Madden's zingers, we got Wares from Wario
They say "Halo rules, Gamecube's weak."
One thing I can tell you, Xbox Live isn't free
Play Nintendo, right now, buy a Wii

Delayed production, Zelda: Twilight Princess
Kill time on Koholint, or replay Wind Waker
Hot chick, dressed up like Master Chief
Samus with her blasters busts up Metroids with ease
Play Nintendo, right now, get a Wii

Play Uniracer, don't need Katamari
Peach one fine princess, Miyamoto built her
Toad say, "She ain't here, so sorry."
Kirby is a blowhard gunning for DeDeDe
Play Nintendo, right now, own a Wii

So, Thanks For All You Did, Tony. Shame it's for a loser cabin that will only get third place.

Awards Voting. Every year, there's this silly list of awards (The Luigi Award for Best Typer, for example) and you're supposed to nominate your fellow campers for each award on the list. It is ridiculous. But, every year some dedicated gamer starts an "official" discussion thread to compile a master list so that each cabin might actually have a shot at getting peoples' names in there. And you get a point for submitting a list of nomiations, so there ya go. I self-nominated for the Paper Mario Award (for Best Artist), but some schmuck hijacked the thread and bumped me off.

The awards will be announced at the final camp chat tomorrow evening, along with the name of the winning cabin (which will be 9, most likely). One random camper wins a Wii as well. Whoo! This is pretty much the end of Camp Hyrule 2006.

I was barely in the Cabin chat today, so no semi-hilarious quotes for you.

Today Cabin 7 rose to third place on the Camp Hyrule leaderboard (we were in fourth yesterday.) We're still 80 points behind the first place cabin, Cabin 8 - The Sages of the Wii Republic (I wonder why they didn't go for "Wii-public"?). Cabin 9 (the Cabin at the End of the Universe) is in second, falling from first. So it's pretty much a battle between 8 and 9 at this point. I'm not confident that an 80 point gap is surmountable at this stage, especially given that 8 and 9 are so close (less than 10 points difference) and are likely psyching their rabble up to levels that are dangerous even to fanboys.

So this is Cabin 7 with the award-winning flag and mascot designs. Kind of a dumb decision to map them to the spacepod because now you can't see what the hell they are. Here they are in all their un-skewed glory:

The flag is clever enough, given our awful name. The mascot, although it is garish, is also in theme. This "Error" chap is an internet meme culled from some probable bad Engrish in Zelda II.

(EDIT: These were not my designs. And I forgot to note who actually did them. I am an ass.)

Today's tasks:

Zelda artwork. Do something, anything, related to the new Zelda DS game, Phantom Hourglass. They didn't even give a pixel size restriction on this one.

I'm pretty jazzed for Phantom Hourglass, based on one feature: you can write notes on your level maps. Nintendo will probably screw this up by having your notes all clear out every time you leave a dungeon.

Anyway, here's my piece:

The old Nintendo cereal was made by Ralston, formerly the human chow division of Purina.

Face painting. This is NOA_Andy, who has been around long enough that Campers all know him. Although NOA_Shaun is the one that everybody hates, and he has some kind of internal pickle joke that I don't get / don't enjoy. His cabin chose some ugly pickle thing as their mascot. ROLLING EYES SMILEY.

Be honest. Am I over-reaching here? Should I have just photoshopped Andy cracking out of a Yoshi egg?

Scavenger Hunt. This is a series of clues that all lead to a single word. You do not receive any points for this task, so I gave it about negative eight seconds of thought. There's not even a button to submit your answer to have it tell you Right or Wrong. It's a waste of time. I would guess that the reason it is not worth any points is because the clues have you searching random crap on the internet, which could lead to trouble. Nintendo doesn't want some Mom triggering a lawsuit because Nintendo encouraged her kid to google "burgundy tuxedo" and ended up hipdeep in porn.

By popular demand, tonight's highlights from Cabin 7 chat:

from the Go-Talk-Current-Events-On-Yahoo department:

from the Living-In-Denial department:

from the If-You-Have-To-Ask... department:

from the Get-A-Job department:

from the OH-GOD-ME-TOO department:

from the Look-Around-You department:

from the This-Is-Why-We're-Not-Winning department:

With the cabin name chosen (poorly), there was a whole lot less "ZOMG WTF IS OUR CABIN NAME VOTE NOW" going on today. The official cabin flag was also chosen, and it's actually not a bad choice. It shows a loading bar and says "Your flag is still being processed." I'll probably post a picture of it tomorrow once the cabin mascot is selected.

None of my designs from yesterday were selected for the Best Of page, which sucks. I'd link you out to it, but I'm pretty sure you need to be a registered camper to see it.

Today's tasks:

Icon design. The winners of the icon design challenge become official Camp Hyrule chat/forum avatars. What a nice claim to immortality. I phoned in this image of Static from Animal Crossing, because I can't get enough of that guy's depressing expression.

Mascot. The winning submission will be stapled on the Welcome to Cabin 7 page, along with the winning flag design. I think you'll agree my mascot is sufficiently incredible.

I am giving you pure gold here, people.

Face painting. The original (left) shows NOA_Mysterious, one of Camp's counselors. You're supposed to draw in what he looks like. I, of course, took a RIGHT ANGLE TURN INTO ZANINESS.

Fiction. Kind of a drag, this one. You're supposed to write a Nintendo-themed story in under 1000 words. I just copy/pasted the Pulp Fiction riff from my ACWW diary. Another phone-in for cheap cabin points.

And now, the Cabin 7 Chat Room All-Stars:

from the I'm-Pretty-Sure-You're-A-Boy-And-You're-Writing-Your-Own-Fan-Fiction department:

from the Screennames-Never-Lie department:

from the Jesus-God-Yes department:

from the We-Already-Decided-Luigi-Games-Suck department:

from the I-Don't-Know-Where-I-Am department:

from the Surprise-Twist department:

from the I'm-Making-My-Own-Game-That-Will-Totally-Be-Better-Than-Anything department:

from the I-Misspelled-ROM department:

It's that time of year again...

Time for Camp Hyrule, Nintendo's weirdass online fanboy orgy. WoFo, for short.

This is my third year. Both previous years had a definite Zelda theme going on. This year, it's gone all outer space... presumably in celebration of Super Mario Galaxy, a future Wii title that is not even a launch release. Although you might be forgiven for being reminded more than a little of Katamari.

I'm in Cabin 7, as StocDred. (Or, as one chat room member fumbled, "Storecred," which is now officially the best SD variant I've ever seen. And I MUSHed under that handle, so I saw plenty.) The chief concern for Day One at Camp Hyrule is naming your cabin, which is just a toxic mess of forum spew that is best not trifled with. I got to the discussion board too late to submit a reasonably hilarious name, so here's what won:

WTF. "Cabin We Are Currently Experiencing High Volume Or Technical Difficulties." Seriously.

The deal is, every day the camp assigns various tasks to all campers. They're usually all artsy junk like writing haiku and photoshopping stuff. When you submit your task creation - no matter how crappy it may be - you earn points for your cabin. The cabin with the most points at the end of the week wins. In 2004, the champs won something exceptionally awful, like a desktop background. Last year, the winning cabin won t-shirts... and I was a proud member of that highly cohesive, team-oriented cabin. (***CABIN 9 FOREVER!***) I have not heard yet what happens this year.

Here's today's tasks:

Flag design. Always a day one flag design event. Given that our cabin name is treacherously awful, some enterprising campers suggested a shortened form of "High Volume Experience." This didn't stick, but I still went with it for my flag.

Face painting. You can pretty much count on a face painting task every day. Most kids copy/paste a Mario moustache and have done with it. Here are three of the "camp counselors" in a typical pre-photoshopped image, and my wacky "out of the box" submission.

Limerick. Another Camp favorite. You can bet we'll see songwriting and a haiku contest by the end of the week.

At last year's Camp I did play,
Because Zelda hype ruled the day.
This year will win boos,
If, like last year's bad news...
We hear Twilight Princess again is delayed!

Oh, me.

And lastly, some choice Cabin 7 chat room quotes. Don't worry about losing any context here; there was none.

from the Iconoclast-At-All-Costs department:

from the Sad-Truths-For-All-Involved department:

from the Paid-Shill department:

from the No-You're-Not department:

from the No-It's-Not department:

I'm enjoying Marvel's Civil War and Civil War: Front Line books, even under the nagging premonition that, like House of M, Civil War is likely to not actually end within the scope of the core miniseries. And when I say "end," I mean "return the Marvel U to the status quo, like most every other big name multi-hero crossover storyline." Betting man that I am, I think that Marvel is going to let the Registration Act stand so that all the books get the fun of dealing with the ramifications of the Act for a year or so, before formally repealing it in another big event To Be Named Later.

Similar to how DC is letting Infinite Crisis drain out into 52, the dangling "New Earth" question, and the One Year Later books. What can you do; it's a good business strategy. As a comics publisher, you'd have to be an idiot to NOT take the advantage of a heavily promoted, mega-popular crossover storyline and turn it into a spray of new series and minis.

Although, say what you will about Infinite Crisis, at least it did end. There is enough denouement in the final issue to happily wrap up all the major plot threads (and if you want to know more, that's what the semi-sequels are for). Compare that to House of M, which ends on a smegging cliffhanger. The feeling I got at the end of that one was that Marvel had crossed the line between Ending a Good Story and Tricking Me Into Buying Another Story.

But about Civil War. Started off great, with the New Warriors reality show that triggers the nuclear decimation of a US suburb... which leads to most citizens calling for a government-sponsored end to un-regulated super hero activities. Very classically Marvel, that. Average people hating the heroes has always been a Marvel bailiwick.

So after the government announces that they want to register all "powered combatants," it becomes a major internal argument as to whether this is a good thing or not. Iron Man leads the faction that approves of registration; Captain America goes underground with the resistance movement.

Emotionally, I'm against registration. But I don't want to just side with Cap's team simply because it feels slimy. I want to put some thought into the decision. I mean, if our world had people who could fly around and shoot energy bolts from their eyes, I have trouble believing they would be allowed to roam free. So I can see why Iron Man thinks registration is the way to go... although I don't buy his sob story about getting the public to believe in them again. The Marvel U gets blown up every other week and nobody ever cared about that before; that ship has sailed, Tony. They hate you. It is just rare that a writer bothers to include them in the story.

The trouble with registration is that it turns the heroes into government employees. And since there is not a fictional universe anywhere where the Government is a happy, benevolent, trustworthy organization, it seems obvious that the White House will quickly devolve into claiming full ownership of every registered hero.

This has already happened in Front Line, where Wonder Man finds himself being ordered to go do such-and-such by shadowy federal agents, simply because he has registered. So, assuming your government is bad... registration will end up a mistake. Why does Iron Man think that people trust their elected officials more than they trust the guy in tights who just stopped a plane from falling out of the sky.

And anyway, registration would not have stopped Nitro from blowing up Stamford, or wherever that was. Registration also is not likely to have stopped the New Warriors getting their own TV show. You can make a case that the government (via SHIELD) would have insisted that the New Warriors retreat... but that's pure Monday morning quarterbacking. Things are still going to explode after the Act's passing, so all of the "safety" concerns are pretty feeble.

Is it ironic that Captain America decides to fight the Act? Not really, but it's supposed to be. Having Captain America be at odds with AMERICA is one of the guy's recurring themes. Somebody should go do a count of the number of times a cover has screamed "Captain America VS AMERICA!!!" and then see if we're all still shocked that the ultimate patriot has joined the resistance.

The whole Spider-Man reveal thing. First of all, it sucks that Marvel press released it BEFORE anybody had a chance to read the damn comic. I can see them wanting to drum up business, but would it have killed them to do it the day after the issue hit stores? Secondly, although I don't believe in Peter Parker's newfound reasons for revealing his true identity (which aren't even discussed in Civil War proper, screw you again Marvel), I'm okay with the new stories this opens up. Sometimes, the cost of needing to do New Things is to change your lead character a little bit.

I found Mr. Fantastic's reasons for supporting the Act hugely disappointing. I was hoping he would give some reasoned, intelligent backing... something for me to chew on. But he just threw up a statistics extrapolation that suggested that metahuman incidents would eventually engulf the planet. Wha?

What he should have said is, "Look, my family has been public since Day One, and we're fine. Everybody knows our identities. We make a living selling off my fabulous patents and various FF merchandising. We do our best to save every life we can; we do our best to fix any damage we cause. We're not perfect, but we have found a way to be both responsible and powerful. Of course, my children have to live inside a fortified skyscraper with six-foot-thick steel walls, but there you go."

I do like Thing's solution. Unable to support the Act and equally unable to stand against his country, he just left!

All the games in today's entry were picked up during a Buy 2 / Get 1 Free sale at Toys R Us. Guess which one was the impulse free game.

I'm pretty much going to agree with X-Play and call San Andreas the Best PS2 Game Ever (and remember, I'm calling this with God of War 2 sight unseen, sarcasm.) It's not the best in graphics. It's not the best in story. It's not the best in innovation or art direction or music. But it is the best in overall gameplay. This is a game to get lost within.

With the previous GTA games, I've already mentioned the easy addiction of the free-world sandbox, the multitude of sidebar games, and the effortless combination of driving and on-ground action. San Andreas takes everything prior and doubles it... with a genuinely gigantic environment that somehow remains detailed and alive without a single loading pause. You can't think of this game without marveling at the diversity of locale, from mean streets to redwood forest to casino-bloated deserts. Not to mention the absurd levels of character customization. Or the undocumented two-player modes.

Sure, you can quibble about the low-poly models, the subjective music soundtracks, the still-wonked aiming controls... but nothing on the racks brings as much game - with as much variety - for your money as San Andreas. This series comes with a lot of crushing hype and unfavorable media, but it has f'ing earned it.

After playing GTA3, back when the series was just one awesome game, my only request was more of everything. San Andreas delivered.

Memory Score: Flying still sucks.

I liked the first Silent Hill, but I skipped on the second and third installments. What I saw from the previews and demos was a series bent on descending into self-parody. It wasn't horror any longer, it was just goofy. There's a difference between something being actually scary (cough, *Fatal Frame*) and something just going for special effects visual shock value, and that's where I saw Silent Hill heading. Maybe I'm misjudging messrs. 2 and 3, but if I did, it's only due to what the official trailers showed me.

So I wasn't expecting much when I fired up the Silent Hill 4 demo. Probably more bloody rusted metal and bad-high-school-art stitched-flesh zombies.

And then the demo stuck me in an apartment where you could look out the window and watch a fairly convincing street animate on for hours.

Sold.

What SH4: The Room accomplished was offer an unbeatable horror game hook: why am I stuck inside a non-descript bachelor apartment and how in the hell are they making a game out of this. The answer lies in having the game play out inside your character's dreams, but it gets far more complicated than that.

Rather than becoming mired in ancient death cults and enigmatic oracle witches and some of the more usual trappings of the genre, SH4 is largely about your reluctant efforts at retracing the steps of a local serial killer thought long dead. Between each dreamscape, you are indeed locked inside your single-bedroom apartment... which is handled in an appropriately claustrophobic first-person view. One of the game's themes is voyeurism, and The Room does an excellent job of turning that into an interactive gameplay mechanic.

Classic Resident Evil is cheesy B-movie fun. Modern Resident Evil is fast FPS-styled action. Fatal Frame is subtle atmosphere and well-told story. But what Silent Hill does best is awful. Some truly awful stuff happens in this game, like the audio-only scene at the pet store. Or the circular prison built for housing children. Or the all-too-real personalities of the apartment complex.

It's still a Silent Hill game - so there's the requisite assortment of slimy, pulpy maggot monsters, and the accompanying clumsy controls and camera, sigh. But this is a game that I wish would have been played by more than just franchise fanboys, because it reached out beyond being simply Game #4. I'll always take psychological horror over straight gore horror, and The Room runs nicely on about 60-40.

Memory Score: My god, the pet store.

We really enjoyed the original Karaoke Revolution and wished they had developed the expansion disk concept. But I'm sure some study told Konami that stamping out complete $40 games would sell better than multiple $15 song upgrade disks. I'm thinking this is a line best suited for an online delivery system.

This was the "Why Not" third wheel in the TRU sale.

And it is, unfortunately, nearly the exact same game with new songs. Which I consider unfair at the full price. The singing gameplay is still cool, but it sucks to see the same character models doing the same motion capture over the same backgrounds.

To make matters worse, the song list is far worse than the original. So, in the end, we barely played this one. The timing of the purchase sucked as well, because I had like a million new games to play between September and December 2004, so a lackluster rehash title wasn't going to get much action.

Memory Score: It's time to get real artists involved with this thing and drop the pathetic soundalikes.

Next time: Another uneven EyeToy release, a major sequel that I hated on, and the one PS2 game I've played online more than any other.

I've pretty much resigned myself to only playing on Thursday nights with the gate open... and some weeks not even that happens. I no longer talk to villagers, and I've stopped caring about weeds. Both my personal relationships and my landscaping are in disrepair. I'm more or less done with Wild World.

Which is sad, considering that I haven't even played the game for a full year yet. Haven't seen all the bugs and fish. But like I've said repeatedly, Nintendo did a lousy job of keeping the game relevant over time, resulting in a game far less compelling than the GameCube original (which, admittedly, generated more traction out of the sheer novelty of it all). Crappy holidays, meager WiFi capabilities, soul-crushing randomness, slow-to-no online community building.

So why do I still anticipate the Wii edition with the heat of a thousand suns, given no outstanding proof that Nintendo has learned anything from the experience? That's the fanboy in me.

The Toys R Us event did spark some return attention to Wild World, however. Although the Mario furniture giveaway arrived with little fanfare and almost no support, when it did get here, it was done well.

Get this: my sister grabbed some rare TRU items but was disappointed because she did not receive a monkey in the bargain... but a monkey did indeed arrive almost a week later, as soon as one of her existing villagers packed up for greener pastures. I take a small measure pride in knowing that Nintendo did not simply screw her over with monkey-lack; they just inserted a simian into the queue and set him to waiting.

Meanwhile, my second Nintendo monkey has already moved out.

There's a fireworks show every Saturday night in August. (To celebrate, Nintendo sent out lawn chairs over WiFi, a sad and fruitless goodwill gesture in the face of the awesome TRU giveaway.) Tortimer will be handing out sparklers and roman candles, and your top screen will glow with happy firework explosions. Feel free to invite someone to your town to watch... watch Tortimer and K.K. scurry back under the circuit board since all the animals disappear when guests show up. I'm considering moving that absurdity to the top of my Animal Crossing Demands list.

Anyway, I'm thinking of opening up my town way early this week and keeping it up way late. I won't personally be around, but the doors will be open for guests. If you're on my friend list, stop on by, help yourself to the free gifts littering the floor, leave a message on the town bulletin board, and check out my sweet Mario furniture pad.

I'll also have my webcam pointed at it, so you can see a blurry discolored live feed of the town gate. This may evolve into the regular way I run Open Gate Night... longer hours but more idling.

Last month X-Play (increasingly irrelevant G4's increasingly irrelevant game review show) did some special episodes where they counted down the top ten games for all three systems.

Of course, no such list is going to be the end-all for all gamers (no Kingdom Hearts? no Paper Mario? no Final Fantasy? no LEGO Star Wars? no Fatal Frame, even for me?), but there are some undercurrents in the lists that I wanted to point out.

First of all, it seems obvious that they used a "no franchise hogs" rule... because there is no other way that the Xbox list would lack the original Halo, and the PS2 list would lack Vice City, MGS2 or the previous (and better) editions of Sly. And what's up with choosing Katamari 1 over Katamari 2?

For all those games that are part of a series, it's probably best to consider X-Play's placement including all the games in that series. Otherwise, seven of the Xbox slots would have gone to games that begin with Halo, KOTOR and/or Splinter Cell.

Which leads me to my second point... look at the number of exclusive titles on each list...

GameCube: Seven pure exclusive titles. Two games that were intended as exclusives (Viewtiful Joe and RE4), and one game that everybody played (Soul Calibur 2).

PS2: Eight pure exclusive titles. SSX Tricky was everywhere and San Andreas had one of those six-month-later Xbox+Windows releases.

Xbox: Three pure exclusive titles (Forza, Jet Set, and Ninja Gaiden). Three titles that are also available on the PC (Riddick, KOTOR, and I'm including Halo 2 even though I don't think that's actually happened yet). The remaining four titles were all available on PS2.

So, how sad is it that most of your Top Xbox Games Ever aren't even Xbox exclusives?

If you take all the games from the Xbox and GameCube lists that are also available for the PS2, you get a stunning seventeen Best Games of This Generation. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't account for Xbox Live, and you won't find Link in SC2... but the unvarnished truth here is that over half of X-Play's list lives on the PS2 in some form or another.

Sony for the win.

Also, if you take a backwards look and sublist the games on the other two that were also on Xbox, things get even weirder. How is it possible that the Best PS2 game - San Andreas, which also had an Xbox release - can have ten Xbox games that rank higher... including underselling dogs like Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil, which did not even make the PS2 list?

There are some similar mind-warping jumps following Soul Calibur 2, Burnout 3 and Splinter Cell. Obviously these lists were not intended to ever be directly compared... although when you try to tell Xbox players that their edition of fucking Psychonauts was better than their edition of San Andreas, you're hoping they have a short memory.

Once again, the sad state of the Xbox is this: if you wanted online play, you went Xbox. That's all they sold the console on, and that's all they delivered.

By the way, I own eighteen of those games, including all of the Cube list!

PS: I'm surprised X-Play could even name ten GameCube games, wont as they are to cater to the NINTENDO IS TEH GAY demographic. Although I would have easily slotted Pikmin 2 in there instead of Viewtiful Joe.

TaleSpin Volume 1 DVD set is released at the end of this month. Amazon is taking pre-orders at $23, which is over $10 under MSRP. You can even combo it with Darkwing Duck Volume 1 for $46.

The box claims "pilot + first 23 episodes," but I have not heard yet if this will be the original full length movie pilot... or the edited version that was cut down into episodic chunks for the show's daily run.

I suspect some purposeful re-ordering of the episodes... because you can plainly see Katie Dodd on one of those DVD inserts, and she only appeared in the epic two-parter "For Whom The Bell Klangs," which comprised episodes 39 and 40. Or they're just grabbing whatever production art they have lying around, and plan on using the same inserts for any and all TaleSpin boxed sets.

I also have not seen any speculation whether future DVD sets will include the show's pair of "banned" episodes, "Last Horizons" and "Flying Dupes." The former was only temporarily banned, but the latter has apparently only been seen twice (according to Wikipedia).

Hell, who knows if there will even be another DVD set. All I do know is that I am buying this one.

A coupla' weeks ago, I noticed that I was getting some traffic from Board Game Geek, a site I had not visited personally in years. In fact, I can prove it has been years, because I found the only time I ever submitted anything to the site - a report on the board game Survive from July 2001. That report is so old that it actually predates the site having user logins.

Anyway, turns out that surprise traffic into fourhman.com was because somebody added my card games to the BGG database. As if they're real, actual games or something. With my name listed as game designer, spelled correctly and everything.

So, I'm flattered.

And I returned to Board Game Geek to see how they've been doing for the past five years. Now, with detail-oriented user profiles, you can track, rate, comment on, discuss, trade and submit pictures for any game in their system... and you can submit session reports, where you describe a recent game. I thought it would be fun to write up some session reports for my games, so when Tony, Josh, Steve and I got together last night, I took notes during two games of TaleSpin. I'm cross-posting the sessions here, in case BGG thinks I made them up and rejects them. I'm submitting the pictures and reports to the TaleSpin page. Don't worry, BGG has literally millions of stupid photos like that.

GAME ONE
We played a four player game, using the base card set, the first expansion, and the as-yet-unreleased second expansion. The game lasted about an hour, which was pretty good considering it had been awhile since the last time we played and we all needed some rules refreshers. The goal of the game was four cargo in play. Going clockwise in turn order: I played Baloo, Steve was Molly, Josh had Karnage, and Tony chose Kit.

ROUND ONE
Baloo added Wildcat as his first passenger, moved to the Loading Dock played a cargo.

Molly started off strong by dropping Katie as a passenger (6 Shipping!) and then Spigot to protect her. Molly moved to the Iron Vulture, played a cargo, and forced Baloo to discard Wildcat.

Karnage stayed in theme and played Gibber to the table, then did something to pull Wildcat from the discard pile (I forget what, exactly.) Moved and played cargo.

Kit added Trader Moe as a passenger. Then, clearly bored by all this non-aggression, sent the Military Guards after Karnage. Karnage refused the dogfight, so Kit opened one of his cargo (it was real). Kit then replaced the Cargo with the Bayou Critters. Kit moved to the Air Circus, played a cargo, and Moe discarded himself.

ROUND TWO
Baloo played Becky, moved to Higher for Hire, played a cargo. Becky discarded herself.

Molly took her big Shipping band over to the Land of 1,001 Lakes for the ol' cargo double play. She ended her turn at three packed cargo.

Karnage accurately evaluated Molly as a threat, so he attacked Molly directly (after playing Wildcat as a passenger for the Pilot bonus). Unfortunately for him, Molly defended successfully! Undeterred, Karnage played Monkey in Your Tank on Molly, opening two of her three cargo. Both were real, so Karnage had to open one of his (also real). The exciting news was that one of Molly's real cargo was the Bells of Tinabula! The Bells (one of the unreleased cards) shuffle the deck and discard pile and remove the top 20 cards from the game! After that was finished, Karnage played Mayday on Molly and discarded her real Cargo. Karnage drew some extra cards with Takin' the Day Off. He then replaced his Bayou Critters with the Lightning Gun, and used it to shut down the Land of 1,001 Lakes. He ended his turn by moving to Higher for Hire and playing cargo.

Kit played Trader Moe (who was re-drawn after the Bells shuffle) and Khan's Board of Directors as new passengers. Moved to Higher for Hire and played cargo.

ROUND THREE
Baloo drew Becky again (!) and played her. Then he used Henry to attack Kit... Henry won and did three damage to Kit, wiping out all of his cargo. Baloo then replaced Karnage's Lightning Gun with the Gorilla Birds. Baloo played the Monkey Workers as a Becky buffer, moved and played cargo.

Molly saw an opportunity to go for the win by using the Thembrian High Marshal to attack Baloo. Baloo ended up winning the dogfight, but had the High Marshal won, he would have stolen an artifact for Molly and put her in a winning position. Molly ended her turn by moving to the Iron Vulture, playing a cargo and killing Wildcat again.

Karnage started his turn by playing Air Raid on Molly, opening her two packed cargo. They are both real, so Karnage got to steal one of them! At some point, one of Baloo's cargo was opened and exposed to be real (I forgot to note how), and that inspired Karnage to use Covington to challenge Baloo to a dogfight. Baloo accepted. During the dogfight, Molly played Like Taking Candy From A Sitting Baby Duck On A Log which opened one of Karnage's cargo and one of Baloo's cargo. Both are real, so Molly did not affect the game overmuch. Covington won the dogfight, so Karnage stole one of Baloo's Cargo and won the game with four cargo in play!

GAME TWO
This was a three player game, using the base card set, the first expansion, and the as-yet-unreleased second expansion. The game lasted about an hour; the goal of the game was four cargo in play. Going clockwise in turn order: I played Baloo, Josh had Karnage, and Tony was Kit.

ROUND ONE
Baloo started the game by adding Ratchet as a passenger. Moved and played cargo.

Karnage played Torque to his passenger chain. Moved and played cargo.

Kit had nothing to play. Moved and played cargo.

ROUND TWO
Baloo's second turn was more productive. First, he played In My Sights to get a temporary Range and Pilot bonus. This was largely a ruse, since he had bigger dogfight plans for later in the turn. To begin, Baloo attacked Kit directly... Kit naturally refused since Baloo only does a double draw, so Baloo happily drew the free two cards. Then he played Sky Scramble (for a extra dogfight attack this turn), pulled Covington and went after Karnage. Baloo had some strong cards, but Karnage defended with two Lucky Shots... which were both drawn at the start of the dogfight! Baloo played passenger Dunder, moved and played cargo.

Karnage played Katie Dodd and Trader Moe, giving him a total Shipping of 9. So he moved directly to the Land of 1,001 Lakes and played two cargo.

Kit sent the Slush Patrol after Karnage, who refused the dogfight and thus had to discard Moe and open one of his (real) cargo. Then Kit did something to discard that Cargo (missed noting that action). Kit still had no passengers to play!

ROUND THREE
Baloo take aim at Karnage's three cargo by playing Monkey in Your Tank on the pirate captain. Karnage flipped over the Airfoil artifact and the Bag of Treasure artifact! Since both were real, Baloo had to flip over one of his cargo... and revealed the Lightning Gun. After some internal debate, Baloo pointed the Gun at the 1,001 Lakes. Then Baloo sent McNee after Karnage, pumped up with Head On... and, somehow, McNee lost. Baloo moved and played cargo, bringing him to three.

Karnage had a low-key turn, playing I Think I Know Just How To Do It to pull a card from the discard pile. Moved and played cargo.

Kit put the screws to Baloo on his turn, baiting the ace into a dogfight against the usually docile Cargo Pilots. Having played all but one card of his hand on his turn, Baloo was eager to accept the challenge and get some fresh cards... but Kit surprised him with Asleep At The Controls, which reduced his Pilot skill to zero. So Baloo had to defend a dogfight with only one card... and even though that card happened to be a Lucky Shot, you can't win a dogfight with only one card. So Kit slapped a damage maneuver on his second play and handily won the day. Kit chose Baloo's Lightning Gun as the discard, then he moved and played cargo.

The second turn ended with Baloo at two cargo, Karnage at three, and Kit also at three.

ROUND FOUR
Baloo sent Captain Hotspur after Karnage, who lost the fight and his Airfoil artifact. Usual turn end, moved and played cargo.

Karnage had Khan's Pilots attack Kit, who refused to fight on the grounds that he will be at an even worse disadvantage than if he just takes the hit. So one of Kit's cargo was opened and it was revealed to be a bluff. Karnage added Klang as a passenger, then played Double Check and played a cargo. Kit responded with What Dumb Excuse Is It This Time and opened that cargo; it was also a fake. Karnage ended his turn by moving to the Iron Vulture (kills Dunder) and playing cargo. Baloo played Empty Promise on Torque to erase his effect table for the turn, and Klang discarded himself.

Kit shook his fist at the universe and did nothing but move and play cargo.

The round ended with everybody at three cargo! It's anybody's game!

ROUND FIVE
Baloo attacked Karnage directly; Karnage refused and Baloo drew his two cards. Baloo held a recruitment drive and played Hacksaw, Gibber and the Monkey Workers as passengers. Unfortunately, it is kind of an anticlimactic ending, because neither of the other players held any means to stop Baloo from simply moving and playing his fourth cargo. Baloo for the win!

I was really excited to see a Lion King world show up in Kingdom Hearts 2, since Simba didn't have much to do in the first one. I'd love to see a Making Of for this game, because I would no doubt be fascinated to hear what movies were chosen and why. I'm guessing existing licensing issues and synergy initiatives govern much of it.

For example, the inclusion of Tron... but we'll get to that in a minute.

The only drag for the Pride Land is that you jump into the story during the halfway point, when Simba is off screwing around with Pumbaa and Timon. I was rather looking forward to some Young Simba levels, the version of the character that everyone on the planet prefers. And where's Zazu, dammit?

I'm a big fan of the worlds that necessitate a costume change, and Pride Land offers the most drastic one yet: a full transformation into animals. Makes you wonder why all the worlds don't do this. Surely Agrabah could come up with some kind of breezy Persian number for Sora and Company.

Shame they weren't able to use more of the movie's music.

Interlude: Why does everyone - and I mean everyone - feel the need to address our heroes as "Sora. [pause] Donald. [pause] Goofy." This always happens during the final Thank You scene, where the trio receives loving accolades from whatever subverted antagonist is native to the world. It is particularly grating because the ever-present subtitling means you can see it coming.

Deeper Interlude: To all video game designers: ALWAYS INCLUDE AN OPTION TO TURN OFF SUBTITLES. Your cutscenes have been fully translated. Your characters are animated and believable. Why do you still feel I have to read their lines along with them? Jesus, you wonder why most people think video game plotlines are infantile and unnecessary... because you guys are treating us like babies. SAME-LANGUAGE SUBTITLES DESTROY IMMERSION. (Unless you are hard-of-hearing, in which case they're awesome.)

After smacking the hell out of Scar, you have to head back to Hollow Bastion for the non-sequiter Tron level. I will say that they integrated the concept well enough, just that it is a helluva weird-ass thing to have bothered with in the first place. I don't believe that Tetsuya Nomura was enchanted by Tron while visiting an American game development house while they were working on Tron 2.0, as the legend suggests. What I believe is that, when KH2 was in the planning stage, the Walt Disney Company was deep in the throes of force-feeding a Tron revival into the public consciousness.

The Tron 2.0 Movement didn't pan out as planned - resulting in a few lackluster new video games in 2003, with any plans of a film sequel already DOA - but we're stuck with a big Tron world in KH2.

Incidentally, the world is called "Space Paranoids" not because of bad East-West translation, but because that's one of the fictional video games mentioned in the movie. I didn't know that until tonight. But I still think it's stupid-sounding.

This world does look cool as hell though. Tron-as-game comes off far better than Tron-as-1982-movie ever did. Happily, "Sora. Donald. Goofy." get new Tron-inspired costumes.

And I love that the game uses the movie's same cheesy digital disassembly effect to transport the characters into Tron land.

Perhaps the best part of this section of the game is that we actually return to the freaking plot, instead of wallowing in movie re-enactments that, while fun and involving in their own right, have nothing to do with Sora's quest... as undefined as that has been. You see, King Mickey returns at this point, and in a big way. It's a surprising reveal, because Mickey presence in Kingdom Hearts has largely been noteworthy only due to his conspicuous absence. At least you no longer have to put up with Donald and Goofy constantly wondering aloud "Gawrsh, when do you think we'll find the King?"

You also meet Cloud and Sephiroth somewhere in here, lost amid their own private storyline. Plus, you get hyper-adorable fairy rockstar versions of Luna, Rikku and Paine. I'm hoping I get to see more of them. Like a bloodmatch against Sleeping Beauty's Flora, Fauna and Meriweather.

Still no Riku though. I'm sure he turn out to be Roxas or an unrevealed Organization 13 member or somebody.

Haven't seen Kairi in a while either. Probably went back to Miniskirt Shortening Camp.

After polishing off Space Paranoids, there's a mega-sweet Lord of the Rings style war scene (which kinda comes out of nowhere and leaves similarly). Then you have to visit all the worlds again for a shorter, secondary unlocking storyline.

I'm sure this pisses off a lot of people, but I don't mind the backtracking. There's no way I'm ready to wrap this game up yet, even after 27+ hours. More to come.