September 2006 Archives

Most days, the internet is a gibbering cesspool of fraud and sickness. Then there are the days when it delivers above and beyond what you Googled.

After finishing Killer 7 last night, I thought I would check for any online resources. Now that I know the ending (Mask de Smith betrays the team to Kun Lan to open a Heaven Smile fitness club, and is then erased from existence when the player - breaking the fourth wall in direct consult with Harman Smith - deletes his save file from the TV), I could forage blissfully unimpeded by spoilers. Any game that expects us to seriously accept a character with the name "Trevor Pearlharbor" is approaching a Twin Peaksian level of dramatic hilarity, and I wanted to Learn More About It.

I found this on GameFAQs (head for the one titled "Plot Analysis"), an investigation weighty enough to stand as someone's graduate thesis. Author James Clinton Powell describes himself as a poet, and it is a kind of poetry the way he weaves elements from the game with real-world history and his own educated speculation to craft a document that is insanely thorough and exhaustively specific. You read it and you wonder how the dude gets through the day.

Anyway, if you played the game and found yourself at all bamboozled by the seemingly scattershot, untenable storyline, give it a read. Here's some of my favorite paragraphs, to give you an idea what you're in for. Turns out, it's terribly intense... and, you know what, it does actually make sense. In this interpretation.

Why the moon? "The full moon is a symbol of transformation. It throbs full screen while each mission loads. As well, when Garcian sees Emir standing, dazed, atop the Union Hotel, the full moon is in the background. I take the persistence of the full moon as a symbol that the Harman Assassins--and Harman himself--were killed during a full moon. If, as I think, Emir has killed Harman and crew just before killing Hulbert, then Harman and the Assassins were killed a full three days befor the recording of Hulbert's cassette tapes."

On the Hotel level: "Kun Lan's dialogue implies that they have been visited recently by successive people. H. H.'s dialogue implies that these visitations are the "surfacing" of people. I propose that, here, Kun Lan and H. H. allude to their experience of Garcian's awakening into his identity as Emir. As Garcian revisits each murder, the spirit of the victim "surfaces" like a bubble--that is, he or she rises to the top of the hotel, through the elevator, and enters the Forbidden Room. These events occur parallel to Garcian's loss of each Persona, because he can no longer identify himself AS them."

About the hilarious fighting game sequence: "The "video game" layer of the ALTER EGO mission takes the game to a more metaphorical level. We see Kun Lan putting down a controller, after we watch the credits for what looks like an online fighting game made by Capcom. This implies that we, as players, have been playing an online video game against Kun Lan."

Religious allusions in Andrei Ulmeyda: "Ulmeyda, importantly, represents most of the characteristics of Western religion. As we know from Clarence's monologue at the end of CLOUDMAN, Ulmeyda's followers drank Ulmeyda's blood; this reflects the ritual of the Last Supper, in Christian tradition. Further, Ulmeyda delberately infected himself with various lethal diseases, and overcame them. His blood is filled with numerous antibodies to genuinely deadly diseases, giving his blood a degree of "healing power," much as Christ's body is believed to have held in the Christian tradition."

Duality in Curtis Blackburn: "Ayame Blackburn is one half of another light-and-dark juxtaposition. Remember that Curtis Blackburn also taught Dan everything that he knew. Presumably, given Curtis' unique skills, he also taught Dan how to perform the Collateral Shot. Ayame Blackburn's strength is found by entering into darkness; Dan's strength is found by emitting light. I suspect that they are two halves of Curtis Blackburn's total knowledge."

I also enjoyed the lengthy analysis of the game's timeline and how it follows from our own American history with Japan, from WWII through Reagan's historic re-establishment of accord... the suggestion that the Smiths' individual powers were inspired by their deaths... and the explanation as to why the VO sounds like somebody is backwards-sampling on a Casio:

...when the game was made originally in Japanese, the characters' lines were spoken in clear English. However, the language was closer to Engrish: English made slightly incomprehensible through Japanese trans- lation. Knowing that native English speakers would be disturbed by the poor grammar and syntax, the developers decided to present the voices garbled and accompanied with grammatically correct subtitles.

It says something incredible about Killer 7 - and about video games in general - that it can inspire such intense scrutiny and still maintain substance.

Background: What is it about Nintendo's proliferation of franchises that turns any calm discussion into a deathmatch? Here's another example of me blistering the hides of the mealy-mouthed bottom feeders who attack Mario while lining up for the midnight launch of Halo 2. This is from about a year ago, back when the Wii was being quaintly referred to as the "Revolution." I love it when people get all full of themselves and post stuff that is flat-out wrong. Complete original discussion here.

When a new game comes out that has lots of great stuff going for it, but nevertheless contains a handful of flaws, I think most people are willing to give it a slide.

But when the sequel comes out and refuses to address those issues, that's when people get really mean. Like when the time limit stayed in Pikmin 2. Or the innumerable little ought-to-have-been-fixed quirks of Animal Crossing: Wild World.

Or LEGO Star Wars 2.

The restrictive 2-player camera was a huge problem in the first game, and it is just as awful in the sequel. In fact, it's probably worse due to the increased complexity of the level designs. If you don't keep within a close radius to your partner, you'll be caught behind something, you'll get dragged along (perhaps to your death) or you'll be randomly warped into another character, causing extreme confusion. It was soooo obvious in the first one that I can't believe that they just overlooked it.

Jesus, just have the camera zoom out as far as possible. Don't stop it at some arbitrary limit just to keep the scene legible; we'll walk back when we realize we've gone too far on our own. And, for flying zeppelin shitcock, don't allow one player to push the camera so that the second player gets dragged. If one player is standing still, that should fucking lock the camera down.

Rhonda and I are at the point where we can recognize a potentially problematic cam situation, so one of us will simply drop out and the other will manuever through the obstacle. What kind of multiplayer gameplay is that, where you're encouraged to bail out on each other?

Internet rumors suggest that the DS version was shipped too early, because the ball sacks at Lucas HAD to have the game drop in holy synergy with the latest DVD rip-off, er, release of the Star Wars films. I wonder if that applied to the other versions as well. I'd like to think that somebody down in playtesting was screaming "No, we didn't fix the damn camera!"

Also: what the hell does "extra toggle" mean? We unlocked it the other night, expecting a screen might pop up and explain what it was, but no such information appeared. And major boos for talking up the cool feature to play as the Episode 1/2/3 characters (provided you still have a memory card save), but then limiting their appearance to Free Play only. Not in the build-a-character mode (which is also gimpy), and not as additional wandering characters in the Mos Eisley bar hub.

And those cheat codes you get for beating the PS2 demo are completely bogus. They just unlock the ability to pay for those characters, which is like getting a voucher for a ticket for a can of soda. And anyway, you naturally get the ability to buy those characters after beating level three. Which is, if you'll follow me here, merely the third level of the game. A self-respecting cheat code would give you the character for free.

Another thing! That third cheat code is for a Tusken Raider, not even Greedo! WTF!

It's hard to believe we're enjoying this game as much as we are. The Han/Luke dynamic is so much more fun than all the forced pairings of the first LSW.

And big ups to the Beach Trooper. You know who you are.

I like some good hype once in a while. And I like a good fighting game once in a while.

I generally don't care much for fighters. Prior to SC2, all of my traditional fighting games were based on comic book licenses (can I get a HELL YEAH for Justice League Task Force!) My problem is that you don't usually get much with them. A roster of combatants, a handful of arenas... and that's it. If you lack the desire to master all of the impossible finger-crunching special moves, and if you're not all that interested in fielding match-up after match-up... well, it seems to explain to me why fighter fans tend to pick one fave and belittle all else. Because if you're hardcore, you've made a serious time investment. And if you're casual, you need exactly one of them. Ever. And it should probably be Smash Bros.

Two things sold me on Soul Calibur 2: the unlockable, collectible weapons... and Link. Which brings us to the hype portion.

There was mad hype about this release, because each console received a different exclusive character. The PS2 version borrowed Heihachi from Tekken (no one cared). The Xbox received Todd McFarlane's overplayed fan-service 1990s embarrassment, Spawn (no one cared).

And the little purple GameCube got Link, looking just like he did in the Spaceworld 2000 demo, before being turned into one of the Flintstone's neighbors. Of course, the Cube version then went to massively outsell the other two, in a slam dunk for Nintendo that ranks as one the GameCube's finest hours.

But back to me. I had a hell of a great time with this one, even though I thought Link's moves sucked. My girl is Talim. Mike and I will still pull this one out for some easy late night gaming.

Also: the single player "adventure" mode is a complete joke.

Memory Score: I refuse to spell it as one word

I gave it a shot. And it did not suck.

This is a de-violenced GTA riff, with a historically tragic video game license. It's hard to believe that it wasn't a complete failure. For years, we've tolerated Simpsons games that are Simpsons games only insofar as they feature renders of the Simpsons characters. Hit & Run went a long way toward redeeming a criminal legacy of bad platformers, curious sports adaptations, and that crappy Crazy Taxi clone.

It's short, the environments are repeated, the lip sync is nonexistant, but the core gameplay is solid enough to enjoy it for a couple weekends. I wonder why a sequel never showed up, because a game like this could have been blockbuster with twice as much content.

Memory Score: Giant robot wasps?!?

I sidestepped Pikmin when it was first released largely because I was busy with Smash Bros. I mean, come on.

But when Pikmin hit the $20 mark, I bit... and found one of those surprisingly chewy little games that nobody played. I'm sure it was the basic concept that threw people off: you control hordes of little flower men. And I recall Nintendo making huge press out of the game being an RTS, which it is (sort of), but conventional wisdom suggests that the real-time strategy genre is DOA on non-keyboarded consoles. So I bet that also led to some hasty judgements.

For me, the biggest problem was the damn clock on each level. Here's a game that you're going to want to explore for hours, and then Miyamoto puts a clock on it! The game is tough enough (to 100% completion, anyway) without it. Nintendo sold this game short by stapling such an aggressive and arbitrary timer to it. I suspect they would have pulled a lot more mileage out of it had they made this first edition (Pikmin 2 hit in '04) much more approachable.

Pikmin FTW: those damn plant dudes have become one of the most recognizable new IPs of this generation. Plus, Nintendo had an actual plant bred to look like the Pikmin blooms! Insane.

Memory Score: A great example of Nintendo-as-Innovator

Next time: a big license with a small hero, one of Nintendo's best selling and hugely anticipated franchise titles, and my first taste of the fabled Capcom Five

While I was considering some small discussion on Apple's recent press conference (iTV seems very typically Version 1.0), Nintendo held their big conference with plenty of new details on the Wii. So I'm jumping straight to that. I enjoyed Kotaku's live-blogging of the event, so here's what Nintendo said and my initial, ill-informed reactions.

- November 19, $250, one color, one configuration

Yes. The date is no surprise (that's a Sunday, so is that actually the shipping date? Or are we talking a Saturday night midnight launch?): holiday shopping season. And this is announced just as Sony delays the PS3 in Europe and seems treacherously close to delaying everywhere, again. The price seems a little high since, as recent as last week, we were hearing rumors of a $150 price point... but there's enough new promises coming later that seem to justify it. And even at $250, it's still significantly cheaper than the 360 and the PS3, plus it includes debateably better built-in features.

I'm surprised about the color, since Nintendo has chosen to cherish the cool cachet of crapping out a collection of coordinating cases. I'm sure we'll see color choices by this time next year, and not just in Japan.

The one configuration is super-important, since both Sony and Microsoft have confused the issue with differently-abled editions on the racks. Pro gamers like you and me know that the "core" versions are crippled and priced accordingly to fool casual buyers and the odd gift-shopping grandma... but nobody else knows that, so you end up with people buying the core version, unpacking it and realizing they didn't get what they thought they were getting... or store shelves overflowing with core systems and not a single full version to be found. It was a stupid idea, and the only reason the other guys did it was so they could squeeze out a million more units at a reduced cost and pump up their market share. It wasn't about choice. It's about inflating their sell-throughs so the press releases all sound better.

Here's hoping that the only Wii multiples are based on color and bundled games. Keep the hardware uniform.

Apparently, there's no DVD playback. Huh. I guess I don't care, since my PS2 is not going anywhere any time soon. Still, seems like that should have been an easy thing to include. I think my friggin' phone plays DVD these days.

Region free. Awesome. No more fear of importing! (EDIT: Booo! They backed off on this!)

- Wii Sports included, along with one remote and one nunchuk

The inclusion of a game - which NOBODY does anymore - helps to assuage the price somewhat. Although let's be honest, in the whole storied history of video games, there's very few launch titles that end up being worthy of full price six months on. Wii Sports would not have been worth $50 on the racks (which, Nintendo further announced, will be the standard pricing for all first-party prices). Wii Sports is a tech demo designed to show off the new bizarre hardware. It makes perfect sense to include it. Now people will consider it an awesome "free" bonus and be less likely to dump all over it.

Because, it's not going to be that cool.

I do have to laugh at the big "WII SPORTS INCLUDED" on the box, because it kinda nicely attacks several Nintendo weak spots in one. First, included game: nice bonus that nobody else is doing without waiting half a year for the first launch game to drop in price. Second, "sports." Nintendo usually is not thought of as the place to go for sports games, so this sort of looks like Nintendo making an effort. There are people out there who solely play sports video games. I think those people are sadly shortsighted and possibly maladjusted, but they do exist. Just maybe this box would encourage them to branch out and buy a Wii. I doubt it, but it's probably a better marketing bone to throw than "WARIO WARE INCLUDED," even though that's what I would prefer.

There's no "standard controller" included, just the remote + nunchuk. New standards will be sold separately, but regular GameCube controllers will work on the Wii (will WaveBirds work?), so if you want that, those damn things are currently wallpapering your EB. Extra remotes will go for $40 and extra nunchuks will be $20, which is way too pricey. I'm guessing that all of the Wii Sports crap won't require the nunchuk, but to fully enjoy Nintendo's Revolution, you're going to want another $40 remote for 2P. At least everything is wireless.

- Launch day first party games: Zelda: Twilight Princess, Excite Truck and (obviously) Wii Sports

You know, I'm pretty much waiting to see how the Wii reviews go for Twilight Princess. I don't doubt that Nintendo will make fun games that work with the remote... but I'm skeptical of them taking an existing title in development and hitting it with the Wii stick. I mean, the first round of stylus-based DS ports were lousy (Super Mario 64DS, boooooo), but now they know what they're doing. I'm perfectly willing to wait for the GameCube version of Twilight Princess.

And I'm kinda ticked whenever I hear somebody talk about how awesome it is that we're getting a Zelda title at launch. That's only true because they delayed the hell out of it. We were supposed to have Twilight Princess for holiday 2005, man.

I have no interest in Excite Truck. Had they turned it into a Mario title, I would have considered it. At least then I'd be getting the next-gen predictably silly hijinks I crave.

I'm in for Trauma Center, that's my launch title.

- Wii Channels

This is where the unexpected stuff starts slipping in, and where my jaw started dropping at the sheer surprise of it all. The "channels" concept continues the metaphor of the remote. If you want to play whatever game is in the drive, you boot up and select channel #1. If you want to buy/download a new game, you go to that channel (which then shows up as it's own channel button - and Reggie said you get to keep the game "forever," so that seems to mean that the retro games will still as long as you own the thing.) Nintendo is counting on having multiple channels ready to go at launch, including news and weather channels! Which, I'll assume, run sort of like leeching somebody's RSS feed. Wasn't that an After Dark screensaver that did that, once upon a time before the internet existed? Kotaku video here.

They priced the retro downloads at $5 for NES games, $8 for SNES, and $10 for N64. This is amazingly close to my prediction back when the "virtual console" was being market-tested. I stand by my $3/5/10 model, however. Didn't mention pricing for Genesis and Turbo-GRFSHPHXHCCXXX games. I'm a little bit interested in buying Toe Jam & Earl, even though I have a perfectly fine working copy about nine feet behind me.

You pay with "Wii Points," which I hate. Anything that attempts to turn actual money into a fanciful harmless-sounding buzzword is inherently obnoxious and dangerous for unmonitored kids and others with a poor grasp on their expenditures. 500 Wii Points = $5, so they might as well call it what it is: yen.

The photo channel instantly reads pictures off your digital camera's SD card (hey! I have one of those!), and it looks sort of like iPhoto without the awful load times. You can produce simple slideshows, and it displays movies as well. There is also some intriguing little fun games hidden here, which would let you doodle on your photos or play sliding puzzle games with them. I'm thinking Clark is going to dig the hell out of that. Virtual scribbling!

Another channel lets you leave messages for other Wii owners (or to a PC or cell phone!), since the Wii is "always on" once you get it on your WiFi or your ethernet. This feature is the missing link that will let friends easily set up DS online games. Although for Wii titles, I'd like something more Xbox Live-esque, where you can instantly talk to another Live friend no matter what they're doing and no matter what you're doing. No mention of that today. I also lust over the 360's strange-o-rama automatic weblogging feature, incidentally.

There will also be a web browser channel (Opera, just like the DS version), but it will be a separate purchase. Although it would be a huge feature for the Wii, it's easy to see why they avoided including it in the box. Parents would not care overmuch for their kids' new Nintendo sporting a hidden web browser.

Oh, have I been perfectly clear that all this wonky WiFi stuff won't cost users a damn thing? No monthly cost! NINTENDO'S TEH JUGGERNAUT, BITCH!

- The Mii Channel

This one is going to be completely divisive among gamers. Exactly half of us are going to gush all over it, because of the extreme cuteness and potential hilarity of it. The remaining half will instantly hate it for the same reason.

Guess where I sit.*

The deal is that you make a little avatar that (can) look like you. Or several of them. And they dap around the Mii screen like virtual pets. The Mii-creation process looks like a do-it-yourself Animal Crossing avatar. The picture to the right shows the Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction era) Mii they made at the show, which I'm sure was well-planned in advance even though the presenter tries to make it seem off the cuff. Kotaku's video here.

The Miis will be used by games that have a need for silly low-poly customizable avatars. Like Wii Sports, FTW.

Miis (is that the proper plural?) can also be contained in your remote, so you can take them to visit your pals with their own Wii. And I think you dupe them so your Mii can appear on other machines. Presumably, this means the remotes can contain other information that would tag along with the Mii... like control preferences, high scores, maybe even your Friend Codes.

*The former!

All in all, a typical Nintendo announcement: nothing like what you wanted (we all wanted Xbox Live with a less irritating design) but tons of stuff you could never have predicted. While Sony and Microsoft are beating each other senseless with horsepower arguments ironically aimed at the Hot Topic Basement Nerd crowd, Nintendo is going to sneak in the damn back door and surprise everyone with a lifestyle device that appeals to people with lives.

Surprisingly, I don't think I have ever actually played a full game of UberChrononauts before, despite being a longtime fan of the game. So we played it tonight. Here's the table just before play began, combining the timelines for Chrononauts and Early American Chrononauts:

As you can see, it's a big damn board. Tony was on the left; Josh on the right; I'm at the bottom. The end of Game 1 (a Tony win) looked like this, with the numbers indicating how close the losers got to achieving all three goals:

Game 2 (a Josh win) ended like this:

Each game took about an hour, with game 2 slightly longer.

I don't know why, but I find this sort of thing interesting to look at.

As this forum link shows, there are plenty of mistakes, mixups and outright lies inside the official Wild World Player's Guide (thanks for the link, Logan!). But the internet probably sucks harder... because of the sheer amount of misleading, confusing, manufactured information out there. At least the Player's Guide looks nice.

After hours of painstaking effort researching un-monitored garbage gaming sites like Neoseeker, Games Radar and Total Video Games, I have identified the Six Common Types of Lousy Animal Crossing Cheats.

What is it?
See, the problem with most of these sites - and why you should never bother with them - is that the "tips" all come from whatever backward pathetic kiddos happened onto Mom's Computer that day. Four times out of five, they just make stuff up and submit it... and when they lack the brain power to do that, they just type in something that actually happened to them and pretend it is somehow unique or interesting.

Identifying Characteristics
An abundance of smileys. Personal asides like "that's just my opinion."

Waste of Time Level
Minimal. You're not likely to ever care about what these tipsters are describing.

What is it?
Since everything that happens in Animal Crossing is triggered by the internal clock, you can do a lot of damage by jumping around in time. Moving forward in time will make trees grow, "fix" the Stalk Market, and allow you to claim the 10,000 bell gift every New Year's. Time travelling is by far the most prevalent AC hint... and the most dangerous.

Identifying Characteristics
The phrase "Now I'm a billionaire!" Almost every time travel-related cheat ends with you receiving tons of cash.

Waste of Time Level
Huge. Since you'll be doing a lot of resetting and clock-tinkering, expect to pay for your time trickery in RL time. Of course, the thing about most time travelling cheats is that, well, they work. Just at the cost of your game's carefully structured continuity.

What is it?
Although much of Animal Crossing is dull and straight forward (find stuff, sell stuff), there are a few oddball "quests" in the game. These range from shooting down Gulliver, to the branching Red Turnip delivery mission. So the presence of some legitmate quests has led to the creation of plenty of garbled fake fan-dream quests. These insidious anti-tips always promise incredible secrets that will rightly strike you as pure crap... but what if it's not? You want to see Mr. Resetti's secret home, don't you?

Identifying Characteristics
Lots of specific instructions. The phrase "This may not work all of the time." Usually ends with you witnessing some impossible hidden animation, like Timmy and Tommy outside climbing a tree.

Waste of Time Level
Gigantic. The instructions typically involve long, laborious procedures, full of restarts and occasionally time travelling. And since you'll probably screw something up, you'll feel like you should try it again and again to make it work. Which it won't.

What is it?
These aren't even tips. These are usually game fundamentals that Moron A has submitted just to see his or her screenname published... or for the benefit of Moron B.

Identifying Characteristics
Very short.

Waste of Time Level
Nonexistent. You don't need to be told that you need a bug net to catch bugs, do you?

What is it?
One of the oldest tricks in video games: turn it off. Restarting in Animal Crossing usually results in a slightly different randomized effect, like Wendell gives you a different pattern.

Identifying Characteristics
A faint arrogance, as if the tipster has lowered him/herself by deigning to share such an obvious cheat.

Waste of Time Level
Big. If you're missing one of Gracie's shirts, you're going to have to reset for hours to get the game to generate the specific one you need.

What is it?
The ultimate in bad hints, this rambling, incoherant mess would not make sense to Nintendo EAD themselves.

Identifying Characteristics
Gigantic paragraphs with no punctuation, with the exception of a hundred exclamation points at the end. Probably feels like a #1 until you realize that the tipster seems to be vainly communicating a series of steps.

Waste of Time Level
Massive, but not because of any time spent in-game... it's due to you trying to decode the AOL L33Tspeak.

We all know the jokes: Aquaman is a useless hero because his only power is talking to fish. Well, he wasn't always such a punchline. In the early Justice League stories, he is treated as fairly as anybody else; your average Silver Age supervillain was fielding some pretty heavy duty equipment, and it was almost always hidden somewhere in "the ocean depths." Aquaman is at least as useful as Batman, whose role in these tales is usually relegated to keeping Giant Walking Statues "busy" while somebody with powers does something real.

So when did Aquaman lose his heroic status? After months of research, I have found it: a tale of man vs. machine, "Justice League of America" #13, August 1962, "Riddle of the Robot Justice League"! And that is today's edition of Stupid Panels of the Silver Age!

The League has been kidnapped out of time and space (causing Jimmy Olsen to think he killed Superman - HILARIOUS) and taken to some far off stupid planet to fight in gladiator combat against their own robot doubles. Who even cares why; the point is that Aquaman does not receive a match...

Is it me, or does the gang seem all too eager to bench Aquaman for this one?

Aquaman then spends the bulk of the story shouting empty cheers to the rest of the team:

"Get with it!" That's his advice for Superman. "Get with it!"

Against all odds, each Leaguer mis-interprets his meaningless cries into something actually useful, like when he tells Wonder Woman to "yank harder!"

Like she's never yanked before.

GL damn near gets an inspiring haiku:

Or course, if Hal wasn't so damn preoccupied maintaining a ridiculous floating kiddie pool, maybe he could hold his own against a robot.

This one is my favorite: "Hit him at his weak point!" To which J'onn replies:

"You stupid shit. I'm the goddamn Martian Manhunter! I don't have a weak point! I'm as tough as Superman, as smart as Batman, I can shapeshift... OH RIGHT... I'm allergic to fire. Thanks, dude!"

Lucky for all concerned that the robot Martian Manhunter is also weak to fire. Just like a Bulbasaur!

After the JLA defeats their soulless mechanical dupes (even Green Arrow managed to pull it out!), they all decide to go off in search of the power doohickey that is keeping the bad guys in charge. All of them except Aquaman, that is, who is ringed up a TV and easy chair.

You see that? Even after saving their asses through non-sequiter cheerleading, GL still thinks Aquaman sucks. "If you can!" I'd be throwing Hal into the Marianas for that one.

As if turns out, Aquaman - from his comfy living room suite - figures out the problem and the team regroups to take care of business without a single Thank You. GL even puts the entire planet inside a ring-shield, so that they may never bother any other civilizations ever again. Wonder Woman remarks that, in time, this whole world will "die off - forever!" And people say today's stories are too dark!

The story that took Aquaman off the A-List is truly worthy of being called Stupid Panels of the Silver Age!

"Get with it!"

Continuing my all out 2006 internet dominance (remember my Animal Crossing interview with Clickable Culture a few months back), I was recently interviewed by a fairly new gaming site, Game Couch. This time, the topic is my very own Fatal Frame: the Card Game.

Check out the interview here. You'll dig it, because I am one hell of an interviewee. I even say a couple things that I haven't beaten to death here at fourhman.com! Here's my favorite pull quotes where I rag on stuff that isn't even related to Fatal Frame:

"And for the record, I thought Beyond Good & Evil and God of War were both vastly overrated."

"...Like the DC/Marvel Comics Vs System game... at no point do you feel like you're sending powerful teams of super-heroes and villains after each other in epic confrontations."

"Looney Labs has a storytelling card game called Nanofictionary that I did not like because it is too much like all those fiddly party games where it always devolves into an argument between one player judging another player's answer."

I'm so predictably cranky!

There's also a couple of pictures of the Game Couch staff actually playing my card game, which is uber awesome. They actually got a Kinkos to print out the cards for them, which is great because most people tell me that Kinkos will refuse to print it on the grounds of copyright infringement. Good job, Kinkos! Don't let the terrorists win!

So big thanks for Game Couch for having me as an interview subject! (Beyond the Camera's Lens also linked to the article. I swear to god I do not understand how they sniff out Fatal Frame news so fast! BCL is totally psychic, or has the best web spidering tools in the universe.)

The thing about Wind Waker is that, no matter how great the game is, it will forever be labelled as the One That Let Everybody Down. Even though by the time everyone actually played it, most people got past the kneejerk whiny ex-fanboy reaction and decided the game was a worthy addition to the series.

Maybe it's because I was pretty late to the Zelda bandwagon (I was annoyed by Link to the Past and got-bored-and-left on Ocarina of Time), but I was more or less okay with the Wind Waker look sooner than most. Yes, I had seen the Spaceworld 2000 demo. Yes, I thought that looked cool. My only reservation to the cel-shaded reveal was one of irritation-by-proxy; I (rightly) figured that this would be assessed as a graphics downgrade and be yankee doodled as an example of how the GameCube is a weaker machine than the Xbox and the PS2. So it wasn't so much that I was ticked that Link didn't look like a cosplayer, but that it would add fuel to the Nintendo Haters party.

Wind Waker polarized the Nintendo audience: you had the half that felt disappointed that "their" franchise had been denied the opportunity to graduate into a fully realistic, modern experience... and you had the other half who began chanting "GAMEPLAY NOT GRAPHICS" at every opportunity.

And it sold like crazy, but that was too little of a press release too late... the street damage had already been done. Perception is reality, and the new reality was the same as the old N64 reality: Nintendo as kiddie friendly, Nintendo as unwilling to appeal to the core demographics, Nintendo surviving on tentpole first-party releases. This was the junction box, and Nintendo stayed on the road well-travelled.

It would be another two years before a game would come along with the anticipation and hype to rival Wind Waker.

Memory Score: Wind Waker sealed the GameCube's fate as the N64-2

This game sucked.

Cleverly timed to release alongside the X2 movie but lacking anything to do with X2 (other than some stock photography of Hugh Jackman on the cover), this is a terrible game with some good ideas that fails at every turn. I'm sure you're surprised.

Bad camera, bad level design, bad enemy lock-on, bad kill combo triggers, bad save points, bad boss fights. And it borrows a bad idea from the unimpressive PS2 game The Getaway in that you have to stand still for half an hour to let Wolvie heal up. At least in the Marvel Comics world, that makes sense... but it still makes a tedious game all the more depressing.

Note to future Wolverine developers (I know you're out there): Sabretooth does not have the ability to leap into the air and create rings of fire when he lands.

The only interesting feature is the stealth mode that lets you see the world through Wolverine's enhanced senses, including the heat signatures of footprints and the lingering smell of generic enemy guards. Oh, and some of the kill animations are pretty cool.

But nothing is worth all the terrible this game puts out.

Memory Score: The cool kill moves are randomized. That's how awful this game is.

I have a huge chip on my shoulder about the Splinter Cell series.

It all goes back to when the first Splinter Cell was purposefully and maliciously marketed as an Xbox exclusive... remember all the commercials showing off the incredible lighting effects? It was the big holiday 2002 title for Microsoft - positioned against genuine console exclusives Metroid Prime and Vice City - so you can bet that the Xbox PR dicks figured that sales would cool considerably if anybody realized that the damn game was coming to Cube and PS2 in six months. So they fudged it and fooled a lot of people. You'll still find fanboys out there who consider Splinter Cell an "Xbox" kind of game, whatever that means.

And to add insult to malicious, intentional injury, the flacks then went about calling Splinter Cell the game that was like Metal Gear Solid without all the crap you hate about Metal Gear Solid (Anti-Raiden sentiment was still riding high.) Which is just plain fightin' words.

Now, they've developed the franchise since this first installment (chiefly into the realm of online play), but this one is an overly-linear, ridiculous dungeon crawl with a crappy story and lots of typically Clancy psuedo-realistic government mumbo-jumbo. I mean, come on, the dude crouches in a shadow and he turns fucking invisible? That's realism?

Memory Score: I got it for the GBA hookup, which I thought was great

Next time: an animated GTA clone, a satisfying Cube success story, and my first Player's Choice selection.

From the same minds that brought you fourhman.com VS. Juggernaut, here's another sampler of the weird visual concoctions that arise when you try to steal image bandwidth from me.

It's the rainbow toaster that makes it magic.

Holy crap, TRIPOD is still around?

Found >< Displayed.

And let's discuss website legibility.

This one almost makes sense.

Stalk you.

I just don't get how kids that are savvy enough to do a Google search on "waffles" (note image #2) somehow neglect to notice that the image they thought they ganked turned out to a lame-o ad gif. I'll give a generous pass to message board postings, since they're awfully perishable (although, come on people: preview!) but the ones that show up on fully editable weblogs and MySpace pages just confound me. I've seen some of these online for months now. I wish I knew how to embed a link into that thing.

The irony is that none of this ceases actual bandwidth theft; it just lets me control what they steal.

I picked up Killer 7 a couple of weeks ago for the low, low price of $15. (I've seen it for $10 since then.) I was suprised to learn that the game is only a year old, having been initially released in July 2005... I would have guessed it was much older, but I gather it's been in development hell for a long time.

And yeah, it's the Gamecube version, part of the once-infamous Capcom Five, five games that were initially announced as Awesome Nintendo Gamecube Exclusives in 2002 or so. Of those five, only four were actually released and three of those went to the PS2 anyway. C'est la vie.

I probably don't need to tell anybody this, but Killer 7, yes, is totally weird. I mean, it's a weird that makes its own internal sense, I think... so it's not, like, WarioWare weird. You're an assassin-for-hire who manifests seven different personalities. Each persona has his or her own special powers and abilities, so throughout the game you're regularly switching between them all to forge through certain puzzles and fight scenes. I'm not sure if there's any point to the seven characters being multiple personalities, other than just being creepy. But a lot of the game is like that.

I'm digging the game's unique visuals, which are done in a flat, monochromatic style... as if Bruce Timm - the guy responsible for the 90's Batman animated series, among others - was told to include even more angles and even less color. The sound is obnoxious, yet another game to shluff off actual audio work in favor of garbled noise. There is some interesting story at work here (lots of ghosts talking about their misbegotten lives, for example), so it seems like a missed opportunity to create drama with real voice acting.

As promised, the controls are incredibly weird. Typically, the game uses stationary cameras with fun cinematic cameras (just like Resident Evil, back in the olden tymes). But it does not use the classic RE-style "human tank" controls. Instead, your path is entirely on-rails... you hold down the A button to run and use the B button to turn around. After every other game in the world using the analog stick to control your character's movement, this is a very off-putting thing to grasp. You only use the stick for choosing a path when you come across a path junction. Very strange.

You can tell that RE producer Shinji Mikami was involved, because the on-rails setup feels like an evolution of the RE tank scheme. Instead of wandering around each room searching for crap to click on, the rails just point you towards whatever you need to see. Killer 7 is the middle ground between the fast action of Resident Evil 4 and the dramatic camera angles of every RE before that.

When you went to shoot things, holding down the shoulder button switches to a first-person POV. So you get to use the analog stick again. There is additional weirdness afoot, however, as you have to use the other shoulder button to scan the area and make the baddies (which are sort of zombie-like) visible. I could do without that; it feels like something that was tacked on to make the game more difficult. "Gee, Bob, it sure is easy killing all these zombie things that walk towards you." "Yeah, how about we make them invisible?"

I do like having to reload by flicking the C stick. There's something tangibly cool about that.

I don't know how many missions there are in the game, but I'm on the fourth one. So far, it has easily been worth the fifteen bucks.

What is this again? Katamari, you say? I thought We were over that. It all seems so 2004.

Still, We must admit this is a great deal. It is truly a gift to all PlayStations. And We're not just saying that because it features Us.

Although We were under the impression that this was a rare find, and not the sort of thing one would find at Toys R Us in the bargain racks beside some kind of "Urban Dancing" game. And We did not even know there was a "PSS". Is that like a PSP that plays games? We are confused.

1. This is me and Maya, who lives in Sweden. Like, the real Sweden, not just some ACWW town named Sweden. I'm pretty sure that's the farthest global reach I've experienced in Wild World. I gave her a Green Pipe and 1UP Mushroom for a Black Lucky Cat and a Gold Lucky Cat, so it was a fruitful trip for both.

I've also met a fellow from the UK (again, the real UK) who claims that Nintendo gave out different special Mario furniture over there, among them the Mario Mural and the Bullet Bill. Awesome!

2. Almost immediately after I complained about it last time, Nintendo has started sending out WiFi letters much more frequently. It's like somebody at Nintendo woke up and started pushing buttons again. We haven't received anything rare, but at least it is something. The letters seem typically to be attached to a holiday... like August's fireworks night, the Bug Catching Contest, or Labor Day.

3. I still have Elise (one of the rare Toys R Us chimps) in my village, so I started a campaign to snag her pic. So I was talking to her and sending her letters every day. I also have Octavian and Kid Cat in town, so I decided to go after their pics as well.

I'm really bad at getting pics. It's yet another item that the worthless Player's Guide does not discuss, so I have no idea of the best way to do it. There must be a trick to it, since I talked and sent letters for several weeks straight and never got anything from any of the three.

Then one day I saw that Whitney had moved in to town... and I think the wolf characters look cool-as-hell, so I added her into my daily chat/mail plan. And within two days she hands over her pic! The other three jerks are still stonewalling me.

4. Speaking of the rotten Player's Guide, I know there's a certain segment of you out there who, upon hearing me mention the Guide, started scoffing and loudly braying about how you never use Player's Guides because you have the internet, duh.

Well, for a future entry, I'm going to collect the best outright lies about Animal Crossing that I have found online. Yes, you can get a lot of secrets and tips online without having to pay for a Player's Guide... but you also get a lot of complete bullshit that dumbass kids submit to tip sites for the sheer thrill of screwing with people and seeing their awful online handles published.

5. Late one night, I saw this gigantic ugly moth sitting on one of my trees. It was the oak silk moth and I figured it had a good chance of being one of the biggest bugs in the game. So I caught a bunch of them and stashed them until the day of the Bug Catching Contest. Luckily, when I gave them to Tortimer, he did not catch on and say anything like "Howrf howrf, Joe, where did you catch such an obviously NOCTURNAL insect?" So my ringers worked and I won the Big Trophy. Now I need to hide a shark for the Fishing Contest...

6. You know the stupid impossible trading quest that starts with a red turnip and then branches out to include various paths of character trading? Well, I finally finished off the Pascal branch, having received both the Golden Axe and Pascal's Pic. Strangely, the massage chair that you're supposed to give to Tortimer is orderable from the catalog... so you can give the Mayor as many as you want to pay for, and receive a scallop (for Pascal) in exchange. In contrast, Saharah's turban is not orderable, so to finish off that half of the quest means that you are stuck buying red turnips in hopes of seeing Wendell. What a pain in the ass.

7. I have donated over 200,000 bells to the poor faraway town of Boondox and received the Blue Feather. The next benchmark for a new feather is 500,000 bells, and I'm assuming that's total donations, not another 500,000 on top of the 200,000 I have already donated.

It has occurred to me that it would be more efficient if I socked all of my bells in the bank... so I could build up to the rare Post Office prizes, and then dump on the money over to Boondox. But you need to hit 10 million bells to start getting cool stuff out of the bank, so Boondox's scale seems much more achievable.

8. One morning I walked out of my house and, as usual, jumped to my tools so I could switch to the watering can. While I'm dragging junk around in the inventory screen, a smegging banded dragonfly zooms right past me. So I quickly switch to the net and run off after it... and, incredibly, I catch it in one swipe while it tried to route itself around the Museum wall.

9. Using the Player's Guide as a basis (don't laugh), I finally compiled a list of every catalog item I need. It is a nicely sizable list since I pretty much played for months without buying much of anything, instead concentrating on paying off my home mortgage.

The Guide, in yet another tribute to non-usability, presents the item lists in no particular order at all. It ain't alphabetical and it ain't even in the order in which the items appear on the in-game catalog. So after typing everything up, I alphabetized the lists by category, and then sent the lists to my Sidekick. Now they all exist as editable sticky notes, so when I find a new item I can easily delete it out.

Obviously there are a ton of items that I fully expect to never see, like the Post Office Model that you receive for having saved 999 million bells. But I still like tracking the more reasonable items.

Fourhman.com was damn near asploded, due to a chain of events that began with Comcast sucking.

You see, our local hometown cable company was recently put on the auction block and Comcast was the buyer. Impersonal, monolithic Comcast. Now, aside from Comcast completely boning just about everybody's email this weekend during the transition, and apart from their "EasyChange" transfer system being Windows-only, Comcast also found the time to send threatening emails off to Dreamhost, my super-excellent domain host for almost five years.

This was either an incredible coincidence or it was triggered by me tinkering with my email settings. Because, under the previous cable company (Suscom... no, you haven't heard of it), I was simply forwarding all ___@fourhman.com email on to ___@suscom.net. It made things a little easier to manage, plus I used it to take advantage of Suscom's spam filters. Well, Comcast does not allow that. And despite Dreamhost's repeated attempts to contact them (on behalf of ALL their customers who are forwarding mail from their personal domains to their home Comcast boxes), Comcast has proven to be unreachable. And the threat further proclaimed that Comcast fully intends to block any and all email coming from domains hosted by Dreamhost, forwarded of not. Must be nice to be the monopoly.

So Dreamhost unfortunately and apologetically had to tell all their users to "turn off" any email forwarding that goes in Comcast's direction. Or risk having their entire world end up on Comcast's blacklist.

My plan was to sidestep Comcast entirely and just formally promote all of my fourhman.com email addresses into full-blown email mailboxes, rather than just holding zones for Suscom/Comcast. Using Dreamhost's slick and easy domain Control Panel, I started with joe @ fourhman.com... and then set up Apple's Mail app (jesus guys, can you give that a real name some day?) to fetch my mail from fourhman.com instead of Comcast.

But what I didn't notice was that my "joe" account - the primary account - had a default disk storage allotment of 50MB. Or more accurately, I noticed it but didn't thinkg anything of it. Yes, Dreamhost printed the number in red and asterisked a warning that the number applies to the entire website... but I still figured that was somehow separate from the 50MB email limit. Pro tip: It's not.

Later that night, I decided to throw up another weblog entry - the latest in a long and interminable series of Sam and Max screenshots - and Movable Type completely freaked out. The error said that I had surpassed my disk quota.

"Freaking hell," I probably said, and I went back into the Panel to turn off that 50MB restriction.

Then I went back into Movable Type to find the poor unloved thing tossing SCALAR errors and suggesting my entire weblog database was corrupt.

That's about when I started to cry.

Fourhman.com was still there, but it was dead. Movable Type would not let me post new entries, view/edit older ones, or even click through my main MT weblog menu. The only thing I could do was backdoor my way into the individual weblog edit menus and export a text dump backup. Which was slightly comforting, because my offline backups are a few months old.

Then I did a little research, and found out that this is exactly what happens when you have a Berkeley database that thinks it is supposed to grow beyond the set user disk limits. It corrupts your data. It's one of the reasons that everybody says that Berkeley databases are crappy and that you should use a MySQL database. I do not recall why I went with Berkeley back when I first installed MT back in '02, probably because the MySQL option was more complicated at the time.

So, given that I have all my entries exported, what I'm looking at is a full clean install of Movable Type (the MySQL version.)

The thing is, I hate installing Movable Type, because the whole thing veers just over my head. Their instructions are fine, but if anything burps at me, I have no idea what to do about it. And I just know that it's going to take me hours to muddle through.

So I start searching for alternate methods, but everything I find about resurrecting Berkeley databases is more complicated than the last. Until one webpage suggests a very simple plan: ask your webhost to restore your site from one of their timed backups.

Duh.

Therefore, I sent out a support request to Dreamhost and that's exactly what they did. They essentially rewound fourhman.com to August 20, 2006. And, being extra-awesome, the gang at Dreamhost was smart enough to just replace my MT database instead of the whole kaboodle. Now that's tech support.

Of course, I had to rebuild my weblog entries from the last two weeks, but that's a small pain compared to having to wipe the server clean, re-install Movable Type, and import all the entries, templates and crap.

And that's the confused-verb-tense version of what happened over the last few days. Instigated by Comcast, exacerbated by my naive innocense, and solved by Dreamhost. I guess I should look into upgrading Movable Type into a more modern MySQL version, but even that has my eyes spinning. For as long as I've used their free version, they probably deserve me sending them some money for the new stuff. Hell, I'll probably pay them to install it.

The funny part is, during the tense period before Dreamhost got back to me with the technological go-ahead, I was constantly coming up with great weblog entries. Now that it's back, I'm just as lazy as I've ever been.