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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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:

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...

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 Fake Animal Crossing Cheats.

I've been sitting out on the Starfox franchise for years, thanks to all the lackluster offerings during the GameCube era. It sucks, because I really liked Starfox 64 and I really want a new hip iteration in that style. For some reason, Nintendo is bound and determined to avoid that classic, blistering on-rails shooting action... giving us Starfox-as-Zelda and Starfox-as-Rogue-Leader-2 instead. Starfox Command is a return to the game's roots, but not in the way we all expected.

Most franchises are ridiculed for not offering enough change-up. Starfox is the rare bird that gets smacked around for not maintaining enough of the status quo. SFC has two gameplay modes: a 2D tactical turn-based strategy half and a 3D arena dogfight half. You plot the course of your fleet on the flat map and, when your planes encounter enemies, you switch to the full-on space combat mode.

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:

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 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

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.

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." Complete original discussion here.

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.

This intrepid blogger offers nothing more than explaining today's crappy, unfunny Marmaduke.

The latest flogging victim in game space is this Clive guy who, in his Wired online column, complained about modern, story-driven video games being too long. The current standard of length seems, anecdotally, to be a promise of "40 hours of gameplay!" Clive, unfortunately, offers up Tomb Raider: Legend as the example of the 40-hour game he could not finish...

I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours -- but still only got two-thirds through.

All of which makes me wonder: Who the heck actually finishes a story-based game in 40 hours? Who are these mythical 40-hour gamers?

Later on, he answers his own question: the 40-hour people are simply gamers younger than he, without jobs, without kids, without other interests, without books to read. Which is so incredibly obvious (and vaguely insulting) I'm surprised he managed to wring enough paragraphs to make a entire article about it. Of course, this is all weblog-based conjecture; my purely fabricated experience suggests that most "kids" with all the time in the world to play story-based games wind up preferring non-story-based games like Halo or Starcraft. How deliciously ironic!

I was pretty excited for this one, because I liked what I saw of the funky art style and what I heard about the retro 2D gameplay. And I really wanted to know what the hell "viewtiful" meant.

But it turned into a disappointment. The kinetic Power Ranger visuals were great, until I found out that, under the mask, Joe is just a hydrocephalic, media-addicted Fred Durst. Add to that the fact that the bad guys repeat like crazy (including a far-too-hard duplicate boss sequence that sent me crawling to the corner in shame) and you have a title that took the old school homage a bit too seriously.

There were some fun quirks to the combat, namely a bunch of VCR-derived super-attacks that slowed down and/or sped up time... so it was totally playable. It just tried too hard to be a "HIT FRANCHISE" right out of the gate, instead of letting itself appear naturally cool.

And I still don't know what "viewtiful" means.

Memory Score: My young Joe...

Apparently in celebration of the release of a new Pokemon movie DVD, today was the day you could receive a free Mew download into your Pokemon GBA games, EXCLUSIVELY at Toys R Us. This has to be the widest Mew distribution that Nintendo has ever attempted, since previous Mew-fests were at far more limited locales.

I was fairly convinced that my local TRU would bone this, so I called them around 10:30am to see if they had any idea what was going on.

Me: "Hi. I was wondering if you were doing a Pokemon event today, where you can download something in your game?" Note the simplified language at work here. No mention of "Mew" or anything too specific. I even began the sentence with the vague phrase "Pokemon event," so I could set up his or her little mind for the true question in the second half. I did, however, insist on pronouncing "Pokemon" correctly... although I considered the more popular long-E slang on the grounds that it might make it easier for the store to parse my request.

Them: "Yes, sir, we are." Egad! An immediate affirmation! This is unexpected!