October 2006 Archives

Let's start things off with something totally abstract. At least this is different, compared to all the variations of "anime cat" that you always get. Hal of Russell5, you're a born outsider.

It's tough to tell when a face was made by somebody who just didn't care, or by a five year old. I hate insulting five year olds, but this is crappy. DEEj of Rodill, I can't get behind this.

What was I just saying about anime cats, Kelso of Nintown? I grudgingly give this one a passing grade.

"turtle" in "hot soup"? That's a long way to go for a joke, friend. Your Blanca kinda gives off a cool Ralph Bakshi vibe though.

I've included an inset of how this Blanca approached me, so you can fully understand the horror created by katie of florida. This is like an episode of Medical Incredible. You're inspired by the struggle, but at the same time you're thinking maybe a quiet death wouldn't be so bad.

This one, meekly offered by Caitlyn of Home (with star flanks), has the eyes too far apart. Common mistake, because the little sample screen does not adequately display how your texture wraps around Blanca's polygon head. It's a skill you develop through experience, I guess.

Lazytown indeed. I hope you were rushing to catch a train or something, Robin.

Robin of Lazytown, is that you?

Nope, it's Beth from oTowne, who line-tooled this masterwork.

Just in time for Halloween, Casi of Florida sends out a pumpkin head. I'm sort of hoping that Casi is from the same Florida as Katie, and that I'm developing a hot Animal Crossing Sunshine State sorority.

This would be all the more impressive if she hadn't just copied it from Nintendo's WiFi site.

The damning evidence!

This is the absolute most over-rated game this generation.

BG&E consistently pops up on every critic's "Overlooked Gems" list. It's held up as a triumph of story in video games. Guaranteed, when the dust finally settles on this generation, you'll find it on every single Most Awesome Games list out there.

And I do not get it at all. This is a half-hearted, transparent effort at best. The vaunted storyline is obnoxiously simple, with stock characters (hey look! the guy who looks like a jingoistic dope actually is a jingoistic dope!) and a plot that could have been ripped from an episode of Captain Planet. And here's a pro tip: it's all over in six hours.

The advance hype on this thing was intense... here was a new IP with a deep-thinking title that was going to change the way you thought about interactive media. Somehow, everybody bought into it. Still. When you can find genuinely complex storylines and richly layered characters in games like MGS2, Fatal Frame 2 and Eternal Darkness (to name a few) on this generation's racks, holding up Beyond Good & Evil as some kind of artistic pinnacle is just humiliating. Any critic who does so should have his or her license revoked.

Sales for BG&E were so poor that the price was dropped from $50 to $20 after only a month on sale. $20 is about right. The actual gameplay was okay (if you dig Zelda clones, which is fine), but the whole package was hugely oversold and falsely reviewed.

Memory Score: ALPHA SECTIONS MURDERERS! ALPHA SECTIONS MURDERERS!

I know that this game's release on a Nintendo system was something of an historic moment, given the storied relationship between the Final Fantasy folks and console exclusivity. But seeing as how I've never played a Final Fantasy game, I didn't really care about such a momentous cessation of hostilities. All I was interested is was that this game required a pile of GBAs for multiplayer.

I'll bite on non-traditional control schemes every time, especially when they are born of top-tier developers. And in those pre-DS days, plugging in Game Boy Advances for additional screen space and game efficiency was just too compelling. When FF:CC came out, I had two GBAs - an original and an SP - and I bought a second SP not long afterward.

It's a strange hybrid of magic-based hack'n'slash and low-level role-playing. There's some fun multiplayer quirks... like a competitive angle to loot distribution (based on "secret goals" that are randomly chosen for each player and revealed only on the GBA screen.) And before you ask, yes, the GBA usage is worth it. Even more so today when you can get the game for $10.

The big fault is that, once you start a game, it becomes increasingly difficult for new players to jump in. Although initial reports swore it would be pick-up-and-play, the levelling-up of character skills and the scalable baddie strengths preclude this becoming the New Gen, tech-savvy Gauntlet. Once you start, you're better off to stick with your same party members if you want to see the game to conclusion. It's a big mis-step for a game that was already difficult enough to round up the proper allotment of gear and players.

Memory Score: The FF connection? There's moogles. That's enough for you, kupo.

Man, every poke-fan on the planet was beside themselves when Nintendo started dropping hints that the franchise's Huge Console Game would be a full-fledged RPG with stellar big-time visuals and gameplay straight out of the unbelievable depth of the Game Boy Pokemon games.

They got it about half right.

A physically draining, franchise-whoring, unappealing disappointment, Colosseum evoked bad memories of the N64 Stadium games at their very worst. You walk into a town and you battle. Then you battle. And again, more battling. That's it. No breeding, no berry-planting, no contests, no fishing, no catching, not even bike riding. It is painful... and that's coming from a self-proclaimed Pokemon fan.

Nintendo is dead-set against letting the franchise expand onto their home consoles; I assume because they don't want to threaten the marketplace power of the ten-year Pokemon handheld juggernaut. As long as they keep pumping out half-assed tedium like this, they'll have nothing to worry about.

Memory Score: I actually fell asleep playing this game. Several times.

Next time: The GameCube pretends it's both a PlayStation and a GBA! Plus, the Zelda multiplayer mashup nobody wanted!

See above.

This was extremely sucky. I had pre-orders with Toys R Us on both the PS2 and the GameCube, with almost no effort. I made no special trips. I just grabbed a pre-sell ticket during any old random visit and, on launch day, I got there as the store opened.

Obviously something awful has happened over the last five to six years. And it's either that the console manufacturers just stopped making enough to go around, or, launch day hype has finally come to sleepy, racist, pro-creation south central Pennsylvania. Because this is what I saw when I arrived at Toys R Us around 8am, two hours before opening:

The guys in the front, apart from most likely being complete eBay bastards, had been there all night. They had dismantled their tents just before I arrived. They were also unhelpfully blocking the signs that offered some explanation of what was going on: 15 Wii pre-orders, 5 PS3 pre-orders, and 150 TMX Elmos.

Yeah, a new shipment of Elmo dolls. Most of the people directly around me in line had no idea that PlayStations and Nintendos were even there; they assumed everyone was queueing up for a TMX Elmo. I did a fair amount of explaining what a "Wii" is, which only underscores the idiocy of abandoning your brand name in favor of something new.

But look at those numbers: only 15 Wiis! That is tripe. And 5 PS3s is embarrassing. I stuck it out, just in case. But all the Wii tickets were snapped up by the choads who had, admittedly, slept on concrete all night.

I cornered the manager later and he said that he did not anticipate any more PS3s arriving on launch day, and that additional Wiis were a big "maybe." Nintendo has made a lot of talk about how many Wiis they intend to ship before the end of the year, so they better deliver on that. I'm still debating the odds on a launch day stakeout to get a non-pre-ordered Wii. And there's always Target and Wal-Mart. Or I just don't get a Day One model and steer clear of the tidal wave until they start getting on shelves without all the forced-scarcity panic.

Sucks. It was so easy last time.

Here's the line behind me. It's almost entirely Elmos at this point.

The good news is that Toys R Us had the last two Spider-Man and Friends toys that we needed, Super Strength Colossus and Flipping Action Beast. This is the final wave of the line; it's officially dead. What a shame. They clearly did artwork for a Friends-ified Storm and Thor, but they never made figures of them. Although, looking back, I've been collecting these for five years now, so maybe that's a good healthy timeframe for a kids toy line.

Clark finds the flipping Beast figure unexplainably hilarious:

On the whole, we're not big fans of Halloween around here, but we do enjoy the happy dress-up for the under-10 set. Clark's daycare held a costume parade Friday morning, plus we went to a kids party this weekend and we have the neighborhood beg-fest coming up on Tuesday. So here's Clark in his waning-fad-good-price Pikachu costume.

When we first tried on the outfit earlier in the week, he looked at himself in the mirror and just laughed and laughed. Of course, that did not translate into any good photos later.

Also, an unexpected great deal at Toys R Us: Taiko Drum Master for PS2 for $14.00. Came out two years ago for $60, just after the GameCube's Donkey Konga, I believe. And they are exactly the same games, just one has bongos and one has a plastic taiko drum. But, they're allowed to be because they were both made by Namco.

There are, thankfully, different songs in Taiko Drum Master, including the bizarre inclusion of the Dragon Ball Z theme (which rocks awesome to the max.) The real reason I wanted the set - aside from the astonishingly cool price - is that it includes Katamari On The Rock, which is as much fun to drum as you would surmise. The game also begins with a wonderful only-from-Japan animation and song, which includes the subtitled lyrics...

I'm so glad to hear you say that
I look cool in my festival clothes.
Even though I was scolded for not washing my hands,
I still feel happy.

Taiko Drum Master is quite a bit harder than Donkey Konga. I think it's the big unwieldly drumsticks that get in the way, which is a subtle layer of interference between you and the drum. You have to really whack the thing to get it to register a hit sometimes. But it is hard to argue with this kind of silly simple fun. Clark digs it, in concept.

It did not take long for the Sidekick to move from cutting edge gadget phone for tech geeks to the rhinestone-studded status symbol of rappers and Paris Hilton. I'm still not sure how that happened. And these days, you can't watch prime time without seeing one of them whenever the script calls for a pampered teen to have an impossibly hip and distinctive cell phone.

But, as cool as all of that is, you know you've made it when they start producing kids' toy knockoffs:

We found these in the Lillian Vernon catalog. I love the inset of the girl receiving her very first a/s/l message.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance drops this week, so they released a new trailer for it. Admittedly, as a DC guy, I'm far less into this than Justice League Heroes, but I'd consider it. Of course, the big problem is that I don't want this on my PS2 unless I see cold proof that they scrubbed all the ugly off the X-Men Legends engine. And I'm not holding out for the Wii version because I just don't trust the remote for something like this. So this looks like a PS3 bargain-bin get, in about two years.

The screens are from the flash version I found on CBR.

Gah. Man-on-robot violence already. Not to get ahead of myself, but the trailer shows off a nice assortment of bad guy types... from Doombots to Atlanteans to what I presume are Evil Vikings. Of course, they will all fight identically and be effing robots, but they'll look different.

It's not that I hunger for blood, or that I feel the need to assert my maturity by having my comic book characters realistically turn people into red paste, just that I'm tired of the cliche of the duplicate robotic henchman.

There seems to be some debate over whether this takes place in the Ultimate Universe or not. I don't know why you would name your game "Marvel Utimate Alliance" - which is a dopey title anyway - and use some recognizably Ultimate character designs (like capeless, helmetless Thor here) and then set it in the regular Marvel U.

I like this a lot.

I like this more.

Having Galactus in the game is a major pull for me. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that he will just be one of those giant-guy-encased-in-cement-from-chest-down type of bosses. If they really want the fanboy vote, they'll have you send Human Torch on a twisty flying mission through Galactus's ship in search of the Ultimate Nullifier.

Man, great job on that render. That is the least fruity yet most canon version of the planet-devourer I think I've ever seen.

Yeah, yeah, we've all seen Tombstone.

Does having Wolverine avoid his costume in favor of a tough-guy t-shirt make it less gay... or more gay?

I don't see any female characters? (Excluding Daredevil, of course.)

Finally, gameplay footage. Here, Luke Cage swings one enemy through a convenient semicircle of other enemies. And I think he's playing World of Warcraft here, actually.

One of the other (few) gameplay shots proves that, in the Marvel Universe, robots can get punched dizzy just as in the DC Universe.

Doc Strange! Playable! Awesome.

And because I'm a fan, I can tell you that he's standing in his Sanctum Sanctorum.

Silver Surfer! Playable! Awesome.

And because I'm a fan, I can tell you that he's standing in his Cosmic Skee-Ball Tent.

When you're done watching Spidey footbag Mysterio (want to bet you'll have to fight a roomful of Mysterio illusion-clones? yawn), the trailer also shows off Scorpion and that stupid team of evil construction workers. The difference between Marvel's great villains and Marvel's average villains is a gigantic gulf of embarrassment. For every Dr. Doom, there's a hundred Rhinos, Toads and Grey Gargoyles. They don't have anybody in the middle ground... as in, not world-conquering, but not crap useless either. (Like DC's Penguin or Deadshot.)

Why downplay "Marvel"? "Ultimate Alliance" is a really weak name. I would have gone with "Marvel Legends," because, despite being terrible to look at, the X-Men Legends games did well enough. Not to mention the respected toy line of that name. "Alliance" just wrecks it.

The three cubic acres of characters is great. It looks like they're doing a lot more fan-service that Justice League Heroes. Although they keep confusing the issue by claiming "over 140" Marvelites are in the game, when only 35 or so are actually playable. And a bunch of those are just costume-swaps, like War Machine for Iron Man (STOP DOING THAT.) Kinda takes the wind out of the "CREATE YOUR OWN ULTIMATE TEAM" bit, doesn't it. As long as your ULTIMATE TEAM is some combination of the Fantastic Four and the New Avengers, you're set. Being able to see Lockjaw in a cutscene just doesn't suffice. I want to be Lockjaw.

One of the great cyclical debates in video gaming is Old Franchise vs. New Franchise. Everybody complains there is too much Mario, too many Final Fantasies, a crutch-like reliance on movie/TV cash-ins, and just nowhere near the number of wholly original intellectual properties appearing on the racks. Like in the 16-bit glory days of Aero the Acrobat, Bonk's Adventure and Bubsy, I suppose.

So Namco - no doubt still fighting against the urge to release a next-gen Mappy 3D mascot platformer - steps up with I-Ninja, a pure-fun 3D action title with combined elements of Mario64, Monkey Ball, Sonic and Legend of Zelda. And no one buys it.

I honestly don't remember how I heard of this one. I think there may have been a demo on one of the OPM PS2 discs. But however I found it, I was glad I did. It's good like first-Sly-Cooper good.

Yeah, baddie variety was nil and it's really only a thin veneer on lots of established gameplay types, but the departure mini-games, the fast/smooth action, and the convincingly cartoony art direction more than made up for it.

Memory Score: Somehow, classic gameplay plus unfamiliar characters equals refreshing. This time.

This was intended to be given out as a free bonus to people who bonus various Namco games during the Holiday '03 shopping season, such as I-Ninja.

Funny story: I was at one of the area gaming stores that I dislike, hunting up a second WaveBird controller. There was a stack of Pac-Man Vs. discs by the register and the amiable clerk gave me one for nothin'. I just asked.

Sad story: Toys R Us had no idea that I was supposed to get a free Pac-Man Vs. with my I-Ninja purchase. So either their shipment was sent to GameStop and no one cared, or else they still have a box of Pac-Man Vs. giveaways sitting in the back, Lost Ark-style.

Either way, I ended up karmically balanced: one copy of I-Ninja, one copy of Pac-Man Vs.

The long, boring saga behind Pac-Man Vs. is that it was dreamed up by Miyamoto himself one crazy day (probably at a How The Hell Are We Going To Push The Cube/GBA Connection meeting) and he called Namco to see if they were interested. So the end result is a cool-ass one-in-a-million mashup where up to four players play Pac-Man while Mario does color commentary.

Memory Score: I love trotting this out for multiplayer, because it shows off an impressive amount of gear

Whenever people start to get squirrelly about all the Mario games that hit every year, the educated gamer's response is "As long as they keep making good games, they can make as many Mario games as they want."

Sonic is what happens when you stop making good games.

Yes, in the great cosmic rivalry between Sega and Nintendo, Mario has not only won, he has lapped the blue blur. And not just because Sega's hardware went belly-up, but because somebody at Sonic decided to start making crap.

I think people were generally okay with the Sonic Adventure series, born to the Dreamcast and ported to whatever john would have them. Heroes, however, was an unlikable dud. The concept seemed sound: create various three-person dream teams, culled from the entirety of the Sonic Universe. Each team gets a runner, a fighter, and a flyer. During the typically Sonician levels, you have to switch between the three to clear various obstacles.

Only when playing it did you realize that this meant lots of stopping.

Yes, a Sonic game based on stopping.

That sound you hear is your innocence dying.

Memory Score: Thanks to years of mediocre efforts, Sonic the Hedgehog has become no more meaningful than latter day flash-in-the-pans like Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot.

Next time: a major franchise returns to Nintendo after years of staying Sony... but not in the way you expected; a major franchise appears on the Cube in exactly the way you expected... but not in the way you wanted; and a brand new title loses all hope of becoming a franchise thanks to awful sales and a transparent story... but not according to every reviewer I've ever read.

We went to some kind of "fall festival" thing today. I don't know what it was actually called, but it was held at one of those huge nursery / country craft / baked goods joints. We have a zillion of them out here. You got your greenhouse section, your overpriced bulk candy, your homemade bakery, and lots of pre-fab wooden collectible junk painted to already look old.

This particular store conglomerate sits on a farm, which was then decked out with play areas and food vendors.

Here's Clark in the choose-your-pumpkin zone, which led right into a tiny corn maze that we didn't do because it cost $3. What kind of man charges people to run through a corn field?

This is the kind of man who doesn't pay for it. Two of them.

These places always have a fleet of nasty, rusty wagons. They're easier (and "homier" (and "penicillinier")) than shopping carts for dragging your boxed perennials up to the outdoor counter. This was Clark's first ride in such a thing.

There was also a kids' play area painted to a Wizard of Oz theme. Here Clark monopolizes the "beat on old broken flower pots" section. You remember that from the movie.

I'm sure there's a photography term for this, but I'll just go with "unfortunate weed placement."

On a hayride. Rhonda called this the "good view" of the horses.

And, as if their liability wasn't heavy enough, here is a slide that ends in a massive hay pile.

As predicted, Bully is great.

I'm putting in two to three hours a night on this one, which explains why I haven't done much weblogging this week. This is precisely the kind of game I like: big open world, lots of little things to do, no forced linear timetable. I think it took me eight hours to open up Chapter Two (which begins with a portentous school-gates-opening-to-the-town scene), and most reviews seem to suggest it takes about three. What can I say; I like screwing around in these games.

It's GTA. But that's nothing to be ashamed of. You'll probably recognize some of the motion-capture. This is a clone, dressed to a theme, done by the guys who made the original. I would like one of these, oh, every other year. With the pattern of incremental tweaks and change-ups from GTA3 to Vice City to San Andreas to Bully, I just can't see tiring of it. I am the demo.

So far - and like I said, I just opened up the gates to the outside world - Bully is smaller in scale than GTA, but looks a lot nicer. Most characters actually have separate fingers, as compared to GTA's oven mitt standard. More importantly, every single doofus you'll see walking around the hallowed grounds of Bullworth Academy is a unique individual. The game isn't just randomly generating STUDENT MODEL #053 and TEACHER MODEL #006... these are named, differentiated people. Take that leggy redhead there; I chose her as my main squeeze. Whenever I see her, we totally make out, and my health bar goes up. And I never even learned her name until she popped up in one of the game's regular missions. (Christy.)

And then there's Trent, this blonde thug who comes after me whenever he sees me walk by. He looks like the older, untalented brother on Home Improvement. I have beaten the crap out of that kid more times than I can count, but he still seeks me out. I suppose we're archenemies or something.

What makes it intriguing is that, if I spot that jerk hanging out by one of the school buildings with his sycophantic pals, I can decide whether I want to risk his attention or not. If my health is low, maybe I go the long way to classes. If I feel like throwing some heat, maybe I charge into the lug. What I usually like to do is bait him into tossing a punch just as a prefect walks into view. Those officious bastards will take down any bully, male or female.

Tonight I broke into some kid's locker and found a Kick Me sign... so I tiptoed up behind Trent and slapped it onto his back. Almost immediately, some of his clod friends walked over and kicked him. Hilarious.

The whole going to classes thing seems to be relegated to Chapter One. As in GTA, the game runs day/night cycles, and you're expected to attend two classes a day at specific times. You have half an hour to get there, or you're declared truant and the prefects start scouting for you. The four starter classes are Chemistry (button pressing mini-game), Gym (alternates between wrestling lessons and dodgeball competitions), English (a word-making game that would likely be less difficult for me if I enjoyed Scrabble), and Art (which, astonishingly, is a ripoff of the classic arcade game Qix. Doesn't anybody own that?) You can skip classes - by simply not bothering to walk into the room - but you just rile up the prefects and it's probably better to get them out of the way, since you're rewarded with skill upgrades. I still have to do English 5, because that scrambled word thing is rough. How many words can you make out of the letters in "crayon"?

The only thing that bothers me is that you have to get back to your dorm room by 2am or so, or you pass out and wake up in bed anyway.

That, and the main character is horribly ugly. He's like a malformed monkey, short and brutish. I can see why, when I first walked through the school gates as the "new kid," the first NPC sound sample I heard was "I hate you!"

The "collector's edition" was highlighted by the dodgeball, which is actually a real dodgeball. It comes deflated, because everyone in America has ball-inflation apparatus readily available. F. Looks like it will be nine to ten inches when I finally do find an air compressor somewhere. The comic inside the package is an embarrassment to the word. You can't call an accordian-folded single sheet of long paper a comic, I'm sorry. Also, it makes no sense, and makes heavy use of repeated drawings... which, as we know, really grinds me. The special locker-shaped packaging, while admittedly nice, is still just packaging. And you get a Rockstar sticker, just like the Hot Topic staff already enjoys.

We had Mike and Noelle in town this past weekend for a visit. So that the future may know what games we played, I present it here.

Since Clark was acting shy when they first arrived, it was a good time to pull out Guitar Hero and not spend the whole evening trying to wrestle the SG away from him.

Clark digs on some Guitar Hero.

I also suddenly recalled that I had the Guitar Hero 2 demo, and it pained me to have to play a KISS song.

We did lots of LEGO Star Wars II, which is just about the most fun I've ever had not having fun. This game is broken all sorts of places, so it's kind of this monstrous bipolar train wreck where you're giggling one minute and cursing the next. Twice now, I've gotten into situations where the game just bones you out of being able to complete the level. In the Endor speeder bike level, Rhon and I accidentally got the AT-ST stuck between two bridges over a bottomless pit... and the damn thing wouldn't drop down the pit and respawn. Eventually we got lucky and inched it back onto land by whacking it with the bike. And in one of the Bespin levels, Mike and I tracked down every last unlockable, only to get to the end and have the game refuse to open the Falcon's hatch. We had to quit out of it. And when we angrily attempted the level again, we ended up with eleven out of ten minikits. WTF.

LEGO Star Wars 2 is a great, fun game. But it also sucks ass and was not playtested in any way.

Speaking of games that screw you over, we played Odama, which I have not touched for months since my save file was forcibly kicked down a bunch of levels just because I wanted to have fun and re-play an earlier land. Anyway, Mike had never seen the game, and this is probably one of the few sold copies on the eastern seaboard, so we enjoyed some crazy pinball-strategy action.

See? I own Odama.

Bizarre game. Shame it's so damn hard.

Also on the GameCube front: WarioWare MegaGames, which is actually more fun than when I first picked it up, because I'm no longer jaded from having recently played the GBA original. Did some Smash Bros where Mike was uber-cheap with Pikachu (he admitted it.) Surprisingly, the big Cube hit was Mario Power Tennis; we did a bunch of couples doubles.

Late night is when the card games come out and the Venture Brothers DVD goes in. I hogtied Mike into beta-testing some new homegrown card games.

The Katamari card game (alpha version).

I've been sitting on this for a while now, my Katamari Damacy card game. It's workable, but there's something missing. There's some rough edges on it, not the least of which is the awful screenshots on the card artwork. This weekend, we tried out a rules revamp, but found it even worse than the old way. So I don't know what's happening with this one yet.

The other test session involved an expansion set for Fatal Frame: the Card Game. This was also a bust. I came up with a new ghost-attack mechanic that sounded good on paper but proved to be obtrusive and complicated in practice. Also, it may have rendered the game impossible to finish. That aside, several of the new cards were perfectly fine... plus, I had a probably cool idea on the way home from work today that may salvage some of it.

BONUS PICTURE: father and son and guitar.

ATTENTION ALL PLAYERS WHO HAVE GIVEN UP: Assuming you didn't just time travel to this week already, we're in the middle of the Acorn Festival.

This week is Wild World's only attempt to mimic the fun and timely "mini-games" that graced the major holidays back on the GameCube version. Every day, you can find acorns littering the ground around a randomized selection of your non-fruit trees (hope you still have some!) Scoop them all up - dump the rotten ones - and give them to Cornimer, who is hanging out by the Town Hall where you usually find Tortimer. SUSPICIOUS?

As you give him more and more acorns, Cornimer will yield items from the Mush furniture series, which is cooler than it sounds. In an unlikely break from Animal Crossing tradition, the Mush items are given out in a specific, non-random order. It's as if somebody on the AC:WW development team suddenly grew a pair and decided to sneak in something accessibly fun. I bet Iwata was pissed when he found out.

So all you have to do is hand over enough acorns and you'll score the entire series. Fantastic. I've collected around 100 acorns and I have about half of the set already. Wonderful.

Why oh why couldn't they have given us more of these? This is genuinely something to anticipate, unlike the monthly parade of useless Yay Days and La-Di-Days that stink up the calendar. It's something different. The acorns only appear during this week, the rewards are rare and cool, the scavenger hunt game part is fun, flippin' Tortimer shows up wearing an acorn mask. There should be events like this every season.

Of course, this being Wild World, Tortimer's exterior presence blocks out all the other travellers... so you won't be seeing Dr. Shrunk or Saharah or Gracie this week. And this probably includes Joan on Sunday morning as well, so don't count on buying turnips for next week. Craphats.

Speaking of that, take a look at this from the latest Nintendo Power:

Since when, Nintendo? When did you start this generous policy? Because I seem to recall slogging through months with only a bare two WiFi letters, plus one that everybody said was a hacker attack. Sure, they've stepped up the delivery since the summer - including some hilarious in-game advertising for Starfox Command - but every Friday?

And does that mean I have to hit the WiFi anytime on Friday to get the letter? Pacific time or Eastern time? What if I start late on Thursday and stay connected through early Friday?

Would it kill Nintendo to get specific about anything in Wild World?

They hate us.

I stopped by my favorite local EB over lunch today.

And not to pre-order a PS3.

I went in to pre-order the collectors' edition of Bully, which drops next week. This EB exclusive comes with a limited edition comic book (who cares) and a Bulworth Academy dodge ball (awesome). I haven't actually seen the dodge ball, but I hope it is an actual playground-legal dodge ball, at least a 9-incher. Rhon suspects it will be an inflatable bait-and-switch, on the grounds that something flat would be easier to ship.

That's the kind of stuff you need to do to get me to pre-order something. Throw in something crazy like a dodge ball.

Coming from the GTA guys, Bully has been a beleaguered title right from jump street. It's been villified and broadly attacked by the usual groups of thought-free morons who apparently found themselves with empty time since we're between Harry Potter releases. The general assumption is that, in Bully, you get to play as a bully and beat up (and possibly kill) little kids. And while I would not wholesale abandon such a concept as a potential video game, it turns out that Bully is emphatically not that game. Bully will have its sordid spots (like the already verified Panty Raid level) but the game actually revolves around you smacking down bullies and their cliques in the name of schoolyard justice. And all with a T rating... although the Concerned Mothers As Represented By Career Politicians of the world will quickly point out that the ESRB rating doesn't mean much.

The smartest thing I've yet read about the game comes from Kotaku:

So what does this say about Rockstar? I posit that this was some serious ninja shit by the R* boys, and that they knew exactly what they were doing with this title, and the near complete dearth of actual marketing. I think they knew that all they had to do was whisper the sweet B word into the ether, and it would eventually reach the right ears: ears attached to empty heads and load mouths. And I'm not talking about bloggers, shockingly.

Rockstar has struck a huge blow for the cause. They gave the enemy a shovel and just watched them dig. When the game comes out it will be important to keep covering it, rubbing it in that the Jackasses were wrong.

This will be the best post-mortem interview ever, and I hope OPM is ready to go to press on it. Can't you just see one of the Rockstar guys begin his paragraph with something like "So we wanted to make a game that we knew would piss everybody off, something where they could jump to a very logical and insidious conclusion, and then have them turn out to be totally wrong. And that's how the Bully project started."

I'll let you know how it goes next week, but I'm expecting big things. Big GTA things.

Also: it occurred to me that a sizable portion of the goons slurping up the PS3 pre-orders could be bleeding edge cinemaphiles who are convinced they're getting a dirt cheap blu-ray player. These are the same asses who still have stacks of laser discs, and they're taking PS3s out of the mouths of hungry gamers.

Who probably just intend to turn them around on eBay, come to think of it.

I finally got around to playing with that crazy unofficial Roll Your Own Mii flash game that showed up a couple weeks ago. The guy who made it painstakingly recreated every known Mii Channel menu option, as thus far revealed by Nintendo. Nintendo is probably wishing they had thought to do this, because this thing has been getting some great internet play.

So something like that will be gracing my Wii in but a few short weeks.

And just to give you an idea of the possibilities, meet the Wiiggles:

And their close pals, the Biitles:

Not to mention the Biitles in their Sgt . Pepper era:

After the slapdash efforts of #4, the screenshots for #5 gave me some hope for this Party. Although, by this time, everyone I know is pretty much burned out on the whole concept... and I'm weary of picking up a new one every Thanksgiving. But I just had to see some real, next-gen board game renders. Whee.

Mario Party 5 introduced the capsule system for using and planting items... which, although it's easier to explain than #4's mini-mega system, it's still clunky and slow.

There are some absolutely crazy extras on this one, the too-cute action games of Beach Volleyball and Ice Hockey, and the strangely detailed Super Duel Mode, where you build custom go-karts for arena-style car-based deathmatches. Really? I'm serious.

Nintendo should combine all of the Mario Parties into one big massive uber-game for the Wii, complete with every single extra mode and bonus feature. With so many boards and mini-games available, you could play for weeks without a repeat, and you'd definitely feel like you got your $50 worth.

Memory Score: I'm a big fan, but at this point I'm, like, $300 in just on Mario Party games. Ugh.

The greatest thing about this disc is that you got it sent to you, free of charge, just for registering X GameCube purchases on Nintendo.com. In a world with Nintendo receding in the face of the other console's exclusive features, you'd think Nintendo would be doing this more often. This is one realm where no one can touch them: otaku nostalgia. They should have given away a different compilation set every holiday.

Wishes aside, this one features almost every pre-Cube console Zelda game, with the notable exception of Link to the Past, which was available on store shelves as a GBA release. So you can guess why they decided not to include it.

I vaguely recall booting up the NES originals, but only out of curiousity. After giving my all to NES Metroid (unlocked back in Metroid Prime), I've all but given up on the old school stuff. I'm not into drawing my own maps anymore.

Memory Score: I should probably check out Majora's Mask, an N64 game I somehow managed to skip

G4's weekly testosterone-fest rated this as one of the worst GameCube games ever, which is totally unfair, because this is, unashamedly and obviously, an actual kids game. I know G4 regularly has difficulty identifying a Nintendo kids games from a Nintendo all-ages game (hint: stop reviewing games just to appease pre-teen PS2 forum junkies), but this one is a solid little kiddie exploration title with hints of Animal Crossing-esque content.

What are all those PC edutainment games? Putt-putt? Reader Rabbit? This is like that, except that it's about Pokemon and hinges around watching television... so there's no way you'll get the edu-crowd to back it.

The deal is that you live with Pikachu - who is wonderfully animated - and you have to travel around a very limited world clicking on other pokemon. Your room holds all of the items you collect, including the centerpiece television set that lets you watch various Pokemon Universe channels. Like Slowpoke's Weather Channel, or Shop'n'Squirtle, or the Pokemon News Network, with Psyduck as the anchor and Meowth as the investigative reporter.

Order something from the shopping channel (using money that you win for answering trivia questions) and the item is delivered tomorrow. Real-world tomorrow. If you collect all of the "missing show disks" (which takes about a week for the diligent player), and you get an exclusive half-hour animated movie. There's even some bare eReader interaction.

It's meant for three-year-olds. And as a diehard, I was happy to check it out.

Memory Score: Finally, the GameCube tech demo "Meowth's Party" comes home!

Next time: A great overlooked new-IP title, a multiplayer giveaway that never fails to impress, and the game that killed Sonic dead.

This is supposedly a new trailer for the upcoming Justice League Heroes game (coming for all systems EXCEPT GameCube), but it looks like every other JLH trailer I've seen. Sorry for the crappy screens; I boosted them from the flash version I found on CBR.

Do you think WB has tallied just how much damage they did to their brand by dumping the WB tv network? I mean, they traded on their prior "Warner Bros" brand and logo back when The WB launched, made damn sure that we all associated that classic, ancient shield with the new, hip television network... and now it's gone. When I see that logo now, I've forgotten all about Bugs Bunny and old Bogart movies... I just see a big blinking FAILURE.

Uh oh. Superman just busted through a brick wall and he is way pissed. That is your first sign of trouble, folks. By and large, Supes is a happy guy. When you present him angry and pinched, you're doing something wrong. In this case, that "something wrong" is appealing to X-Men Legends fans.

How much more interesting would it have been to dress him in a confident smirky grin. The kind that says "I just broke through a damn brick wall to find you, purse-snatcher, and you don't have a chance in heck to stand against me."

Bryan Singer, is that you?

Lots of brawler games promise the ability to pick up cars and smash them into baddies, but few deliver. Thanks to the lack of damage on that taxi cab, I'm unfortunately thinking that, once again, you simply won't be able to chuck vehicles at armored super-goons the way you've always dreamt of.

Ice vision? Ice breath? Ice teeth? I'm not sure what's going on here, but it seems to revolve around the most idiotic of all of Superman's powers.

I don't get why people feel the need to trot out the ol' "freezing breath" all the time. Even in the fantastical world of comics, it doesn't make any sense. You can make a case for heat vision - based on his body being a living solar battery - but the ice thing is just silly. This power should have been sent off for good post-Crisis.

In the never-ending quest to give Batman fancy powers that keep him from paling in comparison to the Olympian Gods he holds truck with, here he is summoning a cloud of bats to flap some mook to death.

That room looks awfully bright to have Batman in it, you know?

I like John. But I love Hal. Hal (heck, GUY) should be the easiest unlockable character model swap in video game history.

Judging from the action clips in this sequence, the game is sticking to the animated Justice League version of the Power Ring: it can make shields and shoot blasts and that's it. Bummer. It's the least creative handling of the Ring possible. I want to be slinging up giant boxing gloves and bulldozer scoops.

And what's with all the scowling?!

She kicks high.

The Flash moves so fast, I couldn't even get a proper screenshot of his multiple-enemy-punch trick. I love the skid marks! Here's hoping I can play Flash for the 90% of the game that doesn't take place on Paradise Island.

Hey, somebody who might actually be having fun being a hero! Of course, most of the gaming audience has no idea who you are, Zatanna honey, but I appreciate ya. Now let's go do the Lobotomize Dr. Light mini-game.

Should anybody really have the power to make robots dizzy?

Seriously? No GameCube version?

Nothing here makes me think that the game is raising the bar for super-hero-based-multiplayer-brawler games, but nothing looks so horrendously obnoxious that I instantly hate the whole meal either. I did X-Men Legends and thought it was pretty lousy, but the multiplayer was a rare find. Justice League Heroes at least looks better than that.

Just get Superman to smile and we'll be fine.

After months of Marvel fans dumping on DC for some of the, er, outlandish aspects of Infinite Crisis, now Marvel has its very own Giant Mega Event That Goes Off The Rails And Sucks.

Civil War #4.

This was far worse than anything that happened in Infinite Crisis. Worse than Max Lord suddenly revealed as a sinister shadow puppetmaster. Worse than Superboy-Prime's bloody swathe through the C-leaguers. Even worse than Identity Crisis' no-balls finale. It's so bad, that I want to think that it's a fastball set-up for an eleventh-hour switcheroo. You know, bad on purpose.

Part of the problem with Civil War - aside from Marvel delaying the series just so they can squeeze in more crossovers for you to buy - is that it has proven that Marvel can't do big events in this DC style. DC knows how to tell a core story but leave "danglers" that draw you into other books, if you choose. If you don't, you still get the core story. You just miss out on sidebar stuff. Marvel turns the danglers into absolute necessities. There is nothing in issues 2 through 4 that explains why Wasp joins with Iron Man, after her voice being one of dissent in issue 1. And the only hint as to why Spider-Man changes sides - in the series biggest surprise ending so far - is a single panel where he refers to "having a long talk" with MJ and Aunt May. Huh? In #1, he's right there talking about how he doesn't want to see his wife impaled on a metal octopus arm. Had I read three months worth of Spider-Man titles recently, maybe I would have some idea as to why he changed his view. Civil War itself makes no effort to reconcile this.

For all its bluster, Civil War is, fundamentally, a far less complicated story than Infinite Crisis. Where IC was jumping between multiple POVs all over the DCU, Civil War is pretty much just an Avengers story. Iron Man vs. Captain America. Even the usual darlings of Marvel's sales team - the X-Men - have had just about nothing to do in these first four issues. You won't hear any complaints about Civil War being inaccessible to new readers, like we had to hear over and over and over again about Infinite Crisis.

And I like complicated, so Civil War has barely registered as a true mega-event in my eyes. Most of the storyline's true depth has been found in the companion series, Civil War: Front Line, which has been the major force holding the ship upright at this point. Although Front Line has developed an irritatingly sophomoric habit of ending each issue with a pretentious adaptation of real-world wartime poetry and prose, juxtaposing scenes from WWII or Vietnam or wherever alongside shots of the two Avengers teams fighting. Please.

Civil War has exactly five different voices (again, thus far): Captain America's injured patriotism, Spider-Man's usual wise-cracking, Mr. Fantastic's super-genius drone, Iron Man's careworn stubbornness... and the fifth voice is everyone else. Entirely interchangeable except for half like Cap and half like Iron Man. There is no one else in this series, linguistically speaking.

So, about issue 4.

The Thor appearance from issue 3 was a great reveal. Thor has been "dead" for a while, so this was a perfect time to spring him on us. He's usually depicted as a major power player, so his choreographed return on Iron Man's side just as the two teams square off (again! Isn't this way too soon for the storyline? Oh, right, Civil War seems to take place over the course of about four days) was really cool.

A few pages in to #3, you have Thor acting without mercy and talking like a bad action movie star. So, something's up. Then he kills Goliath... and if you're crying about that, I have a Baxter Building to sell you. And that's only if you've actually heard of him. The only question with Goliath's appearance in Civil War from the beginning was "When is this guy going to get cacked?" Because, you know, you can't actually kill anybody important in stories like this.

But Thor was a total macguffin. Because Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man somehow cloned Thor, but found the clone uncontrollable in battle. Let's lay out what happened in the lab, one crazy weekend.

- Iron Man presents Mr. Fantastic with a strand of Thor's hair.
- Mr. Fantastic uses the DNA to create a clone, and ages that clone to maturity and physical perfection. (Oh, Rocky.)
- The clone retains Thor's abilities, which implies that the vaunted powers of the Asgardians actually comes down to genetics, not the supernatural.
- Mr. Fantastic creates a not-unreasonable facsimile of Mjolnir. This replica is powered by science, however, not magic. (Or does Thor's DNA grant power to his ancient weapon, as well?)
- Mr. Fantastic, presumably, sews up a duplicate of Thor's costume, then orders the clone to dress himself.

What a nasty, misleading bait-and-switch. At this point, as a reader, I just feel ripped off. That's how we sidestep a true return of Thor? With a barely-thought-out cloning plan? Resurrecting the body of an old friend (never mind that he's a freaking god) is just plain creepy, and does not fit with the characters of Iron Man or Mr. Fantastic. Yes, I can see Tony becoming consumed with the idea of legitimacy and public support. Yes, I can see Reed lost in the theory and science and missing the human factor. But I don't see either of them manipulating the petrie-dish double of a dead teammate. Jesus, they could have dressed up an old Doombot with a viking costume rental and it would have felt smarter than this.

You know, characters-acting-out-of-character is all over this series. Captain America shoves a largely innocent soldier out of a moving truck directly into oncoming traffic. Invisible Woman goes underground and leaves her kids. Spider-Man gives up on years of his belief in the importance of a secret identity. It's like Civil War was written specifically for people with only a passing familiarity with the Marvel Universe, at the expense of those of us who have been reading comics for decades. And yet, there are so many cool scenes that are obviously directed at fans... like Emma Frost explainng the X-Men's non-involvement.

Oh, and the idea to draft a bunch of super-villains to hunt down Captain America? Sheer fucking idiocy. You cannot trust guys like Bullseye and Venom, for crying out loud. You mean to tell me that Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man approved that?! Or are these more clones? Just when you thought it couldn't get any stupider.

I just don't see how this is all going to come together, and that's why I'm reading. That's unfortunate; I'm getting the book because I want to see if/how the utter derailment is resolved, rather than caring about the characters themselves. At the end of issue 1, I was excited. Now I no longer feel like I'm reading about the "real" heroes. It's more like an extended fan-fic with really gorgeous art.

We dropped off my car for an inspection appointment last night, and today I walked over to pick it up. It's only a mile and a half, and it was super-nice today, so I thought I would take you along...

12:45pm: Setting out. I have the DS, my camera, my cell, and my old Pikachu Pedometer with me, so if anyone decides to mug me, they're in for quite a treat. As you can see from the carnage everywhere, this morning was trash day.

12:50pm: This is officially the ritzier section of the development. This stretch is all sidewalked, so I'm doing a sudoku in Brain Age.

12:57pm: Some kind of graffiti promoting Half-Life 2.

12:58pm: Now we're in the sidewalk-free section, so things get a bit dicey. Deep into that forested section, there's a blind curve coming, so I have to cross to the other side of the road to avoid getting killed there. (I've done this walk before.)

1:04pm: I don't usually like to walk with my back to traffic while playing sudoku, but here's that blind curve I mentioned.

1:13pm: Now we're getting back to civilization. This is also where I dive off into parking lots so as to stay the hell off of the street.

1:18pm: And there's the dealership, just one cut-across away.

1:20pm: The final tally on the pedometer, 3765 steps. Sweet. Who needs Nike + iPod when you have Pikachu! That's 7290 feet in 35 minutes, or 208 feet/minute. I know I've done it faster, but the sudoku was kicking my ass.

Then I went to Toys R Us and impulse-shopped Cooking Mama.