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.