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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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!

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.