November 2006 Archives

In the spirit of cool random game giveaways (like the Bully dodge ball), if you buy Elebits through EB/GameStop, you get an awesome Elebits stuffed animal. There's not even any hesitation that I'm going after that. I must come up regularly in EB's promotion meetings. "What can we do to get Joe super-excited about a game he already intends to buy?"

Just to make it a little less awesome, the free plushie is randomly boxed out of two (and maybe THREE) choices. So odds are I will get the ugly blue one.

Elebits also seems to be the first Wii game to use online play in some fashion... although it's just to exchange custom levels and in-game photos. No Elebits deathmatch for you.

My cousin - who, as you'll find out, is named Colin - did get his Wii. So we have been sending off quick Wii-mails to each other and zipping Miis back and forth. We're almost on a Mii-a-Day program.

He also sent me this photo via Wii:

In case you didn't know, the Wii's Photo Channel comes with a reasonable approximation of a Windows Paint program, so you can scribble on photos in your best Hot Or Not style.

What I like about this is, not only is the Wii his first video game console, but also his first dopey Waiting In Line For The Video Game Everybody Wants experience! I waited in line both to not get a Wii and then again to get one, two weeks later, so I'm excited that Colin got to be right there in the thick of it. His family managed to make the second shipment at Best Buy. Colin was #21 out of 52. (As the line grew and confused passers-buy asked what was going on, wags in the queue started announcing it was an American Idol audition.) This is something Colin will remember forever, just as I'll always remember coming home one night to find Dad had bought a Magnavox Odyssey 2. He was playing Cosmic Conflict, I believe.

I'll end on this photo I snapped during our Thanksgiving drive home, using the ol' point the camera blindly towards the backseat trick. I call it "Pictochat at 70mph."

Has anybody ever set up a Pictochat network between two or more moving vehicles? You got yourself an instant YouTube hit if you caught that on video.

The context: this is Peter talking, an American who has lived in Japan for many years, running J-List, one of my favorite online interesting import shops.

"Pets are a part of our household in Japan, and currently we've got a dog (faithful old Sakura) and two cats (black-and-white Mix-chan and all-black Kuro). My wife once remarked to me, "It's important to keep pets in the home. They die in place of family members when the family runs into bad luck." My eyes become little black points like an anime character's at this, as I struggled to understand her statement. She was talking about the concept of "migawari" (me-gah-wah-ree), literally meaning "substitute for" or "sacrifice for." When our dog Chibi passed away earlier this year, the general consensus among my Japanese family was that he had died in order to protect someone in the family from injury or worse, and everyone loved him a little more for that. Originally a ninja term meaning to dress up a tree to look like a person so an enemy would think it was you and attack it mistakenly, the word refers to anything that takes bad luck in your place, protecting you as it does so."

If you're at all into Japanese culture, you should be reading his weblog weekly. Or grab the RSS feed or the email mailing list, which, you know, won't include NSFW pics of Japanese skin mags. Yeah, everything kinda steers back into plugs for the stuff he sells, but his little insights and revelations about life in Japan are worth the commercializing.

I also recommend Japanmanship, which is written by a British game developer also living in Japan. And of course, A Geek in Korea comes to us from an english teacher living in Korea, which is where I learned of the popular Korean superstition that sleeping with a fan on in your room will kill you. I kinda looked twice at the mini-fan we keep in Clark's room after that.

I have to say, before last night I wasn't entirely sure of Twilight Princess.

The first little zone is pretty ugly. It is definitely not a next-gen showcase. I guess it's just tough to capture all the details inherent in a forest and not come up short. Particularly when you're looking at a Gamecube game that has been kicked over to Wii at the eleventh hour. And I cannot stand how Link's hat clips into his shield! Dude, we're staring at his back for the entire game... put some effort into forcing that to look nice.

As I'm running around the Ordon Village and the Forest Temple, I'm thinking of how far this falls compared to the visual style of Wind Waker. There's just not a lot of personality here. The limited animation of Wind Waker worked in concert with the simplified art, whereas here you have limited animation layered on to complicated, detailed characters... so the veil is torn asunder. You don't buy it. Compare the crappy animation of South Park with the crappy animation of the '80s G.I. Joe cartoon. A strong visual look-and-feel will do wonders to gain audience buy-in across relatively lousy movement. Nintendo needed full-on motion and realistic facial acting to pull off this new lush look, and Twilight Princess does not deliver that. Now, I'm only eight hours in, but I don't expect this to change.

I'm really annoyed by the subtitled cutscenes where you have no clue who is talking. We should be past that by now. I don't care if Link himself is always mute, but everybody else ought to have real audio and synced-up lips.

For the Forest Temple, I was just going through the motions. But then I did the second dungeon, the Goron Mines...

Wow. After slogging through the kinda weak monkey-rescue missions of the first dungeon, Goron Mines made me feel like a hero. The whole bit reminded me of the intertwining levels from the first Sly Cooper game, where you're winding your path through massive areas that twist in and out of each other. I'm sure Nintendo would be thrilled to have freakin' Zelda favorably compared to Sly Cooper, but that's what struck me about it.

Anyway, the Mines were gorgeous, the puzzles were intuitive and challenging without being obnoxiously difficult, and the level's new items (magnetic iron boots and the anticipated bow) were well-integrated. It was pretty much a perfect experience.

About the remote control: it's okay. Swinging the remote and nunchuk for various sword attacks is fine. It's far from necessary, sure, but it's not awful. The remote's largest weak spot for Twilight Princess is the lack of camera control. For games like this, I'm happily accustomed to harmoniously manipulating the camera along with my movement. For Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, and who knows how many other games, I always used the left stick for movement and the right stick for direction. You can't do that in Twilight Princess. So the game has to control the camera on its own, and we all know how well that usually turns out. I can't say I've seen the camera get stuck behind a pillar or swing around to the wrong angle - yet - but I still think it's inevitable. At this point, I'm in the habit of constantly resetting the camera by clicking in and out of first-person mode, just because I feel like I retain some control by doing so.

Using the remote as a pointer for your slingshot and bow is very cool, however. And that awesome little speaker adds so much. Those two items right there are about the only thing that makes me happy this is a Wii game and not just the last great Gamecube game.

Another thing you have to respect about Twilight Princess is the elegant way it scripts its way through a day/night cycle. It's not like GTA, where the sun rises and sets on the rigidity of a clock. Here, the day passes as you trigger the various plot points, yet it feels natural because it doesn't just snap from day to night and back again. The first time you venture onto Hyrule Field, you're treated to a beautiful sunrise.

So I'm in. I think I'd probably give it an 8.8 as well.

I have a cousin, age twelve or so, whose parents are valiantly attempting to find a Wii. At last report, on Black Friday they were #6 in line for five Wiis. But when they do find one, Twilight Princess will be his first Zelda game. As I'm playing, I'm thinking of how a young first-timer will react to it... and I can't imagine him anything but impressed. For all the whining about how Game A doesn't measure up to previous editions, or how it does or doesn't compare to games for System B, it's important to set that aside and remember that every game is somebody's first.

This is Trent, staring at a wall. He is such a tool.

This is an artsy b&w shot of Christy.

This is when Christy caught me kissing Angie.

This is what I painted on the top of the Bullworth Town Hall building.

This is when I broke into the asylum.

This is when I broke into the girls' dorm.

This is when the Jocks set fire to the library, which I swear I had nothing to do with.

I get secretly videotaped. I initially thought Josh was just taking a picture. And I had no idea Tony was behind me.

This was the Cher bonus level.

Sorry for the lousy quality. We're learning.

Here's the assorted Wii paraphrenalia, including the games and extra remote. I thought the remotes were supposed to come in cooler packaging than this?

Another external power supply... I did not think to check if it was the same model as the one that lit the GameCube. That would be nice if they were identical.

The sensor bar is waaaay smaller than I expected. It's like eight inches. I figured the size of the box meant the sensor bar was fitting in there longways... but it is actually shortways. I'll mark it on the map for you:

See? Tiny. I placed the sensor bar on that shelf above the tv, where it can be held in place by the center speaker. No need for the dreaded double-sided tape that Nintendo thoughtfully includes.

The Wii is sidled in there on the right, up out of Clark's reach. The GameCube used to live two shelves below. In addition to the gray Wii base unit (so you can match the rakish angle of all the official PR photos), you also get a clear plastic disk to stablize the whole thing as it sits upright. The top panel (relative from that position) is the hidden door for GameCube controllers and memory cards.

The ceremonious Powering-On was followed by about 20 minutes of unceremonious network updating. The Wii found my WiFi right away and grabbed whatever updates it wanted. I'm on Wii version 2.0U! They buffed the warriors but nerfed the necros.

It takes about two seconds to get used to the pointy remote, according to Rhonda's estimate as she made her Mii. The remote's rumble does this pleasant tactile pulse when you roll over a button. Hilariously, the onscreen finger icon that represents your "mouse" turns itself as you tilt the remote. They did that just to look smart, I'm sure.

We screwed around in the channels for quite some time. I think the twelve-box setup is ugly, and it's redundant to keep calling everything a "channel." Shop Channel, Photo Channel, Forecast Channel, Disc Channel, News Channel, Mii Channel, enough already. And I've already decided that I don't like how your downloaded games show up as a new channel of their own. Here's hoping this concept gets a makeover. There's a notice that the Internet Channel is coming soon, and News and Weather are also not ready yet.

The Shop Channel has about fifteen games in it, most of which suck and are overpriced. If I didn't already have half of the available NES games in Animal Crossing, I may have considered purchasing a few. But I already know that Wario's Woods is terrible, so No Sale. Nintendo is going to need to ramp this up fast, because so many Wii sales are predicated on the Virtual Console being cool... and right now, it's not. You can't even buy Super Mario Bros. yet for crying out loud. And where's our promised DS demo downloads?

I popped in our camera's SD card to see how the Photo Channel works... it's pretty slick. After reading your photos, you can doodle on them, turn them into puzzles, or play as a slideshow. You can only doodle on one at a time, and if you want to save the doodle, you have to save it to your Message center (which, oddly enough, does not appear as a big "Channel" button.) The Wii does not fuck with your SD card in any way, so you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting or overwriting photos.

Awesome: when you click on the Disc Channel to start a game, you get a big fullscreen image of the game plus some unique music!

The Mii Channel is not exactly like that Flash app that made the rounds a few weeks back. Most notably, you can't warp out the heads and hair to obscene levels. We made Miis for all of us, and here we are enjoying a family night of bowling:

You can opt to have dupes of your Miis "travel," so they can show up on other Wiis... presumably worldwide? So if you see me or Rhonda or little Clark, please let me know.

Oh right, almost forgot, my Wii Friend Number Digit Transport Exchange Trading Code is 1354 5254 5878 0124. Since there are no Wii online games yet, I guess this is just how Wii owners can send messages/photos back and forth for the time being. That would be cool to turn it on tomorrow and find a message from somebody... but I'm assuming it runs like the DS and we have to mutual friendify. Email me and let's find out.

Wii Sports, as expected, is just kinda there. Fun enough, but I wouldn't have bought it by itself. Bowling manages to be so realistic that it precisely duplicates the problems I have with bowling in real life: I always pull to the left. Tennis is harder than Mario Power Tennis. Baseball is okay, but only when you're batting. I did not try Golf yet. Boxing was awesome because it started me off punching the hell out of Jesus:

Boxing uses both the remote and the nunchuk, each half simulating a fist. For some reason, every game that uses the nunchuk gets all weird and anal about how you plug it in. You're supposed to loop the remote's lanyard through this plastic hook on the nunchuk's plug, and you'll be treated to graphic after graphic of demands to that effect. I can't figure out why they're so adamant about it.

One nice thing about the remote + nunchuk style is that I could share the Punch-a-Jesus fun with Clark:

I originally gave Clark the nunchuk - since, you know, he's sitting on my left - but he traded up to the remote because of all the cool noise it made. He shakes the controller and stuff explodes onscreen while making swooshing noises. Take that, Jesus!

That little speaker in the remote is pretty much the sweetest thing going. You're going to see other companies rip this off, believe it.

One great secret feature to the new controller wackiness is that you can sit like a complete comfortable idiot and still play your game. You're no longer stuck with folding both of your arms in at each other to grip the controller. I was lounging all over the place as I played Trauma Center and Zelda and felt like a new man.

Quick notes about both: Trauma Center is more identical to the DS original than anybody wanted to admit, but it's still cool. I think I may become better at the Wii version, since I can sit more at ease while excising tumors from some dude's stomach.

And Zelda is ugly. I'm barely an hour into it and I'm already sick of the super-realistic all-brown color palette. You guys humiliated Miyamoto over the bright and artsy Wind Waker so we could get this? Good thing the gameplay is just as appealing as ever.

I pulled in at the Toys R Us just after 10am, armed with my three pre-order tickets (Wii, Zelda, Trauma Center), three $10 gift cards, and the coupon for a free $10 gift card with purchase over $75. Since I was late, I didn't get to see if there was any lines at the door. My only fear was that something colossally stupid would happen, and my pre-order would somehow get screwed up.

This time of year, TRU must have people lined up outside every day, because the store was already packed with people who couldn't care less about the Nintendo Wii. I dived into the video game aisle to find an extra remote.

A couple poor slobs were standing by the glass display case getting the bad news from an employee. Already out of Wiis. Only received 48 units and 30 of those were for pre-orders. No idea when the next shipment will be.

Here's the line for pickup. One guy who missed his shot at getting one today bought a game anyway, that eternal optimist.

Apparently TRU called all the pre-orders and held a special early opening at 9am. They did not call me, predictably. The other slightly douchey aspect to the early opening was that, after they took care of the pre-orders and gave out a bunch more tickets to the non-pre-ordered, they dismissed the scene... so some late-comers showed up at 9:45am and thought they were first in line! I heard this from the guys behind me in the pickup line. "Can't show up 15 minutes early and expect to get one," one hefty Nintendo fan sadly declared.

Also from this particular rumor mill: the two Targets in town only received 90 Wiis between them.

I forgot to use the three $10 gift cards.

Here's Clark about to start his first ever Launch Day Unboxing. May it be the first of many, my lad.

Clark has already figured out that awesome stuff comes in boxes. We bought him a big kitchen playset Saturday night, as a Christmas gift, and I brought it inside from the trunk and caused a minor meltdown. We didn't think he had the connection yet between Big Box and Big Toy. He has. So right off, he's dragging the Wii box around and gesturing at me to get it opened.

Apparently, the secret surprise announcement is that the Nunchuk doubles as a phone. MEGATON!

As I unpacked it, Clark kept picking up the little foam bags and plastic wrappers and running them out to the kitchen trash can. He's good like that. Of course, I had to keep an eye on what he was grabbing.

I decided to do a partial re-wire of our home entertainment setup, since it's a spaghetti mess back there. I removed the old RCA alternate plugs for the PS2 - which were only there because you can't use the light gun with my usual s-video cable. Since the light gun hasn't made an appearance in a long time, it's officially pulled. I also discovered that I had the VCR hooked up twice, once direct on the cable -> TV path and again on the router. So I yanked that as well. Awful.

Before even attempting the Wii install, I double-checked that everything else worked. PS2, check. VCR, ick, check. Loose plug ready for video iPod, check. The upshot is, it took me an hour to get everything ready for the Wii.

Which we'll get to next time!

Today I picked up two packs of the new Pirates set (Pirates of the Mysterious Islands) and found this cute flyer inside. WizKids will send you an exclusive ship if you send them:

• All four "bottle messages"
• Four Mysterious Islands wrappers
• The original receipt(s) for purchase of those four packs
• A coupon printed from WizKidsGames.com

Jesus Christ WizKids, you need a blood sample and a spot in my Will too?

How about I send you one wrapper and $5, and you send me the stupid crappy exclusive ship that's probably just stupid and crappy anyway.

Out of my two packs, I got exactly one of the silly bottle messages. And, the coupon isn't even on their website yet.

I'll probably pick up a couple more packs because I want some of those new submarine ships. So we'll see if I get close to collecting all four messages.

Also: the new "Mysterious Island" thing is awful. Instead of the cheap paper islands having some terrible rarely-used terrain thing on the flip side (like "fog"), there's now a D6 chart. Whenever you dock at one of them, you roll and on 1-2 something bad happens and 5-6 something good happens. Yay for stupid randomized effects that could hurt you as often as helping you. Certain crew members will add to your roll, thereby increasing your shot at the good effect, but who's going to waste their build points on that.

I already own the lush painted 3D islands anyway.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus ONE

This super-rare* t-shirt was the grand prize for winning Camp Hyrule's points competition in 2005. Cabin 9 - the best cabin - routed all comers and we all received this shirt in the mail. In 2006, Nintendo hilariously did not give out any t-shirts.

The front shows Stumpy, the non-sequiter mascot of Camp Hyrule. You have to be an insider to know that, so I give some credit to Nintendo for printing such an unexplainably random image. Any questions about the horse/cow thing can be answered with a quick turn to the back, bitch. CABIN 9 FTW!

*I'm assuming it's super-rare. The Nintendo Store in NYC could use these as janitorial rags for all I know.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: the DK Bongos. Now, weird controllers have been around since the dawn of video games. What makes the bongos innovative is that Nintendo bothered to find a non-rhythm game use for them. Namely, Jungle Beat. (And Bongo Blast, if that doesn't end up as vaporware.) Jungle Beat's use of non-standard controls for a standard game is more or less a dry run for the Wii.

Since today's t-shirt was so awesome, you get a crappy innovation. See you all tomorrow.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus TWO

"You Lose," featuring an angry Goomba. I wore this on the day after the election.

Has everybody noticed that my daily Nintendo shirts have all been in different colors? Wiiiiiii! What will tomorrow bring? Only the coolest Nintendo t-shirt ever.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: the eReader. Bit of a lateral here, since the eReader is primarily a GBA innovation. But since a couple GameCube games did make use of it, and since the Game Boy Player essentially turns all GBA games into GameCube games, I'm going for it.

Although I'm pretty tired of having to explain why it was cool, since so many people hated on it immediately. Like most of Nintendo's risky moves for this generation, the best features of the eReader simply required too much gear for most gamers to consider it worth the effort. If you wanted to use it with Cube games, you needed a GBA. If you wanted to use it with compatible GBA games, you needed two GBAs. Plus the cable. And by itself, the eReader just wasn't compelling... scanning in ten data strips to play Ice Climber just wasn't worth the time investment.

Once you got the necessary equipment together, scanning items into Animal Crossing was huge. The NES-styled Pokemon games hidden on certain trading cards were amazing. Nintendo under-marketed the good points and the whole thing was buried under people bitching about having to pay $5 for a pack of cards that spliced new levels into Super Mario Bros 3.

After a long hiatus, we've now received three They Might Be Giants podcasts in under a month.

Take it easy, guys! You're going to kill my iPod.

I guess you're supposed to toss old podcasts when new ones show up, and if I was downloading some kind of topical talk show, I suppose I would. But the Giants' stuff is like getting a complete special EP every time, so I hate to dump them. I mean, I definitely burn these things off to a CD, but I still enjoy having them on the iPod where every other bit of music lives.

But with only an old 10gig iPod, at this rate it stands to become a dedicated TMBG player by '08.

I was happy to hear that edition 10A had a replacement DJ host, because I am alternately annoyed and ambivalent to the varipitched vocal stylings of Cecil Portesque.

And although I always worry a little when They introduce a song from some other band, They have included at least two that I absolutely love: "The Problem with America" by The Vitamen and "Summer's the Worst" by Michael Leviton.

I also regularly get single cuts from another, unofficial TMBG podcast... but it's mostly dubs of their Dunkin Donuts commercials and who the hell wants that.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus THREE

The Nintendo logo. Sort of boring. I don't wear this one much.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: Animal Crossing. A Japanese N64 game given a spit-and-polish for the GameCube, this game went above and beyond innovative. Animal Crossing was a community, an obsession, a lifestyle.

The real time clock and calendar gave you a reason to turn on your GameCube every day of the year and spawned insane ethical debates among fans. You could trade in-game items with your friends via obtuse passcodes. Rare codes were given out on the website and in Nintendo Power. You could plug in a GBA and unlock a "hidden" tropical island. You could plug in an eReader and scan in items and letters. And every Saturday night revealed an accoustic concert by the train station. If Animal Crossing had been released after the microphone and bongos, you can bet the game would have figured out something to do with those as well. In short, you have to go through a lot of games to equal what Animal Crossing had to offer. This one broke all the rules about what a top-selling video game could do.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus FOUR

"But our princess is in another castle" comes from Gameskins, a bygone video game t-shirt store that recently was absorbed into ThinkGeek via Penny Arcade. This is not official, which explains the severely off-model pixel mushroom. I know I don't have to explain the reference to you.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: the GBA/GameCube connection. One day, somebody at Nintendo realized that a whole helluva lotta people owned GBAs... and not as many owned GameCubes. So Winter 03 through Summer 04 saw the release of several innovative means of combining the two. Pac-Man Vs., Four Swords, Crystal Chronicles, Pokemon Colosseum, etc. Unfortunately, those inflated GBA numbers must not really cross over with console purchasers, because most console fans saw these games as a blatant attempt by Nintendo to get us to buy a GBA. Or even multiple GBAs. When really, the intent was to get GBA owners to spring for a GameCube.

For the most part, the GBA/Cube games were terribly clever and made you break out of your usual thinking. The lack of wires should help any future DS/Wii connectivity, but you can bet the poor sales here has made Nintendo gunshy.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus FIVE

This is my Double Dash shirt. I got it when I renewed my Nintendo Power subscription a couple terms ago. Folks, if you're going to indulge yourself with Nintendo Power, don't sign up for more than one year at a time. Even if you go for three years, you're only saving $10 compared to renewing for a year at time, and you cheat yourself out of choosing a Free Gift every year.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: the free pack-in. OK, this isn't so much of an innovation as a willingness to not screw over the customer who has already committed to a $50 game purchase. Nintendo was not afraid to include free accessories if the game needed it, from microphones to link cables. Animal Crossing and Pokemon Box both came with free memory cards, which cost $15 separately at the time. The AC memory card was even pre-loaded with a rare item for the game.

Aside from bundles and pre-order bonuses, I can't think of many other examples of free accessories from other systems. Sony's EyeToy was really more of an accessory that happened to come with a game, rather than the other way around. SOCOM came with a headset, but I think it also cost $10 more. And after paying through the nose for this sort of thing on the N64 (ahem, Hey You Pikachu), I was really happy to see Nintendo put their best foot forward on this one.

It sucks that the PS3's price is due to that Blu-Ray that nobody is sure if they really want.

It sucks that the PS3's bungled production numbers are due to that Blu-Ray that nobody is sure if they really want.

It sucks that the average family has almost no chance of getting a PS3 by the end of the year.

It sucks that Sony would rather act cocky about it, claiming that people will pay $600 for a PS3 sans games, simply because it's awesome.

It sucks that I will not be part of the launch day fun... because the price is way out of line and the availability is shot to hell.

Although I love my Nintendo systems, when I want lengthy, detailed, intense, emotional, cinematic adventures, I go to the PS2. The games that I am most passionate about have been PS2 exclusives (or nearly exclusive): Fatal Frame, Kingdom Hearts, GTA, MGS, Katamari. So I like their track record.

Interestingly, only one of the names in that list is a holdover from the previous generation: Metal Gear Solid. I can't call GTA a holdover since GTA3 was so drastically different than the original Grand Theft Auto series. I mean, walking into the PS2 back in 2000, I probably would have said that my favorite PlayStation series were Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, Deception, and PaRappa/UmJammy. Funny how things change.

That's a good thing. It makes you wonder what is coming next... what will be the surprise releases, the extreme makeovers, and the new-gen hits that will define the PS3. It better be something more than WWII shooters.

The dawn of the next generation is always exciting. I hate that I can't be there as one of my very favorite systems goes through its first baby steps. Even if I did not mind the ridiculous price, I have no interest in fighting and clawing for a pre-order. The two weekends and three hours I invested in the Wii are already more than enough. It's just all hot and it hurts and stuff.

I'm pretty much shooting for a price drop sometime before October '07, when GTA4 comes out. Fingers crossed.

Although with such a highly-anticipated title on the horizon, why would they drop the price? It's more likely that they'll announce a price drop just after the GTA4 rush. Unless Blu-ray parts suddenly get really cheap. The PS3 would have to totally tank by second quarter to warrant a price drop... and as long as they keep not making enough units to go around, it will always look like a big sellout, so it's an easy PR win in the short term.

I do not see how Sony is going to maintain the strength of the PS2 when the PS3 costs so much and is so under-produced. They're destroying their momentum. And not that I want to see this generation go the same way, with Sony having a virtual lock on the industry, but you gotta admit, Sony's massive userbase led to some pretty great things on the PS2.

You wouldn't have seen Katamari Damacy otherwise. Or an astonishing three Fatal Frame games. Or Guitar Hero. Why would a relatively small-time company like Red Octane take a risk on manufacturing a weirdass custom controller, and license expensive music tracks, if there wasn't enough PlayStation owners to support it? As a GameCube or Xbox exclusive, Guitar Hero would have flopped. It might still have been a critical favorite, along the lines of Eternal Darkness, but it would not have been the sudden retail force that the game became. How many Xbox owners actually bought Steel Battalion, with its $200 cool-ass mecha control panel? Not enough to keep the game viable, that's for damn sure.

Despite Sony doing/saying some of the stupidest things ever for the PS3 hype (and you thought Microsoft crashed the 360 launch), I do not want to see them fail. I just need them brought back to earth.

To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.

T-minus SIX

This is a standard, the 1-UP mushroom. One time at work, I had this completely crazy co-worker stop me in the hallway and want to talk about how much she used to enjoy Mario games. It's universal.

Today's GameCubeian innovation: the WaveBird. Before Nintendo let this bird fly, wireless video game controllers were a bad third-party joke. Now it's the standard for the next generation. When I first got one of these, I tested it by walking across the street and playing Animal Crossing through the window. It worked. Playing with corded controllers just seems like caveman times now.

You want the real reason why Sony doesn't mind that they lost rumble on the PS3 controller? You're looking at it.

From the Justify Your Accessory Department.

One year after the EyeToy's release, I don't think anybody had yet figured out what to do with it. This is another Play-style minigame collection, but again lacks any kind of tournament feature. How can a half-assed EA movie tie-in title figure this out, but two (and more!) EyeToy-focused games miss the obvious point. The way these dopey games handle multiplayer is the modern day equivalent of playing two man Mario Bros by handing the controller back and forth. Terrible.

On the positive side, the year between Play and Sega Superstars shows off in polish... not to mention the incredible Sega fan-service. Each game is based on a classic Sega title, from Virtua Fighter to Sonic to NiGHTS. Even freaking Billy hatcher is in there. None of them are very good, but the company reverence is fun. Just in case there's any Sega fans still out there.

Memory Score: Best one: Puyo Pop

Completely phoned in.

This is what happens when your dev team realizes that they can't beat the awesomeness of the previous game, but they have to crap out another sequel in time for the holiday shopping season.

Almost nothing in this game rises above the bar set by Going Commando. It's all very same-y. That's not all bad, as I said in my review, this series does more on a bad day than most games ever achieve. But it still ranks as a huge disappointment. Ratchet & Clank was a franchise that I came to love, and this sequel-sequel pretty much ruined it for me. The whole time I'm playing it, I'm thinking "jeez, why am I doing this again." The magic is gone.

But said magic was replaced with an online mode, which I (predictably) did not care for. Unbalanced, spastic, and already dominated by obnoxious pros by the time I got to it. The only cool thing was the ability to do online multiplayer split-screen. So, like, you can have two people play together on one TV and still go online.

Memory Score: And like that, a franchise is buggered

Speaking of EyeToy AND online play, here's my Best PS2 Online Game Ever. Me, Mike and Scott went through quite a time where we played this every week, connecting two states and three cats.

WCP hit right in the middle of the big Hold 'Em boom, and after plenty of bad advice (remember, I thought Resident Evil Outbreak was going to be the killer app), this was the game that enabled me to talk my buddies into online PS2 and in-home wireless networks. Finally! I'm sure they think it was worth the setup. EMBARRASSED SMILEY

More often than not, the whole thing worked... WiFi + PS2 + EyeToy + headset mics. Which always surprised us.

Shame that the game is almost unbearably ugly and amateurish. Still, for online multiplayer poker, all you really need is a robot to track cards. And it did.

We should get back into this one.

Memory Score: "He's not intimidated... this is his game: heads-up poker!"

Next time: a sleeper hit based on a movie license, a sequel based on a sleeper hit, and a new-franchise hit based on goring up ancient mythology... that made me sleepy.

Toys R Us did some kind of second wave of pre-orders this morning, in a surprise stealth reveal. Kotaku broke the news yesterday, but I did not read it until after my store had closed... so I could not call to verify.

I took a chance and drove out there around 8:30am. The scene was nothing like two weeks ago, as the PS3 / Wii / Elmo crowds fought each other for dominance. I spotted three other cars in the parking lot, but the intense rain was keeping everyone inside.

I considered going around and asking if everybody was here for the Wii - just to get some independant verification - but instead I tucked into some Elite Beat Agents. That game is kicking my ass, once I crossed the "Material Girl" level. And, my god, the rain. Several more cars drifted in over the next hour.

Just before 9:30am - a half-hour to go - somebody walked over to the storefront (probably just to check the store hours) and that broke the dam. Everybody jumped out of their dry cars and piled up in front of the door. Now, it was only, like, ten people... but still amusing. I was in the middle of wrapping up EBA's "YMCA" level, so I wasn't as fast as I would have liked... I was the seventh person in line.

The rain was coming on strong, so everybody huddled under the umbrellas of those smart enough to have them. This necessitated conversation.

I shared the umbrella of a mom who had been there since seven or so. She had heard about this pre-order round online. Ahead of me was a college-age couple... he had been making calls earlier in the week to find his best chances of getting a Wii on launch day. And TRU revealed to him - on Wednesday! - that they were probably giving out another 15 pre-orders on Sunday. I'm calling that a leak.

Unlike two weeks ago, nobody came out at 9:45ish to rescue us. Toys R Us had us all stand there in the drenching rain until 10:00am, where the door opened and an employee stood there with Wii tickets. The manager reminded her to ask if each person wanted one, since there might be people walking in cold who had no idea it was Sneaky Wii Day.

Once everybody had a ticket, we all did this hilarious slow zombie walk through the store, since we were all chilled to the bone. Most of us drifted into the games section, where, surprise #2, they had the launch day game pre-orders hanging on the wall.

I picked up Trauma Center and Zelda. Both suggest an in-stock date of the 21st, two days after the Wii drops on the 19th. I figure that's just TRU covering their collective ass. Nintendo isn't going to ship the Wii and then have people wait two days before the software hits. What, we're supposed to play Wii Sports for 48 hours? Like hell.

Also, they're running a deal where, if you buy three of the Wii's crappiest launch games, you'll save $30. If only I was into SpongeBob games.

Not so coincidentally, we had just been in Toys R Us Saturday morning to pick up Elite Beat Agents and work our way towards their free $10 gift card offer. (Clark got a toy microwave.) If I was a true blue launch day obnoxio-fanboy, I would have thought to pester them about their Wii shipment numbers and probably would have coaxed a pre-order-Sunday reveal from them. So, big thanks to Kotaku for keeping me in the know... my launch day Wii is entirely due to their fine, usually misspelled efforts.

To recap: relatively no stress, a solid gold grab at a Wii pre-order, and the line was almost all Moms with no gangs of eBay thugs in sight. Awesome.

I'll be back in one week to pick up my Wii as early as possible.

And by the way, Elite Beat Agents is pretty much the best DS game I've played in a long time.

Tonight we took Clark to his third Disney on Ice show.

This is when we told him that tonight's theme was "Princess Wishes."

Actually, for a show about the Princesses (and considering the pink-centric merch all over the place), it was largely gender-agnostic. The first bit was a stripped-down Aladdin: Street Rat / Genie appears / Whole New World. Not exactly focused on Jasmine.

Beyond that, it was pretty much a medley of songs with a vague Princess connection and occasional transition bits with Tinker Bell or Mickey and Minnie. The only weird choice was a Mulan number with a song nobody had ever heard before.

Aside from the huge Aladdin kickoff, the other big scenes belonged to Little Mermaid (whose story bridged the intermission) and a near-finale finale with Sleeping Beauty... who slept through the big Death of Malificent in Dragon Form setpiece. We left after that (Clark was getting exceptionally unruly), so we didn't see the expected big ballroom gown showstopper that probably ended the night.

Yes, his shirt says "Everyone Loves a Korean Boy."

The digitally-enhanced shot shows Clark and Rhonda hiding out on one of the upper walkways. Clark decided that he wanted to go up and down the arena steps, which we tried to keep to a minimum. We did not buy any souvenirs.

This is amazing. There's this little song that you probably know from either Mario Paint or, more likely, Animal Crossing. In AC, it's called "K.K. Song" and it's one of the hidden tracks you can request of K.K. Slider, or, Totakeke, as he's known in Japan.

The song is something of a trademark signature of Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka. It has been found in several games spanning a decade, from the SNES to the original Game Boy all the way to the DS. Mario Land 2, Link's Awakening, Yoshi Touch-n-Go, and several others.

The video back on that link shows off all of the known appearances... and also has this weird unedited television show vibe, which I don't get at all. It's like live TV, but done without caring what the host was doing throughout the shoot. I'd love to know who produced the video. And why. It's almost as if they weaseled onto some local station's morning news interview set. If that sort of thing is cool on the internet these days, holy hell do I have something new to do with my weekends.

Anyway, in most cases, the song is absurdly hidden and can only be located by pausing the game in a certain area and waiting for three minutes. Only then does the short little ditty play. It's insane. Makes you wonder how many more goofy things are secreted away like this. The ESRB will never find them all! This reminds me of when "easter eggs" actually meant something, before the whole concept was turned into a marketing bullet point.

But what blew my mind was this:

Kazumi Totaka's name would be more properly spoken in Japanese as Totaka Kazumi (family name first).

Which could possibly be abbreviated as Totaka K.

Which obviously became Animal Crossing's Totakeke.

Years ago, I had a demo of Metal Gear Solid for the PS1. I didn't like it. I couldn't even get out of the first room without being spotted and whacked by the ! guards. But when MGS2 showed up as one of the first truly "next gen" offerings for the PS2, I took the chance on it and found it one of the most compelling and original games I had ever played. And I decided that I probably missed out on something cool by passing on the original MGS.

Against all odds, Nintendo got Silicon Knights (the Eternal Darkness team) to do a Metal Gear Solid remake for the GameCube, but with the look and feel of the PS2's MGS2. There is so much wrong with that sentence. It boggles the mind.

It seemed like a win-win: Silicon Knights gets to work with a gaming legend, Nintendo gets a new "mature" title that is kinda sorta exclusive. But I don't think many people bit. Despite early hopeful rumors, this obviously did not lead to a GameCube port of Sons of Liberty... and Silicon Knights now works for Microsoft. So, uh, I think we can chalk this up to the Nintendo M-rated curse.

For my part, I thought the game was great. Seeing Snake's Alaskan adventure, with the classically silly bad guys and the first encounter with Otacon... it underscored the "virtual mission" theme to Sons of Liberty. Seemed kinda short, though.

Memory Score: The WaveBird kinda took some of the fun out of the Psycho Mantis scene

This is that most bizarre of console games, the lateral port from a handheld. You don't see this all that often.

GBA WarioWare came out of nowhere (it was made largely in secret over a very short period of time) but became a monster hit in '03. A GameCube port was fast-tracked, but plussed up with plenty of multiplayer-centric game modes.

This is a fun party title, but it suffers from an unexpected New Player vs Old Player syndrome. WarioWare masters will rock the face of any newbies at the table, and the very nature of WarioWare's fast-paced, obtuse minigames will mean ugly frustration for those without prior exposure.

We actually ended up playing this one far less than anticipated, just because it felt like playing the GBA game all over again. It could have used a lot more new games, rather than relying so much on the bitmappy GBA offerings. I've enjoyed it more recently, two years later, after losing some of my finely honed WarioWare touch.

Memory Score: ...while ...saying ...something ...nice ...about ...Joe!

Speaking of bizarre GBA-inspired multiplayer GameCube games...

This, the lowest-selling Zelda game of all time, was the final and finest effort from Nintendo's panned-and-devoured GBA/GameCube connectivity push. It was a crappy time for the Big N. They were getting slammed over the eReader. They were getting slammed over the lack of online play. And they were getting slammed over the GBA/Cube connection. By the time Four Swords Adventures was released, everyone had officially given up on the concept of plugging your Game Boys into the Cube. Which is a shame, because this was a great game... and, come on, admit it, you already own a damn GBA anyway.

Like Mega Party Game$, FSA owes its creation to a handheld game: the Four Swords multiplayer add-on to the 2002 GBA re-release of A Link to the Past. There, Four Swords was a randomly generated dungeon crawl, stylized in homage to LttP. On the GameCube, it became more of a linear adventure (no random dungeons), with equal visual parentage to LttP and The Wind Waker. So, think a 2D game with sharp graphics and clean special effects. And four Links in different colored tunics.

The gimmick here is that levels will shift your character from the TV screen to the GBA screen. This never fails to impress me. The boss fights and level designs all relied on some amazing cooperation between players... but a fun competitive angle was introduced by collecting rupees for the "win."

FSA was a clever and intricate game, and it sucks that nobody bought it. You could even play it single-player, although we certainly didn't.

And I don't care what popular opinion says: I love that art style.

Memory Score: Who was the most helpful? Who was the most annoying?

Next time: Spidey does GTA! Pikmin does multiplayer! Pokemon does box!?!

Is because it's election day.

Always a miserable day overall, since election day always starts a ton of unnecessary last-minute fires around the office. You'd think we could avoid getting caught by surprise by such things, since, you know, we all pretty much know when elections happen. It's a train wreck.

Anyway, I did my usual sweep-in-at-the-end-of-the-day voting, eBay Sniper style. I also continued my recent practice of voting against my party affiliation. I enjoy the stealth factor. Plus, the gutless monkey who used Terri Shiavo as a campaign platform, brought a miscarried fetus home from the hospital for his (living) kids to cuddle, and actually lives in Virginia, NOT Pennsylvania wasted a few of his dollars sending his robo-calls to me.

So here's hoping that one turns out the way everyone expects.

I have kind of a thing about this, because, in my younger days, I did some minor league campaigning for guys like him. I fell for the popular rhetoric of the time that those guys were the only "good" team out there. And I always liked their fiscal attitude. Back then, nobody had yet sprung the issue of same-sex marriage, we weren't in a war (at least, none that anybody cared about), the other guys were doing all the tax hikes, and there wasn't as much of a fuss about religious rights. As time wore on, these things and more kinda cropped up, and I found myself on the outside of the party I had always believed in.

Sometime in college, I realized that, as an atheist, I'm never going to be adequately represented by any party. Since then, I've been a lesser-of-two-evils kind of voter.

And I'll almost always vote against an incumbant, because the term "career politician" just disgusts me. I'd put a ten-year-cap on all elected positions, instantly. Because these people have too much power, too much money, and too few checks on their activities.

No matter what party you prefer, they're all scumbags. I hate how America has sports-ified politics.

What would happen if we outlawed the concept of a political party and forced everybody to run for office without the misleading shorthand of "Republican" or "Democrat"?