I just finished reading the novelization of Infinite Crisis. Which probably makes me the only person within 500 miles to have done so.

This was an impossible task... write a novel that literally translates at least sixteen recent comic books, in a storyline that is a direct sequel to a 12-issue series from twenty years ago, containing allusions to seven decades of comic book history, starring hundreds of characters. It's nuts. It could not be done. It wasn't done.

What happened was this novel pretty much describes every panel from the original Infinite Crisis miniseries. It's like reading a comic to a blind person.

What probably should have happened is that this was broken up into several novels, to afford the room for the backstory and drama that longtime fans such as myself natively insert into contemporary comics as we read them. I mean, who exactly is intended to read this novel? A comics fan already owns the IC comics, and, judging from the online buzz, is about 50/50 on liking it anyway. A non-comics fan is not going to understand a damn bit of it, will be confused senseless on all the hundreds of names that are thrown out in mindless deference to the source, and will be left with a ton of questions concerning holes and threads that you'd need to read another year's worth of books to resolve. This was a crazy, impossible project.

He'll play it, but he's not quite doing 1:1 punches yet.

One of the best features of LEGO Star Wars is the ability to re-play levels with the characters of your choice. This leads to lots of non-canon silliness. Probably some spoilers near the end.

Han Solo and his best pal Greedo steal a Rebel ice cream truck. Maybe this is what led to their famous falling out.

Spider-Man spends 90% of his time retrieving lost balloons for kids.

Although this was a huge improvement over the previous Spider-Man movie game, it still has some weird angles to it that you can either spin as "unfinished" or "ahead of its time."

The true-to-scale New York City that never you can roam at will, top to bottom, without hitting a loading screen is wild... but it looks like total crap and has too few landmarks to help you navigate. Web-swinging is almost perfect, a zen experience that makes you feel like you're actually the -Man... but street-level brawling is a mess of impossible combo moves against burly no-name thugs who consistently dodge your super-heroic attacks. There's plenty of GTA-esque side missions and item hunts to keep you occupied... but they repeat to infinity, it just looks weird to have Spidey constantly standing on the sidewalk talking to pedestrians, and the boss fights are all terrible. (One of which, the Mysterio battle, is enough to make you swear off video games forever.)

You have to play it for the web-swinging. Seriously.

Memory Score: Just because humankind has invented ragdoll physics does not mean they must be employed every time.

kottke is holding a Celebrity Mii Contest with a yet-to-be-announced prize, so how can I not enter? Maybe the reward will be a stainless steel Remote strap.

But what Miis to submit (you're limited to two)? Two months ago, I used that Flash game to make the Wiggles, the Beatles, and the Bigger-Than-Jesus Beatles... but the genuine Mii maker isn't as flexible. In RL, only Greg "The Yellow" Wiggle came out looking nice. Which is actually cool and timely, since he just retired from the group due to health problems.

For my second entry, I went with everybody's favorite 700 year old CG pre-hobbit, Gollum.

As Nintendo leaps over Sony's amazingly bankrupt launch - here's my Wiish Liist for the future of the Wii.

DS Channel
The Wii needs to solve the limitations of the DS by acting as a unified online gateway. Fire up the DS Channel and jump into a live chatroom with Wii Friends... then the Wii attaches itself to your DS and makes the connection to your pal's DS for WiFi play. No more interminable waiting for your DS to match up with people you don't know! No more wondering if a specific DS Friend is even connected! No more DS Friend Codes at all!

The DS Channel should also offer a game store... both emulated classics and all new exclusive DS stuff. Buy a new game, keep it on the Wii, and transmit it to the DS when you want to play it. Then transmit it back to the Wii to retain high scores and saved games. This gets around the DS's lack of onboard memory.

And come on guys, DS demos! We were promised DS demos!

Elebits shipped, like, a week early.

I got the automated girl robot call from EB on Tuesday night and was pleasantly surprised. I stopped by EB over lunch the next day and the manager was even more surprised when I expectantly said "I have an Elebits pre-order." She blinked at me. Their shipping catalog still had Elebits listed as dropping 12/19. But - because she's the awesome manager and not just a shlub kid who would have picked his nose and said "That's not in. Book says twelve nineteen." - she goes and looks it up. Turns out, yes, it was on the morning shipment that they had not even opened yet. I sort of imagine the box arriving warm, fresh from Konami's factory volcano.

I also received my random Elebits plush, which, as predicted, was the ugly blue common one. Interestingly, the game itself insists on calling it the green one.

I think I'd be annoyed by this if it wasn't so endearingly clumsy:

The Flash #6
This storyline has been a complete amateur night embarrassment and I eagerly anticipate the current writing team (Bilson & Demeo) leaving the book.

Remember when Impulse was a fun, silly character? I think the mandate on Bart Allen's new attitude was: make him boring. The six parter was intended to set up Bart as the new Flash and explain why the DCU has been red-suit-Flash-less for a year. Of course, the only way to do that was to have Bart's cocky One Year Later-flotsam best friend become a super-villain. Plus a STAR Labs girlfriend. Not an ounce of this reads well, from "the Griffin"'s constant hackneyed use of "bro," to Bart's constant hand-wringing about how he isn't good enough to inherit the lightning. Terrible.

And then the the whole Infinite Crisis dangler - what happened to the Fastest Men Alive when they raced Superboy-Prime into the Speed Force - is tossed aside in a sepia-toned page-and-a-half at the very end! Gawd, so that's all that happened? The other guys essentially give up and Bart volunteers to do the deathrace back to Earth-1? Lame.

Yeah, I ordered four replacement Wii straps.

First of all, yes, I do think it is possible that some straps went out the door a little tauter, a little weaker than most. A bad run of twine that day. That's just the reality of mass production. So I don't think it's impossible that some people playing entirely normally may have had a strap break. But I do think that total legitimate faulty straps is going to be a very, very, very small number. And anybody affected by a genuine factory flaw probably wouldn't have thought much about it... if they didn't hear on the evening news that "Nintendo has to recall Wii straps" and see all the internet hype from drunken college students who smashed their hands into light bulbs.

The vast majority of people complaining about their straps breaking or their black eyes or their bloody fists were playing Wii Sports and went out of control. Done. There's three ways to play Wii Sports Tennis, for example. You can do little, truncated hand gestures all based around quick wrist flicks. You can do wide, sweeping arm movements that feel like actual tennis movements. Or you can do totally flip out and swing your arm as hard as you possibly can, because you're an immortal internet superstar.

The PS2 never travelled much. Maybe twice it left home.* The GameCube, on the other hand, went everywhere. I have this great backpack for it, custom-fitted for the Cube by a company that no longer exists. So, figuring that the Wii will end up doing its own goodwill tours, I have already been checking out the official bags on sale... but the nice ones - the big ones - go for at least $40 and they aren't even that big.

Then I remembered that I have a solution stashed in the basement's yard sale pile:

If you have kids, you probably already have one of these. You get them for free from the hospital, provided you're on the Enfamil mailing list. Hell, we have two of them, and we didn't even give birth. These bags are pretty much the ugliest diaper bags in the world, but they come with some free Welcome Your New Baby! samples and coupons.

And, they're fabulous beginner-Wii transporters.

Don't look half bad on the Wii!

The Wii web browser seems nicely serviceable. After the initial WiFi bootup, it's surprisingly fast - faster than my Sidekick's browser, anyway. Looks to me like anything wider than 700 pixels will enable horizontal scrolling, which I find annoying. That aside, I did not run into too many sites that looked like they needed a Wii-specific re-design. It renders sites fast and clean. The zoom feature is slick for smaller sets (wish it had multiple levels of zoom, though) and there's even a bare-bones rendering button that instantly reduces any page into mostly text for easy reading.

Did you ever look at something and just get it totally wrong? It's as if something in your brain sends the image information down an incorrect path.

Tonight I was clicking through the latest Looney Labs weblog update and ended up looking at their collection of weirdo Christmas trees. In 1993, they did one with Magic cards, which immediately brought me back to when the game was good. And this year's tree is covered with, essentially, NASA trash.

But I'm looking at the one for 1996, which they say was decorated in "space cones." And they provide a picture of the cones, but I just can't see the cone shape. I see these crystalline silver things. They look thin, metal. The text blurb notes that they really had no idea what the widgets were for, and I can't imagine a use for them as well. They're space cones, no doubt intended for some wild astronaut experiment.

After years of the LEGO games being pretty much edutainment garbage and the Star Wars games showing up with far more misses than hits, somehow a combination of the two became the year's sleeper hit. The power of positive buzz.

This game hits on a lot of important notes: simple controls, great chibi look, easy drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, and a fantastic use of license (TWO licenses, incredibly). This is the kind of thing I'll fall for every time, particularly when it comes to co-op games, which are blindingly rare. You have to hope that LEGO Star Wars' sales opened the doors for other clever and accessible multiplayer titles... you know, where it isn't just frag this and explode that. Great little game.

The flip side is that LEGO Star Wars has some serious flaws, all of which were overlooked by critics. If the game had not delivered such an overall fun and silly experience, it would have been slammed facefirst in somebody's empty cement in-ground pool for the floaty camera and confusing multiplayer glitches.

Memory Score: Best use of the Prequel Trilogy ever

The teaser trailer for the first Fantastic Four movie was really awful, but the movie really wasn't that bad, in a kind of fun geeky sci-fi way. Like clockwork, a teaser trailer for the sequel has shown up six months out.

Yay! The wedding! Of course. I'll guaran-effin-tee that Stan Lee is somewhere in that shot.

But I never would have guessed Brian Posehn.