Back to the intense Olympic-level competition of the annual Nintendo Power Awards.

Best Platformer: Drill Dozer, Kirby Squeak Squad, New Super Mario Bros., Super Princess Peach, Super Monkey Ball, Yoshi's Island
Mario will win this one, and I have to admit I had to carefully consider my vote here.

Because I voted for Drill Dozer again. Yeah, part of it that I just like seeing the underdogs win, but also I think that Drill Dozer comes to the table with more newness than New Super Mario Bros.

I really like both of those games, so I wouldn't mind a Mario win here.

Best Shooter/Action Game: Mega Man ZX, Metal Slug, Metroid Prime Hunters, Rayman, Red Steel, Starfox Command
First of all, what's Raving Rabbids doing in this one? There was nothing else to nominate that might actually fit the category? You might as well throw Chibi-Robo in there.

I loved the Deception series back on the PS1. Brilliant stuff. The series consisted of three PS1 games released over a relatively short span of time, so as the PS2 era plodded to a natural denuemont, I was increasingly surprised that the franchise seemed to be dead.

After a five year absence, Deception returned in 2005, reinvented in name - if not in gameplay - as Trapt. Silly name. Probably would have been okay with it if it had been "Trapt" from the start, but "Deception" is soooo much cooler. I'm positive we can blame marketing for that one.

But who to blame for the fact that Trapt is little more than an expansion pack for the PS1 versions? They did absolutely nothing to bring this wonderful series into the next generation. Same artificial limitations on trap inventory. Same no-effort movies and death-scene-cutaways. Same ugly castle interiors. After so long of a wait, Trapt just barely manages to avoid insulting existing fans.

It's still ridiculously fun, in a PS1-nostalgia kind of way. Can you ever get tired of launching jerks into spiked platforms? And since it has been a good long time since I enjoyed a Deception game, I can almost give it a pass for looking and acting like a PS2 launch title. But it remains a letdown. It seems clear that Trapt did not spend much time in development, and was probably just done on weekends while the same team was doing their real work on the Fatal Frame games.

Memory Score: Where are the TMD?

February 2007 marks five years of fourhman.com archives. I was weblogging for a few years before 2002, but that was when I first installed Movable Type and made the leap to a professional amateur website. And as all Americans know from last September 11th, the fifth anniversary is the most important anniversary ever and everything should immediately stop and everyone must pay attention to whatever happened five years ago. Fourth anniversary? Piffle. Sixth? I can't even pronounce "sixth." But the fifth, well mister, you just sit your ass down and pay attention to how true heroes live.

So I thought I'd take a few to lay out some of the stuff I'd like to do within fourhman.com's next five years.

When's the next re-design? Am I due? This red-and-khaki look debuted in October '05, which is like thirty in web years. I've done seven complete re-designs in over a decade, some of which can still be found at archive.org. Overall, I like this look, but I've never been happy with how sparse things get once you scroll down any given archive page. So I can easily see some tweaking is in order. Which brings us to the first actionable item...

Back in December, I won an online contest for a copy of Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol. We're fair-to-moderate fans of the Karaoke Revolution franchise, although the general lack of features and too-small songlists kinda put us off the trail since KR2.

I'm riding really close to the end of Twilight Princess. I doubt I'll have it mopped up in time to dedicate my energies to Chulip this weekend, but it will be close. I did the Zant fight a few days ago - which was awesome, by the way - and I'm fairly certain that there isn't much left, storyline-wise.

But I already know what will happen. There will be a big battle, I will win, and credits will roll. Nintendo will graciously thank me for playing. I will be expected to turn off my Wii.

Except that I will want to go back and fish. Or find some heart pieces. Or delve deeper into that Cave of Trials. Which I can't do unless I go back to the last save point before the big finale.

I know I've railed about this before - specifically about Kingdom Hearts - but why can't games like this let you go back into the game world after beating the end guy? I absolutely hate games that let you spend 60+ hours screwing around a completely free environment, exploring the map to your heart's content... and then shut you out once Satan has been expunged. How about letting us enjoy the afterglow?

We received our first real blast of winter today, resulting in everyone staying home.

We saw it coming; last night we banked on this and treated Clark to a later-than-usual bedtime. We watched the first half of Star Wars.

He did move at all - completely glued to the movie - until the scene where Luke whines to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru about having to postpone his application to the academy. That scene marks the point where it stops being about the "robots." He liked watching them.

After that, he was up and down, sometimes watching the movie and other times running around the room. We turned it off right as they free Leia from her torture cell.

During Darth Vader's first scene, in the very beginning of the movie, Rhonda and I both did the silly Vader-heavy-breathing sound effect, which he thought was hilarious. Quite a bit later, during the part where Vader realizes that Obi-Wan is somewhere on the Death Star, Clark did the breathing all on his own. I'm sure that's going to be a turnkey moment when he's sixteen and looking back trying to figure where it all went so wrong.

I've been awfully controlled with my Virtual Console purchases, mainly because I think the pricing is just a little bit off. $8 for Genesis games is the one that really gets me, although most of the NES games wouldn't be worth $5 even if the Wii gave you a free blueberry mega-muffin with each purchase.

I'm pretty much only buying games that I don't already own in one form or the other. Which actually isn't a major limiting factor since I never had an NES, SNES or TG-16. Toe Jam & Earl is my only VC purchase that directly insults the Sega Genesis I have sitting in a box somewhere. Oh, and I guess me buying Super Mario Bros duplicates the SMB DX I have on Game Boy, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway, it's Super Mario Bros.

Last week I cashed in the last of my Shop Channel credit for Kirby's Adventure, which I was astonished to learn was released in 1993. Again, I missed out on this period of consoles, so it never even occurred to me that somebody was still making NES games two years after the SNES came out. Especially good ones.

It occurs about six minutes into the game. After avoiding helping your father unpack from moving to Long Life Town, you have to go meet the neighbors. Two of them are out gossiping just over your hovel's fence, Michelle and the town doctor.

The new Sonic game comes out this week.

Pause for deafening silence.

The new Sonic Wii game comes out this week.

Oh, really?

Doing a Wii exclusive is Sega's last chance to make people care about Sonic again. Everybody hated the supposedly "reinvented" Sonic The Hedgehog game from last fall, where Sonic makes out with Lacey Chabert while his growing army of clones plays the game for him. I hated Sonic Heroes because the point of each level is to not run. So jumping onto the Wii's coat-tails and driving Sonic like a car with the remote is Do Or Die time.

And judging from the box art, "Sonic and the Secret Rings" is the game where Sonic finally has that fatal heart attack.

We played the crap out of Mario Tennis on the N64. It was always a reliably fun evening. So I was pretty psyched for the sequel.

And then I was pretty disappointed. Because it's not a sequel. At least, not in the respect of offering anything new. It's the same game, except kicked in the junk a couple times. This is the kind of forgettable fare that hurts Nintendo's "the sequels are worth it" image and unleashes the anti-fanboys.

What went wrong? Those flashy new power shots, for starters. I'm sure they were intended to "Mario-ify" the experience in the same way that Mario Kart does racing games, but they just assassinated the game of tennis, wrecking the sport's flow with repetitive, over-long animations. And since these cartoonish plays always return any shot, no matter how far across the court, you can forget about your strategy and settle in for some painful endurance volleys. The best feature about the power shots is that you can turn them off. And we did.

Then there's the mini-games (and bonus court environments), which run from unplayable to maddening. Half of these games take place on fields so colorful that you can't see the ball. And the other half require the kind of tennis skill that the core game won't let you develop if power shots are turned on. If you've ever played multiplayer on that Paint The Wall game, well, you probably only played it once. It will kill your friends and then it will kill you.

Ok, sure, it looks great. Having new character choices is always a Good Sequel Thing (Wiggler!) To give the game proper due, there's not much you need to do to make a great tennis game, if that's all you plan to accomplish. Mario Tennis was a great tennis game. Mario Power Tennis was also a great tennis game, once you sidestepped the lousy add-ons. Just one that you largely didn't need if you still had the N64 version around.

Memory Score: "Yours."

Bought a PS2 today.

Yes, a PS2.

I've been fighting this for a while now. And although I consider buying a PS2 in 2007 a pretty stupid thing to do, I felt kinda backed into a corner. It was a well-considered decision, I can assure you.

My PS2 was dying. This was my second PS2, which I bought just before they introduced the slimline edition (fuck!) It stopped playing DVD movies several months back... it would start clicking and eventually freeze up. Note that the PS2 has always been our primary DVD player, so what little DVD-watching we did do was now shut down.

Throughout this period of slow decay, I managed to play through Bully and Guitar Hero, so it hadn't really affected my game time. But then Chulip came along and started clicking all over the damn place. This was the sign to take action.

You wanna talk obtuse, Chulip is right up there at the top. Like other "undefinable" games, Chulip has been branded as a "kissing game," which is just about as accurate as back when we all referred to Animal Crossing as a "communication game." Yeah, you kiss, but Chulip is really an old fashioned click-here-try-this-find-items-give-items kind of adventure game. And you thought nobody made those anymore!

The first thing you have to realize is that the game hates you. The first few hours are so steep that the manual includes a spoiler-laden walkthrough! I avoided that and had absolutely no idea what to do, other than die a lot. It's a good thing that the game is interesting as all hell, because it actively seeks to keep you from enjoying it (at least, until you suss out what's going on.)