Nick at Nite Promos 1988 (YouTube)
The two My Three Sons ads are just great.

Strike Stuff (Mark Evanier)
Another great WGA strike update from Mark Evanier, this time answering some viewer mail (like, should I buy DVD sets now, or wait until a new deal struck... answer: it likely won't matter), and including this nugget about the Tonight Show:

In case you haven't noticed, they're running old Jay Leno shows from when Branford Marsalis was his bandleader, Helen Kushnick was the producer and Jay's hair was mostly one color. ... Makes you think someone at the network was thinking, "Hey, maybe we can embarrass Leno into coming back and doing new shows."

Best of the West (Japanmanship)
An interesting look at the short list of non-Japan games that have sold well in Japan.

Last Friday we took a family trip to the Day Out with Thomas event at our local antique train station. (What, you don't have one?)

Basically, three or four times a year, a life size Thomas shows up to keep tourist attractions like this one in financial solvency. I mean, I was at the Strasburg Railroad in the pre-Thomas days and it was a dive. You could feel the sightseeing inertia, the sense of impotent desperation as another weekend clicked by with no guests and no money and the grand old steam engines rusting in the shed.

You no longer get that feeling. At least, not on the Thomas weekends.

The Batman TV show DVD set is lost to lawyering.

A big studio rights argument means no release for this show. That Clark and I are DYING to see.

Lousy clan controls provide another way for Microsoft to lie about Xbox Live accounts.

Penny Arcade mentioned this the other day. Setting up a dummy Live account is a relatively easy way to manage a clan. So when Microsoft trots out their 60 gazillion Live users bullshit again and everybody in the Moron Press falls for it, just remember... that number in no way reflects the actual number of current Xbox Live users.

Unbelievably, I made an appointment to watch TV this week.

"Tin Man," on SciFi. It's a six hour miniseries that reimagines The Wizard of Oz, where "reimagines" means "craps on."

I'm an Oz fan. I've read all the original Baum books, and followed quite a few Oz-inspired revamps. As I understand it, with the Oz works long in the public domain, any old Winkie can publish their own variant. I've seen good adaptations and bad adaptations, and SciFi's Tin Man is definitely on the bad side. The Deadly Desert side.

I think there's more success than failure in the world of Oz cloning, but maybe I'm just a fanboy. For all of its flaws, the 1939 Judy Garland film does not do a terrible job at a surface-level Oz movie, although it left no opening for the larger world of the Oz books. Disney's Return to Oz is similarly not-terrible, and loops in some of Baum's best second-string characters. DC Comics' Zoo Crew did a very nice Oz storyline.

The comic book Oz Squad (a child and victim of the comic book industry's black & white explosion) is absolutely fantastic, precisely the kind of reimagining I enjoy: something that could potentially fit inside the existing canon but develops the world into something more. Oz Squad turns an adult Dorothy Gale into the leader of a security detail that guards and polices the border between our world and Oz. The first issue revealed that mechanical man Tik-Tok has a hidden interior Morality spring that had unwound, so Tik-Tok goes batshit and starts throwing babies off a building. I've probably mentioned Oz Squad before. Check it out.

And, you know, the novel Wicked is pretty damn cool for just that same reason. The continuity thing, not the Tik-Tok / babies thing.

Finished up Drawn to Life tonight, the DS game that asks you to draw your own sprites and then gives you shitty tools to do such. I'm terribly glad this game is over; the final boss fight was complete suckage.

One little bit of amazement: the game ends with an unexpected love song duet.

The RARE Korean "Engine Roll Call" Song (YouTube)
The signature Thomas tune, sung in Korean. Although, why label the video "RARE" as if it's some kind of lost eBay treasure? It ain't rare in Korea, I'll wager.

Uncle Sam and the runaway photocopier (Matching Dragoons)
It really is disgusting that DC would let an artist get away with photocopying 75% of his book. Duping your panels can be an effective dramatic storytelling technique, but this idiot is just plain lazy.

Eighty-Five Ways to Decorate your house with Christmas lights (Cockeyed.com)
From "Two-stories with no ladder" to "One Lassoed Bush."

One of the greatest things about finding a game you really enjoy is putting serious thought towards how it sucks. This sets you up for the inevitable sequel that fails to live up to expectations, but also provides a teeny tiny tinty window that, if the sequel actually hits on one your requests, makes you feel like a genius. Thus the cycle of internet commentary is complete. So here's my list for Rock Band, with each concern labelled as either a Patch It! fix, a Sequel It! fix, or a plain old Sell It! fix. IE, something they could tackle with a patch on the original game, or something that might have to wait for the sequel. Or lastly, something that Harmonix just isn't selling at the moment and should be.

Super fast notes suck. Now, I haven't played Guitar Hero III, but most things I've read suggest that GHIII's hard is more about making the fret patterns difficult for game reasons and Rock Band's hard is about being more accurate to the music (and neither choice is inherently better than the other, by the way.) I can't really comment on the verisimilitude of that assertion, but it seems like a reasonable way to distinguish between the two, and it matches with each game's overall presentation.

Unfortunately, having the notes become more like the music means that a lot of hard songs (and upper difficulty medium songs) rely on a ton of super fast note strings. I don't know from music, but I guess these are sixteenth notes? This is where everybody realized that their Strats were busted. Rock Band needs to cool it on this tact. Compared to some of the other hard sections, I think Harmonix actually thought these sixteenth note riffs would be easier, but jamming on the guitar hardware just makes you feel like you're breaking it inside.

I'll still get into a good old-fashioned internet fist fight if the mood suits me.

Check out this article about how the PC gaming market is not dying. The author claims that PC gaming offers more variety and innovation and then lists a bunch of samey shooters and RPGs. In comments, I tried to argue that, although the PC gaming market excels in many areas, it is not the home for the broadest range of gaming experiences. I pissed him off.

Red Dwarf VIII is better than I remember.

Once you get past the drudgery of the three-part "Back in the Red," this final season is pretty good. "Cassandra" seems filled with the kind of writing that seasons 1 through 4 were famous for, and "Krytie TV" has probably the best payoff of any episode in the show's run.

This is what you get when you have a national mag with nobody covering the "video game beat": faux articles that get everything wrong, as if somebody read the company press release and then just imagined what all the hype-talk might mean.

At work, I get a magazine called KidScreen, which covers the kids TV business around the world. I always enjoy leafing through it, because you see what kind of kids shows are popping up all over the world (I saw full-page ads for Boo-Bah and The Wiggles inside KidScreen years before those shows appeared in the States.) But the latest issue has an unexpected blurb about the DS game Drawn to Life that manages to get it almost completely wrong. And the wrongness is the most dangerous kind of misleading dialogue, because it extrapolates on the phonied-up press release and makes the game out to be something it is decidedly not.

Since I know you don't get this magazine, you can read the original article here, but I've duplicated it in its entirety here so we can tick off all the parts that are incorrect.

Customization in video games definitely isn't a new concept - but choosing hair colors and T-shirt styles is destined for obsolescence now that Drawn to Life is on the market. THQ's first original property for the Nintendo DS platform takes the Wii's popular Mii avatars to the next level, letting users draw their own characters and game environments from scratch with the DS stylus.

WTF does the Wii have to do with it, aside from name-checking the most popular gaming option for the last two holiday shopping seasons?

Smash Bros Brawl was supposed to be out this week, before the release was pushed to next February. By pure happenstance, I was off of work anyway. I would have definitely taken off work for a Smash Bros celebration; instead, I was off work and not playing Smash Bros.

I strung up the outdoor Christmas lights, but if you wanted to hear about boring-ass slice-of-life e/n crap, you're at the wrong weblog. Once the decorating was complete, I spent the afternoon/evening playing Rock Band and Pokemon Snap. Being home alone is a golden opportunity to play drums and really turn up the volume. I played through about 2/3rds of the Easy solo campaign. I'm getting high-90s every time, but then, again, it's Easy.

Then on to Snap, which I dutifully downloaded Monday night. I also grabbed the Photo Channel 1.1 update because I wanted to have one of my photos as the channel icon. I know there was a lot of teeth-gnashing about 1.1 removing the Photo Channel's ability to play MP3s (replacing with AAC files), but who the hell cares about the ability to play MP3s in the Photo Channel? And guess what, I changed my iTunes over to AAC as the default format long ago.

First of all, I had to find out what music was used, because I really dig the ending bit. My research shows that the techno in the middle is "Race War" from the movie album More Fast and the Furious, which seems like a shame, doesn't it? Unfortunately - because I paid $1 on iTunes for it - "Race War" is not the supacool ending bit, where the music really starts sounding awesome. "Race War" is merely the repetitive bed in the middle. The ending is, some say, an altered version of "Superfabulous," also in iTunes. Both of the songs are by electronic artist BT. He must have a fan in the Wachowskis.

This is so F-Zero. This could be a hellishly cool racing game if somebody decent is behind it. Get the Burnout team off of doing more damn Burnout games and onto this.

Potty Training - anime (YouTube)
This is what you get when you have a culture that isn't so hung up about honest poop talk. A pleasant, cute cartoon about a little tiger boy who is becoming aware of when he needs to go to the bathroom. The trials of Shimajima have become a central point in our efforts to get Clark potty-trained.

American Civil War II (Only in Japan) (GameSetWatch)
Count the amount of times your jaws hits the floor during this sentence: Metal Wolf Chaos is an Xbox game where you play the President of the United States in a mecha who rampages through various US landmarks and the game only came out in Japan with full English voice acting. This is kind of off-the-wall content that Microsoft needs to get me interested in their shitty product.

Waluigi assist trophy in Smash Melee (Smash Bros Dojo)
I am completely crushed that Waluigi will not be a playable character in Smash Melee. What's up with that?

We picked up Spider-Man 3 on a half-off sale at Toys R Us; $10 is a pretty fair price for a poorly written action-musical. And Clark loves most of it... he likes "Sand Guy," he always points out when Spidey needs "his hoodie up," and we talk about how the Venom suit makes Peter become a bad friend. But this one particular scene has made him double over in laughter on every viewing...

Burnout Paradise, PS3.

I forget why I got into Burnout 3, since I rarely touch driving games... but I'm terribly confident that Burnout Paradise just leaped into the Buy It pile. Particularly if GTAIV gets delayed again.

Burnout Paradise lets you use your PlayStation Eye(Toy) throughout the demo... you can pose for your license, which is hilarious. Of course, being a demo, none of this is saved, but I would imagine the full game lets you constantly check your license for stats and unlockables.

During online multiplayer - which was a hoot, even in the confines of a demo - the game briefly activates the camera to snap a picture of yourself whenever your car gets killed by an opponent. That picture is then flashed to the opponent as some kind of crazy look-at-my-penis-fool reward. In the online matches I played last night, I was the only guy with a camera... so I can't say I enjoyed any photos of random people flipping me off after I smashed their car. After a couple silly poses and shots of the cat, I parked my cam on the latest issue of Nintendo Power. Fanboyism FTW.

The Wii Attitude is heating up.

For the second year, retail clerks across the country are snippy and short with holiday shoppers desperate to find a Wii. While I was picking up a Dragon Ball Z game (see below) and some Eye of Judgment boosters, some shlub came at the Target electronics clerk with the question "Do you have any Wiis?" Without even looking up from scanning my clearance DBZ game, the clerk tersely replied "No." "Do you know when you will get some in?" "Nope," with an edge to it.

I know it's annoying to have people constantly asking for stuff that isn't on the racks, particularly in the casual sector. (I've seen NO WIIs signs posted on some storefronts.) But your minimum wage still earns these folks a full sentence response without attitude.

Pokemon Snap is just as good as I remember.

I was moderately worried that my glowing memories of Snap were rose-colored, being one of my first N64 games and a release right at the peak of Poke-mania. But after a week of taking pictures and unlocking most of the tracks, I'm happy to see that the game remains a unique, thoroughly enjoyable experience. I'm sad that my recollection of the game is sharp enough that I still know most of the secret snaps; I envy those discovering this hidden gem for the first time.

This has got to be one of the biggest advertising mis-steps this decade:

Dale Earnhart Jr.'s new candy bar. So the sport with probably the highest percentage of homophobes gets a candy bar named "Big Mo"? Now, I suppose the "Mo" could be for "Motherfucker" or even "Mormon"... but I've always understand it as frathouse shorthand for "Homo."

The ads running in this month's comics say that the "Mo" stands for his hometown. Good try.

Last year, the Nintendo Power Awards were all about Twilight Princess. This year, Super Mario Galaxy is sure to sweep. Since Nintendo Power was handed over to new owners, I'm not sure if I will renew my subscription. As of yet, the magazine is entirely unchanged under the new management... but the renewal process completely sucks compared to the FREE GIFT heaven that Nintendo ran. In the Nintendo days, I could choose from a pile of free strategy guides, t-shirts, or occasionally other collectibles like the Wii Remote keychain or the GBASP headphones. The new guys have exactly one renewal bonus, a mini-guide to Phantom Hourglass. Suck that.

Although here's an upgrade: the Awards voting is now done online, on a freakin' Wordpress URL. Really? You losers couldn't spring for a custom domain name for this? Couldn't get the form under the nintendopower.com URL that you already own? Poor show, New Guys. Way to look bush.

I guess this means that ANYBODY can vote in the Awards this year; previous voting was always down via postcard inserts in the magazine. Maybe, once the word gets out, this year we'll see a far greater spread in the results than the fanboy insta-vote for whatever was Nintendo's biggest first-party game. I kinda doubt it.

So here's Part One of my picks:

Not a big deal, but this past weekend's sudden ice storm uprooted some trees in the ditch that runs by our house.

That ditch collects all the water runoff from this section of the neighborhood and funnels it out under the street into the drainage system. So the combination of heavy ice on the top of the trees and wet mud at the base brought them down.

Bugs Bunny in Christmas (YouTube)
This is about as holiday as I'm going to get for you: a horrid minute of a bootleg Bugs Bunny doing a motion capture seizure to Christmas music. Enjoy.

Clause and Effect (NYTimes via Daring Fireball)
Fascinating look at how a misplaced trust in 18th century commas is messing up the way we interpret the Second Amendment.

Peter Jackson making TWO Hobbit movies. (The One Ring.net)
Hard to believe the litigants got their heads out of their asses for this one. I'm already predicting that the second movie (covering the WTF period between "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship of the Ring"... what, three hours of Bilbo making tea?) won't actually happen. Looks like it's time to start visiting TheOneRing.net again; haven't been there in five years.

The Harmonix/MTV/EA conglomerate finally debuted the Rock Band community site this week, although I could swear we were promised all sorts of things that haven't appeared yet... Where's the customizable t-shirts and bumper stickers? Figurines of your band? Where's the actual in-game avatars and band logos on the community pages? Did I imagine all of that? (I didn't.) The good news is that if you go directly to the social, you can avoid the awful awful Let's Resize Your Browser Window Bullshit that you get if you go to Rock Band proper.

So you can check out my Rocker profile here. That page lists all the avatars on my system, a few score-related items (should be more!), and plenty of personal musical factoids. My new multi-Joe names are evident there: Joe on guitar, Joe X on drums ('cause the X looks like crossed sticks), and Joe! for singing (the ! sort of resembles a mic).

Syncing up my Rock Band account with my PSN account was super-easy. It's listed as two steps on the sign-up page: 1. Know your PSN name. 2. Find your secret website code in Rock Band. Then you put those two into a form and you're done. (Although the code font's 9 looks like a g.) The 360 pairing reads like stereo instructions, including a bit where you have to make sure you are logged OUT of Xbox Live before you continue. That's just about par, isn't it?

You also get instant websites for your bands: witness my two, Unrepentant Athiests and The Do Mores. Note those URLs; I'm pleased to see that both are totally unique band names in the Rock Band universe.

The Ghostbusters smoke like they're on fire.

We watched Ghostbusters for the first time in forever this week, and I was surprised to see how many scenes show the guys smoking. In today's enlightened society where we treat smokers like the second-class inconsiderate assholes that they are, this really stands out and dates the movie in a bad way.

New wave of DC Super Friends sneaking into retail.

I spotted the My First Batwing today, which is part of the wave that includes figures of must-get Hawkman and Cyborg. Clark is getting the My First Batmobile for Christmas. Don't tell him.

Also, we saw a great playset for the Marvel Super-Hero Squad line... it's a building and garage with plenty of moving parts, and it comes with Doctor Octopus and your six hundredth Spider-Man figure. Birthday.

Referencing this weblog entry from two years ago, a fellow named Nick posted this in my Shoutbox.

In the "Of Ants and People" article you said several times that Christians are not under attack. Reread this article, you personally attack them several times. Hypocritical?

That Ants thing was written during the height of the Dover School Board kerfluffle about sneaking creationism into science classes. I did a bunch of entries about that issue, seeing as Dover is part of my home county. Not sure why or how Nick found that particular one; maybe it's got an awesome Google score.

Anyway, my response was:

You make a very common mistake: the majority attacking a minority is never the same thing as the minority attacking the majority. Christians like to pretend they're "under attack" because it helps them gloss over the centuries of lies and oppression that has been committed in their name.

But since teeny little Shoutboxes really aren't suited for this sort of thing, I thought I would expound upon it here. On Christmas Eve. This is a discussion I never shy away from.

In Part One, I predicted four wins for Super Mario Galaxy, although I could personally only award two of those. In the second half of the Nintendo Power awards, Galaxy is barely nominated. Aside from the generic Game of the Year category, these are the equivalent of the Oscar technology awards.

On to Part Two:

One of Clark's gifts this year was a toy cash register, the kind with a fake UPC scanner. Here he sits criss-cross with his fake money.

Among the other hits this year: a doctor kit, a Craftsman light-up drill, a Thomas VTech phone, an inflatable Fantastic Four spaceship/plug-and-play video game, and a Power Ranger suit...

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote (YouTube)
This is so completely amazing. This guy cobbled together a VR suite out of a Wii.

Think HD-DVD Caught Up? Think Again. (Aeropause)
Could Sony actually win a format war? So far, yes.

Activision seeks money for controller compatibility. (Games Industry.biz)
Feel free to enjoy the ongoing sniping between Activision/Guitar Hero and Harmonix/Rock Band, but it's the article subtitle that I really care about: "Stand-alone Rock Band guitars available in January." HURRY.

Kotaku has no idea what they're doing in their Game of the Year reader polls.

The big idiocy is that they limited it to three games per console. So there's no Metroid 3 on the Wii vote, no Locoroco on the PSN vote... and, unbelievably, no Warhawk on the PSN or the PS3! I guess Kotaku Editorial selected the three per, but that number is just way too restrictive. It's a poll, gang... you can have more than three options.

My ratio of Wiis to Friends is getting closer to 1:1.

Josh got a Wii for Christmas, bringing the number of Wiis among my friends and family to seven. Seeing as I only talk to about fifteen people a year, this is a pretty outstanding anecdotal sign of Nintendo's success.

My comic store's first ever Kingdom Hearts card game demo/tournament did actually happen today, and Josh and I were in attendance. We only had six people playing (including the store co-owner who was running the event), but I've been at Origins events that were far worse.

I had not played the game prior to today, but I did build a deck and read through the rulebook. It is a very simple game, with a pleasant amount of card types that are mostly all playable through some easy mathematical triggers. Like, you have to have a magic-user with a skill of 3 or greater to play a level 3 magic card, that sort of thing. Mainly, I was here for the free demo deck and promo card.