This dates from the early 1980s, I think. I had a bunch of these... little comics that you would spool through a window to "watch" a cartoon. In fact, over a couple summers I made my own reel comics, although most of those were sized for a different toy (and actually, that was one of those car-drives-over-unwinding-path games, so most of those were chaotic race tracks.)
Anyway, here's Reel One of Moon Dog, "The Great Moon Robbery." (What a giveaway!)
My great internal battle on Monday was: do I pack up the entire Rock Band + PS3 kit for a trip to spend New Year's with pals in New Jersey? I waffled during my entire workday, but decided on a Yes during the commute home when I listened to Won't Get Fooled Again twice, really loudly. I'm practicing my Roger Daltrey scream.
The Rock Band box is as large as my entire trunk, so we had to cram our actual overnight bags into the car. This was a surprise to Rhonda. Oh, and I had to have the PS3 back in its retail box, safe on a seat, because I didn't want it in the trunk or on the floor.
Our hosts Chad and Dana have a beautiful plasma HDTV, so I enjoyed seeing what all of my PS3 stuff looks like in reality. Locoroco was absolutely stunning in HD, as was the clarity in Warhawk and the Burnout demo. I have pencilled "new TV" onto the list of things to do in 2008.
There was quite a full house over New Year's, so the Wii would have been a solid hit. And a far easier hustle. But Rock Band is too slick to be missed... plus, the last time I had the Wii out of state, it made some weird clicks and refused to boot up Metroid 3 on the first try. So I'm not risking its movement at present time. After all, I'd have no trouble finding a replacement PS3, but a new Wii? Maybe Nintendo's shelf stock will catch up by the summer. Maybe.
Q: What happens if I have to draw cards, and I already have six cards on my hand? Do I still draw? A: Yes. You simply draw six cards at the start of the game. Afterward, there is no limit to the number of cards that you can have in your hand at any one time.
What this is saying - in a really weird way - is that there is no hand limit in Kingdom Hearts. But what about at the start of your turn, when you're supposed to draw up to six, and you already have six cards in hand? In that situation, no, you do not get to draw anything.
50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2007 (The Beast) Completely awesome rundown of the 50 worst people in America, including this assessment of new View moron Sherri Shepherd:
[she] perfectly illustrated the Creationist's level of intellect when she declared her disbelief in evolution, and was immediately stumped about the shape of the earth, explaining her ignorance was due to the fact that she was too busy feeding her children to acquire rudimentary knowledge about... well, about anything, presumably. Further compounded her astonishing lack of basic knowledge when she authoritatively declared that Jesus Christ came before the ancient Greeks, and that she didn't think "anything predated Christians." Judging by these statements, Sherri probably thinks there are dragons on the other side of her desk.
How Microsoft stole Christmas (Japanmanship) I know I'm a dick, but I could read long, detailed stories about people getting pissed off over their dead 360s all damn week.
Get ready; they're going to do an early launch (2009) of their next console and screw over current owners, just like last time.
With Reel Two missing, we have no way of knowing how Swinehurd captured Moon Dog. You'll have to use your imagination. This is just like forgetting to watch Degrassi for a week. You'll be okay.
I always thought the art had kind of an underground comix vibe, particularly the panels with Swinehurd. It would be interesting to know if the unnamed artist behind Moon Dog counted Wonder Warthog as an influence.
John Flansburgh - one half of TMBG - has been appearing on Adult Swim's great new show Xavier. He's Xavier's computer assistant. Check him out at the beginning of this clip.
There's something screwy with the way Rock Band counts fans.
OK, I can understand the fan cap thing... with that in play, you know that the bands at the top of the charts are truly playing at the Expert-Expert-Expert-Expert level. Rather than just an Easy-Easy-Easy-Easy band playing for a month straight for quick fan wins.
And I can understand why my band loses fans when we fail a gig. Makes sense. Fail out the song and four thousand people stop buying your albums.
But why does my band cease to gain fans when we fall back under the fan cap for our particular level? Shouldn't we at least gain fans back up to the cap? It seems like you only gain fans when you play at a new venue... go back to a previously played gig and you can't get fans, you can only lose them. I'm completely missing something here.
Although it seems a bit premature to fashion an identity quiz based on the seven (eight?) Lantern colors before we've been told more than one paragraph about them, somebody did anyway. I mean, what exactly is the distinction between blue and indigo?
In the skeptic's game, there's a little something called Finding Significance... which occurs when people convince themselves that the shudder they just felt was the death whisper of their uncle three states away. Or, post-9/11, when everybody was out there adding up the airliner numbers in creative ways to come up with 9s and 11s. Here's an example of Finding Significance to con tourists into buying crap.
Basically, what you do is get a band name, album, and album cover from the following sources: 1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band. 2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album. 3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days is your album cover.
I clicked his links just to see what I would roll, and it was so funny/appropriate that I had to 'Shop it up and try again. I told myself I would stop when they ceased to be funny, but they never did. (The only results I rejected was when the Wiki page was the name of an actual band!) Randomized fiction follows.
The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman (Part 2 of 3) (YouTube) There's a beginning and an end to this fan film, but this middle bit is where all the action is. The very first shot - where Little Robin takes forever to get out of the Batmobile - and Little Penguin's script-prompted Waah Waah Waah just kill me.
Spider-Man's new Status Quo (CBR) Interesting one-sheet about the new Spider-Man reboot, post Mephisto. Although I'm fine with erasing the marriage to Mary Jane (I never liked the Erik Larsen big hair soap star MJ years), watering down the Civil War unmasking is pretty stupid. ("...some people seem to recall it, but nobody quite remembers who was under the mask"). Looks like Mephisto has the power to edit the Daily Bugle archives.
Ok, so first I'm ready to take off a week in December 07 for Smash Bros... then some days in February 08 and have people up for a weekend Brawl-a-thon. Now maybe I'll have to set this up for March? I need to stop trying to plan my vacation time around major game releases, 'cause this is bullshit.
When I first heard about Eye of Judgment, I was intrigued but highly skeptical. Clearly, EoJ represents an effort by Sony to push something totally unique to the market... in the wake of Nintendo's wild success with their differentiating feature: platforms with non-traditional controls, the DS and the Wii. And as past experience shows, when you go out on a limb, you either come up big or fail hard. Add to that risk the idea that Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game. So Sony expects you to dump even more money chasing boosters and rare cards. "Hi! Here's our new untested card game that requires a $70 buy-in assuming you already have a PS3! You'll want to buy lots of extra cards to have even more fun!" It's hard not to be cynical about something like that.
But after actually playing it - and yes, buying plenty of booster packs - I'm prepared to say that Eye of Judgment is not only a good game, it's a great game. And technologically speaking, it's a very clever proof-of-concept game. Here's what I thought (or what you may be thinking) about the game prior to purchase, and what I found out.
Darth Vader and Yoda appearing in next Soul Calibur.
Seriously? Look, it's not that I'm against Star Wars, and it's not that I give two shits about the SC storyline (hint to fans: there isn't one) it's just that this is sad. Like Soul Calibur can't stand on its own without some nonsensical cameo appearance. It also doesn't help that Star Wars is effectively DOA at the moment... this MIGHT have been cool circa 2002. For the record, I thought Spawn and that other Todd McFarlane embarrassment were stupid in SC2 as well. Link I gave a pass just because he looked like the Space World 2000 demo.
Call me when I can be Han and just shoot Mitsurugi from across the map.
Shoe named names.
EGM editor Dan Hsu recently listed three names who have stopped submitting review copies of their latest games because they were unhappy with the magazine's game previews and review scores. The jerks in question are Sony sports, Ubisoft, and the dopes who still make Mortal Kombat games. Like anybody gives a shit about new Mortal Kombat games. Bravo, Shoe!
Now we visit the Savage Jungle Inn. Is it too obvious to have a giant Bigfoot with an aching foot problem? Yes, that's probably a clue of some sort. Evelyn Morrison can't help you there, but she does have some interesting travel brochures.
This is the issue with the Dan Hsu editorial about the game companies yanking review copies of their crappy games. On the latest Penny Arcade Podcast, Tycho opined that this was a plus. Not that EGM should name names, but that corporate PR machines should stay away from professional game reviewers. They're both correct: those press release copy/paste jobs that used to define "previews" suck. It's an insult to readers to assume that we can't tell the difference, and it creates a striking narrative disconnect when you read a glowing preview followed months later by the two-blargs-out-of-five full review. Like, boy, were these mugs fooled by the beta build! They weren't. They just weren't allowed to talk about it, some naively assuming that glaring issues would be fixed and others cowed in deference to the usual assembly line machine.
For my part, I still go by the undefinable feeling I get when I hear about a new game. I'll check out reviews from a couple sources, and then glean the pros and cons out of that. For a game like Disaster Report, the bad reviews did nothing to sway me from buying it, because I was that captured by the game's concept. Conversely, the phenomenal reviews for Burnout Paradise are not actually helping me to my decision because I can't lose the taste that it's just a damn car game. And I really enjoyed Burnout 3... I would just like to hear about more ancillary features that would make Paradise a better experience, rather than just more of what I expect from Burnout. But back to the magazine.
U.S. Pokemon Snap commercial (YouTube) For those of you looking for something cool to download to your Wii, here's an ad for Pokemon Snap.
Note the truncated slogan at the end - "Gotta Catch 'Em" - I bet that was done because, technically, they're not "all" in Snap.
Sam & Max Headed For The Wii, Nobody Surprised (Kotaku) It's about time we started getting some substantial rumors about this. I really hope they avoid the download route, because I don't think the Wii's onboard memory can handle it.
Get ready to make the Disney Magic Connection (Jim Hill Media) Apparently Disney is about to start field testing a Disney World wireless PDA/gaming device that would display live wait times for rides, character locations, trivia, location-specific games, and other park info. And get this, it runs on a DS! I want that cart!
Eh. I guess what convinced me was the big in-house ad that says "THIS IS NO TIME TO BE WITHOUT NINTENDO POWER!!!" Now that they're on top of the gaming world, that ad is absolutely correct. I'm pretty well convinced that NP will have some nice articles on Smash Bros and Animal Crossing in 2008, so I'm sticking around. Although losing the big list of renewal gift options really bites. I'm getting a Phantom Hourglass mini-guide instead of something I would actually want, like a t-shirt.
X-Play still sucks; about to be rebooted AGAIN.
How many times does this show have to get revamped before somebody realizes that the long-winded over-written wink-wink-smarm is the problem? That and the sad decline of Adam Sessler. I caught their Mario Galaxy special and turned it off in disgust after five minutes of cheap shots at Sunshine (and they didn't even bring up the camera, which is about the only legitimate complaint!) But really: the for-print scripting style that this show has been doing for years needs to go.
This was sent to the office one day, so the bright idea was hatched that we should all get together and play it.
Taking turns, we made it through Hour Nine and then gave up when none of us could "LOSE THE TAIL!" Although we put in a second evening's effort a few weeks later - and did in fact LOSE THE TAIL - our opinion of the game being slightly better than good dog shit did not change.
I mean, it tries. The story is original (but is it canon?)... the actors were all super excited to be involved, judging from the PR-alicious commentary videos. There is a nice variety of levels, from regular ol' third-person shooting to regular ol' third person stealth to regular ol' third person driving to regular ol' psycho interrogating, but none of it is particularly well done. The best you can say is that the game's stinkiness largely does not interfere with your ability to complete it. Even though we never did because we got bored.
In the face of diminishing tourism, boring old history-laden Mt. Rushmore did the only thing it could: add a dinosaur tarpit and moderately expensive bungee jumping. Seems like a fun place to visit, but why exactly did we stop here again? Oh yeah, because this is an adventure game.
These scans are a portion of a free mini-comic that was produced by Bongo Comics to promote the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies. It's a rather sly look at the show's cancellation and shift to Cartoon Network. Here are pages 2 through 5... it goes on for another 12 pages, but this is the really clever stuff.
I submitted my replacement request on a Sunday, EA registered it on Monday... but UPS didn't ship the guitar until Friday morning. And then it arrived on Monday. Funny way to count "two day shipping." I guess there was some lag between EA notifying UPS... although, suspiciously, the UPS tracking system did not register movement until AFTER I had bugged EA Support about the status of my order. I am pleasantly surprise that UPS delivered on Monday, being a holiday and all.
Right away, I was curious about any noticeable differences between the launch day guitar and the replacement guitar. The most obvious one was this little green sticker...
When I saw that that Endless Ocean was only $30, I gave an involuntary twitch. In a good way.
This game is going to be a tough sell, so that kind of drastic underpricing is very necessary. Kids are going to write this off as boring edu-tainment, "gamers" really have no interest in something this low-key, so Nintendo's only hope is to throw this at the Wii Play/Brain Age crowd. You really have to know what you're getting into with a title like this, and you need a keen internal assessment of the types of games you enjoy. Reviews are not going to help you here. You need instinct.
On the Gameless Games scale, if you put most game-like on the left and least game-like on the right, I think you'd come up with something like this...
Endless Ocean is very much in the vein of Animal Crossing. You don't really have to do much of anything except screw around. It really is impossible to judge it as anything on the video game matrix. You swim. You touch fish. You find new and interesting places in which to swim and touch fish.
Rock Band, Guitar Hero drive digital song sales (Yahoo News) 2.5 million downloads for Rock Band; 5 million for Guitar Hero III. Crazy number play: only counting the 360 and PS3 editions - because those are the only versions that allow song downloads - you get 1 million copies of Rock Band sold and 2.8 million of Guitar Hero III. In rough terms, that's about the same percentage of songs sold across the two games. You can just hear the music companies salivating over this.
Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #138 (Comic Book Resources) Complete must-read... a look at Dwayne McDuffie's amazing 1989 tongue-in-cheek pitch to Marvel Comics: Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers!
As I mentioned back in August, my office PC has been living with some kind of IE virus. Although the Microsoft professional anti-virus bullshit, that we pay out the ass for, showed a clean machine, something definitely was wrong. The only solution was - get this - to wipe the disk and reinstall Windows. Imagine that.
So this week my desk received a fresh, sparkling Windows XP delivery. Then I got back into my Outlook to sort through all the email I missed while my machine was down. Upon attempting to open up a text doc that someone sent me, I landed into a classic example of Microsoft's utter inability to achieve any kind of simple, intuitive user design.
Last week I was all excited about Viz's re-printing of the Pokemon Adventures manga... until I realized that the chapters were grabbed randomly from the original volumes. So the story rarely makes sense, characters leave and arrive with no explanation, and my enjoyment of the series has been destroyed. Now I still need to find old editions of Pokemon Adventures #4 and #7, thanks Viz.
Perhaps the greatest Mac nerd joke of 2008. (Already!)
John Gruber of Daring Fireball did a special MacWorld podcast with Cabel Sasser of Panic Software, and they got to talking about the weird $20 iPod Touch "upgrade" that adds Mail and other apps to the WiFi enabled iPhone-without-the-Phone part. Then one of them points out that the upgrade is actually only 8k which means that - like a lot of video game DLC junk, unfortunately - the file is not actually delivering Mail, but instead simply unlocking the Mail app that already hidden somewhere on the Touch.
Cabel: "It must just be a p-list... Mail equals True."
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men Demo An OK demo. I guess I was kinda interested in this one, just based on the concept of two crazy hitmen forced to team up. Supposedly has 2P co-op, which I'm always up for.
I think my patience for FPS-style controls on a console is just about up. I trained myself to control Warhawk because I really like jumping into one of those fancy planes, but this kind of non-compelling FPS stuff does not inspire me to master it. I mean, I was certainly capable... hiding behind pillars as I led a squad of killers through a presumably corrupt business office... but it was still more of the same not-impressive gameplay that led me straight out of the demos for The Darkness and Timeshift. I bet the story is cool and I would dig it, but I don't feel like fighting the camera to find out.
Games like Kane & Lynch are trying to differentiate themselves from each other, but it seems like the genre hit the ceiling years ago. It's all about fine-tuning the experience at this point, and if you do that well (like, say, Half-Life 2?) you're a hit... but if you don't, it's just another pile of meh.
I did like the odd psychological audio flashbacks that happen as you die (I don't even recall if I was Kane or Lynch in the demo)... you get little snippets of a previous conversation, of some remembered poignant drama with a child, etc. But like the kooky time-manipulation in Timeshift, it's just not enough to make me care about dropping the $60 on the full version.
One of the bizarre little sub-trends in DS games over the past three+ years is the practice of giving a game a subtitle that uses the initials "D. S." Sometimes it makes sense, as in 2005's Advance Wars: Dual Strike. You know, like, maybe you can attack twice. Most of them, however, are just plain terrible... nonsensical phrases that have nothing to do with the game. Somebody, somewhere, probably deep in marketing, decided that inventing a fruity "D. S." subtitle would magically increase sales.
So now, fourhman.com is proud to present THE FIRST EVER DS ABBREVIATION AWARDS.
First the runner-ups, then the TOP FOUR FINISHERS!
Nominated But Not Too Awful Ranging from smart-and-subtle to blatantly buffoonish, these games just weren't horrible enough to land a prize. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (2005, Konami) Dig Dug: Digging Strike (2005, Namco) Mr. Driller: Drill Spirits (2004, Namco) Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (2008, Tecmo) Tenchu: Dark Secret (2006, From Software)
In another SURPRISE! move by Nintendo, I received a Wii email about a Check Mii Out Channel update late last night. The information letter must be a rolling release, because Kotaku still hasn't reported on it. I downloaded it right away, as I'm still moderately amused by the CMOC. <-- Initials provided for additional hipness.
Besides, one of updated features allows browsing of the Top 500 Miis (rather than merely the Top 50), which means increased access to Miis like this one:
Although I'm sure Nintendo will yank that Mii soon enough. Yank it hard.
My great internal battle on Monday was: do I pack up the entire Rock Band + PS3 kit for a trip to spend New Year's with pals in New Jersey? I waffled during my entire workday, but decided on a Yes during the commute home when I listened to Won't Get Fooled Again twice, really loudly. I'm practicing my Roger Daltrey scream.
Flans has a great bizarro role on Xavier.
There's something screwy with the way Rock Band counts fans.
When I first heard about Eye of Judgment, I was intrigued but highly skeptical. Clearly, EoJ represents an effort by Sony to push something totally unique to the market... in the wake of Nintendo's wild success with their differentiating feature: platforms with non-traditional controls, the DS and the Wii. And as past experience shows, when you go out on a limb, you either come up big or fail hard. Add to that risk the idea that Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game. So Sony expects you to dump even more money chasing boosters and rare cards. "Hi! Here's our new untested card game that requires a $70 buy-in assuming you already have a PS3! You'll want to buy lots of extra cards to have even more fun!" It's hard not to be cynical about something like that.
Darth Vader and Yoda appearing in next Soul Calibur.
Shoe named names.
This is 
I renewed Nintendo Power.
X-Play still sucks; about to be rebooted AGAIN.
released February 2006, received May 2006
Viz not kidding about "Best of".
Perhaps the greatest Mac nerd joke of 2008. (Already!)
To get up-to-date on my latest PS3 downloads...
