February 2008 Archives

Lasagna Cat: 02/24/2006 (YouTube)
Let's keep the Garfield hate rollin'. Here's a hilarious Garfield riff, as mentioned on Penny Arcade earlier this week. Watch a bunch of them, they're great.

Introducing the Eyeclops: Super Magnifying Camera (Cockeyed)
Rob explores the Eyeclops, that goofy plastic eyeball thing that turns your TV into a damned impressive magnifying glass.

PlayStation Store Getting Overhauled In April (Kotaku)
Sure, Sony announced dates for the Dual Shock 3 (April 15!) and Metal Gear Solid 4 (June 12!), dumped a bunch of sweet LittleBigPlanet screens, has an awesome MGS/PS3 bundle coming, some cool-sounding Home news (who would have ever thought THAT), and a pre-order beta for Metal Gear Online... but what I'm most excited about is a redesign of that flippin' awful PlayStation Store!

Talk No, Vote Yes (Ted Rall)
Ted Rall nails McCain and Obama for publicly declaring one position and then voting the other way. Everyone in politics is an asshole. Everyone. Also the media.

The Perfect Game (Sexy Videogameland)
A beautiful analysis of what makes Pokemon so great. "With the advent of Wii, we acted as if it were the first time that a truly all-ages game were possible -- but Pokemon did it first." The haters are gonna hate, but Pokemon remains an incredibly engaging and personal experience.

Toy Fair 08: DC Super Friends (Action-Figure.com)
I love this line like I loved the Spider-Man & Friends line. Clark is going to be thrilled when he sees that they added Joker and Robin to the set. He still has GL riding shotgun in the Batmobile and what sense does that make.

Some days I think I spend more time planning my gaming than actually gaming.

With Smash Brawl and GTAIV finally on approach vectors, I simply haven't been playing anything new. I have a terrible habit of snapping up mediocre games right ahead of major releases, perhaps my worst example being a bargain purchase of X-Men Legends the week before San Andreas came out... and my best non-mediocre example being the discovery of Animal Crossing a few days before getting Kingdom Hearts. But while I have been chafing to get No More Heroes or Burnout Paradise, I have managed to avoid both. Although No More Heroes has been a near thing and if Toys R Us ever had the game, I would have impulsed it during one of our many trips there.

And as for Burnout, I can't help but think that GTAIV is more or less going to cover the same ground - or at least, as much car stuff as I would enjoy in Burnout anyway. Plus all the other inconceivable greatness that GTAIV will deliver on top of that. I think if I had heard that Burnout allowed for custom soundtracks, I would have had a greater urge to bite. Now I'm just hoping that feature shows up in GTA.

(There's a small hope, because you could do it on the PSP and, I think, on the PC versions. Of course, getting it to work on the PSP was a file-duping mess. And I'll bet none of those previous games allowed your songs to play alongside supplied DJ inserts, which seems like such an obviously awesome idea that I can't believe nobody's confirmed it. Laslow, taking calls and running commercials, during my favorite songs! A-duh.)

And man, I haven't picked up Professor Layton, which I totally want. Get ready for Layton to win all of next year's Nintendo Power "independent" awards.

Nor have I yet beaten Ouendan 2 into paste. I finished both Elite Beat Agents and the first Ouendan by finishing every single song on all four difficulties, so I can't consider Ouendan 2 done until I hit that same benchmark. I should have been doing more of that instead of wasting all that time on Drawn to Life.

Rhonda has gotten back into Brain Age's sudoku levels, as she helps Clark get to sleep. He's already learned that number puzzles are boring, but hopefully he's picking up that being smart like that isn't. I should get Layton and have me and Rhon do the puzzles together.

The most gaming I've done lately is PixelJunk Monsters (which remains incredible) and before that, Endless Ocean (which remains impenetrable). And this week I started a second run through Ratchet & Clank Future, just to see it in HD. It's been nice to note that the game has more upgrades and weapons available for your second play, because I'm super-anal about powering the weapons all the way up. And yeah, HD. Woof.

This is the most dangerous time, because this is when I'll crack and buy something stupid like Devil May Cry 4. I just need to stay focused until March 9. I've already put in for a vacation day on the 10th.

I just read Scipio's mini-rant about Captain Atom and found myself going "Hey yeah! What about that?"

I guess I just assumed that DC had dealt with Captain Atom suddenly becoming evil Monarch in some book I missed. Which would be pretty likely, as Cap hasn't had much profile to speak of in years. Turns out, they haven't. Most recently, Captain Atom went from a middlingly successful exchange student to the WildStorm Universe to a prime mcguffin in DC's Prelude to Countdown to Final Crisis For Serious Really.

So that's disappointing. When I read Countdown: Arena - which I liked, except for the rushed art - I figured that the Monarch/Atom was a dimensional clone or "our" Captain Arom. I suppose that could still be the case.

I was there for Justice League Europe/International and Armageddon 2001. I liked Captain Atom. I liked that all-silver costume with the red burst on the chest. I liked his role as a major figure in the DCU. Not that all of that means much... you tend to like what you like when you first liked it, right?

The thing is, big-power characters always get shafted in DC because everybody needs to come up short when compared to Superman. By definition. Superman screws up the curve. And his marketing drives the company. So guys like Martian Manhunter, Firestorm and Captain Atom keep getting lost in time or cosmically de-powered or psychically shut down or sent to another universe or given ridiculous weaknesses (and, in J'onn's case, given them again after removing them... I'll never forgive DC for that.)

Maybe the problem is, as a Charlton character, Captain Atom just doesn't fit the legacy mold that DC prefers. Wait, scratch that, it's not Charlton that's the issue... DC has had great success with a Blue Beetle legacy, and has even done some tentative work with Judomaster, Peacemaker, and the Question. The real issue is that DC already has two other Atom legacies. Or, at least, one extremely convoluted one that doesn't include Captain Nathaniel Adam.

You've got the original Al Pratt Golden Age Atom, who was a boxer with an Atomic Punch power (who wasn't a boxer in the '40s). Unlike Flash and Green Lantern, there's not much connection to Al's Silver Age successor, the Ray Palmer Atom. Ray was a scientist with the ability to shrink. So Al's legacy first went to his godson Nuklon, who later renamed himself Atom-Smasher (which I always thought was brilliant). Nuklon's deal, aside from carrying off a mohawk way way way after it was fashionable, was similar to Al's... super-strength, plus the ability to grow. But then we find that Al had a son of his own, Damage, who has energy-based powers and now sports a variant of Al's costume. Add to this the new Ryan Choi Atom, who took over Ray's mantle after Ray vanished at the end of Identity Crisis. And with Al dead (thanks Zero Hour!) and Ray missing (only recently returned, but not in costume), Ryan has been the only "Atom" character of note... despite Atom-Smasher and Damage still hanging around.

So how is a "Captain Atom" supposed to fit in all of that? He's not connected to either Atom dynasty; he's just a 1960s relic. "Atoms" aren't even that cool any more. If he lives through Final Crisis, I bet they rename him.

During the character's late 80s-early 90s revival heyday, Cap was pretty much the only atom around. Al was still in Valhalla with the rest of the Golden Agers (ironically released during one of Captain Atom's post-Armageddon jaunts, actually), Nuklon was ignored like the rest of Infinity Inc, Damage and Ryan Choi didn't yet exist, and Ray Palmer was semi-retired. So the name confusion of Captain Atom was no trouble at all. This was when the character was at his best. A powerhouse in the League, a key figure in DC's event storylines.

Since the weirdness of Armageddon 2001, he did a few episodes of Justice League Unlimited. He was pretty central to Kingdom Come (albeit a victim of the common get-the-powerful-guys-out-of-the-story-first ploy). He led Extreme Justice, which sucked. He showed up as a government tool in the first story arc of the Superman/Batman series. Then he split to the aforementioned WildStorm loaner program (with his original, uglyass costume) and apparently made something of himself... only to return to the DCU as a motiveless cypher with unstoppable power. The Wikipedia entry is quite thorough, and even it has little to say about how Captain Atom flipped One Year Later.

I have to hold out hope that DC will explain this somehow during Final Crisis or these last few issues of Countdown. It's just too odd to leave such a major thread dangle like this, even for comics.

Some incredible genius has hit upon the idea of Garfield Minus Garfield. Similar to the still-enjoyable Marmaduke Explained, Garfield Minus Garfield removes the cat from the strip and exposes the lonely, psychotropic world of Jon Arbuckle. Here are some of my favorites, but you need to go see all of them. I think you'll agree that this improves the decades-old smarm of the Garfield strip immeasurably.

I'm not sure the internet can ever top this.

Cartoon Network and Aardman fail sensitivity training.

From the Wallace & Gromit guys: a obviously Asian-inspired CG series, called "Chop Socky Chooks." "Chop Socky" is bad enough, a eye-roller of a phrase. But "Chooks"? Come the fuck on. It's like two Asian slurs in one. I would expect better from Aardman than yet another Westernized anime show, with a vaguely racist title.

Incidentally, "chook" is slang for "chicken"... in Australia. Somehow I doubt that meaning translates to the US. Like they couldn't just call it "Chop Socky Chickens" and have that be dumb enough. The characters don't even have beaks!

Also note that the promos for the show pronounce the word "chucks"... methinks CN is trying to hedge their bets on this one.

Didn't Magi-Nation fail once already?

The Magi-Nation TCG appeared in 2001, as somebody's best effort at combining the kid-friendly concepts of Pokemon with the high fantasy setting of Magic. I still have the free t-shirts they handed out at Origins that year. Magi-Nation disappeared pretty damn fast... but now it's back, six years later, as a Kids WB show? And get this, there's a card game coming out based on the cartoon! I wonder if it will be the same game as before.

No, I'm not finished with the new Fatal Frame cards.

Did some playtest runs of the new cards and found some lacking. A couple introduced play mechanics that were messy and would need too many asterix notes to clear things up. At least one card idea was just plain boring.

Of course, one of my new ideas to replace the rejected cards is something so stupidly game-breaking that I think I'm going to have to declare it an optional addition. It's thematic, it's intriguing, it's funny, it's dangerous, it offers no occlusion to the current rules... it just potentially loses the game for a player who has it. I can't NOT enjoy something like that.

Pika pikaaaaaaa!

Looks like Pikachu will once again be getting the ban from friendly Smash games. From Penny Arcade's Tycho:

After a few days of playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl, I can answer the question that burns in every gamer's heart. Yes, the shock mouse is still unmitigated bullshit. He remains the yellow refuge that is home to children and quaking cowards.

Even Nintendo fans have to feel superior to something.

One of the running themes in the last few episodes of Nintendo World Report's podcast is the guys busting on card games. Somehow, card games (Magic has been mentioned the most, but they did recently rag on Pokemon even though none of them has ever played it) are nerdy. Board games have taken some shots as well. Video game fans making fun of tabletop games? All this Nintendo-Is-Number-One stuff has finally gone to the fans' heads.

Latest LittleBigPlanet video shows off incredibly cool creation tools.

Sony cannot get this out the door fast enough. The level creation stuff shows how you build your own platformer levels... involving plenty of pre-built stuff and clip art, but also a fascinating artistic tool where you stamp down a block of texture and then carve away at it to create the final shape. Looks amazing.

At least we know the world of Wii is going to look at lot different by the end of 2008. Since, up until now, the Wii has been largely unchanged since launch... barring the odd Wii Channel dropoff, most of which have just been slot-filling time-killers.

We know that WiiWare games are finally coming, and that Nintendo is already rather aggressive about it. Eternity's Child and LostWinds sound and look pretty damn amazing. And I'm still ultra-curious about that Pokemon Ranch game, plus I know I'll get Dr. Mario. Although, crazily, there were no announcements about a memory expansion! Why do they have to be so hard-assed about this? Hopefully the participating third-parties will be smarter than Nintendo and allow their WiiWare games to be shifted to an SD card and playable off that SD card.

We know that Everyone's Nintendo Channel is coming this Spring. This is the one that guys like me have been begging for since launch... with downloadable DS demos and game promo videos. It's going to be a focused hype Channel, perhaps even more advertorial than the sort-of-randomly posted game videos you find on PSN. I do wish they change the name before launch; "Everyone's Nintendo Channel" has got to be the worst Channel name yet.

And now Nintendo has revealed a new "Pay and Play" system, where certain future games could now support monthly fees or add-on DLC packs.

Why would they debut that - which is not the kind of announcement that's likely to gain any fans - and then not back it up with the games that will benefit from it?

If the games are great, no one will mind the fee. Well, almost no one. Monthly fees generally indicate MMOs in this modern era, although I'll wager Nintendo has something else in mind... mainly because Nintendo always has something else in mind. This could be a very big deal should the new Animal Crossing - which has been radio-silent for years - arrive under this kind of plan.

Another viable option could be that Nintendo plans to open up their online service to get past the Friend Code thing... but only if you're paying for it. That would be a very clean way to add voice chat, add live friend status, and other enhancements that they feel are problematic for kids on a free, always-on service. It would be tough for parents to ignore THE DANGERS OF THE INTARNETS if they're ponying a monthly bill. Although not impossible, of course. If this is the case, the day it launches we'll all have to endure another round of obnoxious know-nothing media outlets packing sweeps pieces about Nintendo "toys" letting pedophiles into your home.

On the face of it, I'm not exceptionally leery of Pay and Play. Assuming the content shows up and is worth it. But I'm annoyed that they couldn't bother to name some games that will use this service. They didn't even bring up Guitar Hero III, which would have been a HUGE announcement. I'll bet two-thirds of the Wii Guitar Hero audience do not even know that you can buy new songs on the PS3 and 360 versions. I wonder if you'll ever be able to download songs on the Wii version.

Name the games, Nintendo. Name the games.

Apple Soundtrack (YouTube)
Somebody used the default Apple sound effects to make a pretty sweet little song in Garage Band.

The Conceptual Hall of Shame (Absorbascon)
This is where Scip is at his best, when he deconstructs elements of comicdom. In this entry, he exposes one of the weakest villain tropes around, the "Vengeful Childhood Friend."

Toshiba quits HD DVD business (Yahoo News)
When I got the PS3, I didn't really care much about the blu-ray. In fact, it annoyed me because it drove up the cost. Now that blu-ray won and I have a high-def set, my perceived value of the PS3 just shot up. My first blu-ray purchase will be DC's Justice League: The New Frontier.

Sorry Cindy McCain, It's Time to Take the Gloves Off (Daily Kos)
Ooh ooh ooh, let's get the hate started! John McCain's wife - aside from being nearly 20 years younger and suspiciously married McCain only a month after he divorced his first wife - funded McCain's political career with her own inherited wealth and was caught stealing percocet from her own charity to support her painkiller addiction. More down home, grass roots, good honest GOP family values in action!

Gen Con Files for Chapter 11
Crazy. The nation's biggest gaming con just went bankrupt. Although this year's convention is still going as planned, it sort of seems like future conventions are in danger. Can a bankrupt company continue to put on gaming cons? The real kicker is the reason why: They're being sued by Lucasfilm! Lucasfilm claims that Gen Con majorly screwed up a charity auction, including not giving the proceeds to Make-A-Wish.

Objection: Is the Cultural Trajectory of Videogames Doomed to Parallel That of Comic Books? (Level Up)
There's a meme going around this week that video games will end up being about as well-respected as comics... meaning, naturally, that they will never "grow up." The original weblog article manages to insult and underestimate both comics and gaming, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal steps to their defense.

Pauly Shore countersues Wes Craven (Yahoo News)
Who in balls would have thought that Pauly Shore and Wes Craven are neighbors.

PlayStation Eye Tank War Demo (Kotaku)
Holy crap, Kotaku has a great video of a PSEye tech demo where the camera scans your drawing and turns it into a tank. It's like Drawn to Life without all the suck. This would be a killer tech feature for LittleBigPlanet.

I spotted these in a local Target a week ago:

That's a small pile of original Pokemon Trading Card Game Starter Decks. Like, from 1998. With a foil Machamp and everything. That's some Pokemon history right there.

How exactly would some ten year old starters return to the racks? Who got lost in the stockroom and found these?

I should have carried one over to the price checker to see if Target still wants $9.99 for it, but I was too stunned. I've seen old starters discounted to $4.99 before, but never a box from a set that old.

Yesterday VG Chartz issued a press release stating that the PS3 has sold 10 million units faster than it took the 360 to sell 10 million units. And then the universe caught fire and we all died.

I actually noticed this some time ago and probably even mentioned it once or twice, that the PS3 was selling more or less exactly the same as the 360. When I first found VG Chartz's little graphing thing, that surprised the hell out of me. Because, as we all know, the PS3 is pretty much a failure in every corner... third place, too expensive, not enough games, corporate hubris. And the 360 has become the gamer's machine, with everybody lauding its incredible library and cohesive online system. If you ignore things like Microsoft's abysmal customer service and the terrible RROD failure rate, everybody's pretty up on the 360.

So I figured that sales would follow that popular opinion... and it never has.

That chart lines up the Wii, PS3 and 360 sales from launch day, so you can see how many consoles were sold from Month 1 of release, onward. Despite being more expensive, despite the insults and inanities of Sony's mouthpieces, despite essentially stabbing out the hearts of a world of PS2 fans... the failure PS3 has sold just as well as the success 360.

This means either they're both successes or they're both failures. And if you use the Wii as the standard, it's tough to use the word success. I mean, jesus. Look at that blue line. It's damn near vertical.

Whenever anybody brings up VG Chartz, there's a lot of screaming and moaning that their numbers are fraudulent. Especially if the quoted numbers are against somebody's personal favorite. Although I certainly see a lot of complaining about them, I've yet to see anybody prove that they're off.

Get ready for a PS3 sales boost now that HD-DVD has packed it in. For almost two years, American consumers have seen two side-by-side racks at retail: brown HD-DVD cases right by blue Blu-ray cases. There's a lot of people out there, new HDTV owners, who have been sitting this one out, waiting to see if either would dominate. Now they need wait no longer. Sony's marketing needs to jump on this right away, and start educating the public on the PS3's status as an excellent Blu-ray player. (Everything I read suggests this is true, incidentally, since the PS3 is more easily upgradeable as Blu-ray evolves. Compare that to the prevailing wisdom that the PS2 was merely a moderate DVD player... although I personally have never owned a DVD player that wasn't a PS2.)

Yes, Blu-ray movies are $25 to $30. We all went through the same thing when our long national nightmare of VHS ended, and DVD was the expensive alternative. In fact, I can even distinctly remember, back when the movie studios commonly thought that no one would want to buy movies but instead rent them, VHS movies routinely carried price tags from $60 to $90. Even the kids titles. So there's no point whinging about the $30 price because that's going to come down. And now that Blu-ray player sales are about to steamroll skyward, that price can come down all the sooner.

Even with all the bullshit from Sony over the past three years ("You'll buy a PS3 even if there's no games!"), the long tail of PS2 fandom is still out there. People want to follow them. PS2 owners have been moderately lucky in that the PS2 was still getting games in 2007. I'm sure many PlayStation loyalists have made it through the past year with little more than God of War 2, the GTA PSP ports and two Guitar Heroes. Not to mention catching up on anything they missed out of the PS2's vast and impressive library. Now that the Blu-ray feature of the PS3 is a definite benefit - as opposed to a potential waste - these unconverted will be re-thinking their frugal stance. Naturally, a price cut for Holiday '08 won't hurt, and it seems entirely reasonable to see a price cut if the machine can show momentum after the HD-DVD announcement. I'd also hope for a hardware redesign... seriously, the PS3 is too big and ugly. A slimmed down PS3 box selling for $300 has got to be Microsoft's greatest fear right now. If Microsoft comes in third this generation, the shareholders are not going to allow an Xbox 720.

Additionally, people trust Sony in ways that they will never trust Microsoft. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are just about the best-liked products Microsoft has ever made, and yet they're beset with reliability issues and will never turn a profit. Meanwhile, when you want to buy the best television set out there, you go Sony and always have.

Regardless, nobody's catching the Wii. Only Nintendo can screw that one up.

This month's Marvel books are running an interview with writer Mark Millar, and I found the first quote rather interesting. It's in response to a question about what he thinks of the MU after Civil War (which was, what, a year and a half ago?):

It really reminds me of the Marvel Universe I first discovered when I was a little kid. Marvel books always seemed a little more real and frightening than DC books. It wasn't a world where the heroes were quite as comfortable with one another. Even when they met, they were always fighting, whereas the DC guys always seemed like they were going fishing together when they were off-duty. I like the slightly uncomfortable feel of the new Marvel Universe. The idea that it's constantly in flux.

Sigh. How Marvel of him to try to lob mild attacks at the Distinguished Competition. As long as I can remember, Marvel's marketing plan has always been to stoke the fanboys. Stay classy.

But he's right. He just comes to a wildly different conclusion than I would.

That's precisely what I like about the DC books, that the characters enjoy a reputation of being, well, friendly. Yes, they do tend to hang out when not chasing supervillains. To me, that makes the DCU "a little more real," because it shows the heroes acting human. In broad terms, DC has a groundswell of characters who are marked by their friendships: Superman/Batman, Wonder Woman/Superman, Black Canary/Oracle, Blue Beetle/Booster Gold, Fire/Ice, Flash/Green Lantern, Green Arrow/Green Lantern. Some of these are friends because they have similar personalities, others are friends because they have different means to solve the same problems... and that strikes me as a very real appraisal of human dynamics.

Millar seems to be inching around the idea that DC suffers from story stagnation because, more or less, Superman and Batman have been friends for seventy years, but I wouldn't call forty years of Thing and Hulk fighting each other much of an editorial improvement. And reading between the lines, this is just another way of underlining the stereotype that DC's characters are black-and-white while Marvel's are all shades of gray.

I know he's just winding up readers. It's grist for our imagined rivalries. "Marvel Zombies" didn't always refer to simply an overdone miniseries concept.

One word that jumps out of that quote is "frightening." Seems like a odd choice, doesn't it? Do people want to read superhero comics that are frightening? I like dramatic, I like compelling, I like riveting, I like suspenseful. I'm not sure frightening makes the list. Millar is a writer, so I'm positive he chose that word on purpose... but I can't say I ever really enjoyed a comic because it was frightening.

The other hanging chad in there is the phrase "when I was a little kid." Ooh. Kind of a burn, right? Like, when he was a kid, he enjoyed seeing heroes fight each other. I get that. But today's comics readers aren't kids. They're adults who are hooked on power fantasy soap operas. So he's excited about returning Marvel to the kind of stories he enjoyed when he was seven. After reading World War Hulk (which Millar had nothing to do with, I believe), I'd have to agree.

Of course, the truth is that both companies offer plenty of both sides of the argument. I'd just call it a 70/30 split in either direction. You don't think Captain America and Iron Man went fishing together back when they were both pals in the Avengers? You don't think the Justice League was pissed as hell at Batman when they discovered Brother Eye and the OMACS? There's a lot more parity there than Mark Millar and the Merry Marvel Marketing Society would like you to believe.

Mass shootings getting more and more baffling.

I don't know why we have to weep and wail about finding a motive for anyone who goes on a murder rampage. If somebody if fucking nuts enough to do that, that's motive enough. They're crazy. You're not going to stop any future killing sprees by understanding what made one guy flip. Every situation is different.

Guns are too dangerous and too easy to get in America, our gun control measures suck, and our tragedy-driven 24-7 news media feeds into the death-egos of psychos. And once again, because the killer was white, not a single news article mentions his race. If he had been black, Asian, Muslim, gay or any other minority category, that's all we would hear about. Seriously, you can watch this happen every time. The next time some dude goes batshit, check the news and watch institutionalized racism in action.

Roger Rabbit. Erm.

You know what movie doesn't hold up, twenty years later? Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The murder "mystery" plot is threadbare and clueless. The animation integration is lousy. Much of the animation itself is lousy. Roger's voice is embarrassingly grating. The constant Warner Bros character cameos only underscore how much of the Looney Tunes library is completely unseen these days. If you made this movie today, no one would even want Bugs Bunny in it.

Not that I'm begrudging it as a museum piece, as a stepping stone towards animation's more liberal acceptance today (OMG! Cartoon characters can swear!)... it's just a far better movie in my 1988 memory.

I'm officially inconsolable on BG&E.

Somebody put together a list of (mostly) exclusive GameCube games that Wii owners might want to look into and of course Beyond Good & Evil shows up and everybody starts jumping in to lionize it.

I just don't get it. The story sucked. The ugly people are the bad guys. Their plan is pathetically obvious. All the good characters fall all over themselves to help you out, and the entire "resistance movement" comes down to you snapping three photographs. Sure, the gameplay is good, but it's too short, too linear and there's too little of it. BG&E belongs nowhere near the likes of Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, Chibi-Robo, or Eternal Darkness. It doesn't even rate against Ratchet & Clank.

$3 saved!

I was going to buy Tiny Titans #1 this week until I saw that DC is making that one of the free books for this year's Free Comic Book Day.

Multiple inputs are the shiz-nit.

One of the greatest upgrades with the new TV is the amount of inputs built in to the box. I used to have an RCA/s-video router handling all of my video, plus secondary lines taking all the audio into the surround sound receiver. Now everything goes into the Sony and one audio goes out to the receiver.

Although I am exceptionally curious as to why Sony would number the HDMI inputs thusly: 1 (on back), 2 (on side), 3 (on back, right beside 1). That was pretty damned confusing for a few minutes when I couldn't figure out why HDMI 2 wasn't showing video... because I plugged into 1 and 3.

PixelJunk Monsters is reason enough to buy a PS3.

Mike and I spent all weekend playing it. All weekend. And we still couldn't even open up the final difficulty tier! Somehow, this is one of those games that is so hard, but yet still makes you think like you're in control, like just one better decision and you'd beat the level. I'm very excited about potential expansion levels.

Big Rock Band freakout.

This weekend we played Rock Band on the HDTV for the first time and as you may know, the game includes some calibration options depending on what kind of TV you own. The various TV types - plasma, LCD, standard, etc - have millisecond differentials in how they sync up video and audio... and in music games, those milliseconds can mean a lot. I changed my setting to LCD, thought I was a genius, and then was immediately failing out of drums on easy. The solution was to set it to DLP instead, which I guess is an even finer tuned setting for HDTV sets like mine.

And it obviously worked, because I nailed Clarksville medium (guitar) with 100%, and made through another handful of songs on the hard campaign.

Since Nintendo didn't think it was worthwhile to allow you to save your Endless Ocean pictures to the Wii Message Board (DUMBASSES), here's the only way I can share my underwater photography with you. The old fashioned, camera-at-the-TV way.

That's a pretty typical scenario in Endless Ocean. Couple of fish swimming, with the usual flora-covered rock in the background.

At certain locations, you can pull up a zoomed-in perspective for a finely detailed view. Generally, this is where you find exceptionally small fish or crustaceans. It's a shame that the entire world doesn't have this level of fidelity.

That's not a lousy real-life camera photo; the game lets you screw around with f-stops. Now, I've forgotten everything college ever taught me about f-stops, but I know now that they can make the background purposefully blurry.

Between dives, you may find some animals visiting the deck of your boat. Birds like this one make a lot of sense. Penguins do not.

And that is just ridiculous.

These are just two photos of schools of bigeye travally that I quite liked.

There's a funny sidequest of sorts where a magazine publisher is constantly emailing you and asking for photos of certain fish that can be used in his magazine.

This is what passes for plot in Endless Ocean. You stumble upon a plesiosaur skeleton in a cave wall and your topside partner gets all excited about it.

Yeah, I'm sure that's the shark from that movie.

Snake Eater Pictures (YouTube)
Oh my. This was on Kotaku this week... a collection of insanely great choreographed photography from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2). This goes a long way towards showing how awesome this series is, and I already thought it was awesome.

The Aristocats: Making Money the Old Old-Fashioned Way - Inheriting It (Toon Zone)
A non-sentimental review of one of Disney's second-tier classics. Some really great lines like "Oh, and there's also a side plot involving Edgar ... in which he loses his hat and umbrella."

Microsoft to Acquire Danger, Maker of Sidekick Technology (Wall Street Journal)
And that settles that. My next phone is an iPhone.

Steve Gerber, R.I.P. (via Mark Evanier)
No longer trapped in a world he never made.

2719 HYPERION
Fantastic Disney fan weblog, with some great bits of Disney lore and some excellent photography of little-seen elements around the parks (which I am SO into). It also has some very nice design and layout work, which makes it very very classy.

I now have all 1,080 p's.

I was threatening it for some time now, but this week I finally manned up and bought an HDTV. I went with a 40" Sony Bravia W-series. For the incredible contrast ratio. Why only a 40", you ask? Well, we just didn't want to have to re-arrange the couch and entertainment center. So I scouted for the best TV I could find that was physically no wider than 42". In the Sony line, the next step up from W-series is XBR-series... but the smallest XBR is a 40" with a 43" base, so that was a non-starter.

Obviously it's a serious purchase, and there I was at Circuit City comparing the W-series to the V-series and thinking "Am I really going to spend another several hundred bucks for that contrast ratio?!?"

Then I picked up a $20 PS3 HDMI cable and a $20 Wii component cable. Both by the same company, some dopey no-name. I know $20 is a ridiculously good price for an HDMI cable, so either Toys R Us had the price screwed up or my HDMI is of low quality. Although the PS3 looks freakin' incredible, so I'm happy with the HDMI thus far.

My big fear was analog cable. Regular old cable TV looks like ass on an HDTV set. There seems to be no way around this. It's taking an image that's 420 or whatever and blowing it up to 1080. It's crap. I'm glad that it doesn't look as bad as I imagined - or as bad as some sets I've seen - but it's still pretty bad. It reminds me of two things... watching a really big YouTube video, or what TV was like in the pre-cable era. It's not unwatchable, but it's mostly distasteful.

I fooled around with the video settings - MPEG compression filters and whatnot - to try to smooth out the analog broadcast. It's tough to tell if I actually accomplished anything. Cartoons generally look better than the live-action stuff, thanks to the set's insanely sharp and vivid colors. So that's cool.

Then I swapped the HDMI cable off the PS3 to see what it does for the HD channels, and it was quite an improvement over the SD analog s-video. I need to pick up a second HDMI cable so I don't have to switch it all the time. I have noticed that I'm getting quick blips of audio drop out when I'm on cable HDMI (HD and SD), so I'm not sure what that's about. Either my cheap HDMI cable is worse for cable than for PS3 (how could that be?), or the HDMI-out on the cable box is buggered. I suppose I could work around the issue by sending the audio out through one of the other ports. UPDATE: Tonight, I have yet to notice any audio dropout, so WTF.

Even after seeing HD channels in genuine HD, I'm still not a fan of this big HD broadcast revolution. I think everyone else in the world has a different opinion of the words sharpness and clarity than I do. This HD thing was sold on being perfect, to my recollection. But the image still has little digital fuzziness when you get in close. I guess you're not supposed to get in close. Imagine me standing an inch from the screen, staring at the HGTV-HD logo in the corner of the screen and getting pissed that it isn't vector-image sharp. That's my evening.

But the new TV is really for teh gaming.

Having the PS3 finally pushed to hi-def reminds me why you pay so much for that thing. If you have a PS3 on standard-def, you are cheating yourself at least $150 of its worth. For me, the most shocking change was PixelJunk Monsters going from SD to HD. Holy shit. Monsters is, perhaps unfortunately, built for HD without a low-fi version, so the standard definition display meant that the 1080p widescreen game was getting letterboxed and downsampled for SD. You could barely see the enemy life meters. Now, it's a white-hot animated feast, with huge, impressive characters and outstanding, vibrant colors.

There's not a smidge of HD expense regret there.

I mean, I knew that Warhawk was going to look better in HD, but seeing Monsters in its native form was just astonishing.

I think the best thing is that all this HD-ness shifts all the gaming HUD elements out of the way. I feel like I can finally breathe in Warhawk! Last night I got my Bandit Teamwork award, which means I can move to the next player rank (now that Sony fixed that ranking bug, I'm no longer a default Commander.)

The Wii, on the other hand, is another story. The Wii caps at 420p, which my Sony TV helpfully reminds me every time I switch inputs. 420p upconverted to 1080p does not do the Wii menu screen any favors. I won't say that Nintendo made a mistake in not pursuing HD output on the Wii, but it sure does underline a difference between them and the competition. As more and more people jump to HD, Nintendo is going to look more foolish at the end of this generation than they did at the beginning of it. I would not be surprised to see an HD Wii show up sometime in 2009, as an end run Wii push before Nintendo leaps on to what's next, and to capitalize on the amount of people who finally go HD. I think the switch rate from SD to HD is even faster than the change from dialup to broadband.

And really, it's only the core system that needs an upgrade, not so much the games. I popped in Mario Galaxy and found it fine, far sharper than the Wii menu. It's like the Wii itself isn't even 420p, the channel boxes and text are so smooshy and blurred. Kinda sucks. I haven't tried any of my Virtual Console games yet (OMG Pokemon Snap in HD!!!11!), but I don't expect them to look any better.

The goal was to get an HD set before Smash Bros (again, good for HUD stuff) and before GTAIV. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

I dislike your name. I know it's some kind of silly historical thing that you probably made up anyway, but I still dislike it. It makes me think your doughnuts are some kind of awful health food product.

I dislike your gang-banged California Raisin mascot. It is decidedly amateur work, like a joke mascot for a college math team.

I dislike your lazy spelling of "donut" and your pretentious spelling of "shoppe." I get it already; you're distinctive.

I dislike your cheap, thin-lined logo. Again, it's ugly and amaterish. I know, you've been in business for thirty years. Whatever. You're still ugly.

I dislike your embarrassing use of "em" in what I assume is a slogan. 'em is the proper way to slangify "them" in this situation. You are no better than the slobs who hand-paint vegetable stand road signs that hawk "lopes" and "carots." Please get over your bargain-basement attitude towards good design and intelligent spelling, and hire a damn artist.

However, your doughnuts are pretty good.

As we discussed a few months back, Mario Galaxy was destined to sweep the 2007 Nintendo Power Awards. Let's see what other stunners were revealed. To gauge my prediction accuracy, I'm going to compare my predictions to the reader votes. The mag editors are notorious for selecting dark horse games so that the third parties don't feel entirely shut out. And remember, in my original posts, there's often a big difference between my vote and my prediction.

Wii Game of the Year: Super Mario Galaxy
Yes, yes. Although Metroid 3 was great (and my personal vote), there isn't even a discussion here.
Editor Choice: Galaxy / Reader Choice: Galaxy / My Choice: Metroid 3 / My Prediction: Galaxy / My Record: +1

DS Game of the Year: Phantom Hourglass
Boooooo! So an overly-linear, lackluster Zelda game knocks off the Pokemon juggernaut that reinvigorated a franchise and sold 14 million copies? Jesus, even Zelda fans agreed that Phantom Hourglass was a lame stab for the series.
Editor Choice: Phantom Hourglass / Reader Choice: Phantom Hourglass / My Choice: Pokemon / My Prediction: Pokemon / My Record: 0

Best Wii Graphics: Super Mario Galaxy
I'm surprised the reader vote went so neck-and-neck between Galaxy and Metroid 3. Metroid 3 looks great, but it doesn't have the conceptual freedom to push dazzling environments like Galaxy.
Editor Choice: Galaxy / Reader Choice: Galaxy / My Choice: Galaxy / My Prediction: Galaxy / My Record: +1

Best DS Graphics: Contra 4
What did I just say about third parties? Bingo. There is no bloody way that dopey SNES-style 2D graphics compare to the stylized clean lines and appealing design of Phantom Hourglass. he voters were right about this one. Way right.
Editor Choice: Contra 4 / Reader Choice: Phantom Hourglass / My Choice: Phantom Hourglass / My Prediction: Phantom Hourglass / My Record: +2

Best Music: NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams
Seeing that NiGHTS wasn't even out when this contest ran, it's ludicrous to put this out there... except as part of the push to get third party games mentioned.
Editor Choice: NiGHTS / Reader Choice: Galaxy / My Choice: Phantom Hourglass / My Prediction: Galaxy / My Record: +3

Best Sound/Voice Acting: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
For real? How can a game with a mute main character win this award? Because everybody was so impressed with that nasty General guy? Weird.
Editor Choice: Metroid 3 / Reader Choice: Metroid 3 / My Choice: Simpsons Game / My Prediction: Simpsons Game / My Record: +2

Best Adventure Game: Phantom Hourglass
This is the one where NP asked readers to NOT vote for Phantom Hourglass. They clearly did not listen. And then the editors chose it anyway.
Editor Choice: Phantom Hourglass / Reader Choice: Phantom Hourglass / My Choice: Super Paper Mario / My Prediction: Phantom Hourglass / My Record: +3

Best RPG/Strategy Game: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Yeah, sure it was. This is a political choice, just as political as the magazine steadfastly refusing to run any Pokemon clip art in the article. This must be how they think they can lose NP's less-than-hardcore rep, by ignoring Pokemon.
Editor Choice: Fire Emblem / Reader Choice: Pokemon / My Choice: Pokemon / My Prediction: Pokemon / My Record: +4

Best Shooter/Action Game: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Another non-vote. I originally claimed that only Umbrella Chronicles had a chance at unseating Metroid, and it was a very distant second place.
Editor Choice: Metroid 3 / Reader Choice: Metroid 3 / My Choice: Metroid 3 / My Prediction: Metroid 3 / My Record: +5

Best Sports/Racing Game: Mario Strikers Charged
Now this was a horse race! Strikers and Mario/Sonic/Olympics came out right on top of each other.
Editor Choice: Strikers / Reader Choice: Strikers / My Choice: Strikers / My Prediction: Olympics / My Record: +4

Best Platformer: Super Mario Galaxy
Yep.
Editor Choice: Galaxy / Reader Choice: Galaxy / My Choice: Galaxy / My Prediction: Galaxy / My Record: +5

Best Puzzle Game: Picross DS
Ha! The game that everybody was gaga over for a couple months - Puzzle Quest - doesn't even rate on anyone's scale.
Editor Choice: Picross DS / Reader Choice: Picross DS / My Choice: Disney Meteos / My Prediction: Puzzle Quest / My Record: +4

Best Alternative Game: WarioWare: Smooth Moves
This is always one of my favorite categories, just because it gets some weirdo titles a mention. However, this wasn't a great year for "alternative" games (nothing compares to the year with Odama!) and sticking Guitar Hero III in there is only to make up for the lack of a genuine music game category.
Editor Choice: WarioWare / Reader Choice: Guitar Hero / My Choice: WarioWare / My Prediction: Guitar Hero / My Record: +5

Best New Character: Some guy from Hotel Dusk
The winner chosen here was the absolute last place finisher in the vote. Personally, I'm not buying Hotel Dusk until I see it for $5.
Editor Choice: Hotel Dusk Guy / Reader Choice: Linebeck / My Choice: Count Bleck / My Prediction: Linebeck / My Record: +6

Best Multiplayer: Trauma Center: New Blood
Another editor veto power vote, because nobody chose Trauma Center. I'm just glad Phantom Hourglass didn't win... yech. And I'm surprised Mario Galaxy wasn't even nominated, actually.
Editor Choice: Trauma Center / Reader Choice: WarioWare / My Choice: WarioWare / My Prediction: Olympics / My Record: +5

Best Story/Writing: Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All
Hey third parties! You're still cool!
Editor Choice: Phoenix Wright / Reader Choice: Super Paper Mario / My Choice: Super Paper Mario / My Prediction: Super Paper Mario / My Record: +6

Best Online Game: Pokemon Diamond/Pearl
The single, solitary bit of artwork for Pokemon in the entire article - did I mention the 14 million copies? - is a two-centimeter screenshot attached to this award. You can't tell me that there's not some kind of Pokemon-limiting editorial ban at work here.
Editor Choice: Pokemon / Reader Choice: Pokemon / My Choice: Pokemon / My Prediction: Pokemon / My Record: +7

Overall Game of the Year: Super Mario Galaxy
Again, I have to say that there's nothing scientific about the nominations for this category. It should either be every game released in 2007, or, more likely, every game rated 9 or above by Nintendo Power in 2007. In the end, the discussion is moot because we all knew Galaxy was going to butt-stomp the entire concept. I really like the Galaxy character montage artwork they used; I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the boss battle against Bouldergeist.
Editor Choice: Galaxy / Reader Choice: Galaxy / My Choice: Pokemon / My Prediction: Galaxy / My Record: +8

My overall record was not as good as I would have liked. Somebody smarter than me can figure out the batting average. I discounted the power of Zelda over Pokemon, and put too much stock into Mario & Sonic. Nevertheless, as far as the readers were concerned, I was correct about Mario Galaxy winning every category in which it was nominated. And I was right about Phantom Hourglass capping out at four wins, but I thought it would track more or less the same as Metroid 3 and it did not.

Might have my Fatal Frame expansion finished.

It needs testing, which is probably the long phase because it requires actually playing the game. Fifteen cards: six actions, four ghosts, four items, and one mega film card that lets you roll THREE additional attack dice. Once I feel confident that this is The Fifteen, I'll do a hilarious weblog entry where I reveal the embarrassingly bad arts-and-crafts angle I initially envisioned for the expansion.

The internet is broken again.

Something I've noticed lately: completely fake, automated, link-and-summary-based weblogs. I refuse to link to a damned one of them, but you can find plenty examples on my Technorati page. The game seems to be, steal the RSS feeds of a hundred other weblogs, then generate summaries of the original postings and tack on a randomly created personalizing sentence like "I sure enjoyed this article about movies!" or "Boy, was that rutabaga article a good read!"

Is ad banner money really that great that people have to fake weblogs to get it?

No More Heroes, no more stock.

I've come up dry at two local Toys R Us stores when asking about No More Heroes. One clerk actually laughed at me (WTF?), but at least he knew what I was talking about. A second dull-witted teen required me to explain that TRU keeps M-rated games behind the counter so could he please look there. How in fuck does Toys R Us find young male clerks who are not into video games?

For now, I'll have to appease myself with more Travis Touchdown cosplay!

Colin's Bear Animation (YouTube)
OK, you need the backstory here. Apparently this was done by an animation student for a class in which the lessons were... subpar. So his final project became a commentary on the lousy nature of the course. You'll watch it twenty times, believe it.

Criterion responds to Burnout HDD issue (Games Industry.biz)
There it is. Anybody who cheaped out and bought the HD-less 360s (Core and Arcade models) can't play Burnout online. This is going to happen more and more. $280 for the Arcade doesn't sound like so great a deal anymore, does it grandma?

Bad design alert stickers (design-police.org)
Some very funny stickers for correcting lousy design choices. I could totally use these at work.

DC's Full Coverage! (Comic Book Resources)
A cover collection from the month (Dec 01) when every DC book worked the title into the cover art. Most are very nice stuff.

Disney's "The Aristocats" ... The Animated Series ?! (Jim Hill Media)
Holy crap! You have got to see the character designs for a proposed 2003 Aristocat TV series. I know it's pretty damned non-creative to just age the kittens to teens and call it a day... but damn are they a cute bunch.

The Brain Age Guy: If you want money, go out and earn it. (8 Asians)
Dr. Kawashima, as Nintendo's inspiration and consultant on the hit Brain Age series, has made millions from the arrangement... and he gives it ALL to his university.

"My hobby is work," he said. "Everyone in my family is mad at me but I tell them that if they want money, go out and earn it."

And they say Brain Age isn't hardcore.

The Endless Ocean reviews seem to go one of two ways. Either it's a snide anti-non-game joke blurb or it's a gushing flowery puff piece. The reality is somewhere in the middle. It's too condescending to dismiss the game as boring non-gen grandma garbage (EGM, pandering again!), but anybody who gives Endless Ocean a 7 or higher must be crazy (IGN, pandering again!)

Right away you can see what Nintendo is trying to do. Endless Ocean is supposed to be an approachable, easy-to-control, non-combative Game For Everyone. They've had great success with Sports Games For Everyone and Brain Games For Everyone, so this is an attempt to introduce game-game mechanics to that audience. It's built for a single, nunchukless Wii Remote. HUD elements are there but largely inconsequential. You gradually expose a barebones map overworld. Your onscreen character exists in a 3D virtual environment that you explore in a realistically slow manner. You collect items and go on missions with no compelling purpose or reward. It's almost as if Nintendo is readying the Endless Ocean player for basic video game concepts.

It's actually a very good idea, but one that needs Brain Age style marketing to make that push. I've seen Brain Age commercials during cable drama shows and they're brilliant. They don't look like video game ads; they look like vitamin commercials. Endless Ocean could use something like to reach the proper audience. Although the $30 price tag certainly does help.

But, demographics aside, what do you get in Endless Ocean? Not much. Most of Endless Ocean is the same ocean floor texture surrounded by the same rock outcroppings covered in the same clamshells and anemones and coral. You're going to have to OK with that to ever proceed further, and I have to tell you, it's a damn near thing.

Sure, there's the scattered setpiece structures - a whale skeleton, underwater caves, etc - but they're surrounded by acres of identical sand and rock. It is a huge disappointment, especially when placed against the unrealistically diverse and vibrant selection of sea life (come on... five types of penguins?) The animals all look great and believable - except on occasion when they clip through each other - but they have to live in this bland, underwater clip art backdrop.

It's a good thing that the fish all look so great, because they are one of the collectibles, so it's a nice thing to concentrate on. You have a huge blank encyclopedia and as you "become familiar" with different species, they fill up your book. The familiarity process involves lots of shaking the Remote. It's exceedingly odd. You click on a fish - which I'm fine with, the clicking - but then you have to wave the Remote as if you are petting the animal. Could be a tiny sea slug or a manatee, doesn't matter. You stroke it. After some indeterminate length of time, the game decides you've fapped enough and credits your encyclopedia with the discovery.

The game takes about two hours to hand out all of the gameplay upgrades. You get a whistle for calling your dolphin buddy (don't get too excited; teaching him tricks amounts to merely clicking on him, and although the game makes a big deal about riding him, doing so just loops an animation of your diver clinging onto the animal), there's this crazy pen that lets you draw in the water (I guess mainly for multiplayer communication?), and the expected and anticipated underwater camera.

Which, although you can snap and save pictures during the game, you cannot save them out to the Wii console. I swear, Nintendo has completely fucked the integration between their own games and their own system. They're not even trying. Mario Galaxy let you save your star screen to the Wii Message Board, and even that was the most insanely stupid use of the technology ever. (Like, geniuses, how about just Friend-based LEADERBOARDS? Why the fuck are we filling up each other's Photo Channel with obsolescing pictures of each other's star lists?!) But at least that was an attempt. Endless Ocean has a moderately interesting photography feature and you're forbidden to share it with anyone. You know what's not going to get people talking about this game? Not being able to zap pictures of sea turtles to Friends.

Much hay is made over Endless Ocean being the second Wii game to let you play your own MP3s (the first being launch day marginal title Excite Truck). Great idea, but EO borks it. First of all, you can only play one track. The game will loop one song forever. I'm not expecting iTunes here, but picking one song is useless enough to be insulting. Even if the game doesn't want to bother with a simple playlisting feature, it could at least run through every song in a given folder.

But, in what I guess is a concession to realism?, in order to play an MP3 off of your SD card, you have to walk over to a radio on the exterior deck of your boat and select the song from there. Not from some kind of meta-level Options screen, is my point. This means that you can't change songs when you're in the water. Because your radio is back on the boat. Your radio that you can hear across a mile of water. Is on the boat. Not with your SCUBA gear. So you can't change songs. Until you're done swimming.

It boggles the mind. It's like sitting down to watch The Simpsons and finding it's one of those damn ugly Season One episodes where they had to have the family learn an important lesson about love at the end, just to keep the PTA off their backs.

Look, I'll happily cop to enjoying the slow exploration portions, stumbling onto an unmentioned cave and finding a glowing anglerfish within. But I'm not going to sit here and overwrite paragraphs of whimsy about how Endless Ocean is so magical and inspiring and relaxing. It fumbles around on bits that should have been cake, and it doesn't deserve to be raised so high just because it's different and it's Nintendo.

And yet, it also deserves more than an easy, crude backhand, the kind written in the slacker-friendly eye-rolling that went limp during the Gamecube years. Endless Ocean is not for the "gamer" audience and should not be dangled in front of the hungry hardcore as anti-Nintendo flamebait.

Endless Ocean occupies a strange, lo-fi middle ground. It's for the most adventurous non-gamer, perhaps ready for an experience distinct from Wii Sports or Brain Age... and it's for the most compulsive OCD-gamer, the kind most interested in collecting items and exploring every corner of the map.

Although I'm sure most of us forgot about it, the San Andreas class action settlement finally settlement-ed. The upshot is, anybody who wants to claim that he or she was offended by the Hot Coffee "content" can score a few bucks out of it.

If you bought the game before July 2005 - and come on, you did - and you still have the receipt, you can send in a copy of the receipt for a sweet $35. Without the receipt, you're stuck with submitting the actual game disk, and whatever various level of proof you can provide (ranging from a credit card statement to just your say-so) determines your payout, from $17 down to a lousy $5.

I picked up San Andreas on launch day, in October 2004... so my first thought was, holy crap, San Andreas was four years ago!? No wonder I'm super jazzed about GTAIV.

We talked about this in the office last week. Tony's assertion is that, no matter how this ends up, some politician somewhere is going to field this as proof that human beings everywhere hate M-rated games, and that games with content intended and produced for adults should not exist. He's right, but I think that ship has already sailed. Just the fact that Hot Coffee caused a class action lawsuit places this on the Crusaders' playbook.

For me, the question is where does the money go if it is not claimed by supposedly aggrieved consumers. The money has already been alloted based on San Andreas' sales, so the pile is there and somebody is getting it. Where does the leftover amount go? The government? Lawyers? I would like to take the $35 and fund it right back into Rockstar by virtue of my purchase of GTAIV... but that's a false claim because I was quite clearly going to buy GTAIV regardless. The only way to be righteously indignant about the money is to sign the claim check right over to Rockstar.

Then there's the perjury issue. The fine print reads:

By submitting this form, you attest under penalty of perjury that: you bought a Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas First Edition Disc on or before July 20, 2005; you were offended and upset by the ability of consumers to modify and alter the disc to display the Hot Coffee content; you would not have bought the disc had you known that consumers could modify and alter it to display the Hot Coffee content; and, upon learning the game could be modified and altered, you would have returned it to the place of purchase for a refund if you thought this was possible.

Let's be lawyery about this. "You were offended and upset by the ability of consumers to modify and alter the disc to display the Hot Coffee content." Easy out... it doesn't say I was offended by Hot Coffee, but that I was offended by the ability of other parties to modify the game. OK. So I dislike modding the original artistic vision of game developers. I've been against Game Shark type crap for years (see my ongoing complaints about cheating in Pokemon and Animal Crossing.) This broad brush nails a ton of PC mod content, but what do I care about that scene.

"You would not have bought the disc had you known that consumers could modify and alter it to display the Hot Coffee content." Hurm, tougher. There's no way I would not have purchased San Andreas. Unless it was reported that buying the game would destroy your PS2. I know that getting Hot Coffee to appear on the PS2 version involved quite a complicated hack, and that your game became unplayable soon after viewing the torrid, steamy, sexual, fully-clothed, low-poly, genital-less, unfinished animation mini-game. So I would certainly never have attempted to expose Hot Coffee because there's no way I'm risking my memory card... but I still would have bought the game. I think a reasonable amount of skepticism ("I did not believe the content could actually be accessed, so I bought it anyway.") could get me out of perjury here.

"Upon learning the game could be modified and altered, you would have returned it to the place of purchase for a refund if you thought this was possible." Again, no. Easily one of the best games on the PS2? Not getting returned.

But then again, a lot can change in a couple years. Maybe I wasn't offended then, but I'm totally offended now, as I get older and whatever-the-fuck-not-really.

The other problem with that clause is that it doesn't mention Hot Coffee. But here's how I snake out of perjury: "if you thought this was possible." I didn't think it was possible to return the game, because video games are almost completely non-refundable at retail.

So yeah, we looked for the receipt. Didn't find it, so I really don't have to commit to either side of the ethical dilemma. Although I'm pretty sure I'd go for the $35.

The vast majority of that money is going to go unclaimed... and I want to know what happens to it.

I hope those PC-hacking pukes that "discovered" the Hot Coffee code are proud of themselves. Has anybody ever done an interview with them? I'd love to hear how and why they did that, and what they think of the ramifications.

By the way, that picture is from the new marketing campaign for GTAIV, wanted posters hanging in Brooklyn.

The entirety of the Animal Crossing movie, with english subtitles. I love the constant use of in-game music. Not to mention the dogged adherence to the rest of Animal Crossing's foibles. Enjoy it before it gets pulled!

Creating that YouTube player was a royal pain, by the way. Sometimes the video pages wouldn't show my playlists, sometimes it wouldn't add them, reloading my account page would change from 2 videos to 5 videos to 1 video. Crappy Web 2.0 startups.

Clark can be pretty funny when he's sick.

Clark has had a nasty virus for most of the week. He threw up twice in rather quick succession with zero warning, and I was trying to get him to make a connection between that feeling and telling us so we could get him to a bathroom. I said "This is one of those times when you..." and he interrupted me with "Two times, daddy."

We had him sleeping on an air mattress at the foot of our bed (for theoretically easier cleanup), and we had the TV on. Rhonda and I were talking when all of a sudden he starts laughing hysterically. He was watching that Travelocity commercial where the guy keeps trying to talk and the construction sound keeps stopping him. Clark thought that was hilarious.

That was Thursday night; by Friday night, I developed the same bug, carried to an unholy extreme. Which explains why there's not a lot of weblog content lately.

Another positive link for Fatal Frame: the Card Game.

From an impressively comprehensive list of board/card games based on video games. The author describes the game as "supposedly quite good."

I really need to finish up my expansion cards and do a little re-seeding of the FF:tCG website.

New Ambush Bug miniseries!

There hasn't been an Ambush Bug solo story since 1992, and even that was several years beyond the character's heyday. After hinting around at it for a while, the Bug returns to the DCU in a six-issue miniseries this July, with each issue parodying the major storylines of the past few years. Cannot frickin' wait.

Aquaman Dance Party (Supermarket) (YouTube)
A brief Adult Swim Generation One flashback.

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD 1-6 (2007) (Comic Treadmill)
A fond look at DC's latest revival of Brave and the Bold... and this time it's actually good.

Warhawk Paint & Insignia Contest (PlayStation.Blog)
Neat idea. They're holding a contest for new insignias and paint patterns for the next Warhawk upgrade. Yes, I submitted my little cat head thingy.

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera (Metacafe via Daring Fireball)
I don't know what I was expecting, but this video shows a surprising, clever solution to holding your camera steady without the need for a big clunky tripod.

Fatal Frame 4 info (Beyond the Camera's Lens)
It was first mentioned months ago, but screens and info have finally started to surface about Fatal Frame for Wii. BCL has a great rundown of what we know so far... and this don't-make-me-beg capper: "Tecmo is hoping for a summer release of the game this year." Which I predict, allowing for delays and the transition from Japan to America, lands FF4 in our hands in early October.