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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.)

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!