July 2008 Archives

As I mentioned in Aeropodcast #42, I recently picked up Sony's 2007 Fumble, Lair. I mean, how bad could it be for $15, right?

It is seriously incredibly superbad.

It is nothing less than astonishing that Sony took this game to hype and back when they had to know that Lair was just about complete trash. And Factor 5, they of Rogue Squadron fame - what in fuck happened to them? This should have been right in their wheelhouse, being another damn flying game, but it is boned over from the minute you start playing.

I should shoot some movies of this game in failing action, because it is hilarious. The tutorial level begins with your dragonrider dude, standing on a castle rampart, being told he has to jump on the dragon. Well, the first thing I do whenever I start a game is hit the pause screen to look over the options. So I do that, and it's slow as hell to bring up the options menu, but whatever. The horrible bit is that when I bail out of options, there's a good second where you can see the castle draw in. Like, the little spiky pyramid bricks decorating the castle balustrade actually build themselves out of thin air, like a Sesame Street short where one tiny ball of clay becomes a large ball of clay.

And then, stunned into silence by this beta-level environment rendering, I noticed that the castle wall textures were gradually coming into focus... which is a trick often used to cheaply and quickly render items far away... they will be blurry and low-res until you approach them, and then they fade (or pop) to full detail. Except in this case, I wasn't moving. At all. The rampart textures were almost randomly switching from blurry to sharp all on their own.

Another standout bit o' awfulness relates to the dragon's movement. For whatever reason, Factor 5 opted to have the dragons never collide with thing. You can fly straight towards a mountainside and the game will animate you swooping away rather than tackle the tricky ethical problems associated with letting dragons smack into cliff walls.

Unbelievably, this also applies when your dragon is running on the ground. One of the early levels asks you to land in the middle of a Lord of the Rings style city siege, with hundreds of enemy soldiers storming the castle. You're expected to smash the four trebuchets lobbing junk over the hometown walls. I ran straight for a trebuchet... and as I got close, the game made my dragon zip to one side of the device even as I continue to push the analog stick towards it. Hello? I'm supposed to smash that, for fuck's sake!

I'm only four levels in - with no inclination towards completing it, by the way - and already I think I've got the plot figured out. Tell me if this sounds right: you're Team A, and Team A hates Team B. But many years ago, A and B were the same team... but politics and volcanoes split everybody up. Team A has been, more or less, the prosperous one, but mired in a state-run religion that no one is allowed to question. Team B followed a path of science.

All of sudden, Team B starts attacking A, even though A has the greater military. The dialogue is packed with cringers about how B cannot stand against the might of God, they'll pay for their heresy, A will show them the true meaning of Aness, etc. But turns out Team B is actually trying to steal resources because their cities are in big trouble...

My prediction: Team B is being routed by a Greater Evil, which will eventually tackle Team A, and A and B will be forced to work together to defeat it, reuniting their sundered peoples and realizing that the other guy isn't as bad as the corrupt priests/politicians had them all believing.

I wonder if I'm close.

This is a predictable clichefest along the lines of Beyond Good & Evil, except that BG&E at least had mostly-good gameplay going for it.

Lair is not worth even $15.

Pain, on the other hand...

...is $5 for one more day, thanks to Sony's summer PSN sale, and totally worth $5. I mean, I paid $5 for Balloon Fight.

You launch ragdoll characters into a city street, trying to chain destruction combos. For example, I launched my guy into the top of a hotel, where he skidded into a rooftop beach chair set and knocked a nearby bikini girl backward into the hotel's neon sign which fall apart and bounced down the front of the building, smashing windows and eventually crashing through a glass roof.

It's fun like that.

Pain's big problem is that Sony intends to have this game nickel-and-dime you to death. You start with one level (with multiple modes) and only one character (with I think three unlockable)... if you want additional characters, they're $1 apiece. Not that you need them, but they do provide something else to throw into cars. And the menu screen has plenty of space for new levels and modes, which I'm sure will arrive in the $3 to $5 range.

But again, you don't have to buy anything other than the $10 ($5 on sale) base game and you'll be fine. It's just sort of disheartening to see a game broken up like that with little price tags at every corner.

Getting Pain was a pain, however. Took me half an hour to download and install, plus another free upgrade install, plus an interminable "updating files" bit that offered no hint of when it might finish. All said, it was about 45 minutes before I could actually play Pain, and then I had to suffer through a tutorial that was also far too long.

Pain allows custom soundtracks, but not if your PS3 is set to rip music as AAC files, which mine is. I guess I could change that, but I feel like Pain really ought to be able to read whatever music files the PS3 itself can generate.

A future update promises to add PS3 Trophy support, which will likely make this my first chance at getting Trophies, unless they patch Warhawk first.

I was digging through the discounted games shelves at Target. Although you can still find some bargains in there (Drill Dozer $10! No More Heroes $30!), most of the selection is complete rubbish.

Wouldn't the subtitle "Swine of the Night" have made a much better title?

"What game did you pick up?"
"Super Pickups."
"A good one, eh? What's it called?"
"Super Pickups."
"Yeah, sounds like you like it... so what game is it?"
"SUPER PICKUPS."

This is actually a new version of a twenty year old arcade game. That sucked twenty years ago.

Darkened Skye was that Skittles game. I still can't believe that happened.

Love the "Also Works on Wii!" sticker. And you're complaining about the depth of the Wii's library! Skittles!

And no trip to Target is complete without a trip to the Game Party shrine.

There's good ol' Lair, severely marked down to $15. I, uh, you know, bought that one.

Holy crap, check this trailer for the latest Batman animated series...

How fucking fun does that look! I've long bemoaned the 1960s Batman TV series as sort of painting comic book super-heroes into a bam-pow corner for the past forty years, but there's still room for fun without being wink-wink cheesy and full of self-loathing. It's rather astounding that they're going for a no-Gotham, silly-prop Batman so soon after The Dark Knight. (article here)

And I like that art style so much better than the stiff body copy/paste that Justice League devolved into.

Final Foster's episode entitled "Goodbye to Bloo." I've barely watched that show, but I've seen it enough to already start feeling sad about that episode title. They are going to go super poignant on this one, I'll wager.

Watchmen video game sort of announced. But it's going to be episodic DLC. Come on.

Archie heroes coming to DCU. I think DC has owned these guys for years, but since the Impact! line failed miserably, they haven't done anything with them. Now they will all be DCU-centered.

Milestone heroes coming to DCU. That's pretty damn cool. Like the Archie announcement, it's sort of a shame that they couldn't have done this a few years ago, so these Earths could have been part of the 52.

J'onn J'onzz will never die. "A fan asked whether Martian Manhunter was 'dead-dead or Geoff-Johns-needs-a-Black-Lantern-dead.' 'Geoff Johns needs a Black Lantern dead,' Johns said."

via Comic Book Resources and Toon Zone

On this week's Aeropodcast, I...

...tell my GTAIV/colonoscopy story.

...admit to taking days off of work to play Animal Crossing.

...defend the Wii's library.

...talk a little about Starcraft in Korea.

...push PixelJunk Monsters.

...buy Lair.

He repeats what we say.

Clark already uses the word "blu-ray" like it's normal.

"We buy that on blu-ray, Daddy?"

Pokemon Neo in stock (?)

Target usually has a box of cheap $1 card packs, ranging from out-of-favor movie trading cards to old random game boosters. This weekend I found a Japanese Pokemon Neo pack. 100% Japanese. That is the 1999 set that introduced the Gold/Silver generation of characters to the card game. How in the hell did a ten-year-old Japanese booster get to a Target clearance shelf?

By the way, in true Pokemon TCG fashion, it was a double-rare pack.

Year None!

I almost missed the first issue of Ambush Bug: Year None this week because my shop skipped my books and there was only one copy left at the end of Wednesday. Wednesday being New Comics Day, that means my local store was sold out of Ambush Bug: Year None by the end of the very day it was first on sale. That either means the book is unexpectedly popular or my guys under-ordered; I guess that can go either way.

Needless to say, I did not get the 1-in-10 alternate cover version.

I should work on revamping my Ambush Bug fansite. It's largely unchanged since 1998.

Fatal Frame 4 trailer (Wii) (YouTube)
Oooooohhhhh, this looks so freaking good. I am extremely happy that Suda 51 didn't tart this up to look like Killer 7 or No More Heroes.

Atheism in the DCU (Pretty, Fizzy Paradise)
Kalinara and her commenters discuss the recent retread of Mr. Terrific questioning his atheism in JSA. They come to pretty much the same conclusion I wrote about two years ago during Infinite Crisis, that a rational mind in the DCU, having repeated contact with "gods" and heroes with godlike powers, would seriously question the worthiness, existence and veracity of the Christian God.

The Color of Politics (Second Printing)
Ha! Ben Hatten assigns the rainbow Power Rings to various political figures, including the Orange Ring of greed to Hillary Clinton.

A Real Beauty (News from Me)
Mark Evanier explicates Disney's Sleeping Beauty, and it is packed with that rarest of internet beasts, honest snark.

Who'll watch The Watchmen? (Arglebargle)
C. Martin Croker scans in much of Entertainment Weekly's big Watchmen cover feature, dares hope the movie will not suck, and relates the mob scene at his Dark Knight visit.

Ultimate Alliance 2 Trailer Could Be A Bit More Ultimate (Kotaku)
Um, wasn't MUA2 supposed to follow the Civil War storyline? And why is the subtitle "Fusion"? Why is the overhyped "fusion of powers" defined as Hulk throwing Wolverine at somebody?

Finally got Mike to play Eye of Judgment... I don't think he was overly impressed. I still maintain that the core game is solid and clever, but all it takes is one fumbled scan and the weaknesses of the PS3 Eye system are laid bare. His main objection was that it was too slow... and as we waited for the camera to read a card, I had to admit he was right about that.

I ended up buying the $15 expansion... or rather, the $15 119k key that unlocks the 2gig expansion I downloaded last week. Proof:

We played Doomtown for the first time in two years. Ow. At that age, it's tough to remember anything about the game, so I don't know if I ever faced his Maze Rats Forced Lowball deck before. It's an old trick, but a good one... he has eight Events that either turn all shootouts into lowball, or make players draw shootout hands from the opponent's deck. So of course his deck is purposefully lousy, resulting in a lot of wins. I tried a Dixie Rails deck against it, and came up incredibly short. He even got lucky on my Harrowed pulls, sending most of my supposedly immortal zombie guys to the discard pile.

I pulled it out for our second Doomtown game, with my Collegium Bioengineering deck. I tend to build decks that require a set pattern of play, so remembering all of that structure was like shaking some cobwebs out of my brain. With my Bioengineering, the first step is to get all the Investment Machines out of the deck and start making money, then fetch the Bioengineering device and start cloning SUZY, the Drifter and/or Ezzie. I ended up using Ezzie(s) to eat away most of his Law Dog dudes.

We played a ton of Rock Band... got the bodyguards and PR firm for our band, the Unrepentant Athiests. We realized we can sort of hold our own playing hard with me on lead and him on bass, if we stick to the bottom third of the difficulty list. So we managed to sneak above the Medium fan cap.

Some things I want fixed in Rock Band 2: I want venue selection for Quickplay and Solo Tour modes. There are a shitton of cool venues in Rock Band, but you never see any of them unless you're deep into World Tour mode. Why is every single DLC song locked to Gorilla Dome in Solo Tour?

I've found that I hate seeing a performance score of 100% when I know I missed a note or two. 100% means 100%. It's the very definition of mathematical perfection. To round up is misleading. Mike and I argued about this, but to be fair, his half of the argument was more like "You're crazy."

I want an option to turn off the drum kick pedal. Not because I think it's too hard but because it hurts the hell out of my ankle.

And no more crush note streams. Come on. Who thinks that's fun. The Police suck. Also Metallica.

Once again, we put like six hours in on PixelJunk Monsters, beating all the levels on the original game and a couple on the expansion. The final level of the first island is actually rather easy. The 2-player mode is so awesome, that Clark could play as Mike's number two and actually be useful. He'd pick up coins and if Mike was lucky, Clark would park on a tower and upgrade it a bit.

We did two games of Fatal Frame, using the super-secret new cards that I've been working on for sixteen years. Only one of the new set needs to be changed, and only because it's boring. This morning I thought it would be fun to make it a one-time ghost battle helper that would let you discard cards from your hand to add attack dice to your roll... but I don't think I want that legal for a boss fight. But fights against regular ghosts are almost always a win anyway, so this is kinda like a good solution to a nonexistent problem.

The one card I was most worried about turned into a complete game-changer, in a good way, I think. "Doomed From Birth" says if you ever discard it, you lose the game. So you have to find ways to keep from emptying your hand, or maybe give it to another player. It's amusing as hell, but could lead to a real blue-ball moment if you have some sweet boss strategy planned and then your opponent dumps out of the game because the Fallen Woman made him discard Doomed From Birth.

In both games, one of us had it... in our second game Mike had to hold on to it since turn two. In the first game, I had it and had to risk randomly discarding it. And at the time Mike was ahead so it would have been a deeply petty way to end the game.

So I guess I might be posting this Fatal Frame expansion set soon, like sometime before Mask of the Lunar Eclipse comes out. In the US.

Lately I've been saving random silly pictures as I come across them.

Leigh Alexander's always-great Sexy Videogameland found these a few weeks ago. It's from a Photobucket gallery of hundreds of cute Pokemon-as-Kids drawings... although it seems the original gallery is now gone. Have to act fast on the internet.

That's from some Cartoon Brew article. The fact that you can draw pretty much any female form and then paste a Betty Boop head on it has always disturbed me.

Mappy, you shit. Get a fucking dayplanner.

Saw this on Comics Should Be Good. I totally forgot that Sexy Star Trek Catgirl ever happened.

This is a pause from an amazing Metal Gear Solid 3 video where somebody painstakingly set up all these hilarious scenes just to take ridiculous photos. Naturally, the video is no longer available.

Angry Asian Man wrote about this a while ago; it's a photo by artist Li Wei. He did a whole series of himself embedded into things.

A funny prop element from the Hard Rock at Universal Studios Florida, posted by Jim Hill Media.

And finally, a decrepit poster for Chevy Chase in Funny Farm, from C. Martin Croker's boyhood theater... long abandoned and now demolished.

My latest podcast appearance is up, so please endeavor to enjoy it. It's definitely the sauciest I've been so far. Feels kinda weird to jump into an established podcast and start shitting on things, so I've been largely polite. This time those thrice-damned 360 Mii ripoffs got me going. It's nothing I haven't already said here, but it's probably fun to hear me say it.

Plus, there's ten seconds of silence while host Joe Haygood waits for me to react to the exciting announcement of a KOTOR MMORPG. Hee!

But what really has me psyched is that I gambled and scored on a Play-Asia order last week. They were running a summer sale where various in-stock merchandise was half off, or something like that. So I picked up a Pokemon keychain toy for Clark, and the DS rarity Slide Adventure: Mag Kid (which looks fascinating because it comes with an attachment that lets you move the DS around your table like an IR mouse). Smash Brawl players may recall a few spare Mag Kid stickers.

While shopping, I noticed some US Eye of Judgment starter decks listed at $7.50... which is half retail. And yes, $15 for a 30-card starter deck is unacceptably expensive, but there you go.

Here was the risk. The product description says "The Eye of Judgment: Biolith Rebellion Set 2: Water Barrage Theme Deck." Well, all good EoJ fanboys know that Water Barrage was Set 1 and who wants that. But then the picture of the item shows a Set 2 box. So, not knowing what to expect, I ordered the fire "Set 2" and the water "Set 2," for a combo price of under $15, and hoped for the best. I went with fire and water just in case it was actually Set 1, as I do not own those varieties in either set.

And as my happy tone probably tells you, it was indeed the Set 2 version. Which I have never seen in stores, nor at my two summer conventions. So I nabbed two Set 2 starters for less than the price of one. In fact, my entire bill - including the bizarro Mag Kid DS game - was only around $30. Now I'm debating placing another order for the Coffee Prince DVD boxed set.

The big sale is over, but Play-Asia still has the US EoJ stuff in stock, starters at $10 which is still cheaper than retail, if you can even find them. Warning: if you do order EoJ stuff online, make sure you get the version appropriate to your region, because the US EoJ game will not read Japanese cards.

Yes, yes, fine, Dr. Horrible is good.

I have not a single horse in this race... I'm not a Joss Whedon fan and I don't particularly enjoy super-hero parody, but this three-part mini-movie apparently put together on a shoestring during the Writers' Strike is pretty good. Hang out for the first song - it's a musical! - and you'll dig it. Even though I just saw it for free, I think it's worth $4 on iTunes.

Not this god thing again.

From Dr. Horrible to Mr. Terrific. In the latest JSA, once again some faux-character development is presented in the form of a grasping Mr. Terrific questioning his athiesm. Uh-huh. It's exceptionally cool that Mr. T's race is never really a plot foible, just who he is... it would be great if his atheism could be treated with the same respect.

Buck up Michael. We all know Gog will turn out to be a robot. (Confession: I didn't think of that until I read it on Pretty, Fizzy Paradise!)

Pokemon cards in Burger King Kids Meals.

I think the cards are all reprints, but it's still slick to get actual Pokemon TCG cards for dinner. And the toys are all centered around the cards... deck boxes, card frames and hand holders!

There are twelve cards and twelve toys... but in an unbelievably shitty move, the cards are random! In our first batch of three Meals, we got three Monferno cards! What are the odds!?!

But there's a bonus, BK's new Kids Meals can be customized for total vegetarian.

We bought the Imaginext Batcave playset.

It is so great. It's like Castle Grayskull big. Since the figures are only three inches, it's packed with rooms and action features. Every time I look at it, I find new details hidden in the sculpt, like the little TV dinner tray inside the prison.

We also completed the rest of the figure packs, so we now have Penguin, Joker, Superman (comes with Krypto!) two Batmen and Robin. I hope that there's plans for additional DC heroes and sets, so that this becomes a serious collector counterpart to the Marvel Super Squad line... but so much better since these are actual playable figures. Of course nobody anywhere has any info on this.

Another downside is that this line gets hidden with the Imaginext junk, which is always in the toddler section, while the Super Squad packs always live right by the action figures.

Dead Rising on Wii?!?

Wow. Interesting announcement. Of course, once I heard the photography stuff was shitcanned from the Wii port, I immediately lost interest. I'll hold out for a PS3 version.

Also, Eternal Sonata coming to PS3... being the JRPG based on the music of Fredric Chopin. I mean, jesus. That's a concept I can totally get into, and it's from the team who did Baten Kaitos, which I really liked.

ScreenFlow records the other screen when Screen Sharing in iChat.

I suppose I should have expected that, but I still found it a very cool surprise.

So now you can manipulate somebody else's desktop and record yourself doing it.

Things I Want to See in the Flippin' Watchmen Movie.

Big Figure

Bubastis

Hollis Mason

Moloch

Rorshach eating Dan's sugar cubes > ronch ronch <

Increasingly-naked Dr. Manhattan

Sally Jupiter's nudie comic

Young Comedian in the yellow pantsuit

The photo memory bulletin board in Doc's old workplace

Barbapapa (Nature episode) (YouTube)
My grandfather had a Barbapapa book that fascinated me as a kid. The book was about these blobby hippies who inspired eco-values. At some point, the Barbapapas were animated. This is one of those things that you swear nobody but you remembers.

In this episode, we learn where Seth MacFarlane ripped off the Peter-Hurts-His-Knee-For-Five-Minutes gag.

HOW IT TURNED OUT (Peter Gillis)
This is an old one (found via Mike Sterling's Progessive Ruin) about the eventual future of the Peanuts gang. Quietly moving, as perhaps Schulz would have wanted it.

An Exchange with John K. (Michael Barrier)
Another old page. I can't believe I just found it. It's a long email argument between historian Barrier and animator John K. about what constitutes good acting in cartoons.

Answering Machine Messages of the Stars (Mark Evanier)
Back when Mark Evanier worked with the great voice actors of animation, he had them do messages for his personal answering machine. He promises to post a few of them, starting with Daws Butler doing Huckleberry Hound. Just fantastic.

Toy Story Mania Strategy Guide: Updated (Mice Age)
A look at some of the hidden high-scoring point sequences found in the new Toy Story Mania video game shooting gallery ride.

g2ch's flickr photostream (flickr)
I'm linking to this person's Origins 2008 photo gallery because he happened to catch Clark in one of his photos.

Oh man. I am so up on this movie now.

Whoa, the creation of Doc Manhattan.

OK, that tagline should never ever be allowed in any marketing for anything ever. Cut us a fucking break.

Love the clock parts though.

Instead of boring dreck text, I hope you're noticing the surprisingly effective and differentiating choice of music. This is not just some shitty superhero movie, and that music expresses that.

Dude. That is totally a panel from the book. Exactly. Dave Gibbons should get a directing credit.

That's the first five minutes of the movie right there.

Hee hee, I love rational, multitasking Jon. Great look on the foreground Jon's face. Buzz off Laurie, Doc's working.

The Comedian going crazy in Vietnam. A good sign that we'll get those nice historical flashbacks. Or most of them, anyway. Where's Nelson and his "Black Unrest" crime board?

Ozymandius foils the assassination attempt.

Seriously you guys. This is shot-for-shot from the book. Freaking hell.

Come on! Jesus shit wow.

I've liked trailers before, but it's been a long time since I have been 90% on seeing a film in the theater. I'm going to have to hear some pretty serious craptalk before I'll pass on this one.

That trailer instantly erased all the concerns about Shumacher-esque costumes.

We don't know much about the new Animal Crossing (although admittedly we know more than we do about the new Pikmin), but we do have a very dull-as-dishwater trailer to ogle...

And now here's a version with my LIVE commentary.

I think the thing is, that's one scary trailer for a long-starved Animal Crossing fan. Almost nothing looks enhanced. On a low-fi flash-encoded video stream, you can't tell if that's new footage or copped from the N64/GameCube original. As I said, when viewed in person, those graphics better be super goddamn sharp. The first AC was notorious for blurry textures and the DS sequel was, well, a DS game.

Not a lot of new items in there. Definitely a bunch of those hats were new. AC is, for me, all about collecting the items. If I have to spend my time scrounging up the complete Green Theme yet again, I am not going to be exceptionally pleased.

I'd chalk it all up to Nintendo being their usual cagey selves, except that they pulled this same shit with the DS... IE, not much new. Aside from online play, the DS version actually was missing a bunch of content from the GameCube version. For City Folk, I'm expecting everything we had in both of the other games, to a factor of ten.

This is one of those No Big Announcement E3s. When the biggest fanboy shocker is that Final Fantasy XIII will be on 360 and PS3, you know that nothing really amazing happened. (Most links and all pics filched from my boys at Aeropause.)

Microsoft
These guys are the home to all the franchises I could give a shit about. Fallout 3, Fable 2, Gears of War 2. Stuff I don't enjoy on a console that I'd need to repair three times. Xbox Live is getting a Portal sequel, but that seems unlikely to show up as a genuine exclusive. The 360 is headed toward third place, end of story.

And ho ho ho, how about the Mii Too avatar thing? What a colossal joke. How must the 360 fanboys feel now that their console is just as gay as the Wii. This is typical Microsoft... copy somebody else's super-successful feature, and do a shitty job at it, just so they can theoretically remove a bullet point from a competitor's feature list.

After all the laughing, all the It Will Never Work from the Xbox camp, after the Wii was revealed, they sure have done a fantastic job at switching the business plan to better emulate Nintendo, eh? Somehow, someway, the 360 is now just so casual. Look, 360 Avatars playing Uno! Holy fucking shit! Get in line now, families! It's an obvious soulless fraud.

The absolute best thing to come out of Microsoft's presser was the Netflix deal. If you subscribe to Netflix and Xbox Live, you'll be able to download/watch your movies via your 360. This is a fantastic move, and like Apple TV, will be ultimately heralded as ahead of its time. Of course, if the 360 had any significant market share among the US population, this might actually mean something. We all want the cable companies to shit themselves; we all want to break out of their No Competition pricing schemes... things like this inch us ever so closely in that direction.

And what happened to the price cut? I am so confused. So Microsoft intends to blow out the remaining 20gig models for $300, and then once those are gone, revert back to pushing the new 60gig model as the new standard at $350? As Dubious Quality noted, that's in effect a price increase! Meanwhile, there's the Wii still impossible to find in stock at $250.

Also, nice job ripping off Apple AND Sony on the new Xbox Live menus. How do these assclowns sleep at night.

Nintendo
Speaking of sleeping...

For months, Nintendo has teased a major game for the fall, and as I predicted, iiiiiiiiiiiiitttt's Animal Crossing! Now, I fucking love Animal Crossing, and it is in fact super-popular the world over, but it does seem slightly disappointing that this is it for 2008 as far as big Nintendo first-party franchises are concerned. Animal Crossing: City Folk will sell like crazy. You will need to pre-order it. But it is a very polarizing game, and if you don't like it, you don't have a big new Mario or Zelda or Starfox or whatever to fall back on. Betcha we finally get both EarthBound and Mario RPG on the Virtual Console this fall.

Although Nintendo did pack a trojan horse in with ACCF: Wii Speak. Animal Crossing will come with a little speaker/mic doohickey that sits on your sensor bar and enables live online voice chat. We should expect some kind of Friend Voice Chat Channel, I should think.

Private to Nintendo: Re-release Smash Brawl with tuned-up online play and Wii Speak voice chat and I guarantee we'll all go buy the game again.

Weird news... a new little Remote plug-in will help improve the Remote's motion sensing abilities (you mean it was bad before?). This peripheral will come with - wait for it - Wii Sports Resort, a Wii Sports sequel that they would have been stupid not to develop.

The final Wii game revealed was Wii Music. Sigh.

THEY DID NOT MENTION FATAL FUCKING FRAME. (At least not in any reports I read.) I hope it's on the show floor. If not, then I can't forsee an American release this year... and that is unacceptable.

So that's a whole list of exactly what we expected, and when your E3 conference delivers nothing particularly surprising, that's a problem. The millions they will make off of Wii Music and Sports Resort and Animal Crossing will make up for the lack, I'm sure.

Oh, one surprise: GTA on DS. GTA: Chinatown Wars was mentioned, but I did not see if it is 3D, top-down, 2D, RTS, sandbox, or what. It takes place in Liberty City, and that's about all I know about it. The PSP GTAs were kinda crappy by all accounts, so it seems unlikely that the DS can fix that. Chinatown Wars may be nothing more than a GTA-themed minigame collection, and wouldn't that be hilarious.

Sony
Best in show, but not by much.

Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank downloadable mini-sequel, Infamous, and the games I don't care about, God of War III and Resistance II. Sony also has a movie deal, but it's not as cool as Netflix on 360: movie rentals/purchases coming to the PlayStation Store right this very night. (At lousy prices... I guess $6 to rent an HD film is ok, given that blu-ray disks cost $25 to $30, but $4 to rent a SD movie is terrible. I can buy most newish DVD releases for $15 or less.) At least this is happening now. Maybe by the time Netflix actually shows up on 360, Sony will have a decent enough library to compete.

Home is still in process. God, just can it already! Sony has not done ANYTHING to convince people that they need this, other than to repeat that it will be free.

PS3 is getting its own News and Forecast Channel. Ahem.

DC Universe Online! The debut trailer looks cool, if a little MMO-plastic and staged. Full of fan service though. Will this be a monthly cost game? Because I hate those. But I really want to be a Green Lantern.

The big finale PS3 game was an untitled war something-or-other. I don't get it.

Checked out three PS3 demos last weekend. I love demos.

Siren: Blood Curse - This is that survival horror dealie that's coming to PSN episodically in a few weeks. I haven't seen anything on the episodes' price or bonus features, so I'm still thinking about importing it from Japan. It will be sold in four parts, with a combined size of around 7 gigs. Urgh. I guess they're expecting you to pay for the episodes, finish the game, and then eventually get tired of having it around and delete it. Because 7 gigs is kind of a lot for a game that will likely have zero replay value and therefore no real reason to keep it on the drive.

The demo can be played in about ten minutes, but I enjoyed it.

Oddly, the demo does not employ the series' trademark feature... sight-jacking zombies. Instead, it's just very normal horror stuff. Scary cutscene, sneak past this guy, find a weapon, kill that guy, kill these other guys, take the girl to the mission end point. Looks great though, so maybe that's all the demo needs.

I guess it's loaded with context-sensitive animations, because I played through it twice and saw some different kills in the same situations. The first time through, for example, I just hacked a zombie with my lead pipe and she crumpled to the ground. The second time, I was close enough to a wall that I beat her with the pipe, then shoved her through a boarded-up window.

Blood Curse seems to continue the series' practice of hiring actual human actors to use as models for the in-game characters. It also has very, very sharp menus. This is why I really like HD, because even the menus can get so goddamn beautiful. Siren's menu structure - and this dates back to the first game in the series - is compelling because it purposefully sidesteps the whole Horror Games Must Have Gothic Menus and Spiky Fonts trap. It's a very classy UI, although I think the sans serif font they used is some variant of Impact.

Play Asia has the Japanese version for $60 and a rest-of-Asia version for $55, presumably both include the English voice track and menu option. I have no idea what the $5 difference means.

WALL-E - Why do "kids" games always have uncontrollable whipsaw cameras? Do game developers genuinely not give a shit when they win the licensing bid to crap out a kids' movie game? Shouldn't these games be easier to play, not harder? WALL-E would probably be a perfectly respectable platformer collect-a-thon, if the fucking camera wasn't zipping around like crazy. Particularly when you jump.

Kind of a long demo, and has a few completely frustrating parts where death chasms will reset you to a checkpoint too far gone. The demo takes place in a rather boring spaceport, surrounding a brief glitzy shopping mall zone. It gives away the Earthlings-are-all-fat-uber-consumers thing that Disney was trying to keep a lid on in all the preview materials.

Clark watched me play the entire thing, on the alert for little red coins you're expected to collect. WALL-E himself is cute as balls and has some interesting platformy functions, like sticking to magnetized surfaces. One of the d-pad buttons is actually mapped to "Play SFX," which is nothing more than a random WALL-E chirp or beep. Cool.

Still, fix the camera.

Monster Madness: Grave Danger - Until I stole the screenshot from IGN and saw the retail box art for this game, I would have sworn that it was a PSN downloadable with tons of micropayments. Like that terrible Rocketmen game done right. Turns out this is an enhanced version of a 360 game from last year. So now, where I was formerly mostly up on this one, now I'm like, ugh, $60?

It's a 4-player co-op top-down brawler, with plenty of customizable weapons and an only moderately annoying cast of characters. Clark and I played all the way through one of the supplied demo levels. Although his hand-eye isn't developed enough to walk and attack at the same time, so I would have to reach over and steer his analog stick back into the fray. Noteworthy: while the usual button presses handle the hand-to-hand weaponry, if you switch to your machine guns, you use the right stick to shoot in a circle.

The character walk cycles are very floaty, which is disconcerting for a while. Enemies seem to lack health bars... which really sucks on the mini- and end-bosses. And the audio for the voice samples was all distorted. But it's a 4-player co-op top-down brawler, and there will always be a need for such things.

Also, I am really sick of game developers cheaping out on cutscenes by turning them into slideshows of comic book pages and then pretending that's some kind of acceptable fucking substitute. That's an instant non-starter for me.

We did a round of Clark Is Three photos yesterday. Clark was unbelievably cooperative, so we got some dazzlingly nice photos.

Amazing. My favorite might be the first one in the second-to-last row. He looks so thoughtful.

Zombies / Humans combo missing some beats.

Did a six-player game of Zombies and the not-yet-in-stores Humans on Friday night... and craziness abounded. I don't think all the angles of this cube have yet been identified. It seems like it is waaaay harder for the shotgun-toting survivors to win, when pitted against the self-replicating player zombies. Also, the complications of wrangling two sets of mostly-new players with different turn phases gave me a headache and caused me to mis-rule on a lot of stuff.

I suspect all the elements are there - the Zombies system is so nicely modular - I should just pare the elements down into something simple and workable.

Also, how did I miss the expansion set that came with little Zombie Clown figures? Must get that.

Not into Zack & Wiki yet.

Finally started Zack & Wiki this week, after sitting on it unopened since Smash Brawl came out. I guess it must get a whole hell of a lot better, since everybody says it's overlooked genius, but the first hour was not a lot of fun. Too much preamble, lousy save system. So far, the whole experience seems like a game that isn't sure if it wants to be an RPG or a puzzle game, and it doesn't know how to gracefully meld the two.

Reviewed Burst Limit.

My civic duty to DBZ fans is complete; my review of Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is right here on Aeropause. The game is actually mostly good, but weirdly presented and skimpy on selectables.

Pretty sure I still have boned-up comments.

I just don't feel like teching it, but I have had TypeKey logins fail for me, requiring a second login to get it to stick. Also, since I removed the wonky java stuff, my comment preview function defaulted back to some crazy eco-green theme. Someday I'll fix it.

Boom Blox is probably the first video game my Dad has played in quite some time.

Had an all-family Boom Blox thing Saturday night. My Dad was an Odyssey2 man, and a demon on Wings of Fury on our old Apple //c, but has not touched a controller since. Somehow we got him to play Boom Blox on the Wii, and he came out with the top score on a series of those levels where you have to knock point blocks into multiplier zones. Go Dad!

Clark's first legitimate board game win.

Candyland. This was the first time he understood how the game is played; a month ago he just wanted to pull all the blue cards out of the deck. And hey, Candyland sure does suck. If you get one of the pink icon cards, you can potentially warp all the way to the end of the game, virtually guaranteeing a win. Early on, Clark got the lollipop fairy card and launched to the last rung of the path, while I was still stuck on the second turn. What kind of balance is that?

Also, Clark figured out dice this weekend. We were playing with the Zombies set and I got him to roll the die and then count the pips to see what he rolled. So, it's happening.

Holidays 2007 (YouTube)
Nico Colaleo is entrancingly ugly, and I mean that as a compliment. No wonder this guy hangs with cartoonists and caricaturists.

Supaa Mario Garakishii Discussion (Select Button)
A mostly-civil forum thread about Mario Galaxy, which stands as one of the few times I've read people actively disagreeing with Galaxy's supposed genius and trying to puzzle out why they feel that way.

School locked down after 'ninja' sighted in woods (phillyburbs.com)
Can't you just hear the School Board? "If we didn't go into a lockdown on every rumored ninja sighting, imagine the outcry if a real ninja actually did find his or her way into our schools?!"

Latest "Hulk" may not spawn a sequel (Yahoo News)
Ah doy. Funny article... asks why this movie which barely made a dollar more than the Ang Lee one is considered a success when Lee's was considered a flop. No answer given.

Ohio town split over teacher accused of preaching (Yahoo News)
And not only that, but he burned crosses into students' arms. With an undescribed "science device," I don't know why the article can't come up with more detail than that. In typical Christian-with-back-against-wall fashion, now he describes the crosses as mere X's.

Artist turns chaotic kids' crayon drawings into photo reality (yeondoojung.com)
Really cool. This artist takes any random kid drawing, and creates a real-world photograph out of it, using some brilliant staging, props and Photoshoppery. Must be browsed.

The new Ambush Bug miniseries starts at the end of this month and the covers for the first three issues have been revealed.

Issue 1, July 2008: The wait is over - everyone's favorite Bug is back, courtesy of the original AMBUSH BUG team of Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming! Cities will be destroyed! Cats and dogs will live in sin! Every unanswered question of the DC Universe will be answered! Live heroes will die and dead heroes will live! Okay, none of that actually happens, but join us anyway for this totally irreverent romp through the DC Universe as only Ambush Bug could give you!

There's also a 1-in-10 variant cover for issue 1, but I haven't yet seen what that looks like. Probably the same but with a silver ink applied to the logo. Or a hologrammatic trading card of Cable.

Issue 2, August 2008: The second issue of our 6-issue romp through the DC Universe takes us on a mystic journey into space, where we encounter a new world and witness the return of Amber Butane -- all, like, irreverently! Irreverentially? Plus, find out what really happened when Ambush Bug met Blue Beetle!

The Amber Butane Corps, Ambush Bug's parody of the GLC! I always loved the little lighter insignia. Great Galactus/Silver Surfer style cover.

Also that month, DC is shipping a reprint book collecting some of the Bug's earliest appearances... so modern readers can watch Ambush Bug change from a d-list Superman villain to Giffen & Fleming's meta-commentary Mary Sue inside of two books.

Issue 3, September 2008: Darkseid makes a list and checks it twice! Plus, a shotgun wedding, alternate universes, more OMACs than you can shake a stick at and the very important return of Super-Turtle all wait for you in this all-new, all-ridiculous third issue.

Amanda Conner cover! Amanda Conner cover! Amanda Conner cover!

That's Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five, of course. Don't know what the horseshoe ring on her finger means... unless that's really a U and she's engaged to Ultraman (the evil Superman of Earth-3).

(Images and synopses, such as they are, taken from DC Comics.com.)

So I've been writing for Aeropause.com here and there, some news items although mostly more webloggy bits like an ongoing series on Nintendo Power. And thanks to Aeropause I'm back in the business of writing formal reviews for games.

This week I created a bit o' gaming news in my latest NP feature, when an offhand scan I included was picked up by the big boys.

The scan in question was this ad for Disgaea DS, which I found in the latest Nintendo Power and thought was fairly amusing:

My joke was to point out that the ad features a non-existent widescreen DS. Clearly a sub-par Photoshop work, but wouldn't it be funny if Nippon Ichi was privy to secret conversations with Nintendo, was working on a widescreen Disgaea DS game, and then goes ahead and runs an ad for it, accidentally revealing it in Nintendo Power of all places.

I posted that late Sunday night and the next morning it appeared on Kotaku. I think Kotaku picked it up first (which means somebody at Kotaku was reading my stuff on Aeropause, which is pretty cool), just because it was rather early in the EST when they published.

Then it popped up on Eurogamer and N4G, as gaming sites starting grabbing the scan and speculating on the possibilities:

Kotaku later ran the scan again when they published official comment from Nintendo that this was all completely unfounded.

It's good timing more than any actual info. We're all expecting Nintendo to announce a new DS soon, since the original DS is four years old and the Lite two. Widescreen seems like a given, although surely Nintendo has more enhancements in mind than that. Any semblance of verification is hot right now, in the week before E3... where Nintendo just might officially announce it anyway.

Meanwhile, my original article pulled down five digits' worth of pageviews inside of a day, so this was very good for Aeropause, good for me, but perhaps better for Nippon Ichi, since a whole lot more people are suddenly aware of Disgaea coming to DS.

The last time I posted a Pearl Journal entry was back in September 07 when Toys R Us did the Manaphy download. This particular entry was started in November! I kinda fell out of the game around then (although five+ months of dedicated play ain't shabby at all), although I did keep some old notes about where I was, to wit:

The big news for me in November was that I finally started Pal Parking in captured pokemon from LeafGreen, Ruby and Sapphire. Like, a ton of them. First I brought over all my legendaries, then a ton of duplicate cheapies (Mankey! Rapidash! Manectric!) just for Pokedex purposes. That's really all the game is for me at this point: to see how close I can get to identifying all 480+ pokemon in my 'dex.

So I have to ask: why the ball preamble to Pal Park? The Park Balls are an instant capture, and finding the imported pokemon hidden inside the park grounds is not difficult. Another weird design choice from the people who turned Pokemon Contests into something fun into something painful and twenty minutes long.

Last November I caught Cressalia and Regigigas. I nabbed the Cressalia with my lv58 Gengar using his Psychic attack and a couple heals to keep him in the match. Took two Ultra Balls and Ten Dusk Balls to catch her. I do all this stuff at night to fully leverage the Dusk Balls.

I used my lv70 Mewtwo from LeafGreen to catch the Regigigas. Psychic, Swift, Swift, Recover and only six Dusk Balls.

A few lingering answers from last fall. Yes, you can have Pokemon Battle Revolution send out Electivires and Magmortars to other game paks. I still don't get the whole Wonder Card thing. Battle Rev itself can send out three Wonder Card pokemon (the two I just listed plus Surfing Pikachu), so why is the DS game limited to only display three at a time? If you want to download something else, you have a trash one or more of your existing Wonder Cards... which does not affect the pokemon you downloaded, so why even "keep" Wonder Cards at all?

Oh, and I managed to actually find one of my trades on Nintendo's super-keen Pokemon GTS website.

That's my Wooper, waiting to be snapped up in a trade. I forget how it turned out, although generally online trading is a foregone conclusion. Somebody, somewhere, will give you want you want.

Here's my stats as of last November (current AMAZING stats to follow):

TIME	BADGES	POKEDEX SEEN
MONEY	SCORE	POKEDEX OWN

Now to get current.

The big impetus to play Pearl again was - ta-da - Pokemon Ranch.

Since Ranch requests certain types and then gives you hints on how to find them, it has inspired me to keep at my Pokedex completion quest. I'm even capturing total junk - like lv7 Starlys with first-turn Nest Balls - just to fill up the Ranch. I can't wait to see how big my Ranch data file gets.

Got my Heatran and Giratina. Bred a couple Phiones using the TRU Manaphy. Been abusing Pal Park (my LeafGreen cart is almost completely empty, and Ruby has been restarted so as to collect all the R/S starters... and currently Clark is "playing" Ruby, so it's almost like I've hired him to goldfarm Pokemon for me.)

We had two more download events since last fall... Toys R Us provided Darkrai and GameStop was handing out Deoxys. Darkrai is in the 'dex as number 491. I think the only remaining secret pokemon is a legendary named Arcaeus... no doubt to be found inside the upcoming Pokemon Platinum, the third pillar to the Diamond/Pearl series.

Deoxys provides a use for those four meteorites on the east side of Veilstone City. If Deoxys is in your party when you touch a meteorite, he will change to one of his four specialized forms.

With the help of some other Pokemon players, I've done a bunch of strategic back-and-forth trades solely for Pokedex purposes. During Origins, I had Alex breed me a set of the original Red/Blue starters!

I have every Eevee evolution except Flareon, because I only have one Fire Stone. I trying to dig up more underground, but I keep getting Water and Leaf Stones instead. I have like ten Leaf Stones and almost no reason to use them.

Lately it's just been more Pal Parking, and a bunch of breeding. I'm either breeding out the first stages of the bigger types I already have (last night I hatched a couple of Teddiursas), or I'm manufacturing various starters to use as trading fodder on the GTS. I've become proficient at running in circles without looking at the screen, so I can hatch eggs while watching TV or reading a book.

Oh, this GTS trade just about broke my heart. I needed a Kangaskhan for Ranch, so I put something crappy up for trade, like a Magcargo or whatever. The Kangaskhan I received was a lv67 beast, named Kangourex (which is French for Kangaskhan, so this gal probably originated from a French game). Kangourex's data sheet says that she was transferred from LeafGreen (or FireRed) in November 2007 at lv65... and that she was part of a Championship winning team in both LeafGreen/FireRed AND Diamond/Pearl.

Is this somebody's precious, hand-trained fighter? Why would they toss her aside for a junky Magcargo? Did somebody's older brother get ahold of their game and trade out all their favorites? I feel dirty participating in this. Nelly, if you want your Kangourex back, please send me an email. I'll send her back with a free Leaf Stone.

TIME	BADGES	POKEDEX SEEN
MONEY	SCORE	POKEDEX OWN

Look at how those stats have jumped in the month since Pokemon Ranch came out. Almost fifty more hours of Pearl playtime. Pokedex +140. Another five thousand points to the score, as if I had any clue how that is computed. And my money is dropping (somewhat) because I have to keep paying the daycare lady as I shuffle monsters in and out of her poke-hookup center.

Like it says in the screenshot above, there's no end to Pokemon. At least, until I get 491 in the Pokedex. Which is really close. I think the biggest challenge will be locating the Gold/Silver starters.

Yep. Portal is great.

I finally got around to playing Portal... and I will now join the chorus of supportalers. It's short, it's clever, it's got high production values, it's got a kick-ass theme song. Everybody who comes to our house will be required to play it at some point.

Seeing as I got Orange Box PS3 for like $15, it remains to be seen if I'll even bother playing the other games on the disk.

Rock Band 2 just may include the Rock Band 1 songlist for free.

This is still unsubstantiated, but an editor at IGN 360 says that the entire on-disk songlist of RB1 will be made available as a free download to owners of RB2. Heck, I'd even accept a nominal fee for that ability, but free is hard to ignore.

If this turns out to be false speculation, that 360 guy will be universally proclaimed a huge douchebag.

Download-only Siren coming on disk in Japan.

I want to check this out, but the concept of downloadable episodes kinda makes me worry about filling up my PS3. In Japan, Siren: Blood Curse will also get a regular blu-ray release. And word is, Siren will have an English option from the get-go, making this super-easy to import (Japan and US are the same blu-ray region.) Having the game all at one shot, without sludging the HD, makes me think this will be worth the usual $10 import markup.

Got Wii Fit cockblocked.

It's so crazy. I don't even really want Wii Fit, I just want to check it out (and I bet Clark will dig it.) But I can't find it anywhere. I got a hot tip from my sister that Toys R Us was getting them in this morning, so we ambled into TRU just after opening to find a huge Wii line. Turns out they were handing out Wii tickets early in the morning (still!) and the people in line for Wiis also snapped up the Wii Fits.

My TRU only received twenty copies of Wii Fit, and about ninety Wiis. Hey Nintendo. You might want to start making more fucking Balance Boards. You can't just ship out twenty at a time and call it a day. There's no dignity to this anymore.

No trouble with 2.40.

After playing Portal until 2am, I got the notice that PS3 2.40 was ready... and I let it download and install while I was asleep, that's how confident I was. Apparently some systems coughed all over the update, so Sony pulled it less than a day later. Mine is fine, so I'm enjoying the [super slow] in-game XMB and my [complete lack of] trophies. I kinda hope they hook it up so you can display your PSN Profile card on personal webpages, like, ahem, you can with your 360 Gamercard.

Another AeroPodcast.

If you want to hear me being super-polite during a Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero discussion, just check out Aeropause in a few days when they get the weekly podcast up. Or subscribe via iTunes.

"The Junior Defenders" Trailer (YouTube)
Ally Sheedy, Dante from Clerks, and Tommy the Green/White/Red Power Ranger. In a low-budget indy movie. Wow.

New Walmart logo (Under Consideration)
Looks like the new official spelling is dropping the hyphen. Weird.

get outta my way (Armagideon Time)
Bitterandrew examines the five key components for success in any webcomic. He's so right.

What's in store for the Disney Stores (Jim Hill Media)
Sixteen Disney Stores closed in my home state. The Stores used to both print money and be known for customer service, but the last ten years saw a laziness creep into the chain. Since Disney bought back all the Stores, they want to relaunch the concept as something special, closer to what it was a decade ago... and that meant closing a ton of cookie cutter mall locations.

The Party's Over (Mice Age)
Speaking of Disney, have you heard that WDW's Pleasure Island is formally shutting down in a few months? Will not miss.

A Modern Day Romance (using Facebook's News Feed feature as a narrative device) (Chicago Tribune Head Candy)
Funnish image chronicling a complete romance on Facebook.

Here's a couple brief movies, presented in Fuzzyvision via YouTube.

This is Thursday night in the card game hall, one of several massive rooms left open for organized events and 24-hour pickup games. This is where we tend to spend our evenings at Origins.

Ooh, another Origins success story. One of the closeout card shops let me buy a Mysterious Islands tournament kit for $2.50. These kits are a couple of small ships that come packed one to a booster box, the idea being that the game store that retails the box can use the tournament kit as prizes for in-store events. Either I don't know much about the true value of Mysterious Island tournament kits or the booth clerk didn't, but $2.50 sounded like a good deal to me. The pack has three tiny ships, including a British Turtle Ship that lacks the Turtle Ship keyword and a Pirate Galley that lacks the Galley keyword (hopefully both errata'd!)

At the back end of the vendor hall there was a zone sectioned off for foam weapon fighting. Here's Clark hacking away at Mommy.

Something else fun for Clark in the vendor hall, Paint-and-Take. You can choose from a selection of primed lead miniatures, grab a seat, and then get to paintin'. You can keep what you paint, all for free. Clark painted two figures. Not being a minis guy, I couldn't tell you what we painted, but it was a nice bit of craft project in the middle of buying and demoing stuff.

And here's a rather random 360 of the vendor hall, shot from somewhere near the front-middle of the room.

I guess I was completely off on this one, because when I first saw solicits for the Pirates Board Game many months ago, I assumed it would be a less rules-intensive, more gamer-noob-friendly version of the core Pirates trading figure game. Seemed like a great idea... invent a slimmer, easier edition that users the same pieces and basic concepts. Then sell it during the Pirates of the Caribbean movie push and get your gaming franchise under new sets of eyeballs.

I've almost bought the Pirates Board Game several times for just that reason. I like the little ships, but it would nice to have a ruleset that was less clunky. And now I'm glad I never did, because WizKids royally screwed the pooch on this one. They actually made it harder to play.

We found a booth at Origins selling it for only $15; I'm pretty sure $20-25 is a more average retail price, so I talked Chris into buying it. You get a playmat, enough ships to support two each for four players, a special captain card for each player, a Davy Jones card, a sea serpent and a kraken, plus some coins and curse tokens.

First problem: the playmat is, as promised, merely a thin plastic mat and not a sturdy board. So it will never stay flat, leaving ripples that make it impossible to get your ships to stay upright. This is a huge problem in a game like Pirates where the orientation and position of your ship matters from turn to turn. Unfortunately, the Pirates Board Game uses the same movement rules, where you have to measure movement using the usual R/W guides. It would have been a lot smarter to design a simplified ruleset that eschewed that fiddly miniatures-style move measuring... maybe something more board gamey with actual movement tiles on the ocean playmat.

Chris and I BOTH managed to snap some ship parts during pre-game assembly. Between the two of us, we've put together tens of those damn little ships, so I wonder if the board game ship cards were made from a cheaper plastic, or cheaply scored... or if we were just supremely unlucky. One nice thing, the included ships are heavily colored to represent the four players. If you're the red player, your ships are obviously red, making them easily identifiable during gameplay.

So after being surprised to learn that moving, attacking, exploring and repairing were all just as clunky as before, we tried to figure out what new rules were added. This is when it got confusing. The premise is that the players are rushing for treasure (as normal) but also fighting undead pirate legend Davy Jones. The game ends once DJ is killed four times, and whomever has the most treasure points wins. As you'll see, this is just about undoable.

Curse coins are mixed in, facedown, alongside the treasure coins. These include coins representing a kraken and sea serpent, as well as four "bad" terrains like Sargasso Sea and Fog Bank. These four events are each placed in the four corners of the mat. When one of your ships randomly finds the Fog Bank curse coin, both of your ships are instantly transported to the Fog Bank area of the map. To escape these Bermuda Triangle-style zones, you have to roll some predetermined impossible feat... like roll under your number of surviving masts. And if you fail, you lose a mast, making it harder and harder to escape.

Escaping one of the zones requires you to roll a number selected by your opponent. That's a one in six chance of getting out. Brilliant.

If a ship loses all of its masts, it returns to your home island so you can suffer through a bunch of Repair turns (one mast at a time). If a ship "dies" in this way, the other ship still stuck in the zone gets to escape for free. Small concession. Prepare to lose turn after turn failing escape rolls and then rebuilding back home.

The sea monsters are a little smarter. When a monster curse coin is revealed, the serpent or kraken is placed on one of six specially marked areas of the board, as determined by die roll. The only placement rule is that the base of the monster needs to completely cover the little numbered icon... so you can angle it in any direction, and if it touches a ship, it insta-kills it.

The big drag to the monsters is that they attack anybody within short range before each player's turn. This can be complete murder, since any given ship is likely to spend several sequential turns stuck by a sea monster.

Then there's the coin that says "Defeat Sea Serpent." Sounds like a Get Out of Jail Free card against a sea monster, right? Wrong. If you pull that curse, your ships have to book it towards the monster and kill it. No instant teleportation either. You have to blow more turns sending your ships in that direction.

But Davy Jones puts them all to shame. If you reveal a Davy Jones coin, he shows up on your island, stops all treasure loading, and you have to swordfight him. You roll a D6 and he rolls a D6. He gets to add +3 to his roll. You get to add +1 or +2. If you win (which is, what, a one in four chance?) you get to push him away to some other island, maybe even the home island of your opponent, yay. If he wins, he eats your treasure, knocks over a mast, and you have to fight him again on your next turn. Now do that four times.

Between all the evil terrain zones, the failed rolls and your ship falling over because it's beached on a crease, you're looking at one seriously over-extended game (the box says 30-60 minutes playtime!) What a mistake. Sure, this set avoids all the complicated keywords and crew interactions, but piling on the pain while steadfastly ignoring opportunities to further simplify things makes this a total failure. The Pirates Board Game should have been an entry-level gateway game, with a taste of the mechanics and the means to hook players into the complex core game system.