Finally got around to exporting some recent Ranch snapshots. As much as I like the photography thing, Ranch photos definitely get very samey very quickly. Pokemon, white fence, mountains. Check.

The one of Clark I sized up specifically to use as a PS3 background! Haven't tried it out yet.

If you know anybody with Pokemon Ranch, you'll occasionally be visited by their Mii and asked if you want to travel to their ranch. If you do, the game warps you to them... although in real-world terms, it's actually the game warping a non-real-time dupe of their entire ranch to your Wii's temporary game memory. Like these few examples from Ben's Pokemon Ranch. But you still get to see their entire collection, which is nice.

Response to apexisfree (YouTube via Dubious Quality)
NCAA Football 09 is apparently chock full of glitches, and people are throwing the vids up for all to see. Lots of the evidence revolves around AI players who refuse to tackle (hey, it is only college ball!), but this video is particularly special thanks to one disgusted gamer's hilarious narration.

PAX East Coast: 2010 (Penny Arcade)
Oh ho! Now that is good news. I hope it's somewhere within my striking distance.

SECRET TO OVERWORKED ASIANS REVEALED! (8Asians)
Great story... everybody was in awe of a Chinese couple who operated a restaurant from 6am to closing time at 3am, day in and day out. And then it comes out that the place is actually run by two couples, who just happen to be two sets of identical twins married to each other.

LEGO-da Jones.

A demo for LEGO Indiana Jones showed up on PSN this week, so I grabbed it as a high-def warmup for the main event, LEGO Batman.

I'm disgusted to see that they did not fix ANY of the problems of LEGO Star Wars. Player 1 can still drag Player 2 around the board. Characters can still warp back from a fall into infinite spirals of death. Players are still randomly turned off and on under certain conditions. Unbelievable.

That said, Clark was digging it. With some coaching, he was able to jump to a vine and swing himself to a higher platform all by himself. And he liked Indy's whip. Rhonda and I enjoyed his truncation of the series's name, LEGO-da Jones.

All of Siren available already.

So, like, what's the point of episodic DLC that arrives all at once? All three parts of Siren are posted for purchase, comprising twelve episodes. I don't mind the bundling, but if you're going to carve up a dramatic, story-heavy game into prorated chunks, wouldn't it make more sense to post the segments over the course of a few weeks or months? You know, like episodes of a television series? Build anticipation, keep people talking about the game, create suspense?

The pricing works out to $40 for the entire 8gigs of game... or $60 for the blu-ray import. I still haven't decided what I want to do yet. One or the other will go on sale at some point.

That's right... if you want to see the excitement, the intensity, the sword of the hot new Sonic game, Sonic Kills Evil King Arthur... look no further than Brawl, THE Wii game and totally better than Mario Galaxy.

Look at those moves! Look at those environments! Look at that sword! You're in for a treat, Sonic fan!

I like Soulcalibur. More specifically, I liked Soulcalibur 2 on GameCube, which is not quite the same thing as Soulcalibur 4 on PS3. I've found that I have to retrain my fingers as I become reacquainted with Talim and her super-awesome life-restoring dual blade stick things.

Xianghua, Seung Mi-na, Talim

Overall, it seems slower than I remember? I'm not really sure; it's been a while since I seriously played SCII for any length of time. Talim just seems a tad off, but I love her so much that I could be enhancing her memory in my mind. As I recall, she could kill with a wink and pull twenty dollar bills out of thin air, she was so awesome.

One of the neat features in SCIV is that you can knock off your opponent's armor. I get so pissed when somebody kicks off Talim's hat!

DC originally solicited a DC Special: Ambush Bug book, timed to arrive alongside the second issue of Year None... but now I'm hearing reports that the book was cancelled. Meaning we won't see this great Ryan Sook cover:

Whoo! Great image. For several reasons... first, since this Special was intended to collect "his top stories from the 1980s, torn from the pages of SUPERGIRL #16, ACTION COMICS #560, 563 and 565 and DC COMICS PRESENTS #81," the costume shown here has all the little electronic bits that have long since vanished as the character developed. Initially, the Bug being a teleporter was a big deal, and his supposedly high-tech suit was how he did that. Giffen later changed that/stopped caring about that, take your pick.

Pixel Junk Eden Level:4 (YouTube)
I love the music. I love the look. I love that you can upload gameplay videos direct to YouTube. But I haven't bought it yet because I just didn't love the controls in the demo. I am pained over this.

Apple Patent: Stream Your Entire iTunes Library From Anywhere (Gizmodo)
Oooooooo. An Apple patent reveals a plan to access your music library from anywhere... you'd never have to worry about syncing your iPod, and your iPod/iPhone's storage space would no longer been an issue. Not to mention popping up your MacBook at a friend's to show off some new video you have back at home.

From Tiny Toons to Brave & Bold: Toon Zone Interviews Voice Director Andrea Romano (Toon Zone)
If you've watched cartoons in the last 15 years, you should recognize her name. This is a great, detailed interview with Andrea Romano... where she talks about voice-casting Batman for the umpteenth time, how the voice directing process works, and why it's important to cast ethnic actors in ethnic roles.

I hate him, but I want him.

As I said before, the Star Wars bits in Soulcalibur IV are entirely non-confrontational. However, if you want to unlock the SEEEEECREEEET APPRENTIIIIIIIICCCCEEE, you have to beat Arcade Mode with Darth Vader. Which is super hard. I can beat Arcade Mode (which is 8 matches; Secret Apprentice is #7) with Talim because I fucking rock faces with Talim. But that gets me naught but another 10,000 gold to go spend on in-game panties. Darth Vader is a pile of slow-moving suck.

Although Vader in SCIV did inspire Clark to want a lightsaber. So we got him the current Clone Wars Build Your Own Lightsaber kit, which was on sale for $25 at Target. It comes with a dozen parts that you screw together to create your own lightsaber handle design. The coolest bit is that you have to insert special plastic crystals in the hilt to determine the saber's color and sound! Clark prefers a blue lightsaber.

Final Crisis totally making sense.

We've had two issues of setup, and #3 started paying off on that. It is highly obvious now that Darkseid's group is somehow switching bodies, and have infiltrated the heroes (and villains) at the highest levels. Traditionally, the Justice League et. al. is a reactive group, but this attack is so finely orchestrated that they have no idea what to react to. So they're totally at a loss, the major players have been swept off the table, and they really haven't be able to do a thing about it. Those marketing lines about "the day evil won" were not the usual advertising hype.

Take a look at my first attempts to fabricate awesome in Soulcalibur IV.

Probably going to see a lot of sexy pirate girls online. I named her Silver for no real reason, since I liked the overall green color scheme. You can always change names later.

Her fighting style is Mitsurugi's, which has a very un-ladylike stance, so I may change that. I just wanted some kind of vague swashbuckler gal look.

It's always nonsense to weep and wail and shake your fist at the universe when something horrible happens, because that's life and it sucks. You double the nonsense quotient when you delude yourself into thinking that your pristine existence is somehow better than everywhere else and nothing terrible ever happens within your part of the world.

An Arkansas politician was murdered today, by a nutcase who stormed into Democratic party headquarters, announced he was recently unemployed, and started shooting. The victim - and it seems like a random selection, excepting that the deceased was in politics - was former State Senator Bill Gwatney.

Which is a terrible thing. But then there's this:

State Rep. Janet Johnson started to cry when she talked about Gwatney.

"This is like something you would see in New York or Pennsylvania or California, but not here," Johnson said.

What? Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania gets lumped in with NY and California? Of course NY and CA will have to take the hit, because we're talking from an Arkansas perspective here. But Pennsylvania? Amish Country? The Snack Food Capital of the Eastern Seaboard? Chocolatetown, USA? Was Janet Johnson on a weekend visit to the Reading Outlets and held up by a Mennonite? Is she still holding the Battle of Gettysburg against us?

Comic Book Resources posted a nice Wonder Woman animated movie article, including a new trailer. This un-subtitled movie is the fourth in WB's "Let's Show Up Marvel's Animation Division" series, following Superman: Doomsday, DC: The Last Frontier, and Batman: Gotham Knight. Speaking in Trinity terms, it is entirely appropriate that Wonder Woman get a new animated feature, although the character is kind of a hard sell on her own and they can't expect this to sell like Gotham Knight. Still, she has persevered, being one of only a trio of comics characters in continuous publication for over sixty years (guess the other two.) Perhaps we can take this as a screen test of sorts, and if sales are brisk, WB will be emboldened to dig into the rest of DC's underutilized stable.

Getting dressed. Not the greatest way to kick off a trailer, because it's been done to death. Kinda cheesecakey, but I think this film will take to higher ground for a single simple reason that I'll explain in a bit.

My Time With You - David Choi/Kina Grannis (YouTube via Angry Asian Man)
Super cute song from two YouTube-based celebs, funded by a suddenly savvy JC Penney's. Shame about all the intrusive JC Penney's popups, but when you're a YouTube celeb, you'll take what you can get.

Cop-Confiscated PS3 Replaced with 360 (Kotaku)
Not only that, but I think Microsoft got to count that as a Vista sale.

Aeropodcast #44: Walkin' The Streets of Redwood City (Aeropause)
Haygood and I discuss the whole "kids claiming games as excuse for illegal acts" thing, and I think we solve it. Somebody should stick a tape of this one in the Smithsonian.

I know this came out late last year and everybody else has probably already noticed this, but the logo work on the 20th Anniversary DVD of The Princess Bride is nothing short of astounding.

It's "Princess Bride" written so it can be read both normally and upside down. And it is completely legible! There are no shortcuts; no tricks. The font work is identical on both halves. To make these images, I simply rotated the original in Photoshop. The worst you can say is that the "br" is slightly open and weak. But that's being picky.

Watched most of the Metal Gear 4 bonus disk.

There's about 40 minutes of behind-the-scenes stuff at Kojima Productions, including some subtitled arguments between Hideo Kojima and his weary staff. Then an extensive series of documentaries. But the interesting bit is the full, uncut opening to MGS4... all those bizarre TV shows (mostly live action) that are intended to give the player a unique view on the world that Metal Gear inhabits.

I give. No more talk about Siren.

Last week's news of a blu-ray release for Siren: Blood Curse was apparently for the European market. Even setting aside the common lying tactics that game companies implement when discussing and not discussing upcoming releases, I think I'm giving Siren a pass. It's not going to be re-playable enough to warrant the 8 gig install, and I'm not likely to throw it away once I'm done with it. So if they get around to a disk release for the US, I'll think about it then. Or once I see the Japanese version on sale for import. (Play-Asia currently shows it as backordered, which indicates a lot of US gamers have chosen the disk option.)

Now, PSN Burnout Paradise on the other hand, now there's a game that can eaisly justify an 8 gig install, because that's the kind of game I could see coming back to over and over again. Especially once the thankless task of swapping disks is eliminated.

Sometime after Bully was released on PS2, I stopped posting "formal" game reviews here at fourhman.com. I was just tired of it, and the self-imposed stress of shooting for one a month just wasn't worth it. Especially since I do very little but whine and rant about video games anyway.

But since taking on a post at Aeropause, I've been getting back into it. So far, I've reviewed Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit and Soulcalibur IV... and more will come. Both of those arrived to Aeropause via a third party marketing firm, who sends out retail copies on behalf of whatever company has hired them to do so. My point being that because I get these games for free, I feel more compelled to write a review than I did when it was at my own cost. I like getting the games for nothing, so I see the review as my actual payment.

Aeropause uses a 1 to 5 review system, with half points allowed... essentially a ten point scale. Eleven if you include a zero rating. So I've been thinking lately about how to quantify those numbers, so I get my own internal consistency in my reviews. I know the trend in game reviews is to drop the number, and there's some very good rationale behind that. But flawed as it is, it's still an easy way to describe a game, one that a lot of gamers rely on... if only more reviewers would be willing to give scores below 8-out-of-10, we'd probably see more value in it (as consumers; as game companies, that's another story).

So here's what I came up with.

This is all very exciting.

I only need 19 more pokemon before I have officially caught them all. And amazingly, I've already been through all the truly hard or impossible ones.

My big concerns were the Gold/Silver starters, a few scattered legendaries like Lugia and Raikou, and the handful of crappo types that you can only get by plugging in Game Boy games that I don't have. Well, thanks to poke-pals like Ben, David and Alex... I was able to cross all the toughies off my list.

And when I needed extra Fire and Dawn Stones, my sister Marci came to the rescue, donating the items and sitting through a lot of trade evolutions.

Now, it's almost a certainty that a selection of the pokemon who passed through my DS were cheats. It's the Pokemon Gray Market. Nobody freakin' played Pokemon XD: Gale of Boredom, but yet everybody has plenty of Lugias to pass around. So somewhere along the line, probably well before any of my trading partners got involved, Lugia and Chikorita and other hard-to-get types were hacked out of Action Replays and then set loose in the wild.

It's an ethical puzzle, and it necessarily taints my accomplishments. But Pokemon is as much about trading as battling and collecting, so I find it a fair piece removed from, say, time travelling in Animal Crossing.

Family Guy - Over (YouTube)
Easily one of my favorite Family Guy bits. Fuck you, Hulu, if you ever pull this from YouTube.

Making Sense of Cars (Cartoon Brew)
Gross fleshy cutaway of Cars' Lightning McQueen.

Skeleton show (Michael Sporn via 2719 Hyperion)
And along those lines, here's some BUH-RILLIANT skeleton models of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and other cartoon characters.

The old Popeye cartoons did the dialogue AFTER the animation.

This seems obvious in retrospect. Mark Evanier noted this last week... in a switch from the way cartoons are usually produced, those old Popeyes did the animation first and then had the voice cast do the dialogue. This allowed for ad-libbing, creating that now-classic effect of Popeye mumbling under his breath.

LEGO Batman preordered.

The latest villain reveals include Had Matter, Man-Bat and... Killer Moth! Fan service in the extreme! I'd like to see them sneak a new Question or Spectre in there.

If you preorder at Gamestop, you can get one of four LEGO Batman keychains: Batman, Robin, Joker or Catwoman. I asked the clerk and it's first-come, first-served. So this may be another day off work thing.

We've all put some substantial time in on Ben 10: Protector of Earth. The game must have a hundred levels, because we've already done nine or ten, dotted across real-life locations across the US map... and we've only travelled from the Grand Canyon to Seattle.

Here's how this game happened, by the way. Rhonda and Clark were at one of those junk thrift stores that deal in truckloads of old overstock merchandise. The shelves are seemingly completely random and as much as I despise entering such an establishment, I always always always walk out with something bizarre that caught my eye. The last time I was in one, I left with a starter box of the Pirates of the Carribbean TCG and a Beagle Boys toy car.

Anyway, at this one Rhonda found an unnamed Ben 10 game and some nearby Ben 10 cards. Turns out the cards and game were for Mattel's aborted Hyper Scan "game console." This console's gimmick being that you scan cards in as you play for powerups and whatnot... not unlike some of Nintendo's efforts with the eReader. The game was maybe $5, the card packs were a buck apiece... and the Hyper Scan itself was going for $10. I think the console alone was originally priced around $70.

Even at that fire sale discount, I could not give this a thumbs up. The Hyper Scan is junk. We know this. Although it would have been a lot of fun weblog entries for under $20.

You know how badly I want this?

I have long complained that this should be a system-level feature, on PS3 and Wii and everything else. Even DS. And it looks like finally someone is going to grant my wish. Supposedly this will happen with the 2.5 PS3 update.

Kotaku has the rumor, circled through CVG, and it's still wholly unsubstantiated. But I need this. This will improve my life immeasurably.

Since I do a fair amount of bargain hustling in my gaming, I thought I'd do a tournament-style shootout between all the cheap, discounted game purchases over the past year. My criteria for inclusion was that each game had to be on sale, preferably at a substantial discount from the original price. I widened the net to allow import games and downloadable games, resulting in a Olympic-level competition of fourteen games. This will likely take a week of weblog posts to soldier through. Or more. I'm tired tonight.

I randomized the matchups and here how the initial seven bouts shook out:

Critical favorite Zack & Wiki versus virtual unknown Nodame Cantabile! What a way to kick off the fight card!

Feist on Sesame Street (YouTube)
Boy, I have no idea where I heard the original song, as I have no idea who Feist is. Maybe this was in a car commercial? Either way, great Sesame Street parody.

Advertising Kung Fu Panda (Cartoon Brew)
A vandalism job on a Kung Fu Panda bus stop billboard so good, that you almost suspect guerilla marketers at work.

Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain (Military.com via Mark Evanier)
A veteran who was a POW with McCain offers a wider view to the McCain-as-war-hero PR.

I bought Zack & Wiki during that famous Smash Brawl sale at Toys R Us... they had a short list of games that you could buy for half-off when you bought Brawl on launch day. Zack & Wiki was far and away the best game on the list, and also the cheapest, as Z&W was already busted down to $30 only a few months after its release. $15? A no-brainer.

Nodame Cantabile was a similar deal... I picked it up as a super-cheap add-on to my $50 Ouendan 2 import through Play-Asia. Thank you, no-region-lock DS!

To quantify the system by which one cheapo game will be declared Fourhman.com's Best Cheapest Game of the 2007-2008 TV Season, I will judge each game in four key areas... awarding one to ten points based on my near-random feelings at the time. Those categories are Concept, Gameplay, Value and Timeliness.

The Concept judging area will discuss each game's genre, style, storyline, characters and methodology. Gameplay will analyze the controls, presentation and fun factor. Value will look at how great the discounted price was, in comparison to the original retail price. Timeliness will see how the game stacks up today, since discount games typically hit those prices some time after the original release, meaning that the title has to compete against an entirely different games marketplace... IE, does it still stand out? This initial round will largely judge the games on their own merits; I will switch things up for the finals as I pit the games directly against each other.

On to the first battle of Round One! Fight!

Nice deals at Target.

Unfortunately, I already own some of these, but Target has some good grabs on red tag clearance. On Wii, Bully and Metroid Prime 3 are each half-off at $25 and I heartily endorse both.

This one was dumb: Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword for DS, red tagged to $25... boy, that's some clearance price for a DS game. Although I don't have NGDS, I gather it is quite good.

I noticed Skate and Unreal Tournament fo $20 each in the PS3 section, but the real joy is the Eye of Judgment / PlayStation Eye bundle. Now down to $35, which is half the original price. Remember, Sony tries to sell the Eye alone for $30. And to make matters sweeter, I found an EoJ booster over in the $1 box!

Great podcast this week.

You may disagree, but I thought Aeropodcast #47 was pretty good. I got to do some David Duchovny jokes, we tell an inspiring tale of a local Gamestop manager, and there is a large amount of Microsoft bashing. And not even by me. The podcast will probably be up by mid-week.