October 2008 Archives

The controls are floaty. The online servers are borked. Some of the levels are irritating devolutions into repetitive death cycles. But I am more excited about LittleBigPlanet than almost anything else in 2008 to date.

What makes this game so amazing is that the pre-built levels have all been designed using the same suite of tools that you now have at your disposal. That's killer. You go through these levels looking for inspiration, not just to complete it because it's a video game and that's what you do. You see an intricate series of switches and triggers and you know that, given the time and patience and brainwork, you can make that too.

After being in the beta, I wondered if my enthusiasm for the launch day pickup would be lessened. Because I've already seen the game in action. But as I headed out of Best Buy, I still felt that natural high that I get when I'm picking up a new game. I was still hyped. Hyped to see what wasn't in the beta, what costumes and stickers I'd find, what the rest of the story mode would deliver.

Although the Best Buy pickup was not without incident. I saw lots of PS3 friends playing the game Saturday, so I called Best Buy on Sunday to see if they were selling it. They weren't. I called again on Monday... and I was on hold for twenty minutes while they decided if they had the game or not. Twenty minutes. It took twenty minutes and a crack team of three Best Buy employees to locate LittleBigPlanet on a Monday afternoon. Unbelievable.

Put that on top of my Rock Band 2 experience - where I amble in on a Tuesday and find NO RB2 software anywhere. RB2 bundles? Sure, those are stacked over by the display. But in the game case they still had a hundred preorder packs piled on top of each other. I had to track down an employee over at customer service to find my preordered Rock Band 2 game-only edition.

I doubt I'll be going out of my way to preorder at Best Buy anytime soon. I only preordered RB2 and LBP through Best Buy to get the bonuses anyway.

So now I'm going through the story mode... which I actually prefer to do without online partners so I can take my time and examine the exposed bits and bobs of level design. I don't know what I want to make, but I know I want to make something awesome.

Once the online servers fizzed back to life after the initial failures, I easily found my beta level, a western adventure called Doomtown 0.5a. I want to scan in some Doomtown card artwork and make the level really Doomtowny. Because right now the only Doomtown elements are a sign that says "GHOST ROCK" and an appearance by the demon Knicknevin.

I hope they start tossing all kinds of DLC out for this one. They should go the Rock Band route and have something every week. I know they're already planning $1 Sackboy outfits... and $2 premium costumes based on licensed characters (like Old Snake!!!!). If they dropped a pair of those a week, plus monthly sticker packs and element bundles... they could guarantee that no two LBP players would end up with the same game. And there's something insanely cool about how that will expand the environment.

However I can see how LBP may not be for everyone. If you're not interested in making your own levels, that's a major negative. I guess you could always blow through the story mode and entertain yourself by browsing other peoples' custom levels... but if you're not at least dabbling in the level editor, you're kinda missing the point. This is far and away the best video game editing device I've ever experienced. It is not hard to create playable levels... but it is a heapin' challenge to create awesome ones.

Because that's what so incredible. You can do what you see. Imagine blasting through a classic Mario world and being able to rearrange the pieces, add in your own, create your own baddies and bosses... that's what this is like.

Here's hoping Sony sees a big sales uptick due to LittleBigPlanet, because they sure as hell deserve it.

As we enter Round Two of the 2007-2008 Cheapo Games Shootout, the following combatants stand ready for battle:

Zack & Wiki: Quest for Something or Other (Wii)
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii)
No More Heroes (Wii)
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law (Wii)
The Orange Box (PS3)
Slide Adventure Mag Kid (DS)
Pain (PS3)

Which game will stand as Best Cheapest? In Round Two, we'll cut this list in half... only three games will advance to the Final Round!

Each game will have to face off in six specific categories, with a potential three point maximum in each (although an effort will be made to limit the awards to a single 3 and a single 0, to name the best and worst in each comparison bout). The highest scoring trio will head to the judge's table.

TRICKS OF THE TRADE: Best in Leveraging the Console

Pain, in this original form, comes up the weakest here... as it does nothing special with the PS3's featureset. Harvey Birdman only ranks higher for using the Wii Remote as a pointing device. BBA is right beside it, placing a little higher since it does use the Remote's speaker every few seconds (albeit for crap like "You can do it!" and "Try harder!") Orange Box has online play that everyone hates, thanks to the developer essentially abandoning the game to its error-filled netcode (and starchild Portal is just a PC port anyway).

Zack & Wiki comes with a ton of gesture and motion-based controls, but it's all stuff you've seen before. Unlike No More Heroes, with operates on clever and judicious use of motion controls, including the never-before-seen idea to recharge your weapon by masturbating. Also noteworthy is Mag Kid, which utilizes the DS Lite's GBA port for an impressive single-use accessory... and comes up with a game that could only be done on a portable device.

HIDDEN OCD VALUE: Best in Unlockables, Collectibles and Secrets

The Orange Box may be getting a bad shake since I only played Portal, but it's my sweepstakes so whatever. The only gameplay-extending unlockable I saw in Portal was the commentary track. Harvey Birdman only has some short scenes featuring Street Fighter characters, and they are impossible to locate and unrelated to the actual gameplay anyway. Big Brain Academy actually has negative collectibles. There are a few minigames that only appear in multiplayer mode and can't be used in Practice Mode. I will never forgive this game for that.

Mag Kid. Um. No idea. I'm sure there's something.

Zack & Wiki's unlockables scheme is completely confusing and screwed up. There's a bookcase that separates out bios on the game's characters, bosses, treasures, etc, and I can't even unlock the bios for Zack and Wiki. Pain comes with silly in-game achievements, plenty of modes with difficulty tracks to work through, a tiny list of unlockable characters, and a much larger list of characters that sell for a $1. Not bad.

Standing apart is No More Heroes, which has a ton of collectibles. Wrestling masks (which are all pretty lame), skill and weapon upgrades, t-shirts and other items of clothing (which are great), and, eventually, some concept art.

THE FIRST IMPRESSION: Best in Box Art

OK, Pain is right out, as it completely lacks box art, being a downloadable game. The Orange Box is famous for having a lousy cover... can you imagine anybody picking that up off the rack and thinking "Yeah, I'd like to try this game with my high school band teacher and an ugly Muppet taking a subway exit!" Garbage.

Mag Kid is also a muddle. Even if you can read Japanese, that would still look like nothing more than a sales flyer for Super Potato exclaiming 20% off all DS models in stock. And I've never liked how Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree ripped off the box art to the original Animal Crossing.

So that leaves us with Zack & Wiki (respectable kids' cartoon look), No More Heroes (badass sketchy otaku fanbait) and Harvey Birdman (beautiful Ralph McQuarrie-esque full painting).

Next time: No More Heroes leads the pack as we head into the second half of the Semifinals, but how will Travis Touchdown and company fare as we investigate the music, the cast, and the multiplayer!

Guess which Venture Bros character Clark is describing.

Clark: "That guy is dressed like a girl."
Me: "I think that actually is a girl."
Clark: "But he talks like a boy."

That ten minute auto-off is murder on Rock Band.

PS3 2.5 introduced an optional ten minute timeout for the controllers... which is great, because I've definitely watched Dual Shocks go dead after being left on while we watch a movie. But the flipside is that it wrecks Rock Band... if you're doing a long set, the controller attached to the singer will power off, pausing the song. And it even affects the RB1 drum kit, which is worse as the drum kit doesn't seem to have an active power-on button. So when the kit gets turned off, it's not an easy button press to turn it back on.

Yeah, that Balance Board Tetris thing? Totally sucks.

Absurd Balance Board justification mode aside, Tetris Party is predictably sweet. The optional attack items available in multiplayer are fun, and the game awesomely does what so few other Wii games have dared: it uses the damn Remote speaker! The UI is for shit though, but that's just an obstacle to be lightly brushed aside as the entire room jams for Tetris.

Yeah, I know I just said I wasn't going to download anything until the SD patch arrives... but, Tetris.

The Buzz Epiphany.

After just about every online Buzz game coming down to one question costing us the win, the obvious thought has occurred: the entire population of people who bought this game is equal to the subset of people who are good at trivia games in the first place.

Beautiful Katamari soundtrack more j-poppy than ever.

Maybe it's because I've not really spent any quality time with Beautiful Katamari, so I'm lacking the direct game connection... but the soundtrack CD seems even more like regular j-pop than ever. That's no bad thing; it's still great stuff... it just lacks the truly bizarre tracks, like the animal voices medley from We Love Katamari.

Did Steve Jobs design the Burnout welcome screen?

Seriously, look at this. Almost every element is ripped directly from Mac OSX. The calendar, the weather icons, the reflections, the clock box. I always wonder if PC people notice stuff like this, because it just SCREAMS to a Mac user.

Hurra Torpedo Appliance Junkyarding (YouTube)
I don't know anything about these guys other what I've seen on YouTube. This mini-documentary of the band searching for new appliance-instruments at some American junkyard is just fabulous.

Apple surpasses goal of 10 million iPhones sold in 2008; outsells RIM in September quarter (Mac Daily News via Daring Fireball)
Great list of quotes from analysts, pundits and competitors who were sure the iPhone would fail. The one the really gets me is "When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don't exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren't clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good." WTF? What magical cell phone world was that guy living in? Cell phones are the very definition of clunky, inadequate devices.

Fanboy Dorks Ruin Metacritic (Kotaku)
I feel like we've been waiting years for this to happen. A bunch of 360 fanboys started submitting fake reviews of LittleBigPlanet to Metacritic, bringing the game's average review score down to a sad 6.4. In retaliation, the PS3 nation then dragged Gears of War 2 down to 2.8.

'Star Trek' First Look Photos (Yahoo Movies)
I'm actually moderately interested in this movie now.

PixelPatch: PJ Monsters Updates Incoming (PlayStation Blog)
Upcming PixelJunk Monster update adds trophies (whee!), more difficulty options (wheee!), and record-to-YouTube ability (wheeee!)

And, also, David Hasselhoff will be a new Pain character! I swear, that stupid little game just keeps getting better and better.

Impressions: Tetris Party (Nintendo World Report)
OK, I want to exchange Dr. Mario Online RX for Tetris Party please. Also World of Goo. I still have $20 sitting in my Shop Channel account, but I'm not buying anything until Nintendo pushes out that patch that allows downloads playable from an SD card.

This afternoon I was drumming in Rock Band 2 and then decided I wanted to switch to some singing. (Can we stop calling it Rock Band 2 and just call it Rock Band? I'd like a patch that erases the "2" from the logo, please.) I had just opened up Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" and was super-psyched to belt it at the cat. So I unplugged the drums, put in the USB mic...

...and failed out on Medium inside of five lines.

WTF? I know this song. Is something up with my calibration, I wonder? So I screw with the audio settings, but still fail out right away.

So I go to practice mode. The game keeps giving me a Messy rating. So either I'm a far worse singer than I thought I was, or the singing mode in RB2 is much more unforgiving, or the mic is busted. I change to a different mic. I change to an easier song, Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville." I can't even get the tambourine sections to register. It's like the mic isn't hearing me sing. Onscreen, the little vocal arrow doesn't even appear unless I'm really projecting my voice. I had the mic plugged into a USB extender cable, as you can see, but even if the mic was plugged in directly, it was still a no-go.

Given that info and the picture above, you should be able to deduce what was wrong.

I tried a ton of different configurations to get this fixed, because we have friends coming over this weekend and nothing drives me crazier than when one facet of my equipment fails when people are watching. It's embarrassing. And if something stupid does seem to not be working, I'll often lose my head and overlook the extra-simple reason why it's broken... like missing that the Wavebird's sync dial is on the wrong frequency. So I needed to focus and figure this out.

I was about to start googling "PS3 USB mic fail Rock Band 2 WTF" when I solved the puzzle...

That damn PSEye camera was ganking the game's mic input! So the game was never hearing me through the handheld mic, it was picking me up from across the room via that camera. That's why it barely heard me and never registered a tambourine smack! I unplugged the PSEye and I was back in business.

And that's what I learned today. Because there's no way I can suck on a Fleetwood Mac song.

Weird internet voodoo. For the last 24 hours I've been trying to sync my RockBand.com account with my PlayStation3 account, and it errored out... but just now I tried again and it worked without me entering in anything. I guess maybe it pulled the sync info from my Rock Band 1 account?

Anyway, now that I'm a fully operational Rock Band 2 owner, my online profile page is up to date. As expected, they niced it up a bit. You can finally make shirts and such based on your band. The promised band member render figurines are live... they're very cool looking, but mad expensive at $70 apiece. Of course I want one, but I need to get suited up with the right shoes first. And I haven't decorated my guitar yet.

My first mission in Rock Band 2 was getting everything calibrated. The stock settings were way off, and the tick-based automatic calibration didn't seem to help. The manual has some suggested settings for various TV types. Again, the DLP tweak was spot-on. I do not have a DLP set... mine is a Sony LCD Bravia W. It's crazy how important those milliseconds are. When I was testing the other settings, it just did not feel right. But now I'm back to 100% Medium on Last Train to Clarksville.

Almost a year ago, I posted some off-the-cuff wish list items for the first Rock Band... let's see how I did in predicting the sequel...

When RB2 comes out (I would guess fall 2009 at the earliest), will we be able to use our purchased-and-downloaded tracks in the new game right off the bat? Guitar Hero used the lack of downloadableness to screw over Xbox owners and make them pay stupid rates to get the old songs in the newer game. Now that Rock Band has, from jump street, allowed for DLC... they almost have to provide for the playability of those songs in the sequel. If not, there will be outraged screaming.

If they want to really make love to the fanbase, not only will they let you use your previous purchases but also let you download the complete built-in RB1 song list for use in RB2 (or offer it under a nominal fee) with proof that you already own the first Rock Band.

Well, wrong on the ship date! Whoops! But look at that second paragraph... I totally predicted the $5 fee to get the RB1 on-disk songs into RB2! And at the time we didn't know for sure that the DLC would work in the sequel; that was like the first thing Harmonix announced and we love them for it.

The boned notion that characters were limited to one instrument was a huge complaint of mine. I wanted Harmonix to patch a fix into RB1, but they held it for the sequel. I also suggested that the game needs more face options, and Harmonix delivered on that as well. I think RB2 has twice as many faces to browse.

I offered that a keyboard instrument would be a great reason to pitch Rock Band 2. Obviously that didn't happen.

I complained that the weekly DLC wasn't growing fast enough. They've rectified that by releasing more multi-artist track packs, some free songs, some cheaper songs, and finally gotten into the large scale album releases. Although Rock Band still lacks THE Freezepop song. And where's They Might Be Giants?!?

It seems apparent to me that the only reason we have a boxed retail Rock Band 2 game is to continue to hold mindshare in the face of Guitar Hero's unrelenting release schedule. Sure, the cool kids all know that Rock Band has been kicking Guitar Hero's ass all over the block with DLC every week, but at retail locations that doesn't account for much. All you see at Best Buy is the huge honkin' display setup and an entire aisle full of boxed instruments. If Harmonix had stuck to the original Rock Band, they'd risk looking like last year's model (which it literally is, patches and DLC notwithstanding) once Guitar Hero World Tour hits. Not to mention all the other Guitar Hero franchise product.

So they had to do it, and now they're even screwing around with artist-specific boxed releases (an AC/DC standalone game headed to Walmart)... but it's kinda against the perceived mission of the original: Buy-in once and then download only the songs you like.

Although it's not the MASSIVE SEQUEL it should have been, Rock Band 2 is still a jump above the original. $60 gets you another 100 songs, a much nicer UI, some of the fixes we needed for RB1, trophies, and a bunch more online modes.

One big drag is that you can't carryover your bands/characters from Rock Band 1. You'll have to re-create your favorites and reserve your band name all over again. (The tattoos/stickers are all new as well, so you'll have to change your band logo.) I guess that's the final way that RB1's weirdass single-instrument-character thing will screw us over.

It's difficult to say that I've been playing Doki Doki Majo Shinpan 2 Duo, not because of any personal shame over owning a game based around tapping anime girls, but because there's barely any time spent playing it.

I talked a little about it on Aeropause, but this one is absolute murder. Your patience will be severely tested, as will your interest in tapping anime girls.

You're expected to wander around a map talking to various NPCs. Every time you go to a location, a clock rolls forward, so I guess you have to find certain people at certain times in order to advance through the non-touching section of the game. Obviously I can't read Japanese, so I'm just clicking aimlessly. Areas you're supposed to enter are made rather obvious, however, so it's not a totally blind expedition. And like other import games I've played, you find English in odd areas. Like the menu screen, or as part of the HUD in battle mode.

Even if I could read Japanese, I suspect the game would be just as tedious... because there is reams of dialogue to go through. There must be the equivalent of a New York Times Bestseller in there. Holding down the Y button speeds through the text, which is a boon.

The idea is to gather items that, I speculate, prove that the current girl in question is a witch. Each level has you tracking one particular girl, and, again I speculate, each level culminates with the girl being identified as a witch. Once you out them as witches, they sort of join your investigation team and help you ferret out the rest.

The crux of the game is the two part boss fight sequence. First there's a rather limp battle, then the touching. For the fight, the girl zips back and forth across the screen shooting energy blasts at you. If you tap the blasts at the right time, you defuse them or even ricochet them back at her. You also have some special attacks, granted by the witches you have previously caught. Thus far - and I'm only three witches in over three plus hours of gameplay - the boss fights have not been difficult. They're mainly a matter of dodging enemy attacks via tapping, and then scoring clean, damaging hits on the girl.

Once you make it through that, then you get the touching minigame, which is how this game made its reputation. The girl appears in a still image, occasionally moving her arms or changing facial expressions. She appears over both DS screens, but you can scroll her up and down so you can tap anywhere on her body, even the top of her hair. You're supposed to tap her in places she likes (?) so as to generate enough heart points to get her to upgrade to a different pose... eventually to a final pose where she will reveal herself as a witch.

The confusing thing is that the "good" areas seem to change constantly. It's not like she ALWAYS wants to be tapped on the arm. She may like that at first but then she'll switch and like her stomach tapped. I have no idea what causes the change, other than fraudulent and self-imposed randomizing rules. So you pretty much just tap all over the bloody place, milking hearts out of anything and quickly moving away when you see negative points. It's not exactly sexy, or even very rewarding.

It would like to be sexy. The girls are clearly drawn so (you can sporadically make breasts bounce, or click binoculars for a zoomed-in view of a particular part), and there's sound samples of heavy breathing. But even though the girls are undeniably cute little cartoon drawings, the obtuse gameplay kind of grenades all that.

Interestingly, although you can elect to replay the boss fights at any time, the touching bits are only repeatable after beating the game twice. Or so says the leading internet rumor.

Maybe the language barrier is truly hurting the experience for me, but it is a grind. I figure I'll finish it simply because it's not that difficult. It's just a matter of putting in time.

I still think it's cool that a game like this can exist, even thrive, on the DS. But you'd think that somebody would go all out and acknowledge that otaku are in it chiefly for the titillating parts... and then just make that the whole game. Rather than obfuscating itself in boring dialogue mazes, as if that has any chance of saving the game's reputation. Doki Doki 2 is merely a tease.

For the third year running, we went to a local farm store's fall festival. They hold it for several weekends... hay rides, corn maze, kettle corn, a few animals, that sort of thing.

Somehow we managed to get a shot of Clark and all the ancient rusty farm equipment without people milling around in the background.

Clark and Daddy in a swing.

Clark in the pumpkins-for-sale patch.

You can't see it, but they have dried corn kernel sandboxes for kids to play in. They are likely filled with bugs, but Clark likes it. There's also hay everywhere. There must be bugs all over the damn place.

Clark and Mommy on one of the garden paths.

Not related, but I wanted to put it up anyway... this is my old Weapons & Warriors setup. I dug it out of the basement since Clark is officially only four years too young from being inside the games' suggested appropriate age bracket. You put together these little castles and then use spring catapults and rubber-band cannons to hurl plastic cannonballs at each other. Watch your eyes, kids!

Aeropodcast #54

Here's my preview highlights from the podcast we recorded on Saturday and will likely hit Aeropause early this week.

• I out Sam and Max Season One for Wii as being a crappy, glitchy port.
• Should MGS4 come to the 360, I suggest replacing the in-game Macs, PS3s and PSPs with Dells, 360s and Zunes.
• Joe Haygood makes a South Park joke and again it takes me a second to realize what he's talking about.
• Mike Koss and I bond over an old Magic card.
• I talk about reading game manuals on the potty.
• I confess that I lied to Capcom.

Our work week without Tony.

To be fair, this week would have sucked even if Tony still worked for us, but with him gone, it seemed all the worse. Tony and Josh have already mutually fellated each other on their weblogs, and Tony said some nice stuff about me as well, so check that if you're into reading that sort of thing.

For over five years the three of us have shared an office, so it's definitely a change. At least we'll all buy Animal Crossing: City Folk and have that, right? RIGHT?

"What happened?"

Occasionally, Clark and I will catch some Monty Python on BBC America. This morning we watched the one with the Unexploded Scotsman Brigade. Clark's most common question during any given episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus is "What happened?"

Also, dig this crazy sub-branding for BBC America: "The Birthplace of American Television"! Now that's comfortingly ballsy! They're using it to promote a block of British shows that the States has appropriated (and cheapened), like Life on Mars, Little Britain, and anything with Gordon Ramsay.

PS3 screenshotting for shit.

I was so excited about this, and then Sony ruined it. Although PS3 OS 2.5 has added the ability to snap screenshots of games, it turns out that the feature has to be activated by the game... IE, it's not a system-wide ability. So no games support it and it will likely be some time before games start shipping with it or patching it in.

In better news, 2.5 adds Flash 9 support to the PS3 browser, so Adult Swim.com videos now play wonderfully. I watched Superjail.

Hey 360, where's your web browser?

Takes a while to touch a witch.

I know that Doki Doki Majo Shinpan 2 Duo isn't exactly a gaming high point, but an hour-and-a-half of clicking across a map and speeding through dialogue is a little steep to get to the five minutes of witch touching. Seriously.

The LittleBigPlanet delay has fucked me up.

I have two days off planned this week, during which I will not be playing LittleBigPlanet as expected. The game was delayed a week so they could pull a song off the soundtrack that contained some Arabic quotes from the Qu'ran! This is like the THIRD TIME some stupid game has had to be yanked because of including Qu'ran lines. When will thickheaded English-speaking devs realize that foreign languages mean stuff.

Also, I tried to scam GameStop for the LittleBigPlanet God of War preorder bonus pack (some exclusive God of War costumes and more) by preordering the game with the intention of cancelling it because I already have a preorder in with Best Buy for their Heavenly Sword preorder bonus. Unfortunately I'm too late to pull this off... whereas two months ago I would have preordered and walked out with the code sheet, now the code comes along with the game.

Take On Me: Literal Video Version (YouTube)
If the lyrics to Take On Me matched what was going on in the classic video. Sad as it is, this video pretty much defined my generation. This one and Money For Nothing, I guess. Oy.

No Games Support PS3 Screengrabs (Yet) (Kotaku)
Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Apparently, in order for the PS3 to take a screenshot, that feature needs to be activated by the game itself. And since v2.5 just appeared, there's not a single game that can do this (aside from games like MGS4, by figuring it out on their own). Pissed.

People Not Having Fun: A Gallery of Wii Music Models (Aeropause)
This is a good one. I did a quick feature making fun of the models Nintendo used in their silly Wii Music videos... and somebody posted in comments purporting to be a good friend of the one I ragged on the most. Seems like they took it in stride, though.

Sterling does Batman and Robin (Progressive Ruin)
Mike Sterling watches the truly awful movie Batman and Robin for the first time. I saw this in the theater and never again. I remembered most of the terrible bits that Sterling points out, though, which just shows how horribleness transcends time and memory. His post includes a great YouTube video that condenses the entire thing down to the worst ten minutes.

It's been crappy at work, so this is all you get this week. Aloha, suckers!

Not enough hardcore games on the Wii? Maybe, unless you consider shmups to be hardcore! Not only is the Virtual Console packed to the gills with them, but here comes Blast Works. A traditional shmup with an interesting hook: enemy ships, once killed, can attach to you, creating a giant ridiculous Katamari starship of death. Add to that a complete game editor, allowing you to design your own levels, enemies, ships and firing patterns - plus the ability to download other players' creations - and you've got uber hardcore. Original retail was $40; I found it for $20.

Ragdoll physics demos have been popular for some time, but none have the polish or gameplay quite like Pain. Appearing on PlayStation Network for $10 - and marked down to $5 during a special sale event - Pain lets you launch hapless abuse-addicts into a thriving downtown area. By controlling the character mid-flight, grabbing objects and lurching around on the ground after landing, the goal is to chain combos and run up a huge high score.

CONCEPT: Not much new for Blast Works, excepting an honorable attempt to combine everything into one package. Shoot-em-ups are a relatively stable breed; aside from theming and level layouts, you probably know what to expect. The sticky enemies of Blast Works make for an interesting tweak on the formula... but the included levels really offer nothing new or intriguing or even pretty-to-look-at. 5 points.

In contrast, Pain is almost nothing but theming. From the faux-metal theme song to the Spencers Gifts-level sexy characters, it's a ton of paint covering a very simple concept: chuck people off a catapult. Pain is a throwback, because although there are plenty of Achievement-style mini-goals, you're really doing nothing but tallying up a high score. It's repetitive like an old arcade game. 6 points.

GAMEPLAY: Although the Katamari aspect is amusing, it's still just a shmup. And if you're not onboard with that, Blast Works will die on the vine. The one big feature - the level editor - is a complete mess. It's impossible to use and the results are unrewarding. The game's subtitle is "Build, Trade, Destroy," which implies that user-created content is a major slice of the gameplay... but unfortunately there's nothing smooth or clean about how this all works. Trading designs with other players requires registration to a very skeevy, non-professional-looking website. I know the Wii has online issues, but surely something like this could be handled at the head end, not on some backalley URL. 3 points.

Most people will tell you that Pain is worth a couple plays and that's it. I'll say that once you get into it, it's quite a bit of fun. There are several remixed layouts of the main arena, and figuring out how to unlock them all is a challenge. A small pile of extra modes (and multiplayer games) help fill out the title, but only about half of the bonus games are worth playing... and none are as cathartic as the main mode.

Yes, Pain is shallow. But at least it's something relatively new and shallow, unlike poor Blast Works. 6 points. Since the expansion pack was not on sale I'm leaving it outside the scope of this competition. But as an aside, the play value of Pain is increased quite a bit by the Amusement Park add-on.

VALUE: Blast Works is overpriced at $20. I know it somehow ranks on the short list of everybody's overlooked awesome third-party Wii games, but it's downright awful. There's a reason some of these are overlooked. 4 points.

$5 for Pain is just about right. It feels like a fair price for the repetitive silliness that Pain offers. 7 points.

TIMELINESS: As I said, there is very little unique to Blast Works, and what the title does do looks and runs like crap anyway. Even though there's the potential for infinite user-created content, it all sucks. 3 points.

Pain has already received an expansion ($), PS3 Trophies (free), and a stupid assortment of extra player characters as $1 add-ons. So even though most gamers want to pigeonhole Pain as a tech demo, it has not been abandoned as such. 5 points, because the pricing scheme on the DLC is far too punishing.

FINAL: Blast Works scores 15, 24 for Pain. Pain advances!

The first round of the Cheapo Game Shootout is over! Now the seven winners head into round two, where we will determine the ultimate Cheapo Game for 2007-2008!

No More Heroes sequel on the way.

Hoo boy. I was under the impression that No More Heroes kinda sold for crap, so this is surprisingly good news. Here's hoping Suda 51 tackles the big problems: ugly graphics, empty city and awful motorcycle.

Aeropodcast #53.

We had actually written off #52 due to several days of technical errors, but Stephen managed to cobble it together. And then #53 went off without a hitch.

Careful listeners may notice the catch in my voice when Haygood suggests that the LittleBigPlanet demo ends Saturday night (podcast night) instead of Sunday night. Thankfully he was incorrect.

Also, I got to bring up some favorites during the Tokyo Game Show segment... No More Heroes, Katamari, Klonoa. And I describe Let's Tap, an upcoming Wii game that uses a cardboard box for a controller. No lie.

And McCain bashing around the hour mark.

What's this "copy" button in LittleBigPlanet? Code for "lying asshat"?

Just before the demo deadline hit today, I noticed the "copy" button available inside a menu panel when you're browsing online user levels. I'm guessing this lets you download an editable copy of that level.

I sure hope that one cannot then re-upload that downloaded level, or else we're going to see thousands of shitheads grabbing the best levels, adding a smiley face sticker, and then publishing it as their own work. Bad, bad moon rising.

Buzz Quiz TV just is not hard enough.

The vast majority of the trivia questions are way too easy. "Which characters were on Buffy? Lana, Willow, Xander, Piper." I've never seen one full episode of that show and I know that. How about "Willow Rosenberg, Willow Vanderschmeer, Xander Foulwill, Laura Palmer"? You know, something to make you actually have to think about answers?

This downgrades most online matches to playing the game, not answering the questions. IE, you win by having the fastest buzzer finger or by smart wagering in the final round. Not by knowing trivia.

Also, online mode has a truly terrible round called All That Apply, where - like the Buffy question - you have multiple correct answers. For some unknowably stupid reason, you can see what the other players are choosing, as the clock ticks down. So guess what everybody does: beginning players ring in right away and have their answers copied... and practiced players either wait until 1 second before stabbing all the buttons, or select all four answers and then turn off the wrong ones just before time runs out. Either way, it is unnecessary and irritating.

IGN clarifies the Animal Crossing DS-to-Wii transfer.

Hey DS players, you get to keep your character, your catalog (IE, the list of what you have unlocked), and your inventory. But not your bells. So it's back to Nook's for you!

I'll restate my hope that City Folk will contain 10x as many items as the DS/GameCube games.

We finished Ben 10: Protector of Earth.

Was a fun little game all the way to the end. Some of the boss fights were a little too obtuse for their own good. But we're living proof that you can roll through this game with a three-year-old on P2 and make it no problem. Yes, there appears to be bonus levels post-credits. And Vilgax survives, the bastard! Way to make the game almost completely inconsequential to series continuity.

Somewhere there exists a less annoying cut of the Ninja Turtles CG movie.

Perfectly fine film. The rooftop-in-the-rain fight looks amazing in HD. I appreciated the bizarre attempt to make the film copacetic to both old school comics fans and animated series fans. Like, they eat pizza in one scene, but they don't go on and on and on about it.

One thing I noticed... in a lot of cases, whenever the turtles had to give one of their silly, action movie cliche lines (like "I love it when they play hard to get!" when chasing a bad guy), the character would either have the back to the camera, be far enough way that there was no distinct lip sync, or otherwise have their face obscured. Could this mean that we can get a "serious" cut without all (most of) the dippy empty-headed pun dialogue?

Yesterday we went to an annual Chuseok holiday event, which is a traditional Korean harvest festival. According to the calendar, Chuseok was actually a month ago, but as none of us are farmers, I doubt anybody noticed.

There's always an arts and crafts activity, some Korean performance art (singing, dancing and kickass folk drumming), and a food area run by a local Korean women's association.

I don't know what this was, but it was great. Some kind of cooked wrapped vegetable thing.

Clark's highlight - besides scamming some Halloween pumpkin candy from another kid - was the hanbok dress-up and parade. They had a selection of hanboks for visitors to try on. Korea doesn't have the same Western notions of "boy colors" and "girl colors," by the way. +1 for Korea.

There's something comforting about seeing Clark in a hanbok. We can never do enough to include, honor, respect and remember his birth culture.

Clark painted his own Korean mask at the craft table.

Clark and Mommy in their Korean formalware. They only had one adult male hanbok, so I did not get to dress up.

Mappy The Robot Runs a Maze (Kotaku)
I've read about this, but never seen it... it's from a micromouse competition, where folks build robots that use AI to get through a maze. Mappy is a natural at this.

My Name Is Bill Swadley, And I Work For Fox (Huffington Post)
It's true... mention that you work for FOX and everybody immediately makes the conceptual leap to FOX News, which is embarrassing and incorrect. This weblog confessional tries to educate people on the difference. (Thanks to Tony for the link!)

Related aside: in the latest issue of Jonah Hex, it is revealed that Hex continues to wear his Confederate uniform (until his death in 1904!) not because of any loyalty to the Confederacy (he has no such feelings) but because it becomes a quick way for Hex to determine the value of the folks that approach him. If they express sympathy for the plight of the South, he knows right away that they are foul, evil folk. And as a side benefit, it keeps everyone who hates the Confederacy away from him! Hex dislikes people, so this is a win-win for him.

This is precisely how I'm going to tackle the thorny issue of my own employment by a FOX (not FOX News) television station.

FINAL CRISIS ANNOTATIONS
Doug Wolk with some stellar synopses and timelines of DC's Final Crisis event, including all the tie-in series.

BD-Live falls short again with 'Iron Man' (cnet)
I think they fell short just in even telling people what the hell BD-Live is. Or Iron Man it's apparently a crappy trivia game, with the potential for future downloadable questions. Boy, that sounds great!

Disney is aiming for something a little higher... on their BD-Live disks you'll be able to watch the movie simultaneously with friends around the world. Friends with blu-ray players fancy enough to handle an internet connection, not to mention also owning a copy of the movie, that is.

Rock Band.com relaunches for Rock Band 2
Including some of the cool features we were promised over a year ago before the first RB came out, like the ability to order custom band t-shirts and figural statues!

I often talk about how I never trade games back for store credit. But "never" is really just "almost never," because I have done it from time to time. I remember trading in Diablo 2 for PS1 many years ago (but I kept the bundled Diablo-stickered memory card!). What was that PS1 Descent rip-off? Forsaken? Also traded in.

There are many reasons why I make it a general rule not to trade in games, but my need to continue to possess items tops the list. Yes, I don't approve of the GameStop business plan of reselling games because they're making continued profit without kicking anything back to the game creators. Yes, I know you can generally do better on eBay with a little effort. Yes, the GameStop system pretty much pays you dirt, and the prices have gotten even lower now that they want to further con you into buying their magazine subscription and benefit from "increased trade-in rates!" But mainly, I just like owning stuff.

I did a fairly large trade pile about a year ago, and then completely forgot about it until this week, when I did it again. Here's last year's firing line:

Some of those actually escaped the bullet, but we'll get to that shortly.

You can see by the incredible selection that I don't trade back anything good. This is one of the rules I have codified that govern the teency amount of trading I've done over my gaming history. Trade Back Unplayable Junk. Resident Evil: Outbreak. Finding Nemo. Sonic Heroes (which, along with Spider-Man and Mario Party 4, I instead gave to some family members when they picked up a Wii).

Another rule is Keep the Replacement. The Simpsons Road Rage, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Spider-Man were all succeeded by better games. Which I own. Crazy Taxi was replaced by the Grand Theft Auto series.

If the Game Was Fine But Not a Standout, it may find itself on my deathlist. Red Faction. Splinter Cell. Medal of Honor: Frontline. Timesplitters. SOCOM (kept the headset).

If I May Turn a Profit, or at least get a solid return, I'll consider it if it is already close to one or more of the other rules. ATV Offroad Fury 2 was a PS2 system pack-in, so it's sort of pure profit.

If the Game Was Such a Colossal Disappointment that I View Trade-In as an Appropriate Punishment, I may even take some measure of glee in giving it back. Like Resident Evil: Code Veronica X, whose mid-game boss fight turned me livid with anger.

But let it be known that I do not take these decisions lightly. At some level, all of these games mean something to me. I think of the friends that played them with me. I think of the characters and cutscenes. I sweat this. Even as I'm humping a bag o' games into the GameStop, I'm considering Governor's Reprieves for each one.

Notice I do not include Will Never Play Again as a trackable criteria. I have hundreds of games that I will never play again, but I have absolutely no intention of trading in.

Here's the stuff I turned in this week, which is actually quite a bit worse than the first batch:

I have to apologize for most of those. Just about all of those games are so bad that I can't even keep them around for laughs. (Splinter Cell and Wolverine's Revenge made this picture because I spared them on the first round.)

Most of those games are completely unplayable. All those DS games completely suck ass. Lair is of course a joke, but not funny enough. And dammit I would really like a good Zatch Bell game; Mamodo Fury isn't it, not by a mile.

But you want to hear the tale of the tape, right? Here's what I got, and I'm giving you the final credit amount, including whatever stupid bonuses GameStop was handing out that day. Most of this is really funny.

ATV Offroad Fury 2 (PS2), $1.65
Star Wars: Starfighter (PS2), $2.20
Red Faction (PS2), $1.10
Resident Evil Outbreak (PS2), $4.40 [Whoa! Not bad for pure shit!]
SOCOM (PS2), $1.10
NHL 2002 (PS2), $0.55 [And that will not be the lowest one!]
Simpsons Road Rage (PS2), $3.30
Smuggler's Run (PS2), $0.83 [Hey, that was a launch title! Where's the respect?]
Medal of Honor: Frontline (PS2), $2.20
Timesplitters (PS2), $1.10
Finding Nemo (PS2), $5.50 [Who can beat THE CHAMP?]
Crazy Taxi (PS2), $3.30
LOTR: Two Towers (PS2), $1.10
Resident Evil: Code Veronica X (PS2), $2.75
Zatch Bell: Mamodo Fury (PS2), $2.50
24: The Game (PS2), $1.50
Eco-Creatures (DS), $3.00
Lost in Blue (DS), $7.00 [NEW CHAMPION!]
Sprung (DS), $0.50 [The all-time trade-in loser!]
Cookie and Cream (DS), $2.50
Splinter Cell (GameCube), $0.75
Wolverine's Revenge (GameCube), $0.75
Lair (PS3), $9.75 [Only paid $15, so this is almost like making money.]
Blast Works (Wii), $10.00 [Seriously guys, this game sucks.]
Cooking Mama: Cook Off (Wii), $15.00

And the utterly irredeemable first Cooking Mama game for Wii wins the competition with a trade-in value of $15. It currently sells for $20, so that's pretty sweet. Of course, I bought it at original MSRP.

Cooking Mama aside, much of that latter half was bargain games where, in the final analysis, I didn't come out that far behind. I'm sort of proud of that Lair trade-in. $5 isn't bad to see a truly mismanaged big budget game in action.

I'd normally save this for an end-of-week roundup post, but these videos are too great. Today on Gizmodo, they posted a pair of videos that use a tilt-shift lens... which I of course have never heard of... but the end effect is that it makes real-world stuff look like a tiny intricate toyland. It is difficult to watch these and believe that it's not some kind of composited SFX shot.

How long will it take for every music video director in the world to overuse this amazing effect?

I love when the big boat scoots into dock and all the little boats wiggle from the wave motion.

Video creator Keith Loutit has more. Astounding stuff.

Oh my god the Promise Ending.

Although I knew about existence of the Fatal Frame 2 "Promise Ending," I had never looked it up because it was a hidden ending only available on the Xbox port of the game... and what could possibly be canon about that?

But this week I finally read up on it, most notably in the form of a beautiful screenshot image of the ghosts of Tachibana kids standing together, finally united as part of the game's "happy" ending. Wow. I am a sucker for anything to do with dear little Chitose.

I'm never playing Zack & Wiki again.

Hey, I found out why nobody bought critically acclaimed third party adventure game Zack & Wiki: because it sucks.

Seriously, I was trying to figure out one of the ice world levels (which is not that far in the game, by the way) and died for like the millionth time in an area that I had no right to expect was dangerous. Fuck that shit. Who in the hell enjoys this trial-and-error bullshit?

The Amanda Conner biography.

I read that Power Girl artist Amanda Conner was married to Jimmy Palmiotti, the writer of DC's Jonah Hex and an East Coast comic convention favorite, so I checked out her Wikipedia page. Turns out, she's been a comics artist for twenty years! When that four-part 2005 Power Girl story hit back in JSA Classified, I wrongly assumed she was some undiscovered talent based on the way everybody went apeshit over her... but she's earned her chops well before that. Nice!

I have not talked at all about being in the LittleBigPlanet beta.

Yeah, I'm in it and it is hot. You guys are going to go crazy when this thing comes out. I have played some incredibly cool and bizarre and awesome user-created levels. I did one tonight that does nothing but play the first minute of "Sweet Child O'Mine"!

It is some hardcore work to make levels. I'm making a little Wild West town and the level of granularity means you can get lost tweaking every insignificant little detail. So far, I have one half-finished saloon that looks like crap. But I plan to turn the darkness way up so you'll never notice.

OSX DVD screenshot trick.

By default, Mac OSX makes it impossible to take screenshots while a DVD is playing. This is of course some kind of stupid Hollywood kowtow that Steve Jobs had to pull in order to maintain good relationships with the studios. But because there are plenty of legal reasons as to why you'd want to screenshot a paused DVD image, there is a way around it.

I've known about this trick for some time but never before found cause to use it. It's a little arcane, but you need to open up Terminal while the DVD window is open, type in a line of code, then watch as your cursor changes from a crosshairs to a cute little camera icon.

Blu-ray sale at Best Buy turns maybe-movies into sure-movies.

As anticipated, we bought Iron Man at Best Buy where it was only $25 for the blu-ray version. Who wants that stupid Target-exclusive Iron Man plastic head case? How do I put that on the shelf?

Best Buy also had a 2-blu-for-$35 deal going, on some very specific movies. That's a pretty great price, so I grabbed Letters from Iwo Jima and that CG Ninja Turtles movie.

LittleBigPlanet - The Human Body Level (YouTube)
Straight from some guy in the LBP beta: a level that takes place inside a body. I hope I can create something half this cool during my time in the beta.

High Steaks (Mark Evanier)
A little about the utter nonsense of having candidates show up in City A to be photographed eating City Food Specialty B. In this case, Philadelphia and cheese steaks. Disgusting on all counts, but there's a great Bob Dole story in there.

Which of the EIGHT Versions of the Iron Man DVD Should You Buy? (Gizmodo)
Funny-sad. I hope they have to count all eight of these stupid spin-the-wheel bonus bundles as separate movies, so Iron Man ends up being the dud of the week in sales. That said, we're probably going with Best Buy because it's cheapest: $25 for blu-ray.

Fans unite in auction to save Superman's house (Yahoo News)
Brad Meltzer organized a charity auction to raise the money needed to keep Jerry Siegel's boyhood Cleveland home from falling over. Over $100,000 was raised, which will go to restoring the home so the people who have lived there for 20 years without taking care of the place won't wake up one day to find the roof caved in. Once they die, it's highly probable that somebody will buy the house and have it moved somewhere to be made into a museum.

In which I talk a bit about the ends of various Jonah Hex comics, so consider that a SPOILER warning. (Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin)
Part of a trio of entries regarding the final fate of Jonah Hex, a classic DC footnote for over twenty years.

First things first: I hate that Buzz host guy. I just don't like the look of him. But he's far less obnoxious that the overplayed voiceover guy from You Don't Know Jack, so that's a plus.

The game, however, is a hoot. Rhonda and I did three 1-on-1 matches tonight, and each was no longer than 20 minutes... so it seems nicely brisk for multiplayer. We also did one online multiplayer game, and I think that was even shorter. In summation, nice short chunks of gameplay rather than dragging it out for an entire evening, a la Mario Party.

Some of the trivia games skew towards unfair. There's a hot potato style game that penalizes whoever is holding the potato when time is up, and you have no idea when that is... effectively making it entirely random. The Pie Fight game lets you choose which opponent to hit with the pie by clicking when his or her name is highlighted, but it also includes you in that list so if your timing is off, you whack yourself with a pie. These are small design mistakes that are accentuated in a two player match; both would be less annoying with three or four contestants.

Anyway, most of the games are fine. Some include video clips or Getty Images style still photography, which is nice.

The PSEye integration is pretty classic. The host will spur you to pose for photos at certain breaks between games, but it will also take photos without telling you. That is fantastic and probably dangerous. At the end, the winner is told to ham it up and that photo is nicely displayed as part of the Buzz virtual set, and it looks great. After you're done playing, you can browse all the photos (about six per game) in a album gallery.

The online mode lets everyone in your house play against everyone in up to three other houses simply by making all the controllers active. So everybody can ring in, even though your team is represented by a single sleazy female avatar onscreen. We won our first online match tonight on the final question... it was a game where you have to wager money on the category before the question is revealed. The category was baseball so we only staked the minimum, while the three other loons had wagered the maximum and all lost. (Note: baseball did NOT derive from cricket!)

My fondest hope for Buzz Quiz TV is that they take the Rock Band route and treat it like a gaming platform, not a series of single retail releases. They have started this thinking by offering three expansion packs as DLC, for prices ranging from $6 to $8. The PS2 Buzz games flowed like wine, with different full-retail games showing up in various categories. This is bad. I want the ability to buy only the quiz packs I prefer, at minimal pricing. Since Buzz Quiz TV has been out for a few months in Europe, our edition launched with a pair of free updates, adding a few more sleazy female avatars and PS3 Trophy support.

I bought the Video Games DLC quiz pack, which purports to have 500 new questions. Although so far I've seen FOUR about frickin' Kung Fu Panda: The Game, and a more-than-acceptable amount for The Golden Compass: The Game, so I have to question Sony's true motivation. I bet there's no Nintendo-related questions in there!

But that can be remedied: you can make your own quizzes. You log in to MyBuzzQuiz.com with your PSN account, and type up as many quizzes as you like. (Folks without the game can go there to take free Flash versions of these same quizzes, which is a very classy touch.) Your custom quizzes that instantly show up in your game and can be browsed, searched and played by anybody.

I noticed a low-rent Marvel Super Heroes Real Name quiz, which went for all the obvious, easy characters... so I put together three DC Heroes Secret Identities quizzes with some truly obscure names. If you go to the site and search for "StocDred", you'll find my stuff. The site is all jacked up Flash, so I can't link directly to my profile page.

Custom quizzes are limited to eight questions, but you can create playlists that link quizzes together.

I also did a Fatal Frame General Trivia quiz that is serious. No softball questions in there.

I had the bright idea to make a kid-friendly no-reading quiz for Clark, where the "question" would be something "banana" or "leaf" and Clark would have to press the button that matched in color, but then I remembered that the game automatically scrambles the multiple choices. He's just going to have to learn to read someday.

Soooooo, good stuff. Looking forward to pulling this out on a party night.

You may recall me mentioning that my local Toys R Us did not have de Blob (Wii) nor Buzz Quiz TV (PS3) in stock last Saturday, September 27. They asserted that de Blob wasn't yet released (actual release date: September 23) and that Buzz Quiz TV could not be sold until the following Tuesday, September 30 (actual release date: September 23).

You may also recall me threatening to return on Wednesday.

It was a long morning at work, so I was considering running out to this Toys R Us as part of a very late lunch (like, after 2pm). I was looking forward to being away from the office, as I haven't taken a real hour lunch in weeks. So I'm discussing the merits of the plan with Arthong and Shovesy. They suggest that I call and ask Toys R Us about these games.

The thing is, no matter what they tell me over the phone, I'm not going to believe it. If they say "Yes sir, you bet we have those" I won't believe it because I'll be convinced they misunderstood my request and I'll be looking at a stack of PS2 Buzz games and a copy of Flubber on DVD. If they say "No sir, we do not have those for sale" I won't believe it because how in fuck can they not have two week old games in stock. It's the kind of thing I have to see with my own two eyes and as I expressed this devout desire I pointed right at my eyes with two fingers to illustrate how serious I was about it.

So I make the trip. They have Wiis in stock again, by the way. Microsoft Office-caliber sign on the door.

The empty de Blob cases are still stacked ass out. I ask the clerk; she claims that means they're now sold out. I inquire about Buzz Quiz TV for PS3. She glances over at the PS2 games and says "There's a PS3 one of those?" Then she does a half-convincing lap past the endcaps. Nope, no Buzz Quiz TV there. Finally she locates a similar ass-out stack of Buzz Quiz TV on the racks behind the glass. Welp, that must be sold out as well!

There's some skids of mailing boxes forming a wall by the cash register. I idly wonder if my games are waiting inside that prison.

I got soup from Panera Bread for lunch. To go.

Over IM I tell Rhon that I want to go to another regional Toys R Us after work. This one is probably just as close to us since we moved north a tad, but we're still unaccustomed to thinking of it as being within our striking distance.

We get there around 7:30pm. Clark is all late-night-weird. He likes going shopping, but he's just worn out enough to start being uncooperative.

We really should make this branch "our" Toys R Us. Although it doesn't have a modern layout or exterior (old star-R logo... and the ugly solid blues and yellows storefront from when TRU was trying to look like a ride at Universal Studios), it has more of what we want. The RZone is comparable to our usual store, but there's twice as many action figure aisles, plus a larger clothing section that always seems to have racks of stuff on deep, pink-sticker discounts.

Clark and I head to the RZone. De Blob shells on racks, actual games behind glass. I peer over to the bottom of the PS3 section; big boxed Buzz Quiz TV sitting there alongside the other middlesized games like DDR and Active Life Outdoor Challenge.

My local Toys R Us must be the bottom of the food chain. Last to receive shipments, no one motivating the staff to get stuff racked. Not too long ago, my TRU had to split its footprint and become a Babies R Us / Toys R Us location. The Babies portion got the short end, happily, but it seems possible that the overall lackiness of the TRU half may be in part due to that unfortunate twinning. For further insult, there's a massive building right next door that sat vacant for years before it become a fucking Ollie's Bargain Outlet. Ollie's is one of those stores that snaps up waterlogged merchandise and other items that fell out of the semi one day... and then passes the savings and the cholera on to you! An aggressive Toys R Us would have purchased that building and created an R Us shopping park with ferris wheels and pony rides and people willing to sell goddamn video games sometime during the week they come out.

I think my lesson is finally learned. Toys R Us #1 is fine for fly-bys and impulse trips... but when I truly need a new game, it's Toys R Us #2 all the way.

Clark likes de Blob. He gets to paint things.