Street Fighter Sackboys coming.

I don't even really care for Street Fighter and I want these LittleBigPlanet costumes. Sony may finally be learning to leverage nostalgia in the way that has paid off for Nintendo for years.

By the way, wouldn't it be fun if there was some way to reset the collectible bubbles in the LBP story levels? It's just far cooler to collect actual things while playing, and that thrill is gone after the first time through. Especially sucks when you're introducing new people to the game well after you've already grabbed everything. Then you're stuck with lame score bubbles. Crap, I'd pay for a download that inserted NEW stickers/items back inside all of the story bubbles I've already done.

Uncharted: finished in four days.

Four days sounds lousy, but I put in some intense play periods on that one. The first time I booted it up I played for five hours straight. It's been a while since I've done a Tomb Raider-style game, and I found I have sort of missed that.

I guess I really enjoyed it. And given that Uncharted is a linear, hold-your-hand kind of game, doing a five hour jag with it on the very first boot-up is a compliment.

I know this game is a year old now, but it's new to me so I'm going to talk about it. Couple really nice things to mention.

The game is super-smart about checkpoints. Only in a few areas did I feel it was setting me back just a little too far after dying. Most times the auto-checkpoint was literally only a few feet behind me.

There's a concerted effort to avoid HUD clutter, thanks to the "life meter" manifesting as a black-and-white screen filter. As you take damage, things start going noir, which is pretty cool. And to heal back up, you just need to go hide for a bit. No herbs or medipacks.

For most of the game, it feels like a real world adventure. Like, this could actually happen. In other worlds, you aren't jumped by mythical eight foot spiders as soon as you set foot in the abandoned Aztec temple. And even though Uncharted takes place in a jungle, there are no long lost dinosaurs.

Um, but it was pretty lame.

Check out these excerpts from a press release about the recent Video Games Expo:

Philadelphia, PA - (November 25, 2008) - NBC Local Media and Lunar Tide Communications, Inc. announced today that the 2008 America's Video Game Expo more then tripled its' attendance versus 2007, with 24,674 people attending over a three day period. This is largest turnout, to date, for any video game-based event east of the Rockies.

The three-day turnout has put VGXPO on the game industry map, and made it one of the largest video game fan gatherings ever. The high attendee turnout suggests that Philadelphia, and its surrounding region, are a hot bed for gamers and strong market for exhibitors to showcase their latest products.

Wow, really? I mean, we noticed it was busy... but we couldn't figure out why.

Holy crap, imagine what it was like last year, with only 2,500 people a day! No wonder the GameStop booth kept running out of freebies!

I guess there were exhibitors there. Not game exhibitors, but exhibitors. If you wanted to learn about Panasonic HD sets, they were there. Or if you wanted some literature about DeVry. But game developers? Not so much.

This is from the current issue of DC Super Friends (#9, Jan 2009)... it's page filler but something about it is so stupid/cute that I had to share it. I don't always pick up DC Super Friends because the art is hit or miss, but Clark wanted this issue because the cover is about Superman's birthday. I think that makes this the only DC publication to acknowledge that Superman's 70th birthday (from first publication) was this year.

This page has a great cartoony version of Felix Faust, and I like seeing a character with a demonic backstory doing a cheap number trick in a kids book.

I always think about this gag and want to immediately hear it again, but I never seem to have my iPod handy. So I'm embedding it here.

This is my favorite Grand Theft Auto 3 moment. It's two minutes from Chatterbox FM, when the activist calls in to invite Lazlow to a Liberty City rally. There's so many good lines in here. Text follows.

Lakitu Out-takes from There Will Be Brawl (YouTube)
I think I linked to There Will Be Brawl.com a while ago, but I just got around to watching the bonus materials for episode one... some bits with the Lakitu news anchor. This is the funniest one, the faked outtakes.

EA Announce Dungeon Keeper MMO (Kotaku)
Sounds like a fantastic idea... turn a beloved and forgotten and unique (at the time) PC franchise into an MMO. I'm not down for the MMO part, but more Dungeon Keeper has to be good, right? Now what if I told you this game is only for China? Weird.

Otacon/Lolicon (AltJapan via Kotaku)
A little introspection on the strange relationship between Otacon and Sunny... as a kind of otaku male fantasy fulfillment. It's a good real-world assessment of why it's in there, but I don't think the gameworld is trying to make the case that Otacon <3 Sunny in an inappropriate way. Although part of why we're talking about this is because Otacon has made questionable sexual choices in the past... but I think his guardianship of Sunny is largely to make up for his severed relationship with his younger sister Emma. I mean, the dude gets Naomi. Naomi.

Wii Speak happened; nobody noticed.

As near as I can tell, Nintendo released the Wii Speak Channel download to complete silence on Saturday. I didn't see anything on Kotaku or Joystiq, Nintendo World Report didn't Report it until Sunday. And the Aeropause coverage came from yours truly.

The gaming enthusiast media reports on the stupidest shit in the name of pageviews. I'm a little surprised to see this go completely ignored.

Batman will be fine.

Just so you know, if you think DC is genuinely and forever going to kill Bruce Wayne, you are completely stupid.

I bring this up because mainstream media sources are already jumping on this story, like somebody really died.

Here's your pre-release commentary track on Aeropodcast #60.

Joe Haygood and I talked about the used game market and how it is inspiring game developers to come up with tricky ways to make sure that the only people who play their games are people who paid for a new copy.

Predictably, I am all for this. The only good thing I've heard about used games is that it lets more people play more things, rather than pushing people away with high price point... but games prices always come down anyway as games get older (except first-party Nintendo games, guh), used game sales do very little for the creators, and anybody I ever met who lived off used games was just a damn cheapskate in the larger scheme and wasn't really contributing to the gaming economy anyway.

Naturally, the true concern is the slippery slope. If I personally buy a brand new $60 game and then get told that I later have to pay another $10 to get the ending, that will not be cool. Somewhere, assclowns like Bobby "Let's Make More Crap Guitar Hero Games" Kotick are chewing on plans like this right now. And that will just make me doubly mad at all the skinflints who prop up the used games industry.

This is the second trailer for Batman: Arkham Asylum, coming to PS3 and 360 next year. The first mainly showed off game environments, with a couple crouching Batman shots for flavor. It looks really, really nice. But Batman games have a way of sucking, so here's hoping this game pulls a Resident Evil 4 and redeems the franchise.

Note the road sign. "Hitchhikers may be escaping patients." That is classic Gotham public works right there.

This whole record-your-plays thing in PixelJunk Monsters is great. Since the trophy update, I've been picking through the Trophy Challenges with moderate success.

This one is me screwing up like an idiot. You're supposed to build every possible tower, which means spending your eggs on new tech rather than upgrades. Not a problem. You get the trophy at the moment you build that last tower type... but the game will take the trophy away should you tear a vital tower down. That's what happens here. And I annotated it in the grand Web 2.0 style.

Emsmartened, I did manage to finish that level. There's two parts to this success story... I included this half mainly because my laser towers are ripping up those damn fliers, first the batties then the hated fatties. And I love the sound of those guys popping in death. Because I really hate them.

C.I.L.F. (Cartoons I'd Like to F***) (YouTube)
Oh no, the language shall not be safe for work.

Ex-Team Ninja and Brawl Staff Working On TMNT Fighter For Wii (Kotaku)
OK, let's not get too excited because odds are that this game will end up sucking. This report comes from a vague Nintendo Power preview after all. But a four-player fighting game for the Wii with the Ninja Turtles and online play that's better-than-Brawl (which to me means: voice chat, no lag and live friend list... and seriously, you have to go a LONG way to be better than offline Brawl) could be stellar. Fingers crossed that they don't dope it up with all of the many stupid add-ons to the TMNT universe. Start with that latest CG movie and build from there, please.

FINAL CRISIS FLASHBACK: MR. TERRIFIC (Comic Book Resources)
Nice overview of both Mr. Terrifics... although nobody seems to get the whole atheist angle. Mr. T has figured out that there's nothing particularly praise-worthy about "God" in the DCU. It's not that he denies the existence of the Hand-of-God Spectre, for example; it's that in a world with superheroes and magic and time travel and a boundless universe of alien races, it's just that the Spectre doesn't work for who he says he works for. Or at the least, "God" is simply another powerful supernatural entity like the hundreds faced by the JSA/JLA on a regular basis. And worse, this "God" doesn't even have the sense to show up.

The latest from Animal Crossing... problems with Pascal, making song requests with K.K., and what Gracie thinks of Miis.

OK, you know how Pascal wants scallops? White scallops don't count. Crap in a hat. Here's Pascal floating downstream after not wanting my white scallop and not giving me any cool pirate furniture.

I think Bunnie may be my new favorite.

Bought Dark Knight.

Wow, was that like a billion times better than Iron Man or what? Iron Man was an embarrassing 80s action TV show compared to that. The only question I have is what happens in the next Batman movie, since the only survivor... died.

And in very good news, unlike Speed Racer, the "Digital Copy" that you get with The Dark Knight actually works in iTunes on a Mac.

Did Cartoon Network censor Brave and the Bold?

We watched the Red Tornado episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold on Friday night, and I was sort of taken aback by the surprise heart-wrenching rendition of Batman's famous origin. Not what I expected out of a light Christmas episode, although it was very, very poignant.

We happened to catch the Saturday morning rerun (geez, they DO rerun it!) and noticed that the entire portion with the Crime Alley origin was missing. They re-ran the segment before, and then suddenly cut into the show after the origin bit was over to get the show back on time. Given the way shows are broadcast these days (all digitally, I presume), it seems like a really strange coincidence that the dramatic, serious origin would go AWOL like that... but if somebody really did complain about it, you'd think CN would just pull the entire show rather than clumsily hack it up like that.

You can all find Aeropodcast #61 now available. The good news is that Paul stopped by to join me and Haygood. I don't know how you feel about it, but I prefer a three-voice show. It's the Perfect Podcast Number. The show's title refers to the less-than-stellar debut of GTAIV on PC (hint: buy a console!), but our main topic was none other than Wii Music. The feel-good not-hit stocking stuffer of the year.

I think I've been consistent on this one... it's the Wii jump-the-shark moment. Nintendo's exclusive lineup for the last half of 2008 has been lame. By all accounts, Wii Music is more of a tool than a "game," and that's fine, but don't expect me to get all excited about it. $15 on downloadable World of Goo is a better buy, and we still have no answers about when that play-WiiWare-off-SD patch is showing up. Nintendo rolled over this holiday. Feel free to make as many Wii ___ titles as you like, N; some will be great, some will not. But don't rely on that and the third parties to move things along. Unbelievably, there are still precious few third parties bringing good games to the Wii. Devs are still cranking out expensive losers like poor Mirror's Edge over on the PS3/360 side. And the few third party bright spots - like de Blob or Sam & Max or Sonic Unleashed - arrive with critical failures.

I will say that I was interested to read two articles by authors who found good ways to explain why they personally like Wii Music... but it's not enough to make me swallow $50 on it. A cheaper price and some good ol' fashioned Smash Bros-style fan service would have gone a long way towards making Wii Music palatable.

I just did a check of what LittleBigPlanet stuff I've downloaded, and the total cost of what I haven't purchased is $4. It's like, geez, why am I afraid to spend the extra two bucks?

I have all the free costumes, natch. Even the murdered turkey mask, to which I ought to be morally opposed. I picked up the Street Fighter costume pack right away. The Chun Li suit is adorable and the muscle chest you get for Zangief is hilarious. And I don't even like Street Fighter!

Tonight I bought the Festive pack and the LocoRoco pack. The Festive pack is the first time they've offered stuff besides costumes (if you don't count the free pre-order Kratos pack, which I have), which is really what the game's all about. And it's comparatively cheap at only $3. You get a bunch of stickers, a couple decorations, a nice sleigh object, and two costume elements.

And you can bet I'll get the Metal Gear Solid 4 pack as soon as it arrives, which purportedly comes with four costumes and some MGS-related stickers.

So what didn't I get? The MotorStorm costume and the Resistance monster costume, which clock in at a beefy $2 each. I guess I'm morally opposed to spending that much for costumes based on franchises that I care about even less than I do for Street Fighter.

ST:XI-The animated episode :) (YouTube via Cartoon Brew)
Nice! Somebody took the audio from the new Star Trek movie trailer and edited it to the old Star Trek cartoon. I think I'd watch this.

Apealing or Unappealing? (John K.)
Earlier in the week, John K. posted a random collection of cartoon artwork and invited readers to discuss which were good and which sucked. If you read John K.'s stuff, it's pretty easy to figure out which ones who likes/dislikes and then sycophant it up in comments. Surprise: he doesn't like Ben 10.

Takahashi resumes career goal of screwing with us (Aeropause)
Yeah, I wrote this. But I wanted to again point to the questionable TGS 08 trailer for Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy. For the enjoyment.

This is either really cool or really worrisome.

Clark went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday. It was a pool party at the Y, so a parent was expected to go along for each invited child. Rhonda was the chosen parent and as we were explaining this to Clark, that Daddy would stay home, he said "So it's two-player, not three-player?"

Tis the season for amazing LittleBigPlanet DLC.

That Metal Gear Solid pack gets better and better every time somebody brings it up. $12 gets you five costumes and stickers. New music elements. Six exclusive pro-designed levels telling a Metal Gear story in the LittleBigPlanet universe. And the Paintinator, a new tool that gives sackpeople paint guns, plus the ability to give creatures a life meter for epic traditional boss fights. Oh, and there's trophies!

I am dying over this trailer:

It's time again for my podcast commentary track. #62 is now in your iTunes. Stephen, he of a long podcast absence, made a triumphant return. Apparently he was doing some sort of schooling, a concept of which I have only the vaguest of memories. And most of those are of Magic: The Gathering anyway.

The core topic was game companies being little shits and releasing garbage that they know works like ass but they have to hit the holiday release schedule and they can patch it after the fact later right? Well, that's my take on it.

One pro podcasting tool we're looking at enacting is using video. Not for a fullblown video podcast, but just to see each other and help to better manage the crosstalk. Unfortunately, Skype doesn't all video conferencing, and neither does gMail. Does iChat allow video conferencing with regular AIM users these days? I was pretty sure that it didn't at one time, but that was many years ago. I think the main benefit of using video is that we can snap silly screenshots to accompany the podcast newspost page... but I suppose there's nothing stopping us from doing that now, is there?

One of our community questions was to name our least favorite gaming genre. I quipped - and I would definitely classify this as a quip - that we can just all say "sports" and move on.

It's back to Wordpress to vote in this year's Nintendo Power Awards! This will be much more interesting than last year when Mario Galaxy ground-pounded all comers for a heap of wins. The field is open this year!

Overall Game of the Year Now that WiiWare has happened, Nintendo is packed with three solid platforms. Finally, no more GBA charity cases! I don't know if they've ever revealed just how a game gets on the nomination list for Overall GOTY. Whatever the criteria, Rock Band 2 is in, while Guitar Hero World Tour is not. Now, the huge list:

Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii), Bully: Championship Edition (Wii), Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS), Chrono Trigger (DS), Final Fantasy IV (DS), FFCC: My Life as a King (WiiWare), Kirby Super Star Ultra (DS), LostWinds (WiiWare), Mario Kart Wii (Wii), Mega Man 9 (WiiWare), No More Heroes (Wii), Professor Layton (DS), Rock Band 2 (Wii), Strong Bad (WiiWare), Super Smash Bros Brawl (Wii), Tetris Party (WiiWare), The World Ends With You (DS), World of Goo (WiiWare)

MY PICK: Brawl. It came out early in the year, which will work against it. Plus it has the stink of gimpy online play associated with it. But you cannot and will not beat the depth, the fun, and the fan service of Super Smash Bros Brawl.

VOTERS PICK: Also Brawl. Kart will be a close second. I just don't see anything on that list that has the longstanding support or even the enduring gameplay of Brawl. If Kart had been a better total package (more tracks, adjusted items, adjusted AI, retain 2-man karts), it could have unseated the giant.

I almost wonder if I'm doing something wrong. Even Animal Crossing and My Pokemon Ranch put out better files than this. But for whatever reason, when you export an in-game photo to the PS3 hard drive, you get these little 320x180 tinies. Odd. So don't expect the usual click-to-embiggen functionality here.

Rhonda has a usual outfit as well, the blue pigtails and fairy wings ensemble. Me, I'm usually wearing the last thing I paid for.

Animal Crossing City Folk : Coelacanth (YouTube via Cartoon Brew)
Somebody who is not us catching a coelacanth and repeatedly mispronouncing it.

We cannot catch one of these jerks. Every time we see the huge shadow, we flub the catch. We're convinced something's up, but I can't find any evidence that catching a coelacanth in City Folk is any different than catching them in the other two games.

Wonderful? Sorry, George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life (NYTimes via Mark Evanier)
Great essay about everything that is wrong with one of my favorite movies, It's a Wonderful Life.

Anatomy of a Scandal, a digression (Suicide Food)
A clever exposition of what happens when meat-eaters get pissed off at Suicide Food.

Rhonda is way ahead of me in Animal Crossing. She just got her second story and I still have 100,000 bells or so left on the house upgrade before that. At this rate, she is going to get the gold statue. I wonder if it will have the Mii face? I bet not...

Rhonda also happened upon Wisp one night, which only happened once or twice to us back on the GameCube. Wisp has undergone a genie makeover. I like how you now have to meet him in your attic to collect on his boon.

I thought I was on to something here. The strategy guide mentions that Chip will give out a silver fishing trophy if you show him a particular fish (this is separate from the gold trophy you get for beating a bunch of cheating AI characters to win the tournament). So when I noticed the picture on his cart of him and a koi, I had Rhonda give him a koi she had caught previously. No dice. Chip ate the koi.

Deadlands board game! Deadlands board game!

Earlier this month, Twilight Creations announced that they're making a Deadlands board game, due sometime in '09. (Hopefully demo-able at Origins, please?) This is a great fit, as Twilight's top product is the perennially popular Zombies!!! board game... so the Weird West is right in their wheelhouse. Plus, Twilight co-founder Kerry Breitenstein is one of the original Doomtown champs, with her own character card(s) and everything.

Is it too much to hope that they could find a way to tie their board game in with the Doomtown cast and setting?

This was Get Caught Up With Pixar Week.

We watched Incredibles and Cars on ABC Family (in HD, which was sweet), and received Wall-e on blu-ray as an awesome Christmas gift. Of course, I'm no Pixar superfan, but they do make very watchable movies.

Incredibles annoys me for the same reason that Heroes annoys me: it takes long established comic super hero elements, waters them down for the mass market, and then gets full credit for being innovative and clever. Imagine if Arena League Football was more popular in America than the NFL. That's what seeing this faux-comics stuff is like for me. The retired heroes, the McCarthy-style government crackdown, the hero costumer, the metatextual analysis of capes and villain monologuing... I've seen it all before.

Cars loses points for veering too far into that cloying Boy, Rural America Sure Is Better Than Them City Folks nonsense. And you knew right off that Lightning McQueen was going to magically stop being a jerk by movie's end. But it wins points for being consistently interesting to look at (I like the silly car windshield eyeballs; and you can thank several old Disney cartoons for inventing that), as the animators found method after method to present a world that makes logical sense. For once, Pixar managed to do an entire universe of characters, instead of relying on showing how Character Subset B gets along in the face of Character Subset A (which is usually humans). Although they fell to type anyway by making the subsets divide into city/country classes.

Wall-e was really, really nice. I liked the slightly darker theme (although really, they barely got into the notion of Earth being covered in trash... the characters talked around it more than they talked about it.) The robots were all great and I laughed at every Mac joke. However, I thought using real actors was unnecessary and distracting. And the ending seriously could have used some more explanation, other than "Oh yeah, he's okay now."

We had five consecutive days of opening presents this year, starting light on Christmas Eve Eve and [un]wrapping things up Saturday night at Rhonda's parents' place. Although Clark still is not at the Make A List Myself stage of Christmas familiarity, he is definitely prepared to be needling you every three minutes at every location "Are we opening the presents now?"

Great pose... and for books, no less!

The Nintendo Power Awards predictions roll on, ignorant of holidays and better ways to spend our time. Even Tony thinks Sonic Unleashed will win Best Wii Graphics, and he actually owns it, so you should totally pay attention to my prognosticating prowess.

Best Shooter/Action Game Bangai-O Spirits (DS), Blast Works (Wii), Call of Duty (Wii), Mega Man 9 (WiiWare), Metal Slug 7 (DS), Ninja Gaiden (DS)

MY PICK: What a fucked up category. Shmups, retro stuff, an FPS, and whatever the heck you want to call Ninja Gaiden. Seriously, why is Mega Man not nominated in the platforming category? It's, like, a platformer. This one is a mess, just seeing the words "Blast Works" puts me in a mood, so I'll go with Ninja Gaiden because I played the demo.

VOTERS PICK: This is the one Mega Man 9 gets. In fact, that's probably why it's in this category instead of with the platformers where it belongs, and where it would be beaten by at least two other games. Realistically, most Nintendo fans did not play any of the other games on this list... but they did play Mega Man 9. I smell collusion.