March 2009 Archives

I don't know how well this is working for DC, but the "After Watchmen... What's Next?" campaign seems like a smart - if desperate - way to drag movie fans back into comics. Seeing as there is no ongoing Watchmen series, nor potential for a sequel. I do like how the campaign draws from the entire DC library, featuring the best super-hero works as well as some top Vertigo offerings past and present.

I've already picked up two of the $1 "After Watchmen" preview books, Transmetropolitan and Saga of the Swamp Thing. I remember when Transmetropolitan began, and I almost got into it but I just couldn't make the space for it (what was I getting instead, Marvel's Heroes Reborn?!) The Swamp Thing book (Alan Moore) was really, really good though. I'll probably definitely get the trades of that one. Having never seen that run before - but familiar with the gothic elemental Swampy that came out of it - I was really impressed. It was like the old EC guys suddenly did a core DCU story.

That $1 Swamp Thing issue centers around Jason Woodrue the Floronic Man, for crying out loud. Awesome. Can we get Swamp Thing animated in Batman: The Brave and the Bold please?

DC's official site has a checklist to download, presumably so comic shop virgins can have a security blanket as they brave the wilds of unpainted lead miniatures and unsold crates of Apples to Apples. There's also a flyer that outlines the entire "After Watchmen" assortment, from All-Star Superman to V for Vendetta.

Never really got into V for Vendetta, by the way. I should give that another go sometime.

For me, the best ones on the list are WE3, The Killing Joke, Dark Knight Returns, and Kingdom Come. Naturally I dig the super-hero stuff over the Vertigo stuff, although WE3 is of course not a super-hero story. Identity Crisis is on there, and it's great for 6/7ths of the book until it kinda falls apart at the end... but something like Justice League: The Nail was probably better. Identity Crisis has a bankable author behind it, so I'm sure that's why it got the nod.

Arkham Asylum is in there. I was blown away by that when it came out. It was the first hardcover comic I ever bought, or rather, that I had my mom buy for me. It's been a long time since I've read that one.

The list has lots of Vertigo that I've never read, like Y: The Last Man, Preacher and Fables. They include a Sandman trade that I think I own. I have the first volume and the last volume of Sandman, and I'm not sure why that's how it shook out for me.

I'd like to have seen the first Books of Magic miniseries included. That was a cool bridge between DCU and Vertigo that has probably been entirely forgotten for no good reason.

And no, I still haven't seen the Watchmen movie yet. We're moving closer into a blu-ray debut for that one, I guess.

Yup, RE5 is short.

For me, anything under 15 hours is too short. I like my games to roll between 20 to 30 hours. I think my RE5 clock (single-player mode only) is about ten or twelve hours.

It doesn't help that RE5 has a crappier-than-usual storyline with lots more action movie cliche scriptwriting. "Go Chris... you're the only one who can save the world." Really.

Of course, the saving grace here is the Mercenaries mode. Just as in RE4, that can be played for days, and it actually is difficult... as you gun for the higher score rankings to unlock more levels and characters.

What a great idea.

We picked up Bolt on blu-ray (Disney sent me a coupon for $10 off! They're desperate!) In the blu-ray combo pack, you get the blu-ray (which contains all the extra materials from the deluxe DVD set, plus a few others), a DVD copy of the movie, plus a digital copy that essentially gets you a free iTunes download of the movie.

Street price for that is $30, which is more or less a normal blu-ray price. What a great deal! Buying Bolt through iTunes is $14.99. The deluxe DVD of Bolt goes for $20 to $25. So even if you do not currently own a blu-ray player, it might make sense to buy future-forward for only a few dollars more than the deluxe DVD... and get the high-def version, the regular DVD version, and the iPod/iPhone/iMac version.

Every blu-ray release for the past three years should have done this; or at least the DVD pack-in. Imagine what that could have done for the HD transition.

Noggin to be renamed Nick Jr.

Aw. That sucks. Under "Noggin," I kind of expected the show lineup to be young-but-pleasant. Under "Nick Jr." I expect it to be all David the Gnome junk.

Whatever, we're Sproutlets in the this household anyway.

Got my Pikmin hat.

This week, Nintendo is handing out Pikmin hats in Animal Crossing: City Folk. Apparently you can order more at Nook's, which is unusual for "rare" items like this. At least Nintendo bothered to tell us about this giveaway, and they operated it for more than one day.

Howard Porter sucks.

I'm sure I complained about this guy back when he was ruining Justice League ten years ago... but Howard Porter is a terrible, terrible artist and I can't understand why DC keeps giving him work.

He's on Titans at the moment (hopefully just a fill-in?), and you cannot tell any of the characters apart once they are out of costume. Is that Donna? Raven? Maybe it's Starfire in a wig? Is that guy Roy, or is that Wally? It is impossible to tell. He had this same problem back on Justice League and he has not gotten any better since.

But, on to better League news.

The latest issue of JLA is almost exactly what I like in my League comics. Lots of talking.

I know, we've seen the "I'm disbanding the League" thing a million times, but I'm a sucker for good dialogue... and for any resolution to the thorny No-One-Pays-Attention-to-Black-Canary thing that's been going on for a year now.

One crazy stupid continuity thing, though: apparently this issue takes place after a miniseries event that is not scheduled until July. Say what?

Deadly Creatures was short also.

But really good. I reviewed it for Aeropause and tried to cover all the good and bad points. Long review. I ended up only giving it 3.5 out of 5. I wanted to give it more - because the whole realistic spider fights in the desert thing is really nice - but the lack of replay, short length, and overdone waggle combat hurt the title too much.

Still, go play it. Cool little game that is destined to be overlooked.

The Alien Force finale.

Ben 10: Alien Force had its season finale, a two-part mega-team-up that brought back plenty of the season's guest stars and resolved the Hybreed plot that's been dangling all along. It was pretty good, for kidvid. We were excited to see Ben turn into three of the aliens from the first series (although none of the original ten; albeit Cannonbolt is close to original, as he replaced Ghostfreak). As the ending shows, that Omnitrix is one hell of a deus ex machina.

The best part - aside from Ben almost kissing Julie - was the very last scene where Azmuth tells Ben that the Omnitrix has been reset with all-new forms. So the next season (only the second for Alien Force) will bring another round of all-new aliens. More toys!

Cartoon Network's upfront revealed that the show will become Ben 10: Evolutions in 2010, aging Ben to 16 and making his identity public. I wonder if it will get another art direction redesign, as the characters did when they moved from the original series to Alien Force?

Clark brought this coloring sheet home from daycare:

I love stuff like this. It contains a thousand untold stories. Did the bear eat the people in the bathroom? Is the bear washing his paws after the eating? Does the rule even apply to paws? Why is it a unisex bathroom? Who still uses that awful mechanical drawing crap font?

Cat Shit One (YouTube)
Man, do you know how much of my adolescence was devoted to this kind of anthropomorphic stuff? It all started with me preferring the Disney animal movies to the Disney people movies, shifted into me liking Thundercats way more than G.I. Joe, and rounded out with tons of anthro comics in the wake of the Ninja Turtles explosion. It is damn lucky that I don't own a fursuit.

Virtual Console Getting Game From Famous Japanese Game Hater (Kotaku)
The Japanese Wii has a much better Virtual Console than we do. First Pole's Big Adventure and now this, a legendarily awful (purposefully so) NES game from Beat Takeshi. I guess I shouldn't automatically assume we'll never get this - we did get Cho Aniki - but boy does it seem unlikely.

Price Drop: Stocks, Homes, Now Triple-Word Scores (Wall Street Journal via Daring Fireball)
Three more reasons why I'll never play Scrabble with Mike: "za", "qi" and "zzz" are now all legitimate plays.

Where the Wild Things Are trailer (Apple)
I have no personal stake in Where the Wild Things Are, but wow, what a trailer. It starts out like the movie is going to suck and then turns into awesome.

Henson, Decode Revive Doozers (Animation Magazine)
Henson working on new CG series following the Doozers. I remember being really struck by the Fraggle Rock episode where good-intentioned Mokey tried to get everybody to stop eating Doozer construction, only to realize that it was the natural order of things. The Henson stuff really was shackled for many years (do we blame Disney for that?), so it's cool to see new Muppet stuff in the pipeline... between this, that Science Kid show on PBS, the Muppet Show comic book, and the build-a-Muppet factory store, it's like somebody awakened the Henson giant.

Asia Mall Will Soon Open (FOX43.com)
We're totally getting a local Asian-American themed shopping center! We're very excited about this.

Next Week In Rock Band: Journey Under The Sea With Pat Benatar (Kotaku)
Three songs from SpongeBob SquarePants coming to Rock Band. Getting actual kids songs into RB is a great, great idea. Now if only we could get some kids songs that Clark actually knows.

And where the hell is TMBG in Rock Band?!?

If you're going to distribute free rare items in Animal Crossing: City Folk, could you at least find a way to tell us about it, so we might have a chance of actually playing on the one magical day you intend to hand out the rare stuff? Like, I don't know, via the damn Wii Message Board?

Because I did not play on St. Patrick's Day, I did not get a Shamrock Hat. Because you did not tell me St. Patrick's Day was an event, because the strategy guide doesn't mention it, because nothing in-game brought it up, because Nintendo Power didn't tease it, it did not even occur to me to play AC:CF on St. Patrick's Day.

Let me tell you how real online companies handle this. LittleBigPlanet revealed a free Leprechaun costume about a month ago. Said costume would only be available for a week or so. It's ugly, and it's for a bullshit holiday than I could not care less about, but because it's free I made a mental note to play during the announced period of availability. When the costume went live on the PlayStation Store, I grabbed it and immediately went into LittleBigPlanet to check it out.

Yep, it's ugly all right. But since I had the game loaded I spent much of the rest of the night in LittleBigPlanet. Deciding what level I need to ace next. Browsing the latest user-created levels. Checking if anybody new played my level. Playing their game.

This happens every single time Sony drops something free for LittleBigPlanet. I rush out for the free item (which, as we all know, is merely an unlock code anyway for content players have already downloaded... probably very similar to how City Folk works), and while I'm basking in the free thing (or a pay thing, if I decided to buy something) I end up enjoying the game. This maintains my connection to LittleBigPlanet. This keeps a game alive beyond that critical three-month period after release when most games go from The Hotness to The Forgotteness.

Imagine if you officially announced upcoming free DLC for Animal Crossing. You get gaming news articles. You get some weblogger buzz. You stoke the fansites. You give people who have grown tired of playing an excuse to pick it up again. Maybe, maybe you get new consumers interested and you net a few more sales.

Instead, it's a stupid secret that you were handing out Shamrock Hats on one particular day.

I suppose you think that surprise gifts like this are a nice reward for the truly dedicated players out there. Then let me point you towards the general perception of Animal Crossing: City Folk...

"Animal Crossing: City Folk is a great conversion of Animal Crossing: Wild World, but as a console sequel? It's pretty lazy, and it's hard to praise phoned-in work like this." - IGN

"Furthermore, the gameplay is largely unchanged and, unless you're at home with your Wii at all times of the day, it's better suited to the DS." - GameSpot

"This is all just the same old routine with extra goodies that do little to change things in any meaningful way." - 1UP

"I'm not quite sure what Nintendo was thinking when they decided to release a new game in a franchise that has millions of devoted fans around the world without actually adding anything new for those fans." - Kotaku

"If you are a long time fan of the series - it's hard to play City Folk without it leaving a bad taste in your mouth. You've probably done everything before." - Nintendo World Report

This is an ailing franchise at the moment, and it could use any good press it can find. I hesitate to bring up worldwide sales of City Folk, showing only about 2 million sold... compared to the 10 million copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World on DS.

Animal Crossing on Wii should have been your 2.0 game. A community-builder. Integrated with the Wii's featureset. Integrated with your website. Instead it was a rehash and the sales figures prove it.

Here was another opportunity to get people talking about Animal Crossing in a positive way - even though it's as stupid as a Shamrock Hat - and you blew it.

And in typical Nintendo fashion, nobody knew this was coming until . . . NOW. Go run a Wii update!

I really am tired of Nintendo pretending they're not working on anything and then suddenly springing something insane on us like a slap in the face. I've said this before, but Sony and Microsoft know how to let us in on the damn process. We know what OS upgrades are coming, we know what they're working on, we know that they are listening to what we want, we get preview videos and press releases. In contrast, we have been begging Nintendo for a storage solution for years, and every time they shluffed it off with crap double-talk like "Well, we don't think most users mind shuttling files back and forth, or deleting and re-downloading games, but we're committed to creating a positive experience on Wii for users of all interests! And having more storage space is only a power nerd user thing anyway!"

I just don't get what the big damn secret was.

At any point, they could have said "Hey, we're planning on unlocking the SD slot sometime this spring." Or "This Christmas, we're readying a portable mini-USB drive for extra storage." Or "In 2010, we're introducing a new Wii hardware SKU with 60gig of storage space, a faster WiFi card, and Wii Sports Resort as a pack-in."

It's not like they have to worry about the competition stealing this idea and beating them to market.

Anyway, being able to play VC games, WiiWare games, and Wii Channels from the SD card was announced at GDC today, along with a long-needed Virtual Console Arcade addition. Plus a new Zelda DS game that I don't really care about, having been pretty burned by Phantom Hourglass. I do respect how the transportation theme for this one is trains, having done boats and horses several times each now.

Oh, and for the first six months of the DSi, you get 1000 DSiWare points for free. That is crazy generous. Nintendo must be slightly worried that people are not going to upgrade.

I initiated the update about two hours before I got the official Wii mail from Nintendo. After running it, you get an SD icon in lower left, which I assume only appears if the Wii senses you have an SD card inserted. Clicking it brings up a secondary channel menu, just like the usual menu. The only caveat is that you need to keep X number of blocks open on your main Wii memory to play anything off the SD. If you try to tun a game off the SD, the Wii has to temporarily copy that game to the onboard memory (just like the DLC songs for Rock Band and Guitar Hero on Wii, I think.) There is a slight pause while you watch the Wii copy the game over; I loaded several different games as a test and the wait was never more than a few seconds.

What is really great is that this works for Channels too. So now junk like Everybody Votes and Check Mii Out can live on your SD card instead of taking up valuable MB on the Wii itself. This means more games can offer specific Channels (like Mario Kart and Wii Fit), without worrying about killing your machine.

So I shunted a bunch of rarely-used Channels to my 2gig SD card, as well as all but four of my VC/WiiWare purchases. I now have about 600 blocks of free space!

I would not be surprised to see a sudden jump in VC sales, as hardcore collectors go nuts buying their favorites, now that there's an easy place to put them and play them. I'm sure many have already gone illicit routes using homebrew hacks to store their VC collection on an playable SD card, but today's update gives a legal option to the rest of us.

Speaking of buying stuff, one of the arcade games now available on the Virtual Console is Mappy. Bought it right away, 500 points. This is at least the sixth time I've purchased Mappy (added to PS1, coin-op, plug-n-play, wireless plug-n-play, and GBA). The Wii has long needed actual arcade games... and not those terrible early NES ports. The NES version of Pac-Man is a complete disaster, for example. For years, the arcade originals were always leagues better than the home versions. I hope we can get the real versions of classics like Mario Bros and Donkey Kong as well. And hey, this gives Nintendo another version of Street Fighter II they can try to sell us!

The Virtual Console Arcade games, like Mappy, come with some nice enhancements too. There's settings you can mess with... in arcade language, you could physically alter some special dipswitches to change the game (which was how some arcades would screw you over by turning down the number of extra lives, for example), and that feature is replicated in the Wii Arcade. It's almost like a very old, very barebones MAME frontend.

So there's two items that were a long time coming, Nintendo. Finally, no more "where's the Wii storage solution" jokes! And actual classic arcade games, not lousy NES adaptations. Excellent work.

After two sort-of-boned sequels, one for PSP and one for 360, Katamari is coming home... albeit home to a console without the wide fanbase needed to support such a niche offering.

Katamari Damacy Tribute, coming to PS3... apparently coming this year, but that's likely the Japanese release target.

The Kotaku article announcing KDTribute is really lousy; it doesn't even specifically say this is coming to PS3. You have to get that from the j-mag scan or from the article category tag. People are sort of assuming this is a re-done version of the original Katamari. In which case, let's all hope it comes at a price akin to the original's $20. Or even better, how about downloadable via PSN.

The good news is that it has all 1,080 p's. Full HD Katamari for the first time.

Now they need to address the unexpectedly unpolished angles of the 360's Beautiful Katamari. To wit: the 1994-era mid-level loading, and the always-obnoxious 30 second klaxon.

This looks like the soundtrack list...

Hoo hoo! A new version of the incredibly sumptuous "Lonely Rolling Star"?

I've been getting ready to introduce Clark to Katamari, and now I won't have to revert back to the PS2 compatibility to do it!

The Season One finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars showed off next season's Big Bad, a bounty hunter named Cad Bane. In the episode, he marched in to the capitol building on Coruscant and forced the senators to release the imprisoned Charles Nelson Reilly the Hutt.

As I was watching the show, I couldn't help but think I had seen this Cad Bane fellow before...

You won't believe me, but my first thought was the final failure of the Oddworld franchise, the Xbox-exclusive Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.

In general terms, sure. Both draw rather clearly from Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.

Then I thought of this guy:

Marvel's Sleepwalker, from back when "Marvel Knights" meant they thought people wanted more recycled Ghost Rider plots.

Perhaps Cad Bane and Sleepwalker are of the same alien species. But then it hit me:

Yep, 1992's Chakan the Forever Man. We have a match. If this was SVU, Stabler and Benson would already be kicking in the door to Chakan's unfashionable Florida rental.

In this week's Aeropodcast, we slag the 360.

Grab a seat for this one. Not only did we have two guests from CuteGeek.com, but a listener question opened up a can o' worms on the 360. I stand by my claim: the Xbox marketing line has never been about the games, it's been about the infrastructure. The most successful Xbox games have been those that nicely leveraged that infrastructure. The game variety I want just is not there, and anytime anything does show up that is out of the 360's usual metric (Beautiful Katamari, Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, Viva Pinata), it pretty much dies on impact.

Oh, Tom Nook.

It was only a few weeks ago that Tom Nook single-handedly destroyed my Animal Crossing experience by suggesting he could improve his hours... and then physically demolished Nookington's to re-erect a crappy Nook-n-Go.

On Saturday he polled us again, and we all voted to bring the Nookington's back. Well, he asked me, and then I quick played as Rhonda and Clark to make sure the votes were all of one mind. So I am super-incredibly looking forward to getting my Nookington's. Plus, this means Tommy and Timmy get off the unemployment rolls.

I wonder if Nook brought this up again because we all have barely played since the downgrade, naturally spending less at his shop.

Wikipedia would rather be stupid than useful.

I'm sure I've complained about this before, but nothing pisses me off more than to be checking something out on Wikipedia, following a link for more information, and then finding that the link is going to the dictionary definition page of the noun in question. For example, you read a line about Keith "PitaPocket" Urban's first CD release, and note that "CD" is a link. But instead of getting more info about Keith's first CD, you get the page that defines what the fuck a CD is. Come on. If Wikipedia is going to allow that kind of linking tomfoolery, they should come up with some kind of denotation so we can tell between an on-topic link and an unrelated definition link.

Brave and the Bold is completely crazy.

The latest episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold not only started off with a team-up with the Golden Age Flash (with no explanation why "Flash" has blue pants and a pie-pan hat!), but then used the Gotham By Gaslight costume for Batman. It also guest starred Sherlock Holmes! Throw in the Demon and Gentleman Ghost and it's like a DC pot luck dinner. Wild.

Blue Dragon Plus, woof.

I finished my review of Blue Dragon Plus with a low 2 out of 5. It was just so boring, typical, tedious, and not that much fun. But I know that this is not my thing (I did not enjoy Disgaea, for example), so I scouted out some other reviews. Just to make sure that I was not blatantly missing something awesome due to a personal roadblock. And wow, are the scores for this thing all over the map!

I know that Nintendo Power gave it an 8 out of 10, but 1UP gave it a D+, GameSpot a 6, and Game Informer a 5.5. And on the other side of the swing, IGN and GamePro also gave it an 8. The Metacritic average is currently 72 out of 100.

What is telling is that even the good reviews mentioned all the stuff I dinged the game over in my review... identical missions, slow gameplay, ridiculously difficult unit selection, and weird no-backstory plotline.

I is the Wii fan.

And I prove it by actually buying games.

The hot trend in Wii bashdom these days is to hold the damn thing to the fire for not having enough "hardcore" games, not enough "mature" games, or whatever. And then, when mature, hardcore games show up, get all meh about them. This happened in February for Deadly Creatures and again last week when Madworld shipped. It is fanboy hypocrisy to the nth degree.

Guaran-damn-teed that neither of those games will sell for shit. Now, the blame certainly lies partially with the majority userbase of Wii fad doofuses who bought it just for Wii Sports/Wii Fit. But my finger is also pointing at the supposedly hardcore gamers who stock all three systems but only keep two of them around to act as punching bags for not having Gears of War. Or, when presented with a new release, they yawn and point out how they sold their Wii back months ago.

They wanted games with subject matter darker than the candy-colored Nintendo world, and when such games show up, they're magically not good enough and they won't try them. Complete assery.

One thing I will never do is pick up a 360 just so I can pretend this somehow gives my natural disinterest in the library a legitimate pulpit for complaining.

Oh, and so far, both Deadly Creatures and Madworld are really good.

Korean Comedian For StarCraft (YouTube)
OK, so it's a stand-up comic doing all the sound samples from Starcraft. Which is not so amazing until you realize that the audience actually knows what he's talking about. That's how huge Starcraft is in Korea. Imagine some American dude showing up on the Tonight Show doing Smash Bros taunts. Riiiiiight.

After Dora uproar, Nick and Mattel soothe moms (Yahoo News)
I don't recall this needless drama when ten year old Ben 10 was aged to fifteen. Or when the Muppets became the Muppet Babies. This is all very reminiscent of every game console generational shift, when people start whining about the new stuff being too expensive, or lacking backwards compatibility, or being all flash over substance when compared to last year's games... hey, Mattel is not marching into your house and demanding you turn over all your existing Dora product, to be mulched and replaced with new Tween Dora dolls. They're not even canceling the "classic" Dora line. So chill.

Twitter FuckItList (Twitter)
Instead of posting sappy feelgood things-I-must-do-before-I-die, the FuckIt List is all about things people never want to do.

Wootini's Weekly Animal Crossing Diary (GayGamer.net)
Proof that Tom Nook will indeed remodel his store again and again based on your poll answers.

MouthOff (Cartoon Brew)
A funny $1 iPhone app that animates an onscreen mouth as you talk, and you then hold it up over your face and look like an idiot. Reminds me of how LIttleBigPlanet makes the lead sackboy's mouth animate if the PS3 senses microphone audio input.

Failure By Degrees (The New Gamer)
I've never played Dead Space, but I've read a lot of raves for it. This review is not a rave. It's an hilarious dissection that raises the issue of why we get so strung out about games being "realistic" and "mature" but still allow for ridiculous environmental puzzles and glaring inconsistencies between cutscene drama and actual gameplay.

WB Confirms "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" (Toon Zone)
Next up, Green Lantern: First Flight... then Public Enemies! Counting Wonder Woman (which we still have not seen available on blu-ray), that makes three animated direct-to-video releases in 2009! Actually, four if you count Tales of the Black Freighter. Unbelievable. They are just slamming these things out. The good news is that they could do this for a very, very long time. I'd like to suggest WE3, Identity Crisis, and of course Captain Carrot.

Tony posted a great recap of last weekend's First Ever 2009 Game Night on his weblog, and it was so good that I'm yanking some of his images, centering them, and posting them here. This is just a taste of the hilarity that Tony has, though, so make sure to visit the unmolested original.

What makes it so great is that he did it all in stick figure form.

Like, there's Tony playing Samba de Amigo. I loved Samba's CG intro, the character designs, and the swingin' look... but I bet I would have been awfully disappointed in this one had I rushed out and bought it at launch.

There's me talking about work.

Josh couldn't attend due to him being sick... so we had him on iChat for three to four hours. He claims he took a bunch of screenshots from his POV, which will probably be pretty damn funny as well. Lots of pics of our torsos, as well as empty rooms when we all moved around but forgot to rotate the Macbook.

Some day I'll get somebody to bite on my dream of playing card games over video chat.

And there's me playing LIT, and loving the bits where you have to listen to phone messages from your in-game girlfriend.

My really-for-real TaleSpin cards arrived yesterday. Along with some additional Fatal Frame sets. This is my second ArtsCow order under that deal. I have now ordered enough decks under their promotion code price that I have seven more decks built up under free credit (although I will have to pay shipping on those.)

Maybe it's just that I'm an old Magic player, but there's something about that white border that makes these look extra-real.

I came up with some foldable player tokens to fill out some empty slots in my deck order.

In addition to the original 100-card playdeck, I also printed the two 20-card expansion sets. Plus three "promo" cards just to round out some other empty slots. These three bonus cards have not been playtested very well, so they may be junk. But as I mentioned before, this is the first time I've released the second expansion to the internet! Even though my crew has been playing with it for years.

That's a closer look at the two card backs I whipped up. The deck back is actually a heavily Photoshopped freezeframe of the bumpers that would run between the show and the commercials. Since TaleSpin has that facedown cargo bluffing mechanic, I wanted to make the backs of the cards kinda evoke a suitcase or box. So I settled for wicker with a postcard on it.

The sky back is for the Location cards and the Player cards.

There's the ridiculous 140+ playdeck. Trust me, that is a bitch to shuffle whether you're playing with sleeved cards, naked cards, or inkjet cards. I also added two more "real" Cargo cards to the deck... so the true count (including the promo cards) is a reasonably pleasant number, 145.

Again, I have to express how nice the print job is. The Fatal Frame cards are mostly blacks and dark reds, so the TaleSpin set seems to absolutely pop with color.

Is this officially the craziest paean to an early 1990s cartoon, or what? You can take your Mary Sue fanfics and shove it! I live in Cape Suzette, baby.

Kinda still on the Buzz thing here. Here's my posted quizzes so far:

Nothing too incredibly popular. Most of them are probably way too niche to attract a lot of attention anyway. What bugs me is the few with a crappy one-star rating. What the heck is that about? There is nothing factually inaccurate about them. There is nothing too easy about them. Those are the two areas I would dock a quiz... accuracy and being boring/too easy. Sure, if a quiz has stuff totally wrong, yeah, that's a one-starrable offense.

So this leads me to believe that people are willing to give a good quiz a lousy rating because it's too hard. But isn't that the point of trivia? It's not supposed to be stuff that everybody knows. Granted, nobody has taken the Mappy quiz, but let's take a look at it. You tell me if it's out of the realm of trivia acceptability.

Mappy sequel. Totally fair question. Most people are going to be more familiar with the Mappyland NES game, so that's the bait answer. The real answer is Hopping Mappy. Strange but true!

OK, this is sort of tough, but you can puzzle it out. Windows and GBA are obvious enough for anyone who's been paying attention, which leaves Palm and Sidekick. Sidekick, being the relatively rarer platform, should be the guess... and it's right.

Hey, isn't one of the points of trivia is that you learn stuff too?

Little East versus West here. If you know that Mappy is a Namco game, you might arrive at the right answer on your own. Otherwise, this may require that you've played one of the Japanese arcade ROMs.

OK, I'm being tough again. All four of these are Namco games, so you can't sniff out the glaring misfit on the list. The correct answer is Katamari Damacy, which is kind of a trick since there is a Mappy cameo (of sorts) in We Love Katamari.

Although I must admit that it was a tad crappy to put Katamari Damacy as the answer, because for all I know there is some kind of tiny Mappy cameo in there. Kind of a big game with a lot of junk in it.

I actually get this one wrong a lot. The answer is 4.

This one seems pretty easy to figure out, even if you haven't played the game. And if so, why are you taking this quiz? The answer makes sense, radio / tv / computer / painting / safe. Although you have to operate under the assumption that whatever is in the safe is more expensive than the Mona Lisa. I've always figured the safe contained Marcellus Wallace's soul.

I guess this is another learning question. The answer is the bottom one.

Hey, an NES question! The correct choice is Mapico.

So maybe I'm biased, but that is NOT a one-star quiz. That is hardcore Mappy trivia straight from the mountaintop. I don't dock the Buzz game points for constantly asking me to name members of En Vogue!

I made a bunch more Buzz quizzes.

You get a silver trophy for creating 20 custom MyBuzz quizzes. I also nailed the gold trophy for answering three questions in a row in under half a second each. Oh, shut up.

Assuming the link works, you can check out my quizzes here. So far, I've had more plays on my Buzz quizzes than on my LittleBigPlanet levels.

The return of Game Night.

A Game Night in 2009?!? It happened! LittleBigPlanet, Samba de Amigo, Buzz Quiz TV, LIT... Clark even got to lead some four-man Buzz Jr. Jungle Party and show off the LittleBigPlanet level he's been designing on his own.

The usual food, the usual fun, the usual crowd (plus I even jumped Mike in on this one!) But not as usual, Josh was sick and could only attend virtually. We had him on iChat for at least three hours, just kind of sitting on the Macbook in the kitchen. It was like one of those future birthday parties they used to crow about at Epcot Center.

Played with the new Fatal Frame cards.

Mike and I broke in those new Fatal Frame cards I ordered (unfortunately the TaleSpin set did not arrive in time for Game Night.) Counting the new expansion set, the playdeck is exactly 100 cards. Which is a very pleasant number. However, we're thinking of tossing in another couple Spirit Orbs and cheap Film cards. As it stands, the deck has eleven Film cards of various types, and eight Spirit Orbs. Seems like another two of each might help those cards show up in people's hands a little faster.

Of course, a deck of 104 cards will drive me crazy, so I'll probably look at some prototype promo cards to get the deck size up to either 105 or 110.

Clark has defeated the Wonder Pets.

As I expected, the Wonder Pets DS game is completely simple enough for Clark to master on his own. It's just a short series of minigames (DS feature demos, more like) that, when strung together, form three typical Wonder Pets adventures. He beat all three stories in a day, but he keeps going back to his favorite games because he's four and this is something fun he can do all by himself. We like when he plays the voice-activated games, because then we see him sitting over there repeating "Pull. Puuuullllll. Puuuuuuuuuuullllll." to the game so a housefly can pull a marble out of a tube or whatever.

Prepping for porta-GTA.

I really need to dispose with Blue Dragon Plus so I can be fully prepared for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars this week. I'm to review BDP for Aeropause, and I'm sort of at a loss to write about it, because it's kinda lame, but I'm not sure if it's lame because it's lame or it's lame because it's not my type of game.

Between this and Clark's DS discovery, I think I've already been more interested in the DS in 2009 than in all of 2008.

Can we pretty please get a decent Batman game out of this?

This summer, Batman: Arkham Asylum hits PS3 and everything so far looks really good. Of course, I haven't seen much of anything about the damn gameplay. I have this nagging feeling that they're going to nail the voice acting and cinema work and DC fan service... and then bone the gameplay into a crappy Splinter Cell.

The special edition of Arkham will sell for $100 but include a Batarang, among other things. I'm going to have to hear that the game is very, very good if I'm going to commit to that level.

Free songs from GTAIV.

I was about a month behind in cleaning out my Yahoo Mail account. Which is a pretty regular problem for me. Anyway, I found an email from the Rockstar Social Club with an iTunes code for three free tracks. It was timed to coincide with the release of the 360 DLC pack.

"The Chase is On," "Vagabond" and "Jailbait." I don't know any of them, but they were indeed free.

Is Resident Evil 5 really short?

I'm already a third of the way through in two days. I'm coming up with that stat based on the number of chapters, which I fully acknowledge could be a very poor metric. Still, six chapters doesn't seem like much, especially since all that has happened in chapters one and two is a lot of running through shantytowns avoiding things.

I set the controls to A-type (the choice closest to Resident Evil 4) because I just can't get the "advanced" schemes. The dual stick strafing setups completely mess me up. I'm pretty desperate to unlock some kind of unlimited ammo weapon, so that future playthroughs will be more about standing and killing and less about conserving and avoiding.

And hey, I've played through all five core Resident Evils, most of the first Outbreak, and all of that sweet light gun Dead Aim game... when the hell did Jill Valentine die?

RE5 does look incredible, though. And even if you have to be watchful with your ammo, it is great, tense fun. But we should all admit... ever since 4, this really hasn't been a "Resident Evil" series. It's been an action-shooter game, not so much a survival horror game.

Resident Evil Outbreak Intro 2 (YouTube)
In celebration of today's release of Resident Evil 5, here's one of the opening movies from one of the worst RE games around, Resident Evil Outbreak. This is the one where a zombie walks into a bar and the mixologist says "What a weird customer." Hilarious. Outbreak actually has a very nice credit sequence, showing how the virus spread through Raccoon City via the rat population. So this movie is even stupider by comparison.

More Americans say they have no religion (Yahoo News)
Non-religious count up to 15%, inching up from 14% in 2001 and 8% in 1990. Can't get too enthused about this (it is just a poll, after all), because in three days time some religious group will issue a similarly worded press release proving how more Americans are embracing religion, particularly teens.

Apple's Documentation for New iPod Shuffle Headphone Button Controls (Daring Fireball)
I just don't think that mapping four functions to one button, involving several different permutations of double- and triple-clicks is a good idea.

But holy crap, the new Shuffle's size and audio announce feature is damn cool. I wonder how it would pronounce my J-pop track titles?

Pikmin 2 and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat Get New Play Control (Kotaku)
They probably should have waited to announce New Play Control! Pikmin 2 after we all rushed out to buy New Play Control! Pikmin 1.

DC AND MARVEL BOTH TAKING CLEVER APPROACHES TO THE $3.99 COMIC (Comics Should Be Good)
I'd say that's a bit tongue-in-cheek. Marvel has already raised about half the line, and DC is raising price all across the board but adding page count. Unfortunately, this likely means I'm due for a trimming. Titans, I'm looking at [dropping] you!

And, in the interest of collecting comics blogger thoughts on Watchmen, here's Dr. K, Scipio Garling, Mike Sterling, Brian Hibbs and Dorian Wright. And my man Josh has an epic multipart monologue cooking on it. I haven't seen the movie yet, and no, it's not because I'm some kind of rabid "It's Unfilmable!" Watchmen purist. If I don't get to a theater (I hate movies!) I promise I'll buy the extended blu-ray release.

Toys R Us is running a weeklong deal on all $19.99 video games... two for $30. If you know the kind of games TRU has for $19.99, you can probably guess that this is a good deal on a mediocre selection of titles. But, figuring on Clark inheriting his own DS in a few weeks, we thought it would be nice to start growing his own game library. He already has Ben 10 (thanks to Aunt Marci and Uncle Kevin!), and he has pretty much taken over my Cooking Mama.

Plus, he got a TRU gift card for his birthday (thanks to Aunt Priscilla and soon-to-be-Uncle Rob!). So we stopped by one of the local stores tonight to see what was up, and also to case the joint in advance of the big Resident Evil 5 sale tomorrow. If this TRU had a crappy assortment of $19.99 games, then tomorrow we would check a different store when we head out to catch that awesome $20 gift card deal on RE5.

But then we found this:

The never-before-seen Mr. Freeze figure for the DC Super Friends Imaginext line! The only way we knew this toy existed was due to a Target sales ad last Christmas, which showed a bundle pack of several Batman Imaginext toys... including Mr. Freeze. We were never lucky enough to find that boxed set at Target, but now we found our Freeze individually at TRU. Dig that awesome ice chunk he comes with, perfect for getting Batman to CHILL OUT. /Arnold

And we settled on these two DS games for the two-for-$30 deal: Cars and Wonder Pets. We tested out Cars tonight. It's an old DS game, timed for the movie, naturally. So $15 is probably maybe even a little high for a game that old. But you have to apply the Disney/Pixar surcharge; and it seems like the game isn't even terrible. It's all minigames, alongside a topdown car race that uses both screens, which is a great idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen more often.

Wonder Pets is, I believe, a no-reading, all-stylus game. So that should be right up Clark's flagpole.

Oh, and of course I got my level 100 Regigigas via this month's Platinum pre-release download event.

So, good grabs at Toys R Us. Then we went to Target.

And found the Cyborg figure from the DC Super Friends collection! Jesus! He's a real standout in the line, because he has a ton of custom sculpting to him. ...Compared to his more traditionally jumpsuited companions like Flash and Superman, who are almost nothing but paint apps.

The latest issue of Toyfare states that this line is dead, having been more or less officially turned into the Imaginext sets. So I was very surprised to see this Cyborg show up at Target. Poor Hawkman is still stickered as UNAVAILABLE. No sign of Robin, although he is featured on some packaging. Even more lost is the kiddie Joker, who isn't shown on the backer board at all. I wonder if they've even manufactured any Robins or Jokers?

Cyborg comes with a puzzle piece trading card, part of a series of four. The other three pieces presumably come with two new sucky Batman variants and Hawkman... and since Hawkman will not be showing up anytime, I guess this means the puzzle is impossible to complete. Nice.

So two very rare toy gets in one night! Although in the toy game, you never truly know what's rare until months have passed. We could walk into Target next weekend and find a dozen Cyborgs or Mr. Freezes warming the pegs. All I know is, we never before saw evidence of these guys being in stock, and now we own them.

I noticed Target had Pirates of the Caribbean packs half off ($2), so I told Clark to pick out a pack for me. And it was an all-rare pack! Including Captain Kiera Knightley!

And to wrap things up, Rhonda's excellently clever use of coupons worked out to a savings of around $20. So we walked out of Target with three bags of stuff for $30... and once you factor out a couple of $8 items that were not couponed at all (like Cyborg), the final average price per item was something totally stupid like 15 cents apiece.

Still no Wonder Woman blu-ray though. What the heck happened there.

Now, a pro tip.

This was where I made my stand to get the trophy for Take Ten Inhabitants for a Ride. We really like the little sphinx dogs.

Unfortunately I did not get the magic Trophy moment caught on tape. But you can see my impressive strategy: keep running into things and making endless circles. Eventually, I got to this:

Trophy get!

Cool scary world. Ghosts, skeletons, and penguins. Obviously Takahashi has seen Happy Feet. BA-DUM-psssh.

As random as the worlds seem, there's definitely some kind of logic to it. Certain world types - like the scary forest here - will show up again if you keep travelling.

This was one of those times where my ass-end blew off.

Noby Noby Multiplayer? Nope! Just some in-world vehicles that happen to look like BOY.

Although I still think the game was slagged more due to reviewers being tired of PS1/PS2-style survival horror, I do see what there was to complain about in Rule of Rose. It's just very, very uneven. The exploration parts are great, but then you'll get to a boss fight without much warning. And without much ability to actually beat the boss.

The biggest problem is that, in an attempt to remove the typical video game aesthetic, the bosses have no life meter. You have to just keep blindly attacking in the hopes that it will soon be over. With no feedback as to how you're doing - the boss doesn't change patterns or animate differently, for example - it makes a tedious sequence feel even longer and hopeless. I get that a game like Rule of Rose wants to live off of making the player feel hopeless, but there's a difference between feeling hopeless because of the scenario and feeling hopeless because the controls suck, you burned through all your heals, and the boss doesn't seem to be taking any damage.

I'm stuck about halfway through the game (maybe more than halfway) at a boss fight against a mermaid who hangs from the ceiling and vomits poison. I'm sure that is a spoiler for 99% of you. I guess I'm not holding enough healing items, because the mermaid pukes me to death. And like I said, with no indication how I'm doing against her, I do not know if I'm even close to taking her down. It also does not help that once you get down to a certain percentage of your life (YOU have a health bar, but you have to pause the game to see it, dumb), you start slowly shuffling instead of walking/running. And once that happens, you have no chance of beating the boss; you're too slow and can't react fast enough to get out of the way of her chum.

I suppose I have to go gather more healing items, before the mermaid battle. Which is actually part of when the game is really cool. You have a dog that follows you around. His name is Brown... and he makes me want to get an identical dog and name it Brown. You show him items from your inventory and then he will go find similar items hidden around the level. These items are otherwise invisible to you; you must use Brown to find them. It's a great feature, and it's a lot of fun to watch the dog go sniffing throughout the rooms trying to find you a scone or whatever. His nose can sense the entire level, so if there's an item available, he'll find it.

And there's an interesting hierarchy to the items. Showing item A to Brown will find you either item B, C or D. Item B will find E or F. Etc. You can probably tell that this means the game is rife with hidden secret items.

And again, I love the game's setting and story. You're a lost teen who ends up at an orphanage run by a clique of mean little girls. Every month, the girls demand a tribute and all the fetch-questing revolves around you scouring the level for the proper items to make the tribute. Oh, and it seems like most of the game actually takes place inside a giant airship. Go figure.

Meanwhile, the little tyrants are constantly locking you into rooms with demonic, biting imps. And in the cutscenes, the girls subject you to various forms of kid-thought torture. In an early scene, you're tied up as the girls caress your face with a rat on a stick. Later on, you have to spend time "in the onion sack", which means you're stuck in there while every child in the ruling class drops a snake or spider or other awful thing into the top of the bag.

When you first see the dog, he is tied at the legs and hanging upside down from a chain in the boiler room.

It is nasty stuff. I'm really eager to get to the ending to see what happens to these terrible children. I'm a little afraid that something terrible is going to happen to Brown.

If only I can manage through this ridiculous mermaid fight. I'd be very happy if the game was 100% atmosphere, storyline and exploration. Since they borked the combat so hard.

I wish the camera/screenshot controls in Noby Noby Boy weren't such a mess.

Looks like Mappy and Goro are enjoying a ride on BOY!

Goro, at least, is not. It is an illusion.

This structure always reminds me of the boards in Mappy. It will have a green, red or blue roof, just like in Mappy.

Speaking of cameos, I bet these guys are from some old obscure Namco game. Here's a video:

Gah! Mummies! Everywhere mummies!

For whatever reason (like this game needs one), cats like to ride BOY on their backs.

I am disgusting. I actually rubber banded the Dual Shock and let it sit for an hour, just to rack up plenty of NNB walk time without actually doing anything. You can't be proud of me for this. I stopped it around 8,000 meters.

Resident Evil 5 heading for big savings at Toys R Us

So I was going to get Resident Evil 5 at Gamestop - kind of an impulse preorder, as I only went in to preorder GTA: Chinatown Wars - until I saw the Toys R Us deal in Sunday's sales flyer. Buy RE5 this Friday or Saturday and get a $20 gift card. Yeah, that's pretty much the best deal going.

I immediately hit the phone, called my Gamestop, and switched my $5 over to The Beatles: Rock Band. That's far enough out that if I want to juggle the $5 around again, I have plenty of time to do so. I can't imagine I'm the only person to have wrangled this with Gamestop today.

TRU is also doing a two-for-$30 deal on all $20 games. Finding two $20 games will likely be quite an adventure. Since Clark is about to graduate to his own DS, they may both be for him. There's a $20 Wonder Pets DS game that may match his current skillset (he's getting quite slick at Cooking Mama)... if I could find Samba de Amigo in stock, I'd pick that up, but none of my local TRUs have had that one around lately. And a two-for-$30 deal is not something they restock for.

This is sort of disgusting.

I found a hair growing under one of the toenails on my left foot. Like, under. I bring this up not to appall you, but to provide a signpost for the archaeo-biologists of the future who may be trying to pinpoint the era in human evolution where we started growing hair under our toenails.

Did the Wonder Woman blu-ray happen?

Checked two Targets this weekend and neither had the new Wonder Woman animated film on blu-ray. Not even an empty slot for it. DVD, yeah, but no blu-ray. I can't even find the blu-ray on Warner Bros's obnoxious website. Amazon has it listed, but they'll list anything.

You can't play Warioware: Twisted in the car.

Don't even try. This is the one for GBA with the crazy tilt sensor. The poor thing will try to calibrate the tilter, which will be a complete fail while the car is moving. And even if you do get past the calibration, the car vibration will still play havoc with whatever silly motion game you're trying to accomplish.

The secret is feeling for the hands.

Target has these little Marvel figure/sticker packs over in the cards section. They're blind, so you don't know which of the ten random plastic figures you'll get. They've been overpriced at $3 for months, but recently they have been knocked down to $1.50. Clark picked one out and managed to score Spider-Man (as opposed to somebody dopey like Magneto... why do they keep putting him into assortments like this? No kid wants a Magneto figure.)

Inside the pack was a pamphlet with pictures of all ten, and Clark decided he wanted the Silver Surfer toy. Seems like an impossible task, right? The good news is that Surfer is one of three figures with an extra wide base, so if you fondle the pack, you have a good shot at locating him. The other two characters with a wide base are Hulk and Daredevil. Hulk is easy to identify because he is bulky, with one of his massive arms held down towards the base. Daredevil vs. Silver Surfer is tricky, because both are more or less in the same pose. Two tells to look for: Daredevil has a billy club in his right hand, which is pretty easy to feel (it's a little bendy). Also, DD's feet are closer to the far edges of his base.

So yeah, I found a Silver Surfer for Clark on the first buy.

Another PS2 game nabbed!

Remember that list of PS2 games I sort of wanted? A buddy found me an unopened Rule of Rose some weeks back, and I just ran into a used Raw Danger at Gamestop. Yeah, it's used, which sucks. But it was only $7, which pretty much mitigates that. I don't know when I'll get to it - some great stuff starts shipping next week - but when I do I'm sure this game will be every bit as awful as I expect it to be. Disaster Report 2, the Awesoming.

Used PS2 games? I don't even know me anymore.

I just can't get around to making a PDF; it's sad.

I have more or less finished expansion sets for both Fatal Frame and TaleSpin, but I have yet to get around to crafting the official PDF. It's terrible. I'm lazy.

Anybody who wants a non-PDF peek at the cards can dig into the zip files I posted as part of my ArtsCow.com deck-printing extravaganza. The Fatal Frame zip is in this directory, and the TaleSpin zip set is in this one.

Incidentally, that zip file of all my TaleSpin jpgs is larger than the entire HD of my first Mac.

Speaking of ArtsCow, I had the most miserable time on my TaleSpin order. For whatever reason, their site messed up the call to my credit card. Either they tried to send the order too many times, or they timed out while placing... but whatever it was, it locked up my card and I had to call customer service at 3am to get it unlocked. I did not experience any problems on my first order, and I don't see any complaints at BoardGameGeek about them, so I don't think ArtsCow is running some kind of credit scam. Something just went kerplunk kaplooey with the order. Then I tried it again and guess what, it locked up my card again. So I paid via Paypal and that went through fine.

According to my order history, my TaleSpin cards have shipped; I hope I get them in time for this weekend's scheduled Game Night!

Saturday Morning Watchmen (YouTube)
You know, I bet we weren't too far off from something like this actually happening in the '80s.

Realism Will Be Key to Beatles Rock Band Experience (Kotaku)
100% Must Buy. Guitar Hero can keep the hair bands and the metal garbage. What I want is music.

The Disneyland Art Corner (2719 Hyperion)
Ooooh. This is a droolable look back to when Disneyland used to sell original animation cels for ridiculously low prices (like, 75 cents apiece), because, shit, who wants animation cels?

Sack it to Me - The "We're Biting Our Tongue" Edition (PlayStation.Blog)
Gah. Apparently Kohl's is getting LittleBigPlanet t-shirts. Kohl's. Kohl's? I hate going to Kohl's. The aisles are too narrow.

Lots of New Info on Excitebots: Trick Racing (Nintendo World Report)
The Excite___ brand mutates again! From Excitebike to Excite Truck to Excitebots. I'm sure the Nintendo Haters will be quick to claim that this doesn't count as new IP.

What The Informed Viewer Needs (Postmodern Barney)
Great synopsis of the Watchmen cast, a Beginner's Guide.

What a strange year this is becoming for Nintendo. In a good way.

The return of Punch-Out and A Boy and His Blob. Even though both are twenty-year-old reimaginings, they've been away for so long that they almost seem like new IP again.

I'll pass on Punch-Out (I've stopped added the requisite two exclamation points in the title so as to avoid sounding excited about it.) I wasn't a big fan of the NES/SNES originals, and I'm not especially interested in another set of boxing motion controls. I also haven't heard anything super spectacular about it, other than "Wow, it's great to have Punch-Out back."

As in, is there online play? Can you use your Miis? Create-a-fighter mode? How does it interface with the Wii Message Board? Some kind of Nintendo fanboy-stoking arena, like either the old 8bit Punch-Out stage or a crazy Mushroom Kingdom arena with Nokis and Goombas and Lumas and Yoshis jumping up and down in their seats?

But then again, I haven't really been paying attention.

I'm still kinda bitter that I already own Punch-Out in the first Animal Crossing, but lack any legitimate way to unlock it.

A Boy and His Blob, although technically not a Nintendo property, is so closely associated with them and that NES era that it's one of those franchises that people probably still assume Nintendo owns it. Sort of like Mega Man. You can still find people who think Nintendo made/owns Mega Man, despite the overall franchise shipping 100s of titles for nearly every electronic gaming system invented since the Merlin.

I had (have!) the Game Boy blob sequel, which I think was formally titled The Rescue of Princess Blobette. It had extra stupid box art. Of a castle. I recall being mocked in school for owning it. But it was very clever, and at the time I felt like you had to be pretty smart to beat it. Although the Boy character was completely ugly, constructed of maybe four blocks. Which I guess makes sense, as the franchise comes from David Crane, creator of Atari's Pitfall.

The new version - developed by WayForward, who made their bones with cult fave Shantae on Game Boy Color and recently released LIT on WiiWare - looks very, very nice. We're getting a pile of old school 2D games this generation on all systems (not just DS)... Bionic Commando on PS3 and 360, Mega Man 9 everywhere, Warioland: Shake It, and now this. You have to wonder if Nintendo is mulling over a new 2D Mario that goes in this direction. And you definitely have to wonder WTF Sega is thinking in not readying a new 2D Sonic for consoles with this kind of art direction.

Although New Blob looks great, of course we have no idea yet how it actually plays. In the movie, there seems to be a lot of the Boy fidgeting around in order to get the Blob into the right position. I'd be worried about that.

Still, I love that low-impact stuff like this can show up. It's far and away from the Halos and Killzones, and it (hopefully) will be far and away from the Wii Sports and Wii Fits. To me, A Boy and His Blob fits right in that sweet spot of LittleBigPlanet and Pikmin... games that offer accessible gameplay, deep gameplay, extensive gameplay, smart gameplay... but do not have to swing to either All Shooting and Killing or All Party Minigamez. Things like Blob are a good sign that you can still do family-friendly without watering down the entire game to throwing a frisbee to a dog.

Now if only somebody'd get a new Balloon Kid, Cosmotank or Gargoyle's Quest, we'd be all set.

Still clearing out my Sidekick photo gallery...

I mentioned this a month ago... mysterious new wave of DC Super Friends figs, with Hawkman stickered as UNAVAILABLE, no sign of Cyborg or Joker, and an as yet unseen Robin. We've seen the stupid repaints of Batman and Superman, naturally.

Here's the actual toy... a new mold (red!) of the Batman plane that came out early in the toy line's life. Now it's so a Flash prop! Sure!

Here's Clark in Target's kitty litter aisle playing with cat toys. Such is Our Shopping Life.

And in another reality, Arnold Judas Rimmer changed his middle initial so his name looked more like "Ace" and got into contracting.

Here is the complete assembled six-box series of Pokemon Macaroni and Cheese. It makes a poster, if you define a poster as six boxes of Macaroni and Cheese.

I sent this one to Tony, who married it.

This is how City Folk greeted me on my birthday. Since I never talk to my villagers, I did not receive any cake.

With Noby Noby Boy, you're paying for features, not gameplay.

This was semi-revelatory. Noby Noby Boy is a cute little game, but it's hardly the independent arthouse victory that some quarters have gushed over. The same thing happened with Flower. These are both very gamey games... there are goals and levels and other usual trappings. But because they're unique, distinct in visual style, and priced to move... they somehow become elevated to superstar status. Word is that some people cried at Flower. Really.

The deal with Noby Noby Boy is that the core gameplay is not that great. Controlling Boy is flaky and random. The act of eating - presumably a fundamental element - is disquietingly scattershot. Travelling from world to world serves little else but to give you different things to look at. It's fun, but in a mindless, diversionary sort of way... nothing at all like the fun of Smash Bros or LittleBigPlanet.

But what you're getting for $5 is a progressive featureset almost untouched in gaming and by extension unique to the PS3. Live screenshotting (wonky, but it's there), direct upload to YouTube (or save to HD), in-game instruction manual, and, most important of all, a shared single-minded purpose among every Noby Noby Boy player across the world: logging every single footstep to count our way across the galaxy in meters.

That, plus the ridiculous Takahashi vibe, is certainly worth $5 to me.

Now, the TaleSpin order.

I'm working on getting my TaleSpin cards uploaded for a discounted ArtsCow.com order. It's more of a bear than Fatal Frame, thanks to nearly every card being unique. The initial TaleSpin deck is around 90 cards, and I have two 20 card expansion sets (one of which I've never gotten around to publishing online, incidentally.) Plus, I'd like to do two different card backs... so it's going to be a nice-sized order.

I'd kinda like to cut the final playdeck down... trim out the lame cards and fold in the best of the expansion cards. But I need to assess the maneuver values on the cards to make sure I don't unknowingly remove, like, all the 8's, for example.

Ghost Rider was lousy, but the post-movie conversation was hilarious.

We bought Ghost Rider on blu-ray for $10. That's about right. It's probably worse than Spider-Man 3, but not as annoying.

Clark knew we bought it and was dying to see it. We previewed it late one night, and our feeling was that it was a bit too dark for him. Mainly the bits where the X-Men, er, I mean, Blackheart's pals terrorize and mummify random townspeople.When I told him I thought it was too scary for him, he started grilling me about the movie... which meant I had to tell him exactly what happened during the entire movie. I think I had to do more thinking about the screenplay than the movie's writers did, because Clark was constantly asking Why? after every paper-thin plot point I mentioned.

Clark does not know that Rhonda saw the movie as well; his understanding is that only Daddy saw it, so Daddy could make the call if it was OK for both Clark and Mommy. I am informed that one night this week Clark saw a commercial for Watchmen and told Rhon that I probably will not let them see that movie either.

Klondike bars are much smaller than I remember.

Haven't had one in over fifteen years. Somebody shrunk them.

Yep, you can get a Wii.

It's official. They're not rare anymore. For at least three weeks in a row, I've seen them at Target. I find this comforting because it means if my launch day Wii goes belly-up, I can more readily snag a replacement.

We talk about this a little on this week's Aeropodcast because Joe Haygood noted the Wii availability and suggested the fad was over. I don't think the fad angle is over yet, but the relative rarity appears to have finally subsided. You can chalk that up to a combination of Nintendo upping production, the shopping mania cooling, and perhaps people holding on to their dollars a little more. I don't think we can count out another runaway year for Wii sales. Now that the Wii is on shelves, it becomes an item for impulse shoppers and for those who have been holding off specifically because it was a bitch to get. If Nintendo can gin up a solid first party lineup through 2009, they can maintain the Wii's status. And no, I don't think Punch-Out will be the game to kick that off.