Things We Learned This Week

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.