I guess it's kind of nothing more than pure Trophy mining, going back to Eye of Judgment. But I did it. And the game is still fun, and it is still a challenge to beat the CPU decks. Wringing another dozen or so Trophies out of EoJ crested me over the 300 threshold.
Almost all of EoJ's Trophies are based on CPU play. As was suggested on our latest Aeropodcast (#84), that's probably because no one is still playing Eye of Judgment online. The game delivers a Trophy for beating each prebuilt CPU deck (what, 18 of those maybe?) and then another set of Trophies for beating each deck under some insane condition. The easier conditions are workable stuff like "beat CPU without playing spell cards." Some of them are crazy like "don't let any of your creatures die."
One of them - "don't kill any opposing creatures" - actually opened my eyes to a new strategy: the "Don't Kill Any Opposing Creatures" gambit. Whenever you kill an enemy, as a balancing rule, the opponent gets one free mana. The usual way I play, I try to kill all comers, which ends up granting a lot of mana to the CPU. Playing under the pacifist role sort of crippled the CPU from getting his big cost creatures to the table.
So a round of wins from EoJ got me up to 304 Trophies... and then I scrounged some leftovers from Flower ("Wait ten minutes before playing again"), LittleBigPlanet ("Play online with three people not on your friend list"), and new-to-Trophies The Last Guy.
DC Source dropped some preview pages of Justice League: Cry for Justice. I love the art... a unique sketchy paint style by a virtually unknown Mauro Cascioli. Looks a lot like a guy they would normally only ask to do covers. Six issue miniseries starting this July. It's already out of place in current DC continuity, as a Justice League issue from two months ago referenced it as if it had already happened. Oy.
I am unsure about the motivations at work here. Cry for Justice takes place after Martian Manhunter and Batman have died, and Green Lantern is pissed off about it. So he creates a League splinter group to take the fight directly to the villains. He takes with him Green Arrow, Ray Palmer, Supergirl, the blue Starman, the new Shazam, and for fan-service reasons, Congorilla.
The preview pages show Hal getting in Superman's face about the League not being proactive. Hal sounds kind of vengeful, which is the kind of thing the GL Corps specifically forbids, by the way. At least, they used to. Maybe "Act Like An Ass" is one of the new top secret rules the Guardians keep adding to the Book of Oa.
First of all, where does Hal find the time for this sort of thing? I gather that Cry for Justice will not connect to Blackest Night this summer, but still. Unless we're talking about a Flash, I've never been a fan of the highly active heroes being tossed into multiple teams and multiple books. It's one thing to have John Stewart in the League, because he does not appear that often in the Lantern books... but Hal? He's the chosen one.
And I just don't if that dialogue sounds like Hal Jordan. The comic references this when Diana says "This doesn't sound like you." She's right. It doesn't. It sounds more like the fabled darkening of Hal right around the time of Emerald Twilight or whatever that Parallax story was called. I wish they'd retcon that right out of existence, because I'm tired of people bringing it up whenever Hal gets angry. It's like the entire DCU is trying to help Hal stay off the cigs, except the cigs in this case are a giant metaphysical yellow space bug.
During the opening race in Disney/Pixar Cars, there's a quick in-joke glimpse of a white car branded with a big gray Apple apple. If you want a closer look at the car, the blu-ray release will deliver...
Nice number.
The blu-ray Cars has a nifty game mode called Car Finder, where you have to find cars on cue, Where's Waldo style. I know the phrase "DVD game" sets eyes rolling, but some newer blu-rays have upped the ante and actually contain playable bonus games.
I know I was going back and forth on this one, but we did end up buying EA Sports Active last weekend. As you might expect, I had boku Toys R Us cards to cash in. I think the actual cost of the $60 game was around $30.
First of all, Bob Greene is a colossal douche. I guess he's on Oprah a lot? Thankfully, you don't see much of him during the game. Just at the beginning speech and during little inspirational bits every few days. He is ingratiating and fake. Exactly what I hate about motivationists in general.
But I wanted a workout game, right? And preferably one with reviews somewhere outside of the toilet. EA Active was the one.
Note that the early releases on this game stated it would come with TWO leg straps (which is the bit that holds the Nunchuk to your thigh on exercises where the game wants to spot your leg motion). However the game only comes with one strap, so guess what you have to go buy separately if you want multiplayer exercising... at $20 a pop. There is also a chintzy resistance band that I'm convinced I'm going to snap.
Aeropause's Joe Haygood - Windows Gaming at E3 (YouTube) Joe Haygood, lead dude on the Aeropodcast, was tapped to talk about Windows 7 at an E2 gig! I want to remix this to ABBA for him.
Excerpts From the Diary of an App Store Reviewer (Daring Fireball) Hilarious fictional explanation of the nonsense going on behind the scenes with all these iPhone app approval problems. Apple is getting a right nice black eye over this, not that anybody outside the tech sector has ever heard of this.
We had a really great day yesterday. We're starting to experiment with weaning Clark off his afternoon nap, and some weekends are naturally better than others. Yesterday was one of the good ones.
He slept in, which is a good sign that we'll be able to pull off a napless day. We had a coupon for a largely unfamiliar local comic store. Comix Connection is not our usual comic shop, but since we moved a little northward it's now within our shopping sphere. We breezed through there back on Free Comic Book Day when they were giving out 20% off coupons. So Clark and I performed a sortie through the store eager to use the coupon.
They have a sweet life-size Silver Surfer statue in the back of the store, of which we were instantly enamored. I don't know why we didn't take a picture of it. Comix Connection isn't as good with the gaming stock as Comic Store West (not even close), but they have a spiffier website.
We walked out of there with a Teen Titans manga-sized trade and an issue of CN Action Pack for Clark, while I picked up volume 3 of Showcase Presents Justice League (yay stupid Silver Age!) and a Minimate two-pack of Deadman and the Spectre that was half off before we used the coupon.
As soon as we moved here, we noticed a few roaming neighborhood cats, but this year a pair of them have started staking their claim to our yard.
We call this one Smoky. He/she looks a lot like our Annie, to the point where I once saw this one sleeping on our driveway and thought Annie had somehow escaped our air conditioned rubber sealed airlock biodome of a home.
Smoky will not let us near him/her. We're actually not even sure this is the original Smoky, because a few months back a similarly colored cat was seen along the side of the road not far from our development. Somehow, a Smoky endures. This picture of him/her sleeping on our porch chair is from last week.
The Hands-On House is a kids museum with several rooms of interactive exhibits, nicely scaled so little kids can play with junk while slightly older kids could actually learn stuff.
The exhibits range from pretty low-fi areas like this plastic-bugs-and-microscope light table...
Last week's new episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold was kind of a tough one for Clark.
In it, Red Tornado decides to create another robot, the Tornado Champion. Champion is made to look like a boy robot, so for a while there's some cute father/son scenes as the two fight crime and save people from fires.
Clark naturally liked seeing a boy robot. But being the student of DC history that I am, I knew that a character named "Tornado Champion" was likely to meet a bad end.
And indeed he does. When a lightning attack from Major Disaster (in his old purple hoodie costume! Fan service!) activates Champion's emotion engine, he slowly turns bad and recasts himself as the Tornado Tyrant.
AAA-Ep5: Alfredo's Crushing Curiosity (YouTube) We had a disk full of the Alfredo adventures back in the Apple // days. Were these the first CG cutscenes rendered in real time?
We enjoyed a longish weekend, but some strange stuff happened and as usual I feel like I didn't get everything done I wanted to accomplish.
I had more epic battles with our lawn mower today. At the end of last summer, it literally broke into two halves, thanks to an unbalanced blade, and we had written it off until Rhonda found somebody who fixes such things. So we got it repaired and it worked fine this year until last weekend when something else went wrong, unrelated to the repair. The self-propelling belt slipped off. This happened last week and I was lucky enough to notice the self-propelling had ceased to self-propel... so I could turn it off before the belt was chewed up. Today I reattached it, but I could not get the tensioner properly tightened. So after two passes, the belt slipped again. And this time, I had no warning. Just chunks of a $15 belt flying out the side of the mower.
So I had to do all the propelling myself. I got about 75% done with the yard when the left rear tire fell off. The plastic interior of the tire had worn away enough that the damn thing just slipped over the bolt as I was doing back-and-forths by the edge of our ditch.
After fighting with this thing for so long, I think we're giving up and going to buy a new one. Apparently $300 (the approximate price of this pig) just isn't enough to get you a mower that will last more than two years. I suppose I'll have to specify that our new mower is suited for rough terrain and a generally pissed-off owner.
I finished off the final (of three) campaign tonight, to the tune of over five hours of single player gameplay. This was some seriously fun stuff.
I was very happy to see that not only did the levels get more challenging as you go through the campaigns, but they also change things up just to screw with you. Under the barest of storyline threads, several of the final missions take away some of your chosen faction's troops and replace them with borrowed units from another faction... forcing you to reconsider your strategies.
Those last levels can be endurance tests, though. Sometimes your progress in Swords & Soldiers is measured in millimeters. I know I had at least one level go on for over 40 minutes, which is a lot of pointing and clicking.
So I receive an e-mail from Hyatt Hotels about our upcoming stay at their facility in Columbus for the Origins Gaming Convention That Seems To Be Getting Smaller Every Year. The e-mail mentions that I can check the details of our stay and make special requests via an online form. This is the first I have heard of such a thing, so I scurry to check it out.
OK, cool, they have our request for a single king bed... which almost guarantees us one of the hotel's swank corner rooms. The way the hotel is built, the corner rooms actually afford you three cool views of the city. The only downside is that the windows are covered in spiders. That, and the Columbus Hyatt does not have enough elevators.
But check out these only-in-America room service amenities I can pre-order. They sure do beat the Motel 6 wafer-on-the-pillow.
This one is top of the list. It's the one that's meant to soften you up. $8 for 750 ml of water. Don't be fooled by the European system; that's about 25 ounces. Which is about two cans of soda. Except that this is water.
If you go to the Origins gaming convention website right now, you'll see they have an image randomizer as the header. I'm always fascinated by how niche hobbies (gaming, comics, video games, etc) market themselves, because they almost always just end up speaking to the converted... even though they bluster and worry about expanding the audience beyond those of us who are already presold on the concept. "We've got to get more people interested in gaming! It's not just a hobby for self-loathing losers!" Nine times out ten, the whole thing just comes off as creepy to anybody on the outside looking in.
Take the image that loaded first for me tonight:
Nothing weird about that, right. Cute teen girl and dessicated corpse, perhaps the victim of a horrific car crash.
Now, I happen to know that's from the Twilight Creations booth, makers of the Zombies!!! board game. In fact, last year I tried to get Clark to pose with the dead body, but he would not go near it. But is that the kind of dopey image you'd want all by itself at the top of the page, without context? It speaks to con-going tabletop gamers, but anybody else would think they've wandered into a Dateline NBC expose.
The Mighty Boosh: Not About Quantity (Adult Swim) 2:30am I watch this episode, get to this clip, and laugh like an idiot at the criticism bit halfway through.
Incidentally, this Boosh clip almost exactly mirrors me and Mike in college, where I am Howard and Mike is Vince.
Hot Air (Michael Barrier) Speaking of that, here's a review of Disney/Pixar's Up that is decidedly non-complimentary! I didn't think Americans were allowed to be non-affectionate towards Pixar films! Man, we really did vote for change last election.
First up, the mower. After all this Troy-Bilt suffering, our next mower will be a Craftsman. Or maybe any man willing to come mow the lawn for me.
We went to Lowe's this morning, but of course I brought absolutely no critical mower information. I guess I just assumed there's one mower and all parts would fit. I've been through this before - during the three other times I've had to buy a new drive belt - so I don't know why I didn't prepare for this trip. The upshot is, we bought a 7 inch tire and an 8 inch tire, not knowing the proper inchage for our model. No matter; Lowe's will take anything on return. My mom once returned an unfinished door that sat in my basement for three years and had cat piss on it.
Turns out, BOTH tires were a no-go. I selected a brand with a wide, bulging center, too long for my mower's axle. So in the evening we went to a different Lowe's (less embarrassing that way), returned both tires and bought two 8 inch small centered ones. This time I remembered to bring the busted tire along as a muse. The new tires are metal, not plastic, so I expect them to last longer than the stock tires.
I also had to buy whatever they call the tool that removes the nut that holds the tires on, but I'm happy to say that I got that right the first time.
My 60gig PS3 was just too full - only around 12gig available - so I cracked under the pressure and ordered a 320gig drive through Amazon. It is amusing searching for 2.5" SATA laptop hard drives because most of the online store comments are from PS3 owners in various stages of satisfaction.
Here's the way the upgrade works: You back up your PS3's contents to some external drive. Then you remove the old HD and stick in the new HD. Then you plug that external drive back in and restore the contents.
Cutting in short: it worked. Although I had received plenty of warning from people who lost some files, or saves didn't copy over, or whatever... for me, the backup/restore process was clean and perfect. I did not have to re-download any purchased materials from the store, and I did not lose any files. I didn't even have to re-enter my PSN account name and password.
That's not to say I didn't have some stress along the way.
'm wrapping up our first full day at Origins with a website update. I have to pay for WiFi, so I hope you appreciate the timeliness. I could have waited until we returned home or relied solely on my Twitter feed.
Clark was excellent for the drive. He played some DS, he watched some movies. He really likes the novelty of being able to watch stuff in the car. Here he is watching Bolt.
Bolt was the beginning of the trip. He also watched about half of the first Pokemon movie (the sweet one with Mewtwo) and four episodes of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. I let him choose the DVDs for the trip... in addition to those mentioned he selected one disk of TaleSpin episodes and the Final Fantasy Advent Children movie, neither of which he has ever seen. We also brought one of the Bach-based Baby Einstein disks to engage super calm down at night, and we definitely needed it. Clark has been wired.
Usual fun junk today. I bought some random cheap stuff at a booth that always has great prices. The guys also bought a bunch more stuff. Alex participated in a Pokemon DS tourney.
Here's Clark at the Bandai booth going for the choose-a-card game again. We all played today and did not do extremely well... but they give you free cards regardless, so it's fun for Clark. He has a HUGE stack of cards this year. Dragon Ball, Naruto, Power Rangers, even some of that castoff Doomtown stock. Megan and Alex found a booth that was handing out free Yu-Gi-Oh boosters like water, and they shared the bounty with Clark, which he thought was fantastic.
And now, the inevitable freebies and boughtbies picture:
Vapor's Gambit looms pretty large, doesn't it? Have I mentioned the embarrassingly trite slogan: "Screaming Hoverboard Racing"? Incidentally, during our final epic five-player Vapor's Gambit game of the con, I took the opportunity to investigate some of the backstory. Turns out that the hoverboard track is called the gambit and I believe the city (or country, or planet) is called Vapor. Thus, Vapor's Gambit. Probably more on this one later.
As we wrapped up our Origins trip, we had half an eye towards doing something fun on our way out of town. We were considering heading north to the famous Columbus Zoo (Jack Hannah's stomping grounds) when I flipped through the hotel's city tourism guide and found an ad for a temporary Egyptian exhibit at COSI, a nearby museum. With Clark still gripped by a fascination with King Tut, this became the Saturday trip.
There are actually a pair of Egypt exhibits in Columbus at the moment: this one and a pure artifacts show at an art museum. We figured that Clark would enjoy the kid-friendly angle of COSI more, although I'm sure he would have been entertained by any sizable collection of Egyptian treasures.
Not knowing what to expect from COSI, we were blown away by the expanse of the place. We've certainly been to smallish kids museums, and boringish adult museums, but this one is massive and family-focused.
I guess it's kind of nothing more than pure Trophy mining, going back to Eye of Judgment. But I did it. And the game is still fun, and it is still a challenge to beat the CPU decks. Wringing another dozen or so Trophies out of EoJ 
I know I was going back and forth on this one, but we did end up buying EA Sports Active last weekend. As you might expect, I had boku Toys R Us cards to cash in. I think the actual cost of the $60 game was around $30.
We enjoyed a longish weekend, but some strange stuff happened and as usual I feel like I didn't get everything done I wanted to accomplish.
After 
My 60gig PS3 was just too full - only around 12gig available - so I cracked under the pressure and ordered a 320gig drive through Amazon. It is amusing searching for 2.5" SATA laptop hard drives because most of the online store comments are from PS3 owners in various stages of satisfaction.
