August 2009 Archives

If all the stellar reviews for Batman: Arkham Asylum aren't enough to move you to preemptively declare it Game of the Year, how's this clip of nutcase Batman eating a dead rat grab you:

I glanced backward at all the games I've played this year, and I can't see any of them coming close to being a great as Arkham. Madworld, Deadly Creatures, Ghostbusters, Rhythm Heaven, Little King's Story, Resident Evil 5... all great games (except Ghostbusters), but none deliver what Batman delivers. Looking ahead to the games I have pre-ordered or those I am confident I'll pick up... and I don't see competition there either.

Maybe Uncharted 2 will top Arkham. Maybe Scribblenauts will be mind-blowing. They both have a long way to go.

Batman does so many things so right, that you forget that the game also stands as a redemption for all the sub-par super-hero games we've had for so long. It's not just a walk-and-brawl, like so many arcade games. It's not so heavily stylized that it becomes a broad pastiche, like LEGO Batman. It's not a licensed cash-in, like just about everything else. Sure, there have been little successes over the years. The web-swinging in Spider-Man 2 was aces, and I know some people really liked one of those Hulk games. But they still carry the caveat that they're good "for a super-hero game." Which makes the entire genre no better than Sonic.

The cutscenes are not told in a cheesy stillframe "comic book" format! That by itself is enough to label Arkham an unqualified success. Here's some other salient points:

15 second startup. All the company vanity slides (seriously, who decided we give a crap about the rendering engine's brand name) take up no more than 15 seconds, without you hammering on a button trying to force-advance it.

A smart storyline that keeps things very interesting without trying to over-satisfy. I'm sure there was a temptation to include every single Bat-villain to date. Arkham wisely keeps things to a handful, while escalating the pressure on Batman.

The perfect setting. Arkham Asylum is built for a video game world. It's on an island, so the world boundary is natural (no invisible wall barriers). It's an asylum/prison/hellhole that would of course contain electric fences and bolted doors. So the usual "you can't open this door yet" trope makes a bit of sense.

Fan service. Most of this comes from the collectible Riddler trophies hidden throughout the island (240 of them!). Bane's teddy bear. Jack Ryder. Calendar Man's cell. Sometimes it pushes too far - like, I don't think the Penguin has ever been an Arkham inmate per se, but yet his trick umbrellas are enshrined in one of Arkham's glass cases. But mostly it just makes me giddy. Great voice work on Riddler as well. The voice and the dialogue capture the modern take on Riddler as a cocky, suave genius determined to prove he is smarter than Batman.

Great details. Once you get past the fan service - which is the detailing you're supposed to notice - then you start seeing the details that fill out the world. Batman's stylishly unrealistic shadow while in an air duct. The way his costume progressively takes damage as the game goes on. And so many, so many, combat animations.

Brilliant moments. I'm coming up on the end and can easily identify at least two jaw-dropper sequences where storyline, comics fandom, and gaming conventions combine to great effect. They both come along with Scarecrow bits, so when you see him, be ready.

This game has learned from the best. There are elements borrowed from Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted, Eternal Darkness, Legend of Zelda and probably a half dozen others. But thanks to the strength of the Batman franchise, it never feels derivative. Even though you're crawling through air ducts or using a hookshot, the presentation is all Batman.

Not that the game comes up short every now and then. The ragdoll physics on knocked out enemies does what ragdoll physics always does to knocked out enemies: makes them look stupid. I don't know who decided that ragdoll physics was the way to go in gaming, but it needs to be stopped. When a body gets punched into unconsciousness, it doesn't suddenly lose all muscle tension and break down marionette-style.

And personally, I think Batman's posture is way too stiff. I like a haunting, hunched-over Batman. All the character models are too hard, actually.

And why does Arkham Asylum have a huge Botanical Garden building? Seems like asking for trouble.

I heard developer Rocksteady could be working on a new Tomb Raider game. F that. Get to work on a Batman sequel. I worry that Gotham City will not be as great a match for gaming as Arkham, which could result in the Raccoon Citification of Gotham, but I'll give Rocksteady the yard to try.

TaleSpin Promo footage (YouTube)
Here's that TaleSpin footage I mentioned a few days ago. I guess I always assumed that the mysterious red box from the open was from episode I never saw or poorly recalled. Turns out it's just from a weird promo clip!

Comparing Avatar to Delgo (Cartoon Brew)
Yep, James Cameron's Avatar already looks pretty creatively bankrupt. Not that friggin' Delgo is any measure of cinema quality. Which only makes Avatar worse.

Lego giraffe tail repeatedly stolen (Yahoo News)
This cannot be right. How can a 30 centimeter LEGO construction contain 15,000 bricks?

Convert design evolution (Tap Tap Tap via Daring Fireball)
Great little movie showing the design progression of an application that converts units back and forth.

Power To The People: How Rock Band Network Expands The Game, Gets Any Song Online (Kotaku)
This is this first I've seen details on how the self-uploading Rock Band Network will work. If you're a band, you should probably look into this, because at $160 you could stand to make a pile of dough. I'm still not sure why the whole bloody thing has to be tied to the 360 development kit.

Blow Me Down! (Cartoon Brew)
This is one of those Let's Draw A Cartoon Character As If It Is Real paintings. This time it's Popeye, and it is truly grotesque.

We had one of these over a year ago, but that Gaming ABC chart failed by including flippin' Indiana Jones and Professor X. How's this one shake out:

I think this image (found by GayGamer.net) does much better for one simple reason: it goes by the character name, not the game name. Which is kind of a cop-out, since it lets you dip into some very obscure areas. However, that other one looked nicer (there's no style to this art) and attempted to cover the entire scope of gaming.

A: Abe, from the over-hyped, under-playable Oddworld series.

B: Bomberman.

C, D: Clank, Daxter... seems like a PS2 bias already!

E: Earthworm Jim. You know, I had that on Sega Genesis, but it never really clicked as one of my top faves. I don't think it has aged well. It sits very solidly in an era that was, for pop culture kids of the time, defined very heavily by the Looney Tunes revival. Animaniacs, Roger Rabbit, Tiny Toons, Freakazoid, Bonkers... we had this period where intentionally random slapstick wackiness was all over the place. And then we all grew up and became Adult Swim and Katamari fans.

F, G: Frog (Chrono Trigger) and Gum (Jet Set Radio). And no, I did not know either of those without looking. I like how Gum is subtly drawn in a ridiculous Jet Set perspective.

H: The Heavy, from Team Fortress 2. The first "modern" appearance on the list, by my estimation.

I: Ico. As I suggested last time.

J: Jade, from the over-hyped, under-playable Beyond Good and Evil.

K: Kirby. Little too much Nintendo Core on this design. I would have suggested Klonoa, since this artist seems to dig the slightly off-center stuff.

L, M, N: Link, Mario, Ness. See what I mean. I guess you can't do one of these without including Mario. At least this list puts him on the M.

O: Otacon! Nice. Would have liked a pee puddle by his feet.

P: Pikachu.

Q: Quote, from Cave Story. Unfortunately, that type of anime guy in a hat, standing right beside Pika, makes it impossible for me to look at that and not parse "Ash."

R: Raz or Rez or whatever from Psychonauts.

S: Sonic.

T: Terra, from Final Fantasy 6. Um, come again? Is Terra even a suitably iconic character from the FF series? Weird pick.

U: The guy from Gitaroo Man, whose name was apparently U-1. There are some nice PS2 nods on this list, aren't there?

V: Viewtiful Joe, from the over-hyped, under-playable Viewtiful Joe series.

W: Weighted Companion Cube. Super-nice.

X: The toughest letter to pull off, no matter the metric. This is one of the many Mega Man iterations. Good enough.

Y: Yoshi.

Z: Zangief.

All in all, another cute image. I'd do one of these myself, but it would end up being nothing but pokemon and Fantastic Four villains.

Fansite TaleSpin Source has been collecting fan questions and getting official answers from creators Jymn Magon and Mark Zaslove. Some serious TS-geek fodder can be found - on the level of that overplayed William Shatner Goes to a Trek Convention SNL skit - but here's some cool stuff.

Every episode is considered to take place after the "Plunder and Lightning" intro movie. Even "For Whom the Bell Klangs" which was generally thought to be some kind of pre-P&L buddy comedy with Baloo and Louie, since it never mentions Kit or Rebecca.

I can't believe this never occurred to me before: a couple clips in the open feature Baloo with a red box (once you're looking for it, you can't miss it). Those clips came from a promotional video created to help launch the series on Disney Channel, where Baloo and Kit carry the box through various quick misadventures... and in the end, the box contains a cheap TaleSpin logo.

Molly was not an immaculate conception. (But no, Jymn is not going to reveal her father, other than to call it "an interesting but involved story." And you're not getting anything about Kit's birthparents either.)

The air delivery service idea was originally intended (but unused) for Launchpad McQuack over on DuckTales.

Disney "was never 100% behind TaleSpin" in Jymn's opinion. He also slams them for not bothering to include commentaries on the DVD sets.

All the pirates are wolves. That's it. No more speculation about foxes or dogs or cats. They're wolves.

They tried to use Baloo's original 1967 Jungle Book voice actor, Phil Harris, but his "age [became] a factor" in his voice so they cast Ed Gilbert.

Magon had nothing to do with the few TaleSpin comics that came out in the early 90's... so they are indeed officially out of continuity.

Some animators of the day did not want to work on TaleSpin because they thought it sullied the reputation of the original Jungle Book film. Wonder what those guys think of Little Mermaid 2 and Cinderella 3.

One of the steps in the gestation of TaleSpin was a pitch called "The B Players," which would have been sort of a Roger Rabbit pastiche with Baloo and some other Disney characters appearing as hardluck actors in search of new roles. This could have entered into Disney canon that Baloo (Jungle Book) and Little John (Robin Hood) are indeed the same guy! Of course, Disney tackled the whole cartoon-characters-as-actors thing later in both Bonkers and House of Mouse.

There are plenty more questions posted, and fans keep asking more, so check it out!

Just noticed this old comic scan in the latest edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed. As a kid, each summer I used to read and re-read comic strip anthology books that collected panels and strips from the1900s through the 1940s. Toonerville Trolley, the Little King, Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Little Nemo, all that junk. So I really like this dry gag from The New Yorker, by author E. B. White.

That is going to always be funny to me. I look forward to celebrating this panel's 100th anniversary.

Because that's what happens every time some social issue is raised in gamer space.

Women pointing out that gaming being overly focused on masculine, juvenile power fantasies? Shouted down.

African-Americans cringing about that first Resident Evil 5 trailer being at best unsettling and at the worst outright racist? Shouted down.

Muslims complaining that a song in LittleBigPlanet features a vocal interpretation from their holy text, which some would find terribly offensive? Shouted down.

PETA making a parody of Cooking Mama in another attention-grab for their animal cruelty cause? Shouted down.

And now, homosexuals vowing not to buy Shadow Complex on the 360 because it comes from the works of noted anti-gay rights activist Orson Scott Card? Shouted down.

This latest sortie comes barely a week after a public service campaign - Think B4 U Speak (or some such title marred by trendy internet spelling) - released a magazine ad trying to get gamers to stop using homosexual insults online. I've seen this campaign in other forms, and it is not entirely focused on gamers, just teens in general. Penny Arcade responded with agreement to the message but noted that it was doomed to fail because it assumes "a level of humanity in [the] target audience that frankly doesn't exist."

But it's not just teens, is it? The gaming universe is not 100% hyper-aggro slacker wastrels. There's a good portion of adult gamers out there, and they seem ready and willing to write off any perceived attacks on the hobby from outsiders. (I know I'm generalizing, but white heterosexual Christian meat-eating male is realistically a good yardstick for gamers in America... therefore all others are outsiders.) There will be no discussion. There will be no understanding. There will be no compromise. If you have a complaint, you're stupid, wasting your time, irrational. It's just a game, after all. That's all that matters.

The "perceived" adjective is especially apropos in this case, as the Shadow Complex boycott is really just a continuation of an ongoing Orson Scott Card boycott. By all accounts, the game itself is great stuff. If Shadow Complex was a television miniseries, the gay community would urge the same boycott, and happy fragging gamers would not even know it happened. K-pow, k-pow, they would say from behind their Gears of War sights. Pew pew pew pew pew.

The catalyst piece seems to have been this editorial by Gamasutra writer Christian Nutt. Nutt, you may note, has been in games journalism for a reasonably long time. I remember seeing his byline in magazines, that's how long he's been doing this. He also happens to be gay, and he quite plainly struggles with the complicated issue... Does it matter that the game is based on Card's work, even if Card didn't actually have much to do with the game? (Peter David wrote it, presumably based on Card's world bible.) Does it matter that the game is apparently really good? Does it matter that homophobes are no doubt sprinkled all over entertainment media, without our knowing? Does it matter that Card is particularly virulent on the issue, calling gays "tragic genetic mix-ups" and gay marriage an "end to democracy"?

I went through the reader comments for Nutt's article and changed by mind probably half a dozen times. Particularly when Peter David shows up, a little miffed, and has his say. David says he always separates the creator from the creation. I don't think I can do that, particularly when the Orson-verse engages in such delightful gay-baiting as blowing up San Francisco. How can you not read between the lines on that one.

David also remarks that a boycott will produce functionally miniscule results, and I'm sure he's right about that. But still, if you don't want to give money to a homophobe who has placed himself on his own bully pulpit and runs in circles high enough to actually bring his small-minded threats to fruition, I don't think it matters HOW much money you're technically keeping from him. Even a penny is too much.

(David has a GREAT rejoinder when a commentor tries to turn the table on him, asking if he would buy a product made by somebody who specifically hated and persecuted Peter David.

"Absolutely," David asserts. "Case in point: I regularly buy the work of John Byrne who has called me a jerk and worse, and he's been doing it for years.")

The larger issue for gamers is: Why are we so afraid to talk about this? Why is every civil rights action met with immediate dismissal, as if each one was manufactured by complete crackpots? While I'm sure that crackpots exist, and I'm not saying that every single complaint has merit, I have seen normally reasonable people brush off this particular topic as if it was of no importance at all. Even worse, many graduate to fully insulting those doing the complaining. And all the while, some claim to be sympathetic to the gay rights movement... but that gays should find something else to attack. Something more important to their cause, presumably. Because a video game couldn't possibly matter.

But all great art forms are met with challenges. It's what happens as any particular media expands and evolves. Gamers get justifiably upset when Roger Ebert says games aren't art ("We are!" "We're important!" "We're digital magic!"), but if you dare suggest Shadow Complex may somehow be connected to a known homophobe, you're told to "get over it" because "it's just a game." We can't have it both ways.

Another point I feel many gamers miss - and many white Americans miss in general - is that it is one thing for a minority group to complain about the majority... and quite, quite another for the majority to complain about the minority. You'd think something like this would be blatantly obvious, but a hive mind mentality rules inside any group. And the larger the group, the more invisibly oppressive the hive mind can become. Without minority groups constantly reminding the majority of what's it's like to be the minority, we continually run the risk of the majority slowly creeping toward ignoring the minority entirely. Which could get deadly. And has.

What I mean by this, it is very easy to stand up and lambast something when you know you're going to get backed up by another dozen commentators. There is nothing brave about telling gays to "get over it," because a legion of "yeah, get over it"s will follow.

I think white Christian hetero American males simply lack a cause. They're already on top of the world, so they can't fathom when a minority group's hackles are raised. Everything is already going the gamers' way, so what's to get upset about? This fault is all the more pronounced in a pop culture-based community that contains a wide swath of younger males who lack critical thinking and social understanding. The only cause that the stereotypical gamer can get behind is the one where mainstream media or the government come after gaming for being too violent, too sexy or too immature.

On Aeropause, I mentioned that, as an atheist, I'm very likely sending my money off to plenty of Christianist causes without knowing it. But if the creator(s)/creation(s) are obviously pro-Christian - my examples being Left Behind and VeggieTales - then you can bet I am not sending a thin dime in that direction. It's a matter of degree and it's a matter of knowing the enemy's location and intent. Orson Scott Card, a name brand sci-fi author, has been extremely hateful and vocal on the topic; he has made himself public. In comparison, a behind-the-scenes writer on Game X who sends half his paycheck to his church is quite a few steps below that. It's not black and white. I think this puts the lie to the gamer retort that essentially goes "if you look hard enough, you'll find somebody who doesn't think as you do, so why look at all."

If you care about any given topic, you can't not look. And the counsel of "don't bother looking at all" is the siren song of blind majority conformity.

In the end, the Shadow Complex issue isn't even a great artistic challenge for gaming, as it has very little to do with the game itself. If Shadow Complex was indeed rife with Card's personal ideology - even deeper than destroying San Fran - than we'd have a real discussion. So I can see where the Gaming Popular Opinion is coming from. Nevertheless, I can't believe that so many gamers instantly dismiss the complaint, no doubt without ever venturing into Nutt's article, or similarly thoughtful entries from Sexy Videogameland and Gay Gamer.net. If somebody disagrees with an artist, in our free society they have every right to not buy his work and to tell their friends about it. And those who agree with the artist can buy all they like... and tell their friends the same. But instantly slamming a group in the fashion we've seen over the past few weeks is not only thoughtless, but aggressively prejudicial.

Each issue of kiddie comic DC Super Friends usually contains some kind of cut-out activity page. I don't know why one would ever physically cut apart a comic book, but there you go.

Usually they're paper dolls. One month had some terribly sweet finger puppets of Bat-Mite and Mr. Mxyzptlk. If Clark shows interest in any of the cut-outs, I'll promise him to scan the page for him and then we'll go arts-n-crafts on a printed copy. Because, as evidenced, we're not cutting apart comic book pages for christ's sake. Usually, he loses interest before we get to the scanning stage. Paper dolls are only going to get you so much with a 2009 kid.

This month, issue #18, is a complete corker. MAKE YOUR OWN BIZARRO PLANET!

Since the Silver Age, Bizarro World has always been hilariously drawn as a precise cube, making this not only the best cut-out ever, but also the easiest.

This time, I DID scan it in. Check it out, print it out.

I may do up one the size of a beach ball and hang it above my desk.

DC Super Friends may not have the DC Nerd cred of Batman: Brave and the Bold, or the hipster cachet of Tiny Titans... but it does come up sparkling from time to time.

And don't forget step four!

Mike and Noelle were over for the weekend, and it was PS3 / Wii / PS3 / Wii non-stop. They were nice enough to allow Clark to dictate many of the gaming choices, and since we have so many good multiplayer options, it often hardly mattered in what direction Clark wanted to run. Every choice was a good one.

LittleBigPlanet. A lot of this one. Great for multiplayer, and Clark wanted to spend some time working on his level. Which, after two levels which consisted largely of him spilling in items by the truckload and drawing random shapes in Dark Matter, I am astonished to report that he is actually trying to make a platformer. With no significant prodding by me, he started making steps that will take players over fire blocks, digging secret paths that lead to treasure bubble caches, and generally trying to be very clever about giving players a linear adventure from start to finish.

He has taken to calling his segments "puzzles" after watching me work on my level that is based on locked puzzle rooms. He has one area where you must swing from one platform to another. He has a pyramid where he carved out the middle and filled it with score bubbles, and then built steps to get to it. He has a long fire path with floating platforms above it. Aside from a couple complicated bits that he asked me to do ("I want bubbles to fall right here."), he has created all of this on his own.

Also, I signed up for the LittleBigPlanet Water beta. I hope I get in!

Mario Kart Wii. It was good to revisit this one. I know I was a little down on it when it first came out, and I know many think it's not as good as some previous Mario Karts... but when a game continues to be fun some year after the new kart smell has worn off, it deserves additional accolades.

Fat Princess. Even though it is built for one player, I could happily sit and watch Mike play it for hours. And he could reciprocate. We could be locked in a room for a week with this one and not need anything else. Picked up three Trophies, including one for Mike killing an enemy while he was transformed into a chicken.

RE: The Ninja rumors. Of course he'll have a sword or whatever for combat, but how about if the Ninja can pick up an enemy hat and go undercover, now dressed in the colors of the opposing team?

Wii Sports Resort. Cherry-picked some of the better games. Mike and I had a huge Table Tennis battle. Clark had me fly him around in Island Flyover because he is desperate to unlock the nighttime island.

My Life as a Darklord. Perhaps Mike's favorite. He fought through the end of Act 4, the last two levels of which requiring some serious trial and error. We bought two of the new DLC packs... a $5 pack with six additional monsters, and a $3 pack with three new rooms. Of course, thanks to Pepsi Rock Band caps, the actual cost on that was negligible.

Wii Music. Noelle joined Clark and I for a nursing-home-band version of La Bamba. Then we did a couple rounds of the bell minigame (which is not bad) followed by the music quiz minigame (which can be a lot harder than you'd expect.) Wii Music surprised me and unlocked a pile of stuff, which only underlines how frustrating it is to have no idea when you're going to be handed new material. Now have a Zelda song and an F-Zero song. That's the kind of junk I wanted the game to hand me from Bootup One.

The newly unlocked single-player lessons is well beyond the casual pale... you're expected to go through six instrument lessons, memorizing two sequences for each. Forget fucking that. And they said this game wasn't hardcore.

Buzz Quiz TV. Did a four-player round - adults only, special naptime edition - in which I un-humbly smoked everyone else. Then we played and won an online match, giving me the twentieth online win Trophy. Had some crazy questions about sports and food that did none of us any favors.

Rock Band 2. More four-adult fun, with each of us taking a turn at the mic. Clark played LEGO Batman on DS for most of this. Received the "sustained overdrive for 90 seconds" Trophy, which was entirely unexpected.

The Last Guy. I'm officially over this game. But I make Mike play it to get me Trophies. He three-starred a level for me, and hey presto, Trophy.

Excitebots. Offered up (by Clark) as a racing game alternative to Mario Kart. He and Noelle played through several races. It's floaty and weird, and the forced-to-use-motion controls keep it from being a Nintendo classic. A shame, really.

Animal Crossing: City Folk. I needed to get this week's Nintendo gift: the Hopscotch Floor.

Marvel vs Capcom 2. Clark and I played a little of this. None of us are super into fighters, so a concerningly ugly 15-year-old one is not going to attract a ton of attention. But it's a hoot for me and my son, especially when he pulls off Iceman's mega attack repeatedly. I fail to see why this re-release could not have added a goddamn "back" button during character selection. It is entirely unfriendly to the player, and it means quick-fingered children are stuck playing as the Cable Triplets.

Geez, I hope I didn't miss anything. Not a bad haul for approximately 24 hours, including sleeping.

And then this morning I found out about Toys R Us offering a $30 gift card on Batman: Arkham Asylum, this Tuesday only. So I called up Gamestop and shifted by $5 Arkham preorder onto Scribblenauts. I was going to put on LEGO Rock Band, but LEGO Rock Band isn't in their system yet! WTF.

Anyway, getting a $30 gift card is way better than getting Gamestop's ditzy preorder bonus of a free Batman vs Skeletons challenge level. Even if the Skeletons thing is eventually posted as DLC, I'm willing to bet it won't cost $30. So, way to go Toys R Us.

TRU is also doing a BOGOHO on Wii and DS games this week. That's Buy One, Get One Half Off. This is, like, the eighth time they've done this this calendar year. Except this time, it's probably the start of TRU trying to clear out space for the holiday releases. Usually a Buy Two, Get One Free deal runs some time in October.

But the new Professor Layton is out, and that would be an excellent choice for that $30 Batman gift card, wouldn't it?

Katamari iPhone 3GS VS 3G (YouTube)
Apparently I Love Katamari runs a lot faster on an iPhone 3GS compared to a 3G. Having only ever played the 3GS, I had no idea. But I'm not sure that this video makes the speed difference clear.

Sgt. Frog's Dub: A Success? (Toon Zone)
Sgt. Frog anime has an English release! FUNimation is finally making this happen. I wonder how they plan on issuing this, aside from free streaming.

British award to honor Monty Python at NY reunion (Yahoo News)
40 years since the birth of Monty Python. I've been reading Michael Palin's Diaries (which covers 1969 through 1979) and it has been a great behind-the-scenes peek to the unexpected huge success of Python in England (almost immediately, it seems!), the slow burn of success in the US, Palin's week on Saturday Night Live, the conflicting personalities of the team (John Cleese declares before they start work on what would become Life of Brian: "I need to make quite a lot of money on this."), not to mention Palin's personal life... the ailing health of his father, his career outside of Python, and his friendship with George Harrison.

I'm more than a little depressed to realize that these guys were in their 20s when Python struck gold, and Palin was my age when they did Life of Brian.

Egyptian limestone statue, 1550 BC to 1050 BC (Yahoo News)
So now Michael Jackson resembles a New Kingdom Egyptian woman.

VIOLENCE WORKS. INCREMENTALISM DOESN'T. (Yahoo News)
From columnist Ted Rall:

The more rambunctious right-wingers showed up with assault rifles outside halls where the president was speaking. Can you imagine what would have happened if lefties had brought their AK-47s to anti-Iraq War rallies? The cops would have killed them. Their friends and relatives would have disappeared into some Bushie secret prison in Romania.

And I really like his description of Obama as "the democrats' professorial boy president." That's pretty much exactly what I voted for.

Fat Princess Teases Pirates And Ninjas (Kotaku)
Believe me, I have no horse in that stupid internet-based Pirates vs Ninjas bullshit. But any kind of Fat Princess enhancement is bound to be well-received by me.

Cerealized Fiction (Absorbascon)
A BRILLIANT piece that compares DC vs Marvel to that storied cereal battle of the 1970's: Quisp vs Quake.

Choice Nuggets From Apple's Response to the FCC's Inquiry Regarding the Rejection and Removal of Google Voice Apps From the App Store (Daring Fireball)
Each member of the iPhone App Store review team has to go over 40 submitted applications and updates per day. It's a shame so much of those apps are junk!

After several years of drilling the Guitar Hero name into the dirt by rubber-stamping artist compilations and us-tooing Rock Band's Harmonix pedigree lead, this fall Activision has some really cool features lined up for Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero.

First of all, I don't know what the hell the difference is between the two, except that Band Hero is more pop music. Which, honestly, I've felt that, as a genre, Rock Band has kind of ignored modern pop. You'd think that it would be a huge co-promotion to have Katy Perry debut her "Waking Up in Vegas" song on American Idol and then have Ryan Seacrest come out and say "And you can play that song in Rock Band right now."

But here's what Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero seem to be doing right. DS connectivity. The storied days of the GameCube/Game Boy Advance connectivity failing like XXX have scared developers away from what should have been a launch day natural for the Wii... hooking up a DS, wirelessly. Nowhere near enough games have leveraged this opportunity.

Band Hero, coming in November (two months after Guitar Hero 5), has at least three special DS modes that can used used as other players are playing the game on Wii. Setlist manager: You can use a DS to change the playlist while your friends are playing. In theory, this means no more waiting to select a new song... just have somebody with a DS hook you up.

There's a stage manager mode where a DS player can set off pyrotechnics, and control the camera angles and lights. Plus the DS can edit music videos which are then uploaded to the Wii.

And there's a roadie battle mode - which I believe is also available in GH5 - where two DS players can become roadies and, through a minigame, help the local band or hinder the enemy band. Sort of like the silly attack mode in Guitar Hero III, I guess. Cute, but easily the lamest of the three. I pretty much hate the idea of turning the whole experience into a situation where you're more concerned with avoiding attacks and collecting power-ups than trying to ace a song, but whatever.

Interestingly, none of these modes require buying a DS version of Guitar Hero. They will all be over-the-air downloads from the Wii game. Although, given the way they're talking about these add-ons, I very much doubt that they will all be contained in one download. My guess is that you have to choose between one of the modes to initiate, and therefore you can't switch on the fly from to the other (without cancelling out and starting another download.)

Obviously, you need some DSs and a pile of people to enjoy this, but it sounds cool on paper. This is the kind of thing that will raise my interest level, that's for sure.

Of course, this is all only for the Wii versions. There's been no glimmer that Activision would duplicate some or all of this on a PSP, for example. So if this becomes a key buying feature for you, what are you giving up if you buy this version over the PS3/360 one? The same things you always give up if you choose the Wii version of a multi-platform game: graphical fidelity, easy DLC purchasing and storage, easy online play, and achievements/trophies.

Now what do you give up if you throw your support behind Guitar Hero 5 or Band Hero, to get the cool DS hookup, rather than sticking with Rock Band? Well, we're still all waiting for Activision to make good on Guitar Hero World Tour's promise to have a great DLC library. World Tour has, what, 170 tracks? Rock Band will have 1000 by the end of the year. For me, the custom playlist is the A Number One reason to continue playing a game like this.

Rock Band is also on the cusp of debuting the Rock Band Network, which is intended to service as a turnkey method for local bands to submit their songs as DLC. I suppose pro bands could make use of this as well, but you'd think any "real" group would have an agent and licensing regs and all sorts of Hollywood bullshit that would either assist or grenade the entire process. Not that I expect Rock Band Network to explode in popularity - most people never touch the indie tracks anyway - but it's a nice gimme. And if your favorite indie band decides to participate, that will mean the world to you.

But while all that Wii/DS stuff is cool - and I plainly have the kit to support it - I doubt it will sway me from what Harmonix is doing. They have been uniformly excellent in providing DLC and in keeping the instruments manageably compatible. I do not trust Activision on the DLC library, and it's a little early to ascertain if those DS modes actually work well.

Not to mention Beatles Rock Band, which I'm getting for sure. I know, here in August 2009, BRB is its own little island, with no song compatibility. But I still think at some point that iron gate will open and Harmonix will offer a $5 transfer patch that will make all Beatles songs and Beatles DLC available for Rock Band. It just seems too odd that they would go to all the trouble of setting up an online store just for The Beatles, and not be cooking in future functionality to make those songs work with the existing system. I think all the hooey about "The Beatles need to have a unique musical experience" is just temporary.

Then there's LEGO Rock Band, which also arrives this fall. I can't find a source, but I think you'll be able to import the LEGO Rock Band songs into your non-LEGO Rock Band. So it's a song pack in any case. As long as the songs are not currently available in any existing Rock Band form, if the game comes with at least thirty tracks, that's a theoretical $60 value right there in songs alone.

I also really like that LEGO Rock Band has an even easier difficulty level - designed for kids - where the fret colors do not matter, just the note beat. Clark would be a lot more likely to hit beats than having to parse the color-matching subsystem.

Did I just talk myself into buying LEGO Rock Band? I'll have to check on pre-order bonuses for that.

I waited long enough for an official CD pressing. Tonight I caved and bought a heap of LittleBigPlanet songs separately through iTunes. Now watch part of the Game of the Year / anniversary celebration include a genuine soundtrack album.

There is an instrumental soundtrack on iTunes, released last December: "Little Big Music" by Daniel Pemberton. It's 18 tracks for $9.99, but only eight or so are actually in the game. Which is sort of odd. So the mental gymnastics work as follows... do you buy only the eight tracks you know, or spend another $2 for an additional ten bonus tracks that might be just as great? I went for the full album.

That album is just the Pemberton tracks, but much of the rest of the soundtrack can be found in iTunes with a little search work.

"Get It Together" by The Go! Team
"Left Bank Two" by the Noveltones
"Tapha Niang" by Toumani Diabate (on iTunes you get the infamous offensive-to-Muslims version!)
"My Patch" by Jim Noir
"Volver a Comenzar" by Cafe Tacuba
"Cornman" by Kinky
"Atlas" by Battles
"Song 2" by DJ Krush
"Dancing Drums" by Ananda Shankar
"Rhythm Track, Vol. 1-7" by James Pants (don't overlook this one; the iTunes title is different from the title as listed in the game)

That's my LittleBigPlanet playlist, which skips the Pemberton tunes not used in the game and arranges the songs in a rough order of appearance. Even if you've never played LBP (WTF), you should go into iTunes and check some of these out. Just about all of them will sound completely unsuitable for your preconceived notion of "video game soundtrack."

I did not buy Alexander Nevsky Op.78 "Battle On The Ice," since that's more of a classical, operatic piece. There's also two additional Go! Team tracks, "Huddle Formation" and "Ladyflash", that I've seen some LBP fansites include as being in the game, but I'll be damned if I recognize them. But they're all in iTunes as well, should you want to be a complete completist.

I know that this list contains a fair amount of "world" songs, but taken as a whole, this really is the West's equivalent of a Katamari soundtrack.

All clicked and purchased, it's $20. I think they were all iTunes Plus tracks, so no DRM, and only a few are mysteriously not available to be turned into ringtones. I've certainly paid more for video game soundtracks.

I have a longstanding irrational aversion to Playmobil that stems from a childhood disappointment: I thought they were building sets similar to LEGO. So since we never walk that way at Toys R Us, we were gobsmacked (GOBSMACKED) by this incredible Egyptian playset.

The box is larger than Clark.

Of course, all that sweet diluted-history plastic comes at a steep cost: $100. If Clark is still into King Tut come the holidays, we may have to seriously consider this as The Big Gift. Not that Clark needs any playsets. He is remarkably consistent in maintaining interests, so he will likely still be talking about Egypt come the snow.

There's also some smaller sets... like this $30 sphinx.

Rhonda is definitely going to make me disassemble the motorized Speed Racer Grand Prix racetrack if we get him that huge honkin' pyramid.

Embarrassing secret time (as if posting YouTube videos with questionably misogynistic screengrabs wasn't embarrassing enough): I did not know that you can shake the Dual Shock to queue up another bonus Ooch in Pain.

I have been pretty desperate to unlock Buzz as a playable character. You have to rack up three million points on the After Party level in one go. A couple months back, I had a routine worked out that would reliably get me over two million... and I kept running that over and over again hoping that sometime I would get lucky and something would happen to get me that extra million points. But Pain is really, really difficult. OR SO I THOUGHT. Getting an extra Ooch in there (where you can invisibly shove your character into more obstacles) makes all the difference when racking up a big score. Now I just think the game is really difficult. With one "really."

The bit to watch for in that clip is the cinematic tension at the end... where I get within a few hundred thousand points of the three mill. And Tati heroically summons up the extra effort (ooch) to hurl herself at the nearby dynamite.

That's Tati's new alternate costume, by the way. Here's Cookie's new alt:

Bit of a dark ending there.

Here's another quick replay with Tati. I do love the movie editor.

I made this last one simply because I liked that it looked like she was trying to crawl over the rampart.

I'll have to buy some of the new environments and send Buzz headlong into them. I feel like I should wait for a bundle (I did not buy the School or the Museum maps), but as they have never bundled any Pain DLC to date, I don't know why I think that.

Pain already has Hasselhoff, and we knew Andy Dick was coming as a playable character... but how awesome is George Takei! This will be the first case of Pain including somebody respectable.

The Hallo Spencer Show opening titles (YouTube)
I went through about a six month period where I was really into this show. It's a crappy German Sesame Street that was very strangely redubbed into English and broadcast on equally crappy small town stations. I thought it was hilarious.

A Dose of Reality (Mark Evanier)
Mark Evanier lays out three common misdirects about health care arguments, and then asks for somebody to send him a genuine argument... because it can't all be nonsense as no plan is perfect. Mark is so level-headed, I love that guy.

SOME TUESDAY NEWS: THE GREAT TEN (DC Source)
A Great Ten miniseries! With Accomplished Perfect Physician on the cover of issue 1!

Oh crap, Scott McDaniel on art. He's a tough guy to read.

Jonah Hex movie poster debuts (Robot 6)
Well, here's the first sign that the Jonah Hex movie won't be any good: because the movie poster looks exactly like every other super-hero movie poster since Spider-Man 1.

Why Did I Just Spend Two Hours Examining Nude Photos of Vanessa Hudgens? (DISGRASIAN)
Come for the are-these-legal pics of Vanessa Hudgens, stay for this biting line about the nature of photography in the modern generation:

I have about 60 photos in an album from my entire childhood; I've got 40 new pictures on my Blackberry of myself next to a super weird dog I met at a coffee shop last week.

Managing UI Complexity (Brandon Walkin via Daring Fireball)
Why, I think I could spend all day reading examples of how Microsoft can't design a user interface. The last screenshot example is killer.

"Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths" Announced as Next DC Animated DVD Feature (Toon Zone)
J S A! J S A! And finally, perhaps a Flash-centric movie (although he did have a pretty big role in New Frontier.)

Interview: Former Microsoft Exec Fries Talks Xbox's Genesis (GamaSutra)
Packed with plenty of examples of the Xbox succeeding despite Microsoft's best efforts. I'd love to see the marketing division's list of names that were better than "Xbox."

This week, your American PSN account will be on par with a feature that Sony Europe has had for months. Soon, there will be no more of this crap:

Instead, the html-embeddable Portable ID badge will show off the Trophy count and user level. Instead of showing off nothing.

Which is a step in the right direction, although, admittedly, it's not that many steps. PS3gamercard.com still does a nicer job, with icons of the latest Trophies and an optional background from the last game played... but if Sony is going to keep jerking their code around so third parties regularly have to hack at it to get it to work, then I'll switch to the Sony solution. You guys know I don't like un-official sources anyway.

Sony is also messing around with how you can view your Trophies online when you're logged in at PlayStation.com, which is cool. I still say they're missing the obvious and getting very late to the Facebook/Twitter party. I may have brought this up when Nintendo added Facebook-photo-upload to the DSi, but these services should all somehow integrate. Microsoft has led this front for years; you'd think everybody else would be on board by now.

Here's a nice buff for PS3 owners:

Buying the new Batman: Arkham Asylum game on PS3 gets you this quasi-interactive mini-Batcave for PlayStation Home. For free. I'm sure if you want a Batman costume, that'll be $2. But the cave itself will be free.

I tell you, I officially do not mind Home. I can easily kill a couple hours screwing around in Home, just checking out the various gamespaces and seeing if I can find anything to unlock. I don't, like, talk to anyone. It's just an opportunity to walk around some nice HD environments and be advertised to. If you're at all interested in Guitar Hero, Siren, Warhawk, inFamous, Resident Evil, classic Namco titles or whatever other games have set up shop in Home, that interactive advertising angle is pretty neat. You have to wonder what will happen to the gamespaces for titles that have already died on the vine, like Godfather 2. It was poorly reviewed and what are the chances for a Godfather 3 game... so why maintain the Home space?

It's just a shame that the avatars are the worst thing in the world. And here's a not-secret: Home is really slow about getting all the player textures to pop in... so often you enter a room and you see only low-fi versions of all the people, like it's a friggin' PS2 game. Just when you thought those avatars could not be more Uncanny Valley, now imagine them uncanny AND ugly.

As I've said before, Wii owners would kill for a Home analogue. Miis + Wii Speak + Nintendo-based gameworlds + fan-service unlockables would be unbelievably successful.

I posted about this on Aeropause (same graphics!), but I didn't want to engage a full-on religious debate, so I just blithely pointed it out and left it at that.

It does seem rather unique to have one cute game character flatly ask another "Do you believe in God?" I'm sure plenty of other games have specifically referenced "God," but I can't recall any being so direct about it.

Afterlife was coy about the whole thing, as I recall. You had a demonic assistant and an angelic one, and your SimCity was filled with souls on their way to one of various "final rewards."

I wish I could summon up examples, but I know games have sidestepped naming "God" in favor of generic terms like "the almighty" and whatnot.

Of course, plenty of games concentrate on other religious pantheons... Norse, Greek, etc. But, in modern society, there is a marked difference in naming "Odin" or "Zeus" over naming "God," despite the positions being more or less functional literary equivalents.

I'm sure in many cases, some weirdness with supreme beings stemmed from culture gaps between West and East. With Christianity not being much of a social sensitivity bugaboo in Japan, a Japanese NES game would have been more likely to include crosses and God. In fact, I think that Japanese Mappy Kids game does some of that, although as it has never been translated into an English ROM and I have played very little of it, I don't know much about it.

Anyway, here's the full conversation that follows the random "Do you believe" question:

I can't be too bothered; it does make good thematic sense. Medieval England - the seeming setting for Little King's Story - was pretty much kind of a Christian zone, if that's understating it enough.

It just caught me by surprise. And, as an atheist, I do think that there is some concern for allowing a majority religious opinion unchallenged status in a non-religious setting like this. It's sort of like the supposedly innocuous "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegience... it is not a direct attack on those who does not share that belief, but it does send an unspoken message that anyone who isn't part of the club doesn't belong. Sometimes the most subtle examples are the most insidious. Because they invisibly support the believer's misguided notion that everybody believes what he believes.

Although in this case, the "God" reference is almost immediately defanged of any seriousness, since the monk wants to build a Church of Soup. I wonder if that was a localization decision.

I'm actually going to try not building the church, just to see how far the game will let that stand. It's quite possible that the soup church is the first step in a long line of necessary nation-building construction trees. Or maybe it's just a building.

How many times have I lamented the lack of a DC counterpart to Marvel's Super Hero Squad toys? More times than you've care to read, I'm sure. It took a while - I have SHS guys older than Clark - but finally a comparative chunky chibi toy line is on the racks. It's part of the Batman: Brave and the Bold assortment.

I read about these in ToyFare some months back, although I don't think they knew at the time that it would be sub-branded "Action League." It's pretty much the entire cast of the first six episodes of B:B&B. Plastic Man, Blue Beetle, Green Arrow, Red Tornado, Aquaman, plus baddies like Black Manta and Gentleman Ghost. There is already a bunch of two-packs available and happily not all of them include Batman. So we won't end up with extraneous Batmen. At least, no more than usual.

This was a problem with Marvel's Spider-Man line. Every two-pack had a new Spidey in it, making collecting all the second string characters onerously expensive.

There's already some Action League accessory packs, like that Batmobile that comes with freakin' Clock King!

Toys R Us has an exclusive six-pack with a translucent Gentleman Ghost that we will probably pick up.

Although it will be tough to skip the set that includes Gentleman Ghost's demonic horse...

These little guys are more or less the same size as the Batman Imaginext series, which is still slowly adding pieces. There's a new, much nicer Batmobile out (the first, smaller Batmobile was more like a four door sedan than a Batmobile) and some kind of silly armored car with a jail cell in the back. Of course, these sets come with more friggin' Batmen. Imaginext is a great line, but I wish they'd get more unique figures in it. Last fall they added a cute Mr. Freeze, but since then it's been Batman repaints all the way.

Pants Pankuro (YouTube)
This week, you get more Japanese potty cartoons.

Joyrider Casper given a puss pass (Yahoo News UK)
There's a cat that likes riding the bus. He's lucky he hasn't been squished.

The Everything Disease: A Forensic Analysis of the Popularity of Pokemon (Kotaku)
Tim Rogers did a great outsider/insider view of Pokemon in Japan. Although you'd think a guy that writes as well as he does would know not to screw up "begs the question."

Fashion Fab: Choose Wisely (GayGamer.net)
Now that is a fantastic Pokemon t-shirt.

"G.I. Joe" should be court-martialed (Yahoo News)
What!?! Who told this reviewer that you're allowed to hate indulgent 80's-nostalgia wankfests!?!

Deciphering Windows 7 Upgrades: The Official Chart (Mossblog)
Heckuva job, Bally. Why is every single Windows OS upgrade as painful as the transition from System 7 to System 8. No, from 9 to OSX. No, from PowerPC to Intel. No, actually, there's never been a Mac upgrade as tragic as every Windows iteration.

Namco released yet another retro Museum collection recently, this time as a downloadable PS3 title. This first set does not include Mappy, but that did not stop them from fronting a Mappy t-shirt to the PlayStation Home Mall...

Yes, I bought it. 25 cents! This marks my very first bit of paid Home content. Sony will be so proud. (Rhonda said: "Like, a real quarter?")

Although I imagine that this shirt will become a free reward whenever Namco gets around to getting Mappy into the PS3 Museum release schedule. Even in the Museum demo, you can unlock a couple of Home trinkets, and I noticed some shirts I have already "won" on sale at the Mall.

Hey, we're in Home, why not hang out a bit.

The Katamari Forever shirt is now available! This one is free, like most advertising items. Unlike most advertising items, this one is fully awesome. Guys get the Prince; girls get Ichigo (the strawberry cousin). Kind of sucks that you can't separate the character from the shirt. I really dislike wearing just a t-shirt and have been dying for a cliche Hawaiian shirt ever since Home launched.

Here's me and my Prince buddy watching the Criss Angel Mindfreak movie.

Watching the movie gets you a free Criss Angel Mindfreak Coffin Sofa. Actually, just showing up gets you the coffin sofa. As soon as I got the message that the sofa had been delivered, I buggered out of there.

There is a temporary Fat Princess land set up, and it is pretty cool.

It's like being at a theme park.

You have to answer some easy trivia questions, visit the princess, and then you win a Fat Princess throne. Cute.

Now that I have won some stuff to decorate my pad, let's check it out...

Boy, that is swank.

The sofas are still piled up from the time I had the Aeropause crew over to visit. What a wild night.

I've built a Namco shrine over along the wall. Check out that great Galaga coin-op! Here's a closer look at all my Namco junk:

A Pooka from Dig-Dug, and a bunch of Idolm@ster soda cans. All free! I'm still missing some of the Idolm@ster cans, so I do not have a complete set. :(

Similar to my epic battle with Warner Bros Digital Copy Support about the Speed Racer blu-ray, I have had an entertaining go-round with their email robot donkeys concerning Watchmen Director's Cut on blu-ray.

The deal with Speed Racer was that the blu-ray packaging promised the digital copy would work in iTunes, and then the actual packaged code was Windows Media only. Two months later, they made good on the promise and provided a system to generate an iTunes download, but it bears repeating that WB never contacted me about this. I heard about from somebody else who happened to know about it and had read my whining.

The situation with Watchmen Director's Cut is a little different. The blu-ray says you get a digital copy, but the fine print on the back of the box states that the digital copy is the standard version, not the Director's Cut. Which, although intensely stupid, is no as cut-and-dry a case of packaging fraud. It is merely misleading. Why, when you buy a Director's Cut, would you be OK with the digital copy being the standard theatrical version? You wouldn't.

So I emailed my pals at WB Digital Copy Support.

Saturday, July 25

I recently purchased Watchmen Director's Cut on blu-ray. The front of the box promises a digital copy, but when I used the digital copy disc and code, I received a digital copy of the standard theatrical release, not the Director's Cut version. The Director's Cut version is available on iTunes, so why does the blu-ray package not include a digital copy of the version I purchased?

WB responded as follows:

Wednesday, July 29

Hello,

Please contact the appropriate studios digital copy support inbox for help with this title.

Thanks!

Of course, Watchmen is a Warner Bros release from top to bottom. They distributed it, Legendary Pictures produced it (they have a five year deal with Warners), WB is all over the blu-ray packaging, and, of course, the original comic comes from DC, which is fully owned by Warners. The only way this could be more of a Warners film is if Bugs Bunny was in it. (And, actually, some Looney Tunes can be spotted in the film.)

So I sallied forth once more...

Wednesday, July 29

I am confused by your reply. Is not Watchmen Director's Cut a Warner Bros release? If I have a question about a Warner Bros digital copy, shouldn't I go to WBsupport@digitalcopysupport.com?

When a specific blu-ray movie's packaging states that it comes with a digital copy, I would expect that it comes with a digital copy of that exact specific film, not a different cut of the same film. If I wanted the standard release, I would have purchased the standard release, not the Director's Cut. Does Warner Bros intend to rectify this issue with the consumers who have already purchased this misleading blu-ray?

Their complete non-sequitur is as follows:

Friday, July 31

Hello,

The digital copy feature on disc 2 is of the theatrical cut of the movie. The "alternate" version or Directors cut of the movie plays from disc 2 in a regular DVD player, and cannot be copied to your computer.

Hope this helps!

No, that doesn't help. I thought I was pretty clear about, you know, blu-ray. But whatever. And really, WB doesn't have to backpedal on this. The fine print is the fine print, and it is rather clear that the digital copy is the version that is shy 20 minutes of material. It's just ridiculous. How lame that we can't even buy a film and expect to get a digital copy of the film we bought.

But the nonsense does not end there.

I guess I should be thrilled that Watchmen came with an iTunes option at all, because the brand new Green Lantern animated movie does not. It is devolved back to Windows Media only. The Dark Knight: Windows or iTunes. Wonder Woman: Windows or iTunes. Bolt: Windows or iTunes. Green Lantern: Windows only. And it's not like they crow about this on the box front. Again, this is all fine print buried by the copyright notices.

Why the leap backwards to Windows Media? The only people who use Windows Media as a viable video compression codec are webcam kids uploading tripe to YouTube.

This is all just dirty studio politics designed to reward or punish Apple, however the wind blows. And the consumers end up getting screwed. iPods and iPhones are far and away the most popular portable media devices on the planet, iTunes works on both Macs and PCs, and yet when you get a digital copy from Warner Bros, you have no way to anticipate if the file will work on an iPod. What does a Windows Media file work on? Let's find out...

What? You can't even use this Windows Media digital copy on a flippin' Zune?!? What in the hell is up with that. Does Microsoft ever have a clue about anything?

The Watchmen sidestory release Tales of the Black Freighter came with a digital copy code... but it was only for the privilege to buy a digital copy for $2.

No wonder some blu-ray forums are already sick of the whole digital copy concept, considering it an unnecessary "feature" designed to bloat up blu-ray costs. When it should be a turnkey solution to viewing the movie you bought on platforms outside of your living room.

I thought maybe I could use an office PC to download the Green Lantern WMV, and then convert it to something iTunes likes... but with the DRM I figured I would probably just end up with a movie that would only play on one office computer.

The simplest solution is for Apple to allow WMV into iTunes, but that seems about as likely as anything else making sense in this whole stupid scenario.

A couple weeks ago, I started reading The Hobbit to Clark at bedtime. It was something of an experiment, since this is his first book without pictures on most pages. Without pictures at all, really, as we went for the full original, not one of the many abridged and/or kid-ified versions.

He did really well. Naturally, his level of attention flowed with the ups and downs of the story. When he first met the characters, he was fascinated (he asked why Gandalf was "mean"), and the adventure with the trolls was an early high point. But he seemed to zone out during the relatively dry Rivendell chapter. Although, when you're talking about a four year old, they are perfectly capable of fidgeting and fussing with blankets and yet still remembering everything they hear. Even though I was sure he had not paid attention to any of the Rivendell bit, when he watched the animated movie, he pegged the elves' song as being straight from the book.

"Riddles in the Dark", where Bilbo meets Gollum, was particularly engrossing. It's great pacing. You escape from a harrowing bit with the goblins, the dwarves in chains, the sudden reappearance of Gandalf, a scary chase through underground tunnels... and then Bilbo is alone and lost with a monster who intends to eat him.

Clark also enjoyed the brief appearances of the Eagles, and of Beorn... but the geopolitical relationships of Laketown, the Lonely Mountain and the elves of Mirkwood held little interest.

Now, Smaug... that was a page-turner.

After we finished the book, the next night we watched the 1977 animated movie... which, according to the credits, was animated by four guys in Japan. You can see the anime influence in many of the background characters, particularly in the human men. But of course, that film was produced well before we began classifying anime as a thing. I wonder if Rankin-Bass's The Hobbit is an early example of an American-produced, Japanese-animated cartoon with the Japanese artistic style allowed to peek through. In the next decade, we would see a lot of that - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Thundercats, etc - but in 1977 I recall there being more strict divisions. You'd think I would know more about this topic.

As an adaptation of Tolkien's book, it's a fair shot. The character designs are purposefully ugly, and plenty of memorable moments are shaved for time... but you have to enjoy the parts that they did get right. Many of the voices are surprisingly compelling, considering that much of the cast is the regular six people who did voicework for forty years of Hollywood productions. John Huston is STILL my perfect Gandalf voice. And, out of all the stuff that the film could have easily skipped, it does include Bilbo being forced up a Mirkwood tree and seeing the purple butterflies. That's one of my favorite Hobbit bits. Any adaptation that remembers that beautiful scene is OK with me.

This week we started reading Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth. I loved this one as a kid, although I know Clark is too young to get all the puns that form the book's snarky core. Tollbooth is great because the chapters are all really short... plus, there's plenty of pictures. I was thinking of other books that were either read to me, or that I read at an early age, so now I have a nice list of novellas to share at bedtime. Fantastic Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wind in the Willows, Mr. Popper's Penguins, maybe even A Christmas Carol.

Even if, some nights, Clark just anticipates this as a bedtime stall tactic, I'm glad he is willing to sit and imagine and listen to full-blown literature from authors who possessed the enduring talent to scale their writing across age groups. These books are clearly memories that I have carried along from childhood, whether I read them or they were read to me, so I hope I can do the same for Clark.

Fat Princess is a huge deal for the 4-and-under set.

I set Clark up in a Fat Princess skirmish, because I figured he would find it funny to watch. The game is pure chaos, with 32 little soldiers running around. I love games that use modern processing power for something other than uber-realistic graphics, and Fat Princess is a adorable miniature war. I put Clark into a game with 31 CPU characters (half his team, half the enemy) and set it to easy. I also turned off the Blood & Gore option, so killing just means people fall over. With the violence cranked, you get little pools of blood and body parts all over the battlefield.

I didn't expect Clark to win.

Unfortunately, this is not a video of Clark winning, just him messing around during the second game of the morning. He has won twice now. More or less by himself, if you don't count the cooperative team members also working on storming the castle.

In this mode, you win by breaking into the enemy castle and rescuing your princess. You have to carry her all the way back to your castle... and if the enemy has been feeding her cake, she gets, well, fat. And a fat princess is more difficult to heft along the map.

In the first game he won, after enough time had passed with his team working on erecting siege ladders and such, Clark just dashed through the battle, jumped up the ladder, zig-zagged through the castle, picked up his red princess and walked her right out the front door. There happened to be just the right amount of support dudes near him, and they fought off the blue team and healed him back up as he followed the cobblestone path to his castle.

This is a great game for a little guy. With so many CPU players, Clark is free to screw around as much as wants without too much fear of being ambushed. If he wants to put on the worker hat and go chop trees, he can. If he wants to switch to the archer, he can. If he wants to go feed the prisoner princess cake, he can. With so much craziness on onscreen, I think Clark feels like he's really doing something. Like it's a true big boy game.

Over the course of three or four games, I have been slowly adding to his skillset. The first step was basic buttons: circle to pick up items, square to attack, x to jump. Then we covered triangle to switch weapons. Then the concept of feeding the prisoner princess and collecting resources by chopping trees and mining stone. We just covered L1 to target something (although that lesson doesn't seem to stick). He really likes hitting d-up to gather friendly troops to his side, then getting everybody in the catapult to wage a genuine assault.

At some point, the CPU guys will take care of all the unit upgrades, maybe even build a ladder, and then Clark can swoop in and be the hero.

And there's no timer. So Clark can play this for as long as he wants without some artificial clock suddenly ending the buzz. Odds are, on the "easy" difficulty, the AI team is not going to bring the princess back on their own. Although we have seen it once. Clark felt kind of ripped off when that happened.

He just won a fourth game while I was typing this. I'm going to have to step him up to medium difficulty.

So, $15 price tag justified!

PAC MAN (REMI GAILLARD) (YouTube)
This is, like, Jackass in France doing Pac-Man.

Legend of Zelda has No Coherent Timeline? (Gamasutra)
First comment pays for all: it's a legend, see? Perhaps instead of trying to make all the games fit into one timeline, maybe they should all be thought of as skewed re-tellings of the same story. That is simultaneously fascinating as a study of the oral tradition and legend-making... and hands Nintendo a huge Get Out of Jail Free card.

The pulpiteer (Brainy Gamer)
Michael Abbot explains why he feels the need to promote Little King's Story... as you would guess, it's because it is yet another unique, compelling game that no one is going to buy.

JOHNS BRINGS JSA TO "SMALLVILLE" (Comic Book Resources)
First reaction, "Smallville is still on?" Second reaction, JSA?!?

new white on rice trailer (Angry Asian Man)
I don't follow a lot of movies (which may seem hypocritical after last weekend's Watchmen explosion), but the trailer for indie film "White on Rice" is really funny. I watched it via Front Row, which is the first time I've booted Front Row since, like, Week 2 with the iMac.

San Diego (#2): It's Just That Easy (Dubious Quality)
Bill Harris describes how his son beat a carnie and shipped a gorilla home.

This Looks Like Art From Warren Spector's "Steampunk" Disney Game (Kotaku)
Man, what is this Epic Mickey game! I am in love. Hopefully there's an actual game here, and not just some fanciful freelance concept art.