I do this for me, you know. I realize you couldn't possibly be interested in this.

I currently have four pre-orders in with Gamestop. Beatles (9/9), Scribblenauts (9/17), Uncharted 2 (10/13) and Ratchet & Clank F2 (10/27). In each case, I'm in solely for the preorder bonus. I did have Arkham Asylum preordered with them, but the morning I heard about the Toys R Us $30 gift card deal, I called and shifted those five dollareedoos onto Scribblenauts. I actually was going to put them on LEGO Rock Band, but it was not yet in their system and the manager thought it was DS only. No.

Obviously I must be talking about Scribblenauts A LOT at home, because I brought up a Scribblenauts movie on the Wii's Nintendo Channel and Clark ID'ed it right away. Should be fun to test his imagination by asking him what silly stuff we should summon in the game.

It's that time again. Time to bag and box an unholy assortment of comics.

I've been letting my "new" books stack up for quite some time. I'd like to be more proactive about getting my comics organized and put away, but it never seems to work out that way. They pile up in a corner of the den, to the point that, the other weekend when Mike and Noelle were sleeping in the den on an air bed, they probably suspected the comics would fall on them.

The last time I put books away was December 2007. The picture above is just about every book purchased since then. That includes two Free Comic Book Days. Half of Countdown and all of Trinity. Final Crisis. Marvel Zombies 2. Sinestro Corps. The end of World War Hulk and the beginning of Blackest Night. I think the Justice League disbanded three times over that period. It is an impressive amount of periodical literature.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Joker Trailer (YouTube)
Game. Of. The. Year.

Guy Ritchie to direct DC Comics adaptation "Lobo" (Yahoo News UK)
Error in line one: Lobo is not "blue-skinned."

Separation? What Separation? (Peter David)
A little about the blurry line between church and state by Peter David.

I know there's a reason we don't have to go to work tomorrow, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

We're in NJ at Chad & Dana's, and we actually spent a lot of time outside. They have two little girls and Clark has had a blast playing with them. But while whiffle ball and frisbee are things that happened, it's the gaming that I'm willing to weblog. Particularly the stuff that was new to me, or at least had not been touched for a while.

Right now I'm watching Chad play Braid. This is clearly not my thing. I'm putting Braid right inside the Mega Man 9 category of games that are unconscionably difficult. I'm sure many people enjoy this. I would not. My favorite part is listening to Mike watch walkthrough movies on YouTube and try to explain the solution to Chad.

As I mentioned last week, I have a room full of comics to bag-n-box. Out of the probable 400 books, I have selected my twelve favorite covers. Here's the first six.

Stan Lee Meets The Thing, 2006

The line "This Stan, This Monster" gets me every time.

Countdown to Final Crisis #23, Nov 2007

Countdown certainly was a mess. Seemed like there was a lot of good ideas in there, but nothing ever came together and it was all thrown out the window anyway. Still, the image of a dirtied, chained Mr. Mxyzptlk is pretty amazing.

We just received our DVD/CD of They Might Be Giant's new kids album, Here Comes Science. $10 on Amazon, which is pretty great.

I had the inaugural listen in the car this morning and was struck by the near-immediate slam on angels.

Here's a portion of the lyrics to "Science is Real."

Science is real
From the Big Bang to DNA
Science is real
From evolution to the Milky Way
I like the stories
About angels, unicorns and elves
Now I like the stories
As much as anybody else
But when I'm seeking knowledge
Either simple or abstract
The facts are with science
The facts are with science

There's also a track called "My Brother the Ape", which is about a person (presumably a young person) struggling to accept that he shares a closer kinship to apes than to, say, the snowy egret

Not that I considered myself a schooled expert on the Beatles catalog, but wow, there's a lot of stuff in Beatles Rock Band that I had never heard before. I suppose I was far more familiar with their early bubble-gum lovey stuff, not so much the naval-gazing hippie bit from the final days. Except, of course, whatever made it into the Yellow Submarine movie.

There's only 45 songs on the disc, which is quite a bit low. In fact, I suspect there is a substantial Beatles Tax at work here. If you compare Beatles Rock Band, feature for feature, with Rock Band 2, BRB comes up way short for your $60. The balance is, hey, it's The Beatles, but I still feel a bit overcharged. Especially when Harmonix was already happily crowing about additional DLC-for-purchase ready to go next month... which, you know, could have been used to fill out the on-disc setlist. We were song-shortchanged on this one, folks. Half the tracks of RB2, no interchanging with RB2, no visual customization, a limited pool of future DLC, only a few venues... not that all of that is a big loss (I'd certainly rather see the cute, aging Beatles avatars than my nameless Rocker), it just adds up to making Beatles Rock Band seem a little anemic on comparison.

The highly-vaunted "lost audio" that plays between tracks really does not amount to much. It's usually just somebody noodling on a guitar, or Paul saying something like "Are we ready to go now, lads?" I'm also disappointed that the "dreamscapes" quality does not hold up across all the Abbey Road Studio songs. Sure, some songs (like Sgt. Pepper, I am the Walrus, and Here Comes The Sun) get cool-ass music videos, but a lot of the studio song dreamscapes are merely psychedelic visual effects applied to the band's avatars.

Pokemon Rumble first gameplay - official english trailer (YouTube)
Pokemon + Robotron + Gauntlet. Fair enough.

Repentant man breeds 4,600 scorpions (Yahoo News)
Yes, there is such a thing as taking an anti-animal cruelty stance too far.

Opinion: Time For A 'Hot Coffee' Postmortem (Gamesutra)
I'll never forget being at the mall in the wake of the Hot Coffee explosion, hearing a dad explain to his wife how "that game" had "all kinds of porn" in it.

I don't know how I missed the stealth drops of these four new Fat Princess classes last month. I saw when everybody jumped on the Pirate vs Ninja crap, but I never saw the Cook and the King!

These images were all teased on the Titan dev blog at the end of August.

Swordfighting is Clark's favorite Wii Sports Resort mode, unless you want to count "crashing Mii planes into the side of the mountain." So here's an iPhone movie of the former.

Clark bashed his way through the first five AI opponents using this technique, and then he had to rest.

Man, that Pain movie editor is such hot stuff. Here's a trio of David Hasselhoff videos. I spent Sunday night on a Pain unlock streak.

This first video is my run at beating a 6,900,000 score, which unlocks Tuxedo Hoff.

For whatever reason, the editor cut me off at four minutes, so you're missing the final ooch that put me over the 7,000,000 mark.

The Pepsi/Rock Band promotion ended last weekend, and I am proud to report my final tally of accumulated wealth.

I put my first code in on July 9, which is when we finally noticed the yellow Rock Band caps showing up in our area. Between then and the 27th, I entered 29 codes. These were ALL winners. Every code won for everybody, every time.

By then, the internet had discovered the Wii scam where you got 200 Nintendo Points instead of a specific Rock Band song, so I was buying Pepsi whenever we were out. It was a great deal: $1.30 (or less) for 200 points (normally $2) plus the diet Pepsi.

On July 27, I got my first loss, and my world came crashing down. At that point, I stopped purchasing Pepsi. But I put a sign on the lunchroom soda machine begging for extra caps... and it paid off big. People would bring me their caps every day. Rhonda also had office mates giving her caps.

Continuing the excitement, here's the latter half of my favorite comic covers of the past two years.

Jonah Hex #33, Sept 2008

Hex almost always has an awesome cover. But this snowy scene from Darwyn Cooke is a favorite.

The Brave and the Bold #16, Oct 2008

Scott Kolins with a cute and rare team-up: Superman and Catwoman.

They Might Be Giants - Roy G Biv (YouTube)
I want to re-sing this so it's about the Green Lantern War of Light.

Brighten Your Walls With Colorful Controllers, Smiling Handhelds (GameSetWatch)
A beautiful poster of happy cartoon video game controllers.

Top 28 Red Dwarf Moments (Heckler Spray)
Oh yes, the double Polaroid!

I've actually been through all 34 "storyline" levels by now, a full day before the damn game was supposed to come out! Whoop whoop!

The game lets you save your screenshots out to the PS3 HD. For the big win, the screens save as a huge 960x540! I've shrunk them here for web purposes, but it's great to have such nice big screenshots at my disposal. Unlike, say, LittleBigPlanet, which exports screens out to a third of that size.

These first three are all from the first level. It's part normal Japanese living room with a candy/toy store on the side.

Freaking Walmart always seems to score rare toys before anybody else.

I read ToyFare magazine every month. And I have NEVER seen them mention this kickass Joker figure from the Brave and the Bold line.

The back of the packaging doesn't even show him. In fact, the back of the packaging shows almost no figures at all, which is a colossal mistake in the action figure biz. Why is the full contents of the line such a blasted secret?

 

Getting the right layout on your iPhone screens is pretty important. At least, it is for someone who is nuts, as I am. It took me a month, but I finally organized the apps into a loose structure that I'm moderately happy with using and viewing.

I stuck with Apple's suggested bottom-Dock Quartet of Phone / Mail / Safari / iPod. Although I seriously almost never use the phone. But I'm in Mail all the time, Safari frequently, and iPod every now and then.

Directly above that is four heavily-used apps: AIM / Twitterrific / Video Games / Facebook. Three of those should speak for themselves; "Video Games" is just a free RSS reader that comes packed with feeds for a dozen gaming websites. I like it because you can tag an article and have it post directly to Facebook. But I hate that the icon is a circle.

It was an impulse buy at Threads. I'm kind of a sucker for Katamari stuff. And I had not yet seen anybody else wearing the Katamari Prince outfit.

I walked around the Mall, but I was either laughed at...

MegaBot Episode 01 (CLEAN) (YouTube)
Funny Power Rangers parody... I enjoy the Elemental Gearbolt ref, but I might be the only one.

Review Of Meatballs (John K. Stuff)
High praise from John K.'s review of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs:

I would give this an even zero - which is leagues ahead of any other animated feature today. Most cartoon features are thousands of points in the negative.

52 Reasons 52 May Have Been The Comics Event Of The Decade (Second Printing)
Put this way, 52 does seem pretty damn cool.

OK, so Snow Leopard didn't immediately recognize my five year old 1310 series HP all-in-one. And then it did recognize it for printing, but not for scanning. This is an acceptable evil from Apple dumping all those ancient printer drivers from the OS, resulting in a utilitarian-proud 7gig of reclaimed space for everyone. I dug up the original HP install disk, re-loaded the whatevers, and now I can scan again.

But one thing that Snow Leopard inexplicably altered has completely disrupted my workflow: the loss of the drag-and-drop jpg to Photoshop dock.

I used to do this ALL THE TIME. I'd find an image, usually something for web use, and drag it from Safari directly to the Photoshop icon. Poof, up it comes and I can go forward with my latest clever LOLcats idea.

Now, under 10.6.1, this is completely turned off. The icon remains dead and unbootable.

Even though I am, after a month or so of Snow Leopard, fully mentally aware of this issue, I still drag a jpg to the dock at least three times a day. And every time I cry out in frustration.

I'm not the only one to be bothered by this, which is comforting because usually I am the only one to bothered by this.

After years of me slamming the fail rate of the 360, my launch day Wii finally gave up the ghost last week. The popular stats say only 6 to 10% of Wiis fail, and a small fraction of those come back from Mushroom Kingdom Repair entirely blanked of data. I played those odds and I lost.

I knew my Wii was sickly. It had been making loud and louder disk-reading noises for quite some time. It sounded like an imminent hardware failure, but since it was still running I did not send it off for a checkup. It was out of warranty anyway, so why not just wait until the abacus dies and then get it fixed. That's what I know about how computer parts work.

The Wii went quiet for good one night, refusing to boot up beyond the Health and Safety Warning. It went off to the Syracuse tech support the next day.

Now, I'm not entirely stupid. I was backing up what I could. I shunted just about everything off to an SD. Just about, because a handful of key first party games do not allow you to copy the saves off to SD. Let's tick them off: Animal Crossing City Folk, Smash Brawl, Mario Kart, Pokemon Ranch. Probably a couple others.

OK, let's get past this bit where all my favorite companies disappoint me. Let's talk about one that only disappoints Mike (long story): Looney Labs.

Chrononauts is one of my very favorite card games. I remember demoing it at Origins the year it came out, being instantly impressed and buying it right away. That must have been about ten years ago, because Looney Labs recently announced an eleven card expansion that brings the timeline up to 2008!

"The Gore Years" is out October 23, so they have not yet revealed all the cards. But we do know that the set includes five new timeline cards, three new patches, and three new characters.

Previously, the Chrononauts timeline was comprised of four rows of eight cards each, running from 1865 (Lincoln's assassination) to 1999 (Columbine school shooting). So under Gore Years, the timeline will appear to have an incomplete row of five at the bottom, which just puts on us track for another mini-expansion circa 2015. Assuming something cool happens.