Don't tell him!

Clark doesn't know it, but he's totally getting this for Christmas:

That Playmobil Pyramid playset is going to be insane. He asks about it every time we're at Toys R Us. By now he has a very good grasp on how Christmas works, so I imagine he would be terribly disappointed if it did not show up.

Other brands heading his way include Ben 10, Secret Saturdays, Cars and Spy Gear.

Incidentally, the save system on New Super Mario Bros Wii is even worse than I originally thought. The game only naturally saves after defeating the end-world castle and the mid-world castle. So if you get a Game Over on the mid-world, you lose all of your progress in the world to date. Guess what happened to me last night. Plus, you lose all stored items.

I did not notice this at first because when you play multiplayer, as long as one player has lives, you can still save your progress. If you can stagger player deaths, you can keep Quicksaving and not lose anything... unless ALL players run out of lives on the same board.

So that totally blows. I just don't get the fun here. How is it OK to be unnecessarily forced to re-do sections you have already completed, in the year 2009. If any other game in the world tried this, it would be reviewed into the toilet.

Quicksaving only works to a point, since each Quicksave is deleted when you use it. I mean really, the game can't just auto-save after every bloody level? What's so horrible about that?

Additionally, unless you already have a million lives, you can't repeatedly use Super Guide to get through the frustrating parts. You have to die eight times to trigger to Super Guide, so if you are low on lives and have a bunch of boards to go before the auto-save, you'll probably just die off and watch everything get reset again. Including the levels you Super Guided.

I suck at this game and I won't be playing it again until I can piggyback off of somebody who is good at it. I have too much actual fun to do.