May 2010 Archives

For whatever reason, I had Amazon deliver my ModNation Racers preorder to work. The game was released on Tuesday and Super Saver Shipping declared a Saturday delivery... but it actually showed up on Thursday although I did not check my office mailbox until Friday. How's that for boring!

The Amazon preorder got me a pair of exclusive Mods - IE, driver characters - one for Ratchet and one for Clank. The Clank one is pretty nice. If you are as anal about preorder bonuses as I am, you'll recall that each preorder also included a bonus mod+kart pack, randomized from four potential sets. I got the Gopher and Golf Kart, which is also pretty nice. I would have preferred the Cat + Cheese Kart, but I imagine eventually they will all go on sale at the PlayStation Store for $1.75 anyway.

There was also a code in the box for a free Sackboy + Sackkart set, so that's awesome. And because I registered online to receive ModNation website updates or whatever, Sony also sent me a code for a Pilot + Airplane Kart pack. That's a lot of free junk right out of the gate.

Now, what do you do with pilot and airplane gear? You make a Baloo and Sea Duck getup as shown above. The goggles on Baloo are not right at all; I'm hoping eventually I'll unlock a hat that is more in line with lazy, fat cargo pilots. The skin is also a problem. There's no animal fur option (boo! Send it back!), so I went for a sort-of-scaly skin tone that I turned gray.

Even with all those free Mods, I've been racing with Baloo.

The game is like the best version of Mario Kart ever. As in, it's Mario Kart if Nintendo ever actually bothered to seriously evolve their franchises instead of just doing the same thing with only minor tweaks from generation to generation. I'll levy Super Smash Bros Brawl as the only example of Nintendo getting this sort of thing correct.

So, take Mario Kart but add in complete character and car customization. Give it an online hub where players can actually interact with each other. Allow players to share designs and take screenshots. And oh yeah, make sure you can create your own tracks. That's ModNation Racers.

OK, OK, there's a smarmy Creative You Against The Boring Establishment storyline that wasn't interesting in the other dozen games that did it. And the NASCAR-esque sports overlay is nowhere near as charming as it thinks it is. But still, you play it and you wish Nintendo would wake up and stop defining success as selling the same game to a different set of kids every few years.

The single-player campaign is mean. It is just as frustrating as Mario Kart, because you can be going great until one single weapon attack knocks you from first to seventh place. Each track in single-player has several course-specific challenges; like Get X Airtime or Attack X Enemies or whatever. I'd probably ignore these, but each challenge unlocks more gear for the creation aspect... so I'm desperate to do what I can so I can add more stickers and clothes and colors and tools to my design palettes.

Now I wonder if I can make a Cape Suzette racetrack...

Hi, I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC: The Musical (100th Video) (YouTube)
What I like about this is that it doesn't fall into the trap of openly declaring One Is Bad and One Is Good, in the way that most "I'm a Mac" parodies do. I also liked the recent episode with Iron Man vs Jonah Hex.

Violent video games touted as learning tool (Yahoo News)
The scientist conducting the study has to explain and explain what they're researching and what they're testing. The clown from the PTC just gets to sneak at the article's end with an unsubstantiated, unsourced, uncorroborated "Violent video games will of course have a negative effect" quote.

ModNation Racers for PS3: Launched and Unwrapped! (PlayStation Blog)
I know ModNation Racers is going to be a nickel-and-dime bitch like LittleBigPlanet is, but that doesn't stop it from being really freaking good.

Silly Bandz Bracelet Craze: School Ban Over Distraction (Yahoo News)
Is there any way to look at this kind of thing and not just see a bunch of old farts once again getting in the way of things kids like?

Arresting images of oil spill help drive story (Yahoo News)
And I'd argue that the oil spill hasn't been covered enough.

Review: Sam & Max - The Tomb of Sammun-Mak (PS3) (Aeropause)
My reviews continue on the new Sam & Max season. Clark was very impatient with this one, since it did not get to the Tomb part fast enough for his liking.

I was typing up some comment responses to my last post and realized I was writing a book, so I thought it best to FULL ENTRY this pig! Because it is a great discussion topic, and I'm not so bullish that I don't enjoy seeing the complete issue from other viewpoints. This isn't as if we want to argue about whether or not the Fatal Frame series is the single best horror game franchise ever made, where if you came at me with an opposing opinion I would immediately delete all comments and take out an ad in Variety calling you a Nazi neanderthal.

Paul says:

"I am baffled by the idea that trading in/selling games for store credit is a sign that we don't value our hobby and the public shouldn't either. People as a rule don't trade them in out of some secret shame about the hobby. They trade them in because they're done with them and can get money for them. Otherwise they stack up, gathering dust, when they could turn into a fraction of a new game they want. It's craven materialism that crosses all cultural boundaries, not some hidden hobby inferiority complex."

OK, yeah, I'm probably exaggerating. Maybe it's not so much a secret complex but that we're just all so damn cheap. I just think it's a shame that, thanks to the success of GameStop and similar, we're becoming enthusiasts that are defined by being cheap.

I don't see the same level of buy it/trade it/buy it in other hobbies. When you buy music or movies, your first thought isn't "I'll watch/listen to this once or twice and then flip it." We tend to keep that stuff. So why don't we keep video games? People who are big movie fans don't trade in movies, even as they gather dust. You've got your film freaks with old massive laser disc libraries on one end, and you have average families that only get around to offloading VHS movies at yard sales. And even then it's kid stuff that has been outgrown or when they move on to another format and have re-purchased the material in a new format. Imagine that, people re-buying entertainment media that they liked! We freak out when Nintendo re-releases an NES Mario collection and start screaming that they're just out to bleed us dry.

As Tony mentioned, I am a keeper. I'll be on Hoarders in twenty years and it will be the funniest damn episode you ever saw. Clark will be rummaging through old boxes and have to say stuff like "Really, Dad? Another mint-on-card 1994 Phoenix X-Men figure?" So I don't understand the mentality of constantly exchanging in stuff you claim to like, just for the sake of money.

Paul, I agree with your points about the good side of the used game market (and mirrored some in my post), but I think most people take it to an extent where it harms the people actually making the games. It even gets downright hostile. We tend to figure that the developer already gets enough money, so screw them. Meanwhile, dev houses are being shut down and people put out of work.

I know it's more complicated than that (can't blame terrible crunch conditions on the used market!), but I think we err on the side of being more or less okay with game developers getting next to nothing for their work. If GameStop's system kicked back some portion of used sales back to the publishers, wouldn't that be something!

In the end I'm not really concerned about making money back on my collection. I don't sell back my novels, my comics, my music, my toys, my TV/movies, my clothes, my furniture or anything else. So I don't see why video games have to have some massively widespread special system set up for it. If I want to offload old toys, my options are eBay and yard sales... I don't have KB Toys with some amazing Toy Buy Back program.

A Yahoo User (I have GOT to fix my commenting system, because that is screwy) says:

"What makes video games different than movies, music, and books - which have the same used markets? They are all forms of entertainment (video games are not a hobby for everyone who plays them) that some people keep and others dispose of when finished with them."

Movies/music/books do not have multiple global retail chains devoted to the trade-in-for-credit scenario, nor do they have the big box stores (like TRU) scrambling to add that to their business model. So I don't think other forms of entertainment have the same used markets. They have used markets, sure, but nothing like what goes on via GameStop. How much money does a local Paperback Trade make, and what impact does it have on the publishing industry? None.

OK, there's the rental business for movies/TV. $1 Redbox and Netflix and all that. I guess I don't see that as precisely comparable because that wing of entertainment is already so accepted and so genre-ized that people have already booked themselves into little fan-compartments. Then they buy and keep from that subset, and they rent from the wider universe.

Go to Borders and ask why they don't offer an in-house trading program. Go to a book publisher and suggest that they would grow the industry by allowing a BookStop to buy back recent releases and sell them again to different people with 0% going to them. They'd look at you like you're nuts. Somehow I doubt they're thrilled with the existence of sites like Bookmooch, where users trade books for no money at all. Where, effectively, you can buy keep trading and trading to get free reads for the rest of your life. If Bookmooch ever grows beyond a niche (and it won't because it's inconvenient; same with Goozex for gaming), you can bet somebody in publishing is going to take notice.

As for half.com, eBay and other secondary sources, I'm sure the content distributors would love to get a piece of that action. That's all Project Ten Dollar is anyway: a piece of the action. I know I'm veering toward sounding like I want all secondary markets eradicated, but, again, half.com doesn't define movie fandom (for example) in the way GameStop defines gaming fandom. It is the prevailing mindset that GameStop encourages that bothers me above all else - don't keep stuff, sell it back to us for a pittance so we can turn a profit - and the fact that a huge swath of self-identified gamers go for it. That's why I'm cool with the gamecos finding a way to recoup some money there... are they being assclowns about it? Probably.

I LOLed at your final comment:

"And what terrible punishment shall we drop on those who use a library?"

Libraries haven't been relevant to American society in decades. Not that they're a bad thing, just that only a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total audience use them. Particularly since the internet boom. If libraries were a monetary threat to the publishing industry, they would have been shut down already. The original historical point to a public library was to spread education/information/entertainment and conveniently smarten up the populace, not to just be a place for old people to read Harlequin Romance novels for free.

I know you guys are looking at me like I'm trying to absolve the publishers from all guilt, but I'm not trying to be that way. I know they screw us over, I know they screw over their employees. I know they'll take any steps they can to find new ways to screw us over so they can maximize profits. I know GameStop is a business and also works to maximize their profits. I know not every gamer can continue to afford brand new games all the time. I know this is a dangerous path and if we don't stay vigilant that the gamecos will push it as far as they can until the public rejects it and the whole system fails (which, as Paul pointed out, is where PC gaming is.)

But when the chief attack is "I don't want to pay full price" - and I'm not saying my beautiful commenters said that - I find myself lacking in sympathy when the publishers find a way to ding you for another tenner.

I don't know if we'll get to this on the podcast or not, but the discussion on Project Ten Dollar has me thinking.

On the surface, I'm all for it. By all means, punish people for being cheap and buying used games. Particularly when that used game system never gives money back to the people and companies who created the games in the first place. But, as has been pointed out to me, it doesn't make logical sense. Person A buys a game, then eventually flips it to GameStop so Person B can buy it two months later at a 30% discount. Person A no longer owns the game, so it's not like the game company has to extend service to two people. It's still one player, just spread across two purchases.

I'm sure the gameco thought process is that, in a world without GameStop, both Person A AND B would have bought that game at full price. So GameStop is cheating them of potential business. Now, sure, B may have waited two months anyway and bought it "new" once it hit a Target endcap sale. Or A may only buy games because he knows he can flip them for credit shortly thereafter. But I think, overall, more people do exactly what the publishers fear, and purposefully buy used games to save money. Duh.

So charging $10 for a enabler code is way to get at that used game market and extract some kind of revenue stream from it. I mean, can you blame them? Our hobby has almost become defined by the process of buy it/trade it/buy it again... and the publishers only make money once on the deal. There's a lot of gamers who have stopped paying developers for games and started paying GameStop. What other hobbies do this?

Of course, the way around it is to buy new. Then you don't need to worry about a game not working as advertised, because that enabler code is provided gratis to the original purchaser. I'm not saying this whole idea isn't dickish. It's certainly friendlier to tie the O.P. into exclusive content or bonus DLC rather than withhold core features, but desperate publishers will take desperate measures.

But what really gets me is the idea that our hobby is disposable. That's why I enjoy any technique that stings the secondary market. It's a shame that so many people who self-identify as gamers are really only in it for the short-term hype. Buy the latest game, trade the latest game, buy the new latest game. How can we expect the mainstream to accept gaming as a legitimate interest, as a viable slice of world culture, when our main instinct is to be cheap and sell off every part of it that we own? What kind of message does that send to the Roger Eberts of the world? "Yeah, it's definitely art. But not art worth keeping."

I have Odyssey 2 cartridges still ticketed at $30-40, and that's in 1983 dollars. So I get that gaming has always been expensive and that buying used is a natural response for people who quail at modern price tags. And I'm sure that having that cheaper option gets people into the hobby who maybe couldn't afford it otherwise. And I know that GameStop does act as a cheerleader for gaming, as its fate is directly connected to the health of the industry.

But I can't shake the feeling that we've got a problem at the core, that we ourselves feel our hobby is not the kind of interest to take seriously. Because we have somehow taken on the role of victim in the game maker / game player relationship. Even though we expect AAA production values, flawless animation and voice work, hours and hours of gameplay, multiple modes and bonuses, and bulletproof rendering skills, we don't feel that's worth sixty dollars American. Oh, and we expect the game creators to listen to our every online complaint and address it immediately via patch or sequel.

We've officially reached chicken-and-egg status on this. People buy used games because games are expensive. Games are expensive because too many people are buying used games. It's not like I personally enjoy paying $50-60 for brand new games, and it's not like I don't know that the publishers are already strip-mining me for cash... but if somebody is already getting a discount by buying used, I don't feel they have much to bitch about with an additional charge to activate online play or whatever. Jesus, I guess you could just not play online then. Next time, pay full price. Or wait until the game goes on sale, because that does happen, you know.

I've always believed that if something is worth it to you, then it's worth it to you. And everybody has a different threshold. ModNation Racers, to me, is a sure buy at $60. Super Mario Galaxy 2, to me, is not a sure buy at $50. I make decisions like that all the time. I look at retail discounts and giveaways. I look at preorder bonuses. I gauge the likelihood that the game will get marked down in three months. I figure how long I can wait, alongside how much time I legitimately have to devote to it. That's how I decide what's worth it to me. But I don't include the used rack in these calculations, and I don't consider a rental service like Gamefly.

So I'm not likely to get hit by Project Ten Dollar. I wish that this move wasn't necessary, but I have a real tough time coming to the defense of the gamer who subsists on a system that never seems to get around to rewarding the people who made the games in the first place.

I did the horse-wrangling mission with Bonnie, where you chase down some wild horses after herding them into a small canyon. You end up having to personally go after a spirited stallion that breaks from the pack. At the end of the mission, Bonnie says you can keep that last horse. I took my fancy new horse exploring into the hills where it was immediately killed by wolves.

It seems like every time I wake up at the safehouse in Armadillo, there is a prostitute screaming outside. Every night, one of them will be outside on the deck getting tossed around by some jerk. I always try to punch the jerk away, but he invariably pulls a gun so I have to kill him. One time when I did this, the game told me I unlocked a PlayStation Home item. I wonder what it is, some kind of Hero to the Whores plaque?

I turned a corner in a hilly area and came across some poor fool being chased by a pack of wolves. Just so happened this was near the old Bacchus place. I activated Dead Eye and picked off three of the four wolves, but also nicked the victim right in the leg. Sure, the wolves are dispatched, but the guy I shot starts screaming and limping towards the homestead. The man and woman who live there saw the wounded guy, started yelling about how they'd sic the law on me, and booked it up the hill to go find a sheriff. They must have found one, because a minute later the game put me into Wanted mode and I had to outrun some deputies.

Another time when I had the law after me (another accident; I killed a deputy because I mistook him for a bandit chasing an innocent), I hoofed it until I saw the game tell me that I could surrender to the law by getting off my horse and standing still. Weapons holstered. I ran out ahead of the posse, hopped off the horse, put my gun away and stood there. The sheriff and his men stormed up the hill and shot me.

One time I came across a lawman who was bleeding out by a coach. He said two bandits had escaped, and could I go catch them. By this time, I had earned the lasso, which lets you rope bad guys and hogtie them, rather than kill them. So I hustle out after one of the escapees and lasso him. I hogtie him, put him on my horse, and carry him back to the sheriff. As soon as I drop the squirming bandit by the sheriff's feet, the sheriff kills him with one shot. Then I lit out after the other bad guy. I hogtie him in the same way and bring him back alive... and the lawman shoots that poor soul dead as well.

I was exploring a trail that runs near to Fort Mercer. I had never been through there before, so I was pretty excited to find a bunch of Red Sage. Plus, I kept getting jumped by cougars so I was making a nice collection of pelts. Cougars make a hell of a scary noise out there. At the end of the trail, I started really pushing the horse so I could get back to the nearest safehouse... and I ran us clear over a cliff and died.

Pac-Man Illusion! (YouTube)
Cool Pac-Man home decorating idea. Note the use of the mirror.

HEXED: JOSH BROLIN (CBR)
Josh Brolin on the Jonah Hex makeup: "It sucks, man."

On the Relative Difficulty of Mario Kart Titles (Gamasutra)
I love the faux-scientific presentation punctuated with mild swearing. That's pretty much sums up Mario Kart philosophy.

Video: Impossible Slopes Illusion (Mighty Optical Illusions)
Cool video of a handmade illusion... wooden marbles that seem to roll uphill.

Disney to Close Original Star Wars Rides By September 8 (Gizmodo)
Star Tours will be replaced by a pod-racing movie ride, which means Disney will have updated the attraction to the year 1999.

Clark really liked the original Star Tours when we were at Disney last fall, to the tune of three rides over the trip... I even surreptitiously recorded one of them with the iPhone so we could watch it later. Come this fall, it's officially Yesterland material.

Microsoft upgrade aims to make Hotmail cool again (Yahoo Mail)
Because if there's one thing Microsoft has mastered, it's cool.

Batman: Arkham Asylum action figures available Jan. 2011 (Joystiq)
January 2011? The game came out Summer 2009? Can we drop the preamble and just admit these figures are being timed for Arkham Asylum 2?

It's even worth more, I daresay. But that's the going rate, so who am I to judge.

I realized that I have not said much about The Saboteur, even though I've been playing it like nuts lately. There's a lot that the game gets right, in the name of fun, which is nice. There's a lot the game sort of zones out on, however, and that's why we're already down to $20 retail on this li'l guy.

And I wanted to write up something on the game - because I really like it - before I get into Red Dead Redemption and forget everything I ever knew about The Saboteur.

The game has a weird beginning, because you're in a flashback nested in a flashback or some such avant garde screenplay trick. It gets weirder because part of the flashback involves you being an ace race car driver in pre-war Europe. Yeah, I sort of didn't expect the game to kick off with a Mario Kart sequence. Obviously it's there to explain why your character (a grumpy puss Irish brawler) is miraculously awesome at driving cars... which, to be fair, the various GTAs and similar have never bothered to tackle. Still, odd. Thankfully, the intro flashback wraps up soon enough and you're spring into the open world mini-Paris.

The map covers Normandy, Paris, plenty of outlying towns and zones, plus two towns over the border in Germany. It's not true scale, as you can jog from Normandy to Germany in mere minutes. The environment does not change that much across the map. Paris, even though it is divided into three zones, looks the same east to west. The countryside areas are all happy French countryside. The landmarks are all there, so that angle was well done. At least, as far as I know, speaking as a guy who has spent less than a week in the City of Lights across an entire lifetime.

The game's graphical gimmick is that the Nazi-occupied areas are b&w. Noir. Rainy. Depressing. As you work through the missions and knock out the Nazi watchtowers and parked tanks, the world turns to color. It's a cheesy idea, yeah, but it turned out pretty nice.

The real kicker for me is that nearly every single thing you can do is marked on the map. Every tower. Every killable Nazi General. Every cannon. It's like if GTA marked all the Hidden Packages on the map instead of making you search for all 100. While this may sound like a watery copout, the good news is that the map is literally covered with these markers. The vast majority of my time in this game (45+ hours at the moment, and not near finished) has been devoted to me prowling the map and taking down those white map markers one by one.

It really is straight up my alley, because all I ever want to do in these games is sneak around, snipe from a distance, perform stealth kills, and disappear without ever being caught. And even when I do trip an alarm, outrunning the Nazis is rarely a problem. I know it sounds like a cakewalk, but it lets you focus on fun because you're not constantly restarting.

There's a nice amount of things like that, where the designers clearly decided to jettison the esoteric, grinding standbys that needed to evolve. The game tells you what cars you need to steal to complete your collection. You can save anywhere. The requirements for the unlockable bonus abilities are spelled out right from the start. You get free weapons, once you pay to unlock them at the Black Market storefront (with a couple free ammo samples). Awesome. I hate dying in GTA and losing weapons. Again, the focus is on having fun, not the mini-metagame of managing your money and inventory.

One downside to the entire experience is that a ton of those marked activities are more or less the same. You're bringing down hundreds of Nazi guard towers, usually with nothing more than one bundle of dynamite placed at the base of an unguarded entry ladder. These Nazis really ought to have more guys on guard duty. Nevertheless, even after doing it over and over again, I keep doing it.

Occasionally, you run into objects and people that ignore France's natural gravity. Big floating cannon installations. So the engine shows some weakness there, for sure. And lately the game has grown sort of, well, crashy. So far this week it has crashed on me three times, which is exactly three times more than I expect from a console game.

But I wouldn't even call that a big complaint, stupid as it is... no, the game's chief weakness is a pile of visually unemotive characters. There's a lot of fine voice acting, but the character faces barely change. That would have been fine five years ago, but in the meantime we've had games like Uncharted and Heavy Rain, so the bar is set pretty high these days. Even Assassin's Creed II - a game that holds many, many similarities to The Saboteur - had an attempt at facial animations (albeit a weirdly cartoony one.)

Lots of good, some bad, still one hell of a buy for $20.

There was a rubber duck board game at Origins last year that we all almost bought. The hook was that each game came with six randomized ducks (out of a set of 100), and if you bought at the con, they would let you trade ducks with the assortment they had on display.

Anyway, here's where they get their duck supply: the questionably-titled Oriental Trading catalog.

Like I said, none of us bought it last year, even with the duckswap option. Now that I know I can order a dozen DC-ripoff ducks for $6 (+S&H), maybe I'll pick up the game.

I am fascinated by the buzz cut on the Green Lantern duck. The Flash logo on his cowl and the Wonder Woman chest symbol seem to betray some semblance of thought went into these adorable li'l knockoffs.

I noticed my comic shop had this game in stock this week. I'll have to refresh my memory on whether it seemed fun, and then maybe I'll go nuts on oddball duckies.

Several weeks ago I entertained a stray thought: "I bet Clark would dig Dragon Ball Z."

I had not seen the show since Toonami vanished to make way for Adult Swim, but I have fond memories of late night viewings of the Frieza Saga. That was, shudder, a full decade ago.

That much time in the bank means that the entire series is readily available. Back then, if you wanted to own the show, that meant buying tons of meager DVDs with four episodes each. Now, you can get 30-40 episodes in one $20 box set. So we picked up Season One at Target. For whatever reason, the various seasons have randomized pricing, from $19.99 to $24.99. And no, that number has nothing to do with how many episodes are actually in the set.

And yeah, Clark digs it. Season One begins with the Raditz fight, which only goes for a couple episodes... downright minuscule by DBZ standards. Then the show launches into the classic formula: bad guys will be here in twelve episodes, so the good guys have to prepare. For Clark, the anticipation was palpable as he waited for Vegeta and Nappa to make landfall.

What I like is that Clark gets it. Thanks to the overplayed drama, he completely understands when the show is dead serious (and when it starts playing for laughs.) The deaths of the Z fighters during the Nappa battle were somber moments. Especially Piccolo, whom the show spends a lot of time on prior to the battle scene. Plus, being a crazy looking alien, Piccolo is more memorable to a five-year-old than Yamcha and the other guys.

By virtue of Clark not finding animated cartoon death funny, I dub him light years ahead of the adults I usually find in movie theaters, who laugh at every bit of violence, even the portions purposefully presented as meaningful, serious and/or dramatic.

We just started Season Two, and we're at the part where Krillin, Bulma and Gohan are betrayed by the two faux-Namekians. The revelation that two Nameks were actually bad guys in disguise was one of those plot points that just slays an attentive five year old. Clark could not believe it.

We certainly watch a lot of cartoons, and a number of that is somewhat serialized (like Ben 10), but nothing as straight-connected episode-to-episode as DBZ. The soap opera continuity is a massive draw for Clark, because he wants to know what happens next. It's like our chapterized readings at bedtime: events matter because what happens tomorrow follows what happened tonight.

I doubt we'll get through all nine seasons, mainly because I never made it through all nine. There comes a point where the DBZ formula plays itself into a corner. My initial thought is that we'll go through the Frieza Saga (which means up through Season Three, according to this boxed set's numbering), but the more I think about it, we may take it all the way through the Cell stuff.

Harmonix tossed a survey up on Twitter about potential new band-specific releases. You know, to correct the crashing-southward line graph that connects The Beatles to Green Day.

Queen has appeared in nearly every single music game ever made. Zeppelin and Floyd are depressingly obvious and play into that head-metal vibe that has bothered me since the first Guitar Hero. I don't think I've seen much Eagles or U2 in gaming, so at least they'd be somewhat new. Ish.

Even if you select "No," you still have to pick up to three that you like. These are all bands where I know, maybe two songs apiece. If that. You might as well call it "The Eagles: Rock Band - Hotel California Edition."

I'm just not down with single-artist editions. Especially single-artist editions that cost as much as the normal, multi-artist versions. Especially when they contain less than half as many tracks, but somehow manage to have plenty of DLC prepared on the backend. Judging from sales, I'm not alone.

Either price the single-artist versions down to $30 or less, or focus on genre-specific releases if you absolutely must appeal to niche audiences. I'd pick up a 1970s disc with songs from all of the above (sorry, U2) and probably really like it... but one entire $60 release with 40 Pink Floyd songs? Uh, no.

Of course, there is one band where I would drop the sixty without a second thought...

The Crying Girl Revisited - They Might Be Giants (YouTube)
By the way, I ALSO met John Linnell in Central Park once.

Persuasive Games: The Picnic Spoils the Rain (GameSetWatch)
Note this: "Heavy Rain does not embrace filmmaking, but rebuffs it by inviting the player to do what Hollywood cinema can never offer: to linger on the mundane instead of cutting to the consequential." Great article.

DC Universe Classics Blue Beetle III (Jaime Reyes) Action Pics (Action Figure Pics)
I just bookmarked actionfigurepics.com, for sure.

Something New (Mice Age)
I was wrong in my guess that Disney would not allow trading of the new Vinylmation figures.

How a Toon Elevator helped Mickey Mouse learn how to talk (Jim Hill Media)
Making a non-mute Mickey is definitely necessary... but I want to see Disney tackle the problem that has long bothered me about the costumed characters: get the characters to the proper scale. Mickey is, like, three feet tall.

I mean really. Back when the DSi launched and everybody was all whiny about the value of the system, something like Photo Dojo would have been a big help.

Not that Nintendo needed it.

Here's me vs. Clark:

It's a shame that Photo Dojo has no way to share fighters with friends. That would be killer to be able to download characters made on other DSi systems.

Here's me vs. Josh:

A year of DSiWare has yielded a nice library of downloadable material. Not a great library, to be sure, but definitely a good pile to supplement whatever retail DS games you may prefer. Of course, with a Nintendo 3DS on the way (this fall?), anybody who has yet to pick up a DSi or a DSi XL by now ought to at least wait for this year's E3 to see what Nintendo has coming up next. This whole DSi thing has been more or less a test run for the next system anyway.

Sadly, I think it's just an unfortunate shelf-stock tag pairing.

Sounds like a boardroom win-win, though. You get ALL THE AUDIENCE of the Resident Evil franchise plus ALL THE AUDIENCE of the Chipmunks franchise. That's, like, as sure-fire as when they did that Gilligan's Island in Space cartoon.

The free-by-mail Egyptian Playmobil PC/Mac disk comes with a moderately playable version of Senet. There's also a really nice seven minute CG movie featuring all the Egyptian toys, but they ruin it by having it end with a bullshit Flash game.

Wow, when did this combo pack happen. And why.

Here's some more toys nobody wanted. Official model cars based on Reservoir Dogs and The Godfather, two films noted for their having automobiles as key plot elements. What?

I do like the posed hands on the Marlon Brando figure.

And that's what fourhman.com looks like on an iPad!

2/3rds of the way through PixelJunk Shooter and I'm still rather ambivalent towards it. It just doesn't grab me in the way PixelJunk Monsters did. I don't actively hate it in the way I did PixelJunk Eden, and it's not a game that screams Yes-We-Know-This-Is-Bad-But-Whatever like TMNT Re-Shelled or Revenge of the Wounded Dragons... but I'm certainly not over the moon over it. It just is. It's pleasant enough.

Here's me in one of the first level blocks, right when you come across flammable gases...

It's certainly more compelling in multiplayer. Here's me in Yellow and Mike in Green. We struggle for a while with the bit where you have to turn a waterfall into a land bridge.

This board took a couple attempts before we hatched a plan. We opt for a "You go that way and I'll go this way" plan around :28, then mass panic erupts at :40 as we flee the incoming lava.

Look at the ridiculous way Buzz Quiz World pushes reports to Facebook:

That was from a 8-player online game, with four people in our house and four people somewhere else. I got the distinct feeling that our opponent was actually just one dude running all four buzzers, because his group never had deviating answers. For our part, we agreed to work together to make sure one of us won, but when we came to a question where we did not know the answer, we split the guesses amongst the group.

Red Dead Redemption Gameplay Series: Multiplayer Competitive (YouTube)
You ought to at least watch the first bit, where Rockstar shows off a completely ridiculous way to begin a multiplayer deathmatch.

How 'The Karate Kid' Ruined The Modern World (Cracked)
Wow. Yep.

Late Night Musings (Mark Evanier)
On why there should be no feeling sorry for any of the late night drama players. They're already rich, duh.

Point-And-Click Remake For Infocom's HHGTG (GameSetWatch)
Updating a text adventure from the mid-80s to look like an adventure game of the early-90s.

Wii Party - Nintendo's Next "Wii Something" Title (GayGamer)
First good Wii ____ idea since the first Wii Sports.

We deal with criticism (Brainy Gamer)
Bookmark this for the next time you want to downplay a bad Metacritic score. Site's got some issues.

Local boy with cancer turns into a superhero for a day (Seattle Times via Dubious Quality)
Most Make-a-Wish kids just go to DisneyWorld. This kid got half of Seattle to act in a complicated super-hero fantasy.

multicultural crayons, take two (Angry Asian Man)
A handy color guide for Arizona law enforcement.

Darksiders was not a bad game, but I certainly felt much better about it when I figured it was two games for $55 instead of just one.

The deal was, you buy Darksiders and confess to that fact via sales receipt, then add in a $5 S&H check, add someone at a dark, filthy fulfillment house will send you Red Faction: Guerrilla in the mail. Hopefully in the format you prefer. (Cue me opening an envelope with a code to download the free Microsoft Zune edition of Red Faction Guerrilla. FROWNY.)

You had to complete this bold retail venture by some deadline in March, and I definitely did... and now it's May and I still lack a free copy of Red Faction Guerrilla. I think they just announced a sequel, for christ's sake. Announce my free game is shipping!

I'm just doing this because I know that as soon as I complain, the forces of fate will deliver it to my mailbox.

I was reminded of this when my Sam & Max order arrived yesterday. Telltale Games - very smartly peddling non-game merchandise based on the game properties they own - had a Sam & Max sale with everything 30% off or whatever. So I ordered a random t-shirt (Max's skull) and the DVD set of the complete S&M animated series. Clark, having watched me play most of Season 3 Episode 1, was psyched to hear there was a Sam & Max cartoon.

I have some other orders that are yet to be delivered, although some for good reason. Like, ModNation Racers isn't out yet (EXCELLENT reason), and I have that coming from Amazon.

I'm still waiting on my free DJ Hero sticker sheet. But when a company is too cheap to include stickers in the damn retail game box, I don't imagine they're too quick to mail out sticker sheets to patrons who signed up for them.

Of course, Red Dead Redemption is coming mid-May. Not via mail order, however, so that hardly makes it germane to this post. I GameStopped that one. I'd like to have The Saboteur all mopped up by then. Have I mentioned The Saboteur? I really like it, but I can see how it would pale in comparison to other open-world sandbox games. Gets a bit samey.

From Lex Luthor's campaign trail. Sort of incredible that DC did that ten years ago now. Lex won, and while he almost served a full term in real time (being ousted in the first story arc in Superman/Batman in 2003), in comics time that's, like, a week and a half.

This Death pin carries a 2004 copyright date, but I'm pretty sure I picked it up at a Wizard World in 2008 or so. No idea if it was actually promoting anything more specific than "Remember, we publish Vertigo too."

2005: New DC logo! A well-planned and long overdue design change. If you're going to stick with a name as anciently vague as "DC Comics," you might as well have a sweet logo.

Maybe 2007? Not that it matters.

2007, part of a series of five pins that DC handed out for attending their panels at various comic conventions. All played into Countdown in some way, what with the search for Ray Palmer and the ethical dilemmas of Mary Marvel.

Also from convention season 2007 (and probably afterwards.)

More from convention season 2007! This series also featured logo pins for Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern and Batman.

The GL pin was re-issued in 2009 as part of a series of pins featuring all the Lantern colors, but I did not get any of those.

I believe this is from Wizard World Philly 2008. As if super hero logo pins aren't nerdy enough, here's a pin that touts the 10th anniversary of the umbrella imprint that handles super hero merchandising.

This was DC's pin panel giveaway at the 2008 shows, the I Am Batman series. Again, I only managed two of the set.

And that brings us up to date. See you in another thirty years.

But I'm pretty sure I'll get a runner-up prize, so that's cool.

Here's the dude that won:

That's MicroFantasy by Skitch. I friended up with this guy back in the early stages of the contest, so we could exchange games, and it is a nice piece of Warioware crafting.

This entry by WolfPupTK makes me smirk:

That's some elegant sprite usage!

This claw game by DillDoe makes my head hurt when I think about how it had to be put together. Must be lots of "if object X is touching object Y" kind of crap.

This Kotaku Suite by Gentle Thud must be using 100% of the graphics allotment.

How do you do three completely different screens like that? Brilliant.

This runner-up placer by k8sousa is adorable.

So those are my favorites out of the top ten finishers. I would have placed any of those five above my entry, so I'm glad that one of them won.

Screwball Scramble in 8.5 seconds (YouTube)
If this isn't the fastest Screwball Scramble run the world has ever seen, I'd like Guinness to state otherwise.

Analysis: McMillen Explains 'Why So Hard?' (GameSetWatch)
The guy behind Super Meat Boy explains the evolution of difficulty in gaming, specifically the whole lives vs. challenge dynamic. Great article, and it underlines why I think New Super Mario Bros Wii is way off base when it comes to delivering a fun, accessible experience. This actually makes me interested in Super Meat Boy (especially the cool-sounding multi-replay feature), a WiiWare title I was avoiding because of the dippy Adult Swimish random hipster name.

These Are Your Favorite Kotaku-themed WarioWare D.I.Y. Games (Kotaku)
There's me! Me! I made the finalists! I'll post videos of my favorite competitors shortly.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE TIMM (TMT)
Some depressing reality from Bruce Timm... Animated Batgirl, Judas Contract and Wonder Woman/Green Lantern sequels all cancelled. He's been strongly encouraged not to do R-rated animated super-hero movies, thanks to the relative failure of the live action Watchmen film. Ugh.

Neil Innes: And now for something completely different (Yahoo News UK)
I always forget where my subconscious picked up the phrase "Bonzo Dog Doo Dah." It's from this guy.

Microsoft echoes Apple view on Adobe's Flash (Yahoo News UK)
Steve Jobs attacks Flash and the internet explodes. Microsoft quietly rings in agreement with Jobs, and nobody cares. That's either a comment on Flash or a comment on Microsoft's relevance.

Vinyl Groove (Mice Age)
Kevin Yee discovers Disney's new Vinylmation store. They had these toys when we were there last fall but we did not buy any. An entire store dedicated to them? I imagine we could not have resisted that.

The Juvenile vs. the Adolescent (Michael Barrier)
Interesting quote from Barrier about teens:

Once children enter adolescence, with its anxieties and insecurities and consuming self-consciousness, they pass beyond the reach of artists like [Carl] Barks; they're incapable of hearing what those artists are saying until the glandular din subsides and they become adults.

That fits nicely with what I said a few weeks ago about Nintendo's bell curve of fandom from kids-to-teens-to-adults.