After Clark and I finished reading the first "Hunger Games," he thought for a minute and then asked "Do they solve the mystery in the next book?"
"What mystery?" I asked.
"The mystery of the romance."
]]>
After Clark and I finished reading the first "Hunger Games," he thought for a minute and then asked "Do they solve the mystery in the next book?"
"What mystery?" I asked.
"The mystery of the romance."
]]>
Nintendo announced their intention to dub this Saturday a Kid Icarus multiplayer battle day, where you're supposed to play Kid Icarus: Uprising online. I enjoyed that bottom Facebook comment. "But I need time to design the Evite!"
]]>This Times article by Frank Bruni has a bit in it that speaks to my transition out of the GOP.
Within [Republicans'] uppermost ranks are many champions of small government who squirm at the small-mindedness of the scowling theocrats in an increasingly uneasy coalition. These fiscal conservatives take advantage of the religious right's political muscle but have reservations about its hectoring piety, and their own views on social issues are often moderate or somewhat liberal.
The hectoring piety of the scowling theocrats is exactly why I can't bring myself to vote Republican any more. I can only sit and wonder where all my small government friends went, as religious social issues have bullied me right out of the party.
That, and poorly justified expensive wars.
]]>
Found this at one of those country craft farm store joints.
I am constantly amazed at how often I see "Green Hornet" substituted for Green Lantern. And "Flash Gordon" substituted for the Flash. And don't try to tell me whoever put this candy basket together was perhaps thinking of the 2011 movie because, jesus fuck, I'm at a country craft farm store joint.
I mean, Seth Rogan movie aside, nobody has heard from the Green Hornet or Flash Gordon for decades. And yet they're still out there in the public consciousness. Gives you some idea just how powerful an impact radio dramas and lush comic strips had once upon a time.
]]>
It makes no sense to me that Rocksteady would go to all the trouble of creating multiple characters, unique attacks and special weapons for both Robin and Nightwing, and then refuse to let you play as them in the main Arkham City post-game.
The above clipping is from IGN's quick preview of the upcoming "Harley Quinn's Revenge DLC. We already sort of knew that Robin would be playable, but him being stuck to just this mission is crazy talk.
Oh, and those stupid high score-centric Challenge Maps that the game is convinced we all so dearly love.
We can already switch between Batman and Catwoman in Arkham. Why can't we add Robin and Nightwing in there as well? Is there too much work involved with adjusting goon audio, making sure Riddler reacts properly if Nightwing solves a puzzle rather than Batman? Are Nightwing and Robin thematically lacking some critical gadget ability that the city requires to traverse?
Seeing as how we already have Robin DLC (with unplayable Robin) and Nightwing DLC (with unplayable Nightwing), and now we have Harley DLC with sort-of-playable Robin, it seems highly unlikely that I'll get my wish. Maybe they have a second Harley-sized DLC pack forthcoming that lets Nightwing headline. And maybe that's exactly what will happen. Because as I said, going to all of that work and then limiting the character to stupid Challenge Maps is just nuts.
]]>
Last night I racked up my tenth Platinum Trophy - predictably - on LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7.
Getting Platinums can be a funny thing. Some are easy to Platinum. Some can be done just by grinding out enough time. Some games you'd think would be super-simple to Platinum get grenaded by one insanely awful Trophy that wrecks the whole thing. Like Skylanders' god-awful Beat Final Boss With Only One Skylander thing. Seriously.
I'm proud of that Katamari Forever Platinum. The final Trophy I needed - for completing the object catalog - felt entirely unreachable. It came down to me missing one item: a particular type of small house. And then I got lucky while rolling around one of the city-sized levels.
We nailed Platinum in Green Lantern in, like, three days. Ahem.
I am currently Level 17 on PSN, and if I'm doing the math right, my rate is about one and a half Trophies per day, every day, since I bought my PS3.
EDIT: I'm not doing the math right. Trophies did not arrive on PS3 until July 2008 and I had my PS3 before that. New math comes out to almost two Trophies a day. Somebody make me an infographic!
]]>
Check your local Best Buy for this kiosk while you're out looking for rare Skylander restocks.
]]>
I saw Avengers-branded magnetic bracelets at Toys R Us and did not think much of it. I mean, yeah, magnetic bracelets are pure hokum and a completely un-scientific faux-health fad, but these were toys. Your kid wears them on each wrist, and when he bangs them together they light up or some shit.
Then we downloaded the "Marvel's The Avengers Iron Man Mark VII" free app and were tossed headfirst into the Land of Woo.
The app is pretty cool, otherwise. It's an interactive comic that retells the armor-focused moments from the two Iron Man movies. It's supposed to be Tony Stark discussing the evolution of his armor, and you can tap stuff in the panels to make him fly or shoot or whatever. Full voice-over, occasional easy drag-and-drop puzzles.
But after buzzing through "Iron Man 2," the app spends three panels (more than any other scene in the story) to a bit where Pepper presents Tony with a gift of colantatte bracelets. Tony then goes through "research" where Jarvis rattles off nonsense about magnetic bracelets, about the numerous health benefits and how they're a legal medical device in Japan.
W. T. F.
Tony declares these have inspired him for his next suit. And the app then launches into a tease for the movie. FIND OUT WHAT TONY BUILDS IN MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS ONLY IN THEATERS.
As this Skeptic.com post points out, where's the line between comic book fiction and bad science promotion? I mean, I'm annoyed that Clark is being sold this magnetic bracelet bullshit inside his fun Iron Man app, but guess what, that arc reactor inside Tony Stark's chest doesn't work as advertised either in the real world.
The difference is that there are people out there selling these stupid things as real, actual health things... and clearly that cabal got to Marvel/Disney and everybody signed on the dotted line for a co-promotion. Disgusting. There's no potential confusion about the arc reactor or the Cosmic Cube or Mjolnir being real, so when you sell toys of that junk there's no real-sounding health disclaimer that raising this hammer to the sky might actually call down lightning.
Hopefully this won't be a THING in the movie, where we have to pause all the weightless punching to explain how awesome colantatte bracelets are to the audience.
]]>
Yup, I finished all the Jetpack Joyride mission goals, and opted to start over. Nice thing is, it keeps your numerical level going... so I'm already at level 22 since this screenshot was snapped.
]]>
We had another retail success story yesterday. It always feels good to just stumble into a deal, or run across a rare toy by happenstance, rather than endure the wilds of eBay and online price gouging.
Skylanders. At a GameStop, we found Lightning Rod, one of the newer figures to be released. And at Target, wonder of wonders, they had two Dragon's Peak adventure packs. So now we have all four adventure packs (which means we have all the power-up items)... and we're only four away from a complete set of all 32 base Skylander toys. I adamantly refuse to do the math on what this all costs. And by "base," that means I'm not counting the Legendary figures, which are just repaints. But we have four of those too.
We need Dino-rang, Camo, Warnado and Wham Shell.
Incidentally, this was our first drop-in at this particular GameStop, and it has to be the best GameStop this side of the Susquehanna. For one thing, it's huge. For whatever reason, GameStops around here tend to be around the size of a Christopher & Banks dressing room, and when 80% of that tiny-space stock is used games, I don't often spend a lot of time in them. This GameStop is actually the size of a real store. Must be expensive rent.
Plus, I asked about Kid Icarus cards, and they gave us two free packs. A couple weeks ago, Nintendo and GameStop held a Kid Icarus: Uprising demo day, but none of my immediately local GameStops were among the "select stores" that were running the demo and handing out free cards. At this GameStop, I delicately asked "Do you have Kid Icarus cards?" - which, you have to admit, is a genius way to tackle it, because the phrasing makes me look like an idiot father who thinks he can buy his son Kid Icarus cards. So if they don't have any of the free cards, the staff can assume I thought you could buy them... but if they do have the free cards, they look like heroes for handing them out to us.
So now we have just about all of the Kid Icarus cards as yet released. We don't have whatever they handed out at the Nintendo Store in New York, and we don't have whatever Game Informer subscribers received with the magazine. We have the cards that came with the game, the Club Nintendo cards, the Nintendo Power cards, the @Gamer Best Buy cards and now the GameStop cards. Plus the one booster pack that Nintendo sent me (which I'm guessing is the same random packs they handed out at PAX). I remain astonished that Nintendo is not selling these cards at retail. Maybe they're waiting for enough copies of the game to get into players' hands so it makes financial sense to print and distribute packs of Kid Icarus cards.
Next: two PlayStation Move games on the discount end cap at Target. Medieval Moves: Deadmund's Quest and Puss in Boots. Both marked down to $12. We tried the demo for Deadmund some time ago, and Clark really liked it, but I doubted it would stand up to a $40 price point. I was actually monitoring the price of the Deadmund/Sports Champions/Move controller bundle pack (which seems to float between $75-$99) since then we would get two games and an extra Move controller, but $12 for Deadmund pretty much negates the value of a second controller and another dopey archery mini game set.
Deadmund is decent. It overdoes the motion controls to the extent that it feels like a second-year Wii game. Like, why should the same button be used to trigger four separate actions depending on the position of the Move controller? Dumb. But it looks good (except for the amateur-level pencil art showcased during cutscenes) and the on-rails movement makes Clark feel like he's accomplishing some serious stuff.
Puss in Boots uses the same on-rails trick, which is really smart for motion control games aimed at kids. Clark is KILLING IT as Puss, and it is pretty good for a movie tie-in title. It shifts from sword fighting to balancing to steering vehicles to posing, all with Move motion controls and all while following the movie's plot.
Finally, Toys R Us had a video game accessory clearance sale, so I picked up Sony's stupid PlayStation Eye TV bracket for the attractive sum of $1.26. Original MSRP for this goony piece of plastic was $15. Which is nuts, it's just a two inch support that nicely positions your Eye camera on the top of your flatscreen. $1.26 might even be slightly more than it's worth, but it does what it says on the tin so I won't complain further.
]]>Look, we all know this is just Smash Bros, but that doesn't make me any less excited for it. PaRappa! Fat Princess! Buzz! Twisted Metal! Patapon! God of War! LittleBigPlanet! I've been saying for years that Sony has become increasingly desperate to duplicate Nintendo's success in leveraging character fan service, and today's reveal of PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale is solid 100% proof.
Although, it would be nice if looked just a little less like Smash Bros.
]]>
Bought one of the new iPads last weekend. Even opted for the WiFi+4G model, because I want to experiment with the month-to-month data plan. See if that can be useful on a trip or when the poor thing is outside of a WiFi blanket. I'm sure I don't need to point out how sucky it is that the +4G edition costs more... in a perfect world we'd have the +4G option on every iPad without having to fret about buying a model specific to a carrier. I blame the carriers.
Anyway. The screen is amazing. It's so good that you don't realize how good it is, unless you're comparing iPad models side-by-side. We had the original iPad, so not only are we getting an awesome screen upgrade, but also a substantial speed/processor boost.
Comics look great, as long as you don't zoom in too far. The newer games/apps that have already issued Retina screen updates look sharp as hell. I love this new post-pixel world!
I'm not sold on the Smart Cover. Okay, it's clever; the iPad knows to turn itself off and on as you open and close the cover. But it seems weird and flimsy to me. I don't quite know what to do with it when it is flipped all the way around (fully open position) and I feel like the magnetic clasp is easy to knock free. The Smart Cover is just a lid for the thing, whereas before we had a full body encasement. Our new iPad seems exposed. So, not sure about the Smart Cover.
Related: do you guys have a thing about turning stuff off and on? Clark will sit there and absent-mindedly flip the segmented Cover panel open and closed, making the iPad screen repeatedly click between sleep and awake. I have this urge that this is bad for it, but I don't think there's any rational proof for that. Is it because we were raised by people who were raised by people who lived during the Depression, so we're still anxious about abusing light switches and stuff?
The way the iPad makes Clark's world so different from mine at age 7 is suitably astonishing. I love it. The closest technological comparison I can think of is being the first generation to grow up with television in the home (which I wasn't, incidentally). It changes everything. And since THIS is Clark's world, it's not even surprising or anything to him. It's just normal.
My plan is to use the new iPad as my Official Journalist Notebook at this year's E3. I have a very nice Bamboo stylus (which was mainly for SUPER SKILL DrawSomething bouts), and I bought the accompanying Bamboo paper app which makes for a very convincing pen-on-paper experience. Plus you can snap photos to embed into your notes. Seems pretty perfect. Last year, the convention center WiFi was dodgy, so maybe 4G on the iPad will be an improvement. Although when you have that many goofs in one place all clawing for internet access, maybe no service in the world could keep up.
Not like I needed any additional reasons to avoid a motion-controlled casual game fest themed to the Cabela's franchise, but check out this blurb on the cover...
Seriously? "Grief your friends!" as a front-of-the-box bullet point? On a family-friendly mini-game collection? "Be a dick! Make them pay! No one but you will enjoy this experience!"
Also, we're turning "griefing" into a buzzword that the general public knows about?
Ugh.
]]>
I know a lot of you guys say "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is a funny show. Caricature bobbleheads that say things like "What's up bitches" are not selling me on it.
]]>