I should have been a pair of ragged claws

girlfriend, more puzzles first Joe thrilled, now indifference Crapcom strikes again

Metal Slug Advance is the best possible realization of SNK's run-and-shoot series on the GBA. It is a technical marvel; the rich, over-exaggerated animation that made the series stand out in arcades is achieved with vastly inferior hardware. This portable entry in the series suffers only rare slowdown and a few lost frames of animation. While the game looks like the early arcade entries, the gameplay is modified to fit a handheld. A health bar replaces the arcade's one-hit death system. The arcade versions of Metal Slug can be conquered in less than an hour given a few pockets full of quarters. (Or a PC capable of emulating the hardware.) Metal Slug Advance addresses the inherent brevity of their rich worlds with an adroit card collection system. Cards are hidden throughout the game worlds. Most of the cards are trinkets, but others provide benefits like increasing the armor for your vehicles or doubling your ammo supply for a weapon. The catch is that in order to keep the card...

I've been playing some Go lately on Little Golem . Ok, maybe a lot. While anyone familiar with playing turned based games over the internet can tell plenty of stories of games puttering out after a few turns and going nowhere. Little Golem has a silver bullet: parallelism. Little Golem encourages you to get into plenty of games at going at the same time. The result reminds me of an old commercial where it showed Gary Kasperov playing against a hundred junior chess players at once, walking down a row of chess boards, pausing an instant, making a move, then going onto the next. Except online everyone is walking between every Go board making their move. Physically impossible and incomprehensible, but online it makes perfect sense. I'm currently involved in over 20 games of Go at the same time. I'm playing against a friend at work, against my brother, two sets of rating matches, and a few tournaments. Go is a tough game, and sitting down to play a 19x19 board for a few h...

Nintendo released its US release list for the first half of 2005. The biggest games on the list for me are the two Fire Emblem games ( GBA & GC ) and two WarioWare games ( GBA & DS ). I'm also glad to see the GameCube bongos will get more playtime, with Donkey Kong Jungle Beat and Donkey Konga 2 both coming stateside. Nintendo has yet to announce a title that encourages me to preorder the DS. WarioWare is the only title with a release date that I would hate to miss. I'm probably most interested in Nintendogs , Jam with the Band , and Animal Crossing DS, all announced, none with US release dates.

I've had the fortune of hearing a few talks by Will Wright at GDC and finally one of his presentations has been released in an hour long MP3 . Recommended listening.

I am now a proud owner of the new PS2 thanks to a surprisingly good deal at EB . Quick thoughts on it so far: Size Wow. I thought the GameCube was a small system, but it towers over the PSTwo and looks to be three or four times the volume. The size and color make it difficult to find when you are looking for it in a messy pile of game systems. (Not that I would know of course. This is purely hypothetical!) Top loading Argh, I wish it was a side loader so I could pile other systems on top of it. The top panel feels a bit flimsy, but hopefully the top loading will allow boot disks to emerge allowing region-free play. Loading times The loading time for games seems to be sped up a slight amount. Winning Eleven 7, a game that has load times of over a minute, probably had 10% less load time compared to my previous system. The 10 second load times of Taiko Drum Master have virtually disappeared. From the few games I tried out, it seemed the shorter the original load time was, the greater t...

The latest installment of ESPN's recent sport series on American football in the US discusses the sport at Georgia Tech. Sorta. The article is more about how few students at Tech (in particular undergrads) care about football because they are simply too busy doing their work to goof off. From my experience, the article is largely accurate. I think the overall intelligence of the students is a bit overstated. There are quite a few geniuses, but Tech was largely populated by mere mortals like me. The overwhelming volume of nerdiness, though, was perfectly conveyed by the article. From my time there, I feel Georgia Tech presents a relatively unique college experience. Most people I talk to speak of the "good times" in college, the parties, the excessive drinking, and what not. I don't drink, I'm not very good at parties, and I really wanted to get something out of college rather than watch it pass by in a chemically induced stupor. (Most of my four years were indeed...

Ignatz the Mouse wants nothing more than to hit Krazy Kat in the head with a brick. Krazy Kat loves being the target of Ignatz's masonry affection. And the local policeman, Offica Pup, struggles to keep them apart. I first heard of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" comic strip in Bill Watterson's 10th anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book, where he cites it, along with Peanuts and Pogo, as the strongest influences of his work. Also in the book, Watterson laments the contraction of the comic strip, from full page canvases in the first half of the 20th century down to the three tiny frames we have today. I never understood this complaint until I got my hands on a collection of George Harriman's work. Krazy Kat is like no other comic I've seen. The way the central themes of violence, love, and justice are juxtaposed is far more twisted and challenging than anything I've seen on a comics page. The interactions three primary characters, in particular Krazy Kat...

The DNA tests just came in. Your biological father turns out to be Curt Schilling. Hey New York, nice work on the loss. The disappointment. The biggest meltdown in baseball history. And you lost to the Boston Red Sox. The shame. The shame. Hey Sox - go break the curse.

With Nintendo's recent revealing of the DS lineup , Miziguchi's Studio Q released screenshots for its upcoming title, Meteos. While I was willing to give Lumines the benefit of the doubt, the studio announcing another handheld falling-block puzzle game has erased all my optimism. Take a look at the screenshot below; it is frankly embarassing. And the knife to the belly: the lead designer is none other than Kirby creator, Masahiro Sakurai . Oy vei.

Brilliant happy game but don't make me walk so much two visits is fine

NFC Games has an excellent article on the visual evolution of Nintendo's Mario character. Comparing and contrasting the various character designs over the last two decades is enjoyable, but I don't agree with a bit of the analysis. The "Jumped the Shark" Mario section largely features designs not created by Nintendo's core development group in Japan - rather by Square and NST, Nintendo's in-house team in the US. I'd consider the Paper Mario 2 iteration of Mario to be the de facto 2D version of the famed mascot rather than the blurry Donkey Kong Country-style mess in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

The rolling, sticking, never-stopping, ever-swelling clump of stuff that makes a star of out everyone and everything. Namco's Katamari Damacy is one of the most original and charming games that I've ever played. During the game, you roll around a sphere around various places. Smaller objects, like tacks and matches, stick to it, bigger things don't. Yet your katamari grows as things stick to it, and the once unassailable blockades become fodder for your ever-snowballing pile of junk. The initial enaging element is, haha, look what I just rolled over and squished onto my ball. The secondary element of the continuous increasing of scale is surprisingly and lastingly engaging. Often you'll start a level rolling over tacks, rolling around the heels of towering humans. After a minute or two, you're knee high to them, then soon enough you can knock little children over and consume them! Then cars! Then buildings! The epiphany that occurs when you realize that what once wa...

Miziguchi called my bluff and did have something in the bag. While Rez was a music/shooter, his new development team (Q-Entertainment) is seemingly mixing a Tetris-style puzzle games with his electronic music vibe. SPOnG reports: [F]rom what we can make out, the player interacts with a set of blocks in order to manipulate a graphic equaliser, therefore impacting on the game?s soundtrack in some way. I'm somewhat disappointed to find that the gameplay appears to be one of the least interesting in any gaming genre. Falling blocks is so 1988. Still, Miziguchi turned a rail shooter into one of the most enthralling experiences, so there's more than a chance he can pull through again. I'm quite disappointed that this is going to be a PSP title. With an awesome Christmas season and the DS being released, the thought of burning $400+ on a PSP just to get some personal time with Miziguchi's latest is torture on the pocketbook.

Update : This game is coming to the US (?!?) as "Feel the Magic: XY/XX" and IGN has some interesting gameplay details. Alright, I may have dissed Nintendo's approach to the DS, but the few games that have been announced may make the system the official DeathMonkey Best Console of All Time Forever Plus. Why? Because the games sound so friggin' weird. I thought the surgery game would be the most bizarre title to launch on the system, but it ain't got nothing on the Sonic Team's Kimishine . This is a dating sim where you try to hook up with a chick by RUBBING THE SCREEN . Woah. While this game has got to be more appropriate than it sounds, but with a one-line description like that, I'd be shocked to ever see it on a WalMart shelf. The original working title was "Project Rub", which the team claims it was an Engrish pun with "Project Love". Gotta "rub" puns that reinforce racial stereotypes! Ok, I'll s...

Sony revealed a new PS2 form factor (informally dubbed the PStwo) to be released in mid-November. The original form factor suffered from a nouveau/retro 1980's VCR sort of look, but this razor thin sleek new shape makes me want one all over again. If anybody has any ideas on how to convince Bessie to get me one, drop me a line.

A recent WalMart faux pas showed that the Nintendo DS is releasing at the end of November with a retail price of $199.99. Regardless of the validity of this specific information, several industry analysts agree the Nintendo DS is launching by the end of the year. The trouble is, in this most crowded of Christmas seasons, Nintendo hasn't brought the hype. There's no "gotta-have" flagship title announced that tend to drive these sort of launches. (Then again, the last Nintendo system to have one was the N64's Mario 64.) The noise generated from E3 has subsided and there has been an acute silence on the PR front for one of Nintendo's most important hardware launches to date. Sending a clear message to gamers that the DS is cool and desirable will be difficult to convey with the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by other game companies through the typical media formats this Christmas season. Convincing gamers that they should spend $200+ on new hardware...

Update - Here's a movie of the game from the SCEJ web site. Looks awesome! The second game by the Ico team is Wanda and the Colossus . And the details from Quarter to Three's Japanese wunderkid, Kitsume : In the game there are only three characters the designers characterize as "living" (and one of them they do so vaguely). The rider of the horse, the horse and a girl found in a wasteland altar, who they say of, "Is she living? Is she asleep? It looks like a girl who has completely lost her soul..." So the main character wants to resusciate here somehow and determines to fight the "colossus." The horse will form an important support role and by pressing the R1 button, you'll be able to get a grip onto a colossus. Then you'll be able to try and climb it and find its sweet spot. The designers say they want to make the giant golem-like creatures seem less like monsters and more like mysterious entities, as well as they aim to create the fie...

OK, I was wrong . Pikmin 2 is great and is what the first game should have been. All that was wrong about the rushed, incomplete original is fixed in a beautiful, decadently polished experience. The thirty day time limit of the first game is gone; take your time exploring the worlds and collecting treasure. Once you get the original three Pikmin types, the game opens up to be a refreshingly non-linear experience. Go anywhere, do what you want to do, just get enough money to pay off Olimar's company debt. To replace the tension lost by removing the time limit, the overworlds in Pikmin now have a few dungeon entrances tucked throughout them. Only the Pikmin in your current group can be brought into the dungeon and you have to play it smart because you can't grow new Pikmin underground. The dungeon floors, in a surprisingly turn, are laid out randomly. Most of the time a floor contains a landmark puzzle or enemy encounter, but the position and order of the elements change each tim...

Astro's dashing dodge mob brawling, boss encounters! bland flight; still Treasure.

I stink at Warcraft 3. I enjoy RTSs and can play a competitive game of RoN, but Blizzard's latest strategy game rewards the type of micro-management click click click play that I can't keep up with. I borrowed the game at work and decided that I had to play quickmatches on Battle.net. (Quickmatches, or auto-matchmaking, allow the system to try to provide you an opponent of near equal skill.) The first five or six games were a little rough. OK, very rough. Most games involved an army of a dozen or more giant Undead spiders crashing through my Human town where two grunts and a rifleman die valiantly before I resign. After about 6 crushing defeats, the auto-matchmaking system seemed to say "oh, wow, you DO stink" and the opponents I began matching up with were far more appropriate to my skill, even too easy. Now I'm often the terror with the giant army crashing through my enemy's base; maybe not with the precision and awe-inspiring skill that I succumbed to my...

Clover Studio , responsible for the superlative Viewtiful Joe , has released footage of their latest project, Okami. (28 meg mpeg) While the movie reveals nearly nothing gameplay-wise, the game's amazing art style is gleefully showcased. Clover Studios is trying to render the world of Okami in the form of a moving classical Japanese painting. The environment in the game seems hand painted and, in a clever use of bump-mapping, Okami presents the "background" of the world is as piece of parchment. Most games attempt to develop an immediately engrossing visual style through photo-realistic rendering. To my knowledge, Okami challenges the player visually more than any game to date. The entire artistic conceipt is an attempt to make the player believe that they are looking at a moving parchment painting on a video monitor.

Bioware's latest RPG always interested me because of the stellar reviews and decent word of mouth, but it had an uphill battle to fight in my mind. Star Wars is dead to me after the ruthless debunking of my childhood myth during Episode I and II. I've never liked Bioware's games and I played it on the PC. Not that there's anything wrong with the PC, aside from the 30+ minute installs, the patches, the crashes, and (what I assume is) a poor interface conversion from the XBox. While installing yet another driver to prevent KotOR from crashing when trying to load a save game I kept thinking I would be playing happily right now if I tried the game on XBox. Oh well. The first hour of KotOR fits the quality level established by Episode I & II. The player starts in a starship under attack by Sith forces, fast paced John Williams-style music soaring and battles erupting in corridors. What is the player doing? Wading through clumsy, ...

Here's a list of the games and there's some great ones in the lot: Frequency, Ico, Viewtiful Joe, Ikaruga, TimeSplitters 2, even Rez(!). Ideally, you can pick up half a dozen of the best games ever made for $30, but my experience with these sales at Circuit City has not been positive. The selection at my nearby stores has been poor and the staff uninformed and overworked. The allegedly on-sale items were not separated from the rest of the merchandise and some items still rung-up at the full price. Hope you have better luck than I've had. ;)

Wow. It hurts me to say that since I'm such a snob of the mainstream, but the biggest Hollywood blockbuster this summer is well written, well directed, and well acted. I found the first movie to be uneven; interesting moral quandaries for Spiderman but Dafoe's Green Goblin was overplayed and unsatisfying. My hope for the sequel came from Peter Parker's closing monologue about the struggle to choose to do good. The second movie dives right into these issues with Peter Parker struggling to maintain his personal and financial life while performing the endless tasks required of a superhero. The conflict hinted to at the end of the first movie erupts to a climax, making for a gripping internal struggle. The super-villains in Spiderman movies are nearly footnotes; they are physical threat that forces Spiderman to make the decisions that make the movie emotionally fulfilling. Everyone knows Spiderman will win the day and die only when the movies fail to be profitable, but the choi...

Gamespot interviewed Michael Pachter , the senior vice president of research for investment banking and brokerage firm Wedbush Morgan Securities. While his title might suggest that he doesn't know anything about gaming, his responses to questions are insightful and exceptionally opinionated - in a way I like! Here's on of my favorite snippets: GS: What's the conventional wisdom say when looking at Microsoft's decision to can its sports lineup? Is it that they can't compete with EA's sports lineup? MP: It's not just that no one can compete with EA. Microsoft [games] suck! I guess their tennis game was good--Top Spin. Microsoft should can all games that they developed and should have bought somebody who knows how to do it. GS: Have they bought anyone in recent history that knows what they're doing? MP: The Rare guys were great developers for the N64, but they didn?t do anything for these guys. [Microsoft] made some really bad decisions. T...

This cool toy is the type of thing that I've been dying to do for years but really don't have the ear to get it right. A fantastic way to spend 5 minutes or the better part of an hour. Josh Nimoy has a number of other cool toys to play with; I especially enjoy his Textension project that plays with text as 3D objects. I actually did do a project like this.

According to EuroGamer , Sammy, a game publisher most known for its pachinko gambling machines, owns 22 percent of Sega and will purchase the remaining 78 percent by the end of the year. And the knife to the stomach: Satomi-san, who will be president of the new merged company, has previously expressed his desire to see Sega focusing increasingly on the arcade market, and hopes to use the company's development talent and wealth of intellectual property to build on the success of Sammy's low-cost Atomiswave arcade system. Will the creative nucleus of Sega survive yet another blow to their collective pride? Probably, but with an ever-increasing arcade-centric approach, will anyone outside Japan be able to tell? Wise from thy gwave! Sorry. Had to do that.

SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium I played so much Match of the Millennium since Friday that I developed a tiny blister on my thumb from the fireballs, dragon punches, and spinning pile-drivers I've been landing. Or trying to land, at least. This potentially weekend crippling injury hasn't stopped me from continuing to bust some heads, mainly because Match of the Millennium is one of the best handheld games I've played. MotM is to the Neo Geo Pocket Color what Tetris, Link's Awakening, Mario Golf, and Advance Wars are to Nintendo handhelds. SNK's flagship title for their handheld is exceptionally polished and full featured. There's no shortage of things to explore in the game; there are a few dozen franchise characters from both Capcom and SNK to play, solo, tag team, and 3 character team modes, a few different fighting styles, and a Olympic themed mini-game system that are great to play when you only have a couple of minutes to get yo...

Every E3, there's usually one or two little gems that I can't wait to get my hands on. This year it comes as Odama from Yoot Saito, the mastermind behind Seaman, for the Nintendo GameCube. Here's a snippit on Odama from GameSpot: . . . Odama is fundamentally a pinball game, and bears all the basic traits of a good pinball game--realistic physics, the ability to tilt the board, and so on. However, the pinball happens to take place on a historical battlefield. And what you need to do, in order to help your army achieve victory against superior enemy odds, is use the odama--a gigantic, metal ball--to bulldoze enemy forces, buildings, and defenses, so that you can clear a path for your army's siege party to reach the enemy warlord. How's that for strange? Who says RTS games can't be innovative?

From the new trailer the next Pixar movie is going to be, wait for it, incredible. It certainly has a more teenage feel than Pixar's earlier work with some serious Hollywood style action sequences and lots of explosions! I'm dying to see it.

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect 16 player multiplayer on the PS2 version. This is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Blessing because the TimeSplitters series needs to be online like hot chocolate needs marshmallows; curse because the PS2 version of TimeSplitters 2 is crippled by load times up four times as long as the other platforms, plus it ain't nearly as pretty. If Future Perfect somehow supported XBox Live (a possibility with EA's "surprise" announcement of their support of Microsoft's online gaming system), that would be reason enough for me to buy the system. Well, Full Spectrum Warrior may cause me to break down anyways. . . Second Sight Its hard to determine which I'm more excited about: the next TimeSplitters or Free Radical's first non-fps with an actual storyline. Looks like the game has psychic powers, stealth, and some gunplay - rarely a boring mix! Here's an SAT analogy for you geeks out there - Factor 5 is to Hoth Missions a...

Looks cool, but the IGN article that came with the picture has me a little scared: What was wrong with the original Prince? Camera, pacing, easy enemies, no boss fights, sand creatures who felt fluffy...? Prince of Persia 2 promises to remedy this -- all of this. Combat will be the biggest change. Ubi is touting a new "freeform" combat system that will allow gamers to string together any attack or move to any other. The result is rumored to be something akin to Tony Hawk, not necessarily in terms of specific control and button layout, but rather in how it will be possible to move from a swipe to a stab to a summersault to a rail slide, or heel grab, or whatever. I've agreed that the camera had issues, but I thought they did have boss fights? And since when do boss fights make for a better game? Who thought the creatures in the first game were fluffy? I also didn't mind the game's "ease", I had issue with the poor feedback and widely varying d...

I assume thanks to being a Google blogger, I was invited to use their new GMail system. What's cool about it: they provide every account with 1 gig of searchable storage space. Downside: they peruse your mail to provide ads at the top of the page. That sort of information could be used for all sorts of nefarious plots and plans, but could they be any worse than what Microsoft is already doing to Hotmail users? Oh, and I got scott.lewis@gmail.com . I actually got my own name. Rulin'!

A friend from work let me borrow a few Hellboy comics and wow, good stuff. Mike Mignola's paranormal storylines can require more than usual suspension of disbelief, yet his engaging, witty characters, brilliant gothic art, and amazing page layout more than make up for it.

Wow - Day 2 of GDC coverage nearly a month late! Game Design: A Love Story - Raph Koster, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman A lightweight session with Warren Spector, Raph Koster, and Will Wright all designing games about "love." Raph Koster blatantly ignored the instructions of "no interactive fiction" and created a multiplayer romance novel game called "Passion's Tender Embrace" where people play out different parts of a generic romance novel online. Warren Spector didn't finish a game idea claiming "I just can't design a game that doesn't have guns." He discussed what he thought was needed to make a game where the player falls in love with a computer character. He clearly did a lot of research on the subject but the design area he was approaching was very difficult and possibly intractable. Will Wright made (yet another) sublime presentation. He proposed a mod called "Collateral Romance" for Battlefield 194...

Bessie says: "Don't listen to Scott. My singing rocks! He is just jealous that I am the next Whitney Houston. Thank you. -Bessie" Does that make me Bobby Brown? Do I need to check her into rehab?

Serendipity! Last weekend I was doing the dishes singing FreezePop's " Science Genius Girl " and Bessie said that she wanted to play Karaoke Revolution to sing it with music. I immediately tried to defuse the situation. I dearly love my wife, but I must either be out of the apartment or unconscious when she dons the KR headset. So I humbly recommended Harmonix's sublime Frequency as an alternative, because the "Science Genius Girl" appears in that game as well. Shockingly she agreed and I got her in front of the PS2 sans headset. Bessie had some difficulty completing the initial few songs in Frequency. Her opinion of the game was not improved when the game actually booed her if she failed a level. Frantically struggling to keep this dim light of gaming interest glowing, I hastily replaced Frequency with its successor, Amplitude . Harmonix mentioned in its post mortem that they did significant usability testing on Frequency in order to make Amplitude a m...

I ignored Mind Control's little web game when I passed by it at the IGF . Something about the weird dude on the left side of the screen and the scarab with sparkles freaked me out. It won the "Innovation in Game Design" award and I thought I should give it a shot. Oasis is Civ on speed after a few mountain dews. Cities, roads, mines, technology, research, armies, barbarian hordes come flying at you at a blazing pace. Everything is simplified to make you want to play fast and furiously. The tension between exploring the map, building roads between your cities, and investing more workers to do research is tight and enjoyable.

Arriving in Japan Winter 2004! Hopefully in the US by Summer 2005 if the localization can get done by then. There was some images of Japanese ads that I linked to, but they've been taken down, so I have to link to the lame ign galleries . The images aren't very clear. :( Edit: Some blessed soul translated the previous advertisement for us to peruse. Hurray!

Here's the 1up article outlining the Next Big Thing for Intelligent Systems. Can Nintendo R&D 1 do no wrong? Consider that Advance Wars 2 is the worst game they've made in the last 10 years, and Advance Wars 2 one of the best console strategy games. I think Bessie would like to send a special "thank you" to Intelligent Systems by developing two of the three biggest gaming time sinks in the last few years. (Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Rise of Nations, natch.) Plus, there's supposed to be an announcement about the next Fire Emblem game sometime in April. Hopefully it'll be in the US by the end of the year. . . Here's some screenshots from IGN . Yeah, I know, Day 2 and 3 of GDC isn't up yet. So sue me.

Carmack or Miziguchi ? Doom 3 or Rez? Sega's old wonderkid wins a "no contest" in my book. The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is this afternoon and Game Hotel is tonight! The Experimental Gameplay Workshop was my favorite session in previous years and I can't wait to see what new side projects people have been working on. I'll try to write tonight if I see anything worth mentioning.

Aside from some outrageously stupid talks and Microsoft's keynote that turned out to be a press conference, I would say one of the best GDC days I had. Risk and Return - Masahiro Sakurai Sakurai recently left Nintendo and is now an independent developer. He was the lead designer of the first few Kirby games and the Smash Bros series at Nintendo. I think he was one of the people that made Nintendo great for so many years. Unlike most Japanese presenters at GDC, Sakurai's presentation was well organized, had an interesting, generally applicable thesis, and the slides were brilliant. The talks focus was how risk and reward systems in games are tied together; the more risky a situation is in a game, the greater the reward can be generated from overcoming it. The example that I can think of is having your ship abducted in Galaga. It is a highly risky move that you can bet your whole game on, but the rewards of successfully reclaiming your captured ship makes the game mecha...

What the heck is up with Pikmin 2? The first Pikmin game was an interesting take on a console RTS/puzzle game; flawed, but well worth playing. I played Pikmin 2 at E3 and it was so similar that I had to remind myself I was playing the sequel. Now a year later more screenshots from IGN and Pikmin 2 looks. . . almost exactly the same . I was hoping N would do something to turn this title around and give it more reason to exist than to fill up an increasingly vacant release schedule.

1up has published an incomplete, but compelling list of highlights of Sony's internal development teams consistent weirdness . As much as I want to hate Sony, I love PaRappa, Frequency, and Ico far too much to complain about their dominance of the console domain. If you're going to use the money you make from all those bazillion copies of soulless third party drivel to create a few beacons of creative light, well, I hate to say it, but long live the king.

Thoughts on games I've recently played: Prince of Persia - UbiSoft took Ico and made it all Hollywood. Know what? It isn't a dumbed-down knock-off but a carefully crafted homage with enough popular elements to make the game style appeal to a broader audience. The game features a rewind system that I can't imagine playing another platformer without. The platforming itself is darn good - Bessie often commented on how cool it looked as I was playing through it. In the included making-of feature, they say the Prince in PoP has more animations than any other game character and it is hard to argue the point after seeing the game in motion. The camera system of the game is bipolar; randomly switching from functional and cinematic to downright ornery and back again. Combat is also a let-down for such a well polished game. The Prince fights breathtakingly, but playing it feels sloppy and rarely second nature. Beyond Good and Evil - BG&E is an amazing game that has been tragica...

As much as I love a new unique game, here are some sequels I can't wait to get my hands on: New Fire Emblem ! To be announced in April, I hope the game sold well enough in the US to make localizing the game worth the money. I'm still playing my favorite game of 2003 and I'm looking forward to the next adventure. Viewtiful Joe 2 ?! This is only a rumor, but I'm more surprised than I should be about Capcom developing a sequel. I consider Viewtiful Joe to be a masterpiece, and unfortunately, it has sold like one. Almost all my favorite recent games (Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, Rez, Frequency, Amplitude, Fire Emblem, etc) have not found a large enough audience to be profitable. In that regard, I'm very excited that one of the best games of last year has been given another chance to find its home in the heart of mainstream gaming, or at least a larger audience than the first. On the other hand, who am I kidding? This is Crapcom , the masters of destroying the memo...

World Soccer Winning Eleven 7 International . 15 syllables of nonsense, one amazing futbol game. Before I start coating the game with praise, a fair warning: the menus are the very definition of byzantine, the graphics and animation are sub-par, loading times aggrivating, the tutorials oppressive, and the commentary starts repeating within the first couple games. No matter; when you're running on the pitch you can feel the magic. The controls are analog and smooth as butter, and the game design the clearly illustrates the cost/benefit of certain maneuvers. When you lose the ball, you always know why. I typically don't like sports games but I'm starting to love this one.

Pictures from Christmas. I swear I must have been on crack, but I find these to be funny. A very special demon-possessed Christmas morning with Vicki and Tracy. Vicki gaps in shock, while Tracy, no stranger to hearing evil cackling in her head, looks to make a move on Vicki's Christmas present. Vicki got a Panda hat from some store. Bessie et al thought it would be funny if I wore it, held her stuffed sea lion, and looked really sad. As a whole, I do believe the picture looks sad, intentionally or not.

Bessie and I had Mark, John, and Ladzer (pronouced la-zhay ) down for dinner and gaming. Bessie made fried eggrolls for the first time and they turned out extremely well - I ate far too many and I think everyone else really enjoyed them as well. We played some Call My Bluff , Boggle, and EyeToy , but I had the most fun with Mamma Mia and Bushido Blade. Mamma Mia Kevin, being an uncanny great gift giver, gave me this card game for Christmas along with the awesome Stikfas guy I posted about earlier. Again, like the action figure, I was a bit skeptical when I got it but it turned out to something I really enjoyed. I like finding games that fit situations in my life, and Mamma Mia is a great fit for an informal party game. Mamma Mia is a pizza-making game by Uwe Rosenberg , the mastermind behind Bohnanza , one of my favorite trading games and an experience that I always walk away from with a smile. I stink at describing game rules, so here's how BoardGameGeek summar...