As I start to remember the games I've sold back for store credit or eBay monies, I'll start jotting them down in der blogenheimer. Of course, I can't remember everything I've sold back but again -- it'll be a growing list. Here's part one of who-the-hell knows.

Manhunt 2 (Wii) - I have to admit: Part of me wanted to buy Manhunt 2 because I was interested in seeing just how "terrible" it was that it had to be rated AO, banned, and subsequently neutered. Considering that -- according to what I heard at least -- the only things that were really censored were the killing blows, I figured I'd see if there was anything egregious about the rest of the content that was more offensive than the original Manhunt. As I mentioned in an editorial a while ago, I now believe that this AO rating was simply a reaction to the previous uproar over Rockstar's games -- unless they cut out a LOT of stuff that the public never got to hear about. Nevertheless, I looked online for a video that showed the un-censored version of the PSP port and... well, really, people, there was nothing worse about Manhunt 2's content when compared to the original Manhunt.

With that out of the way, then, what made me sell it back was the complete lack of compelling gameplay or design. It simply didn't feel intense or gritty. At times, it even felt silly. I found myself growing impatient with the game, running around willy-nilly and then just jumping into a shadow if some clown saw me. It just felt like the developers tried to force the dirty, screwed-up motif of the first game into this second one without taking the time to look back and say, "Does this work? Does this feel forced? Is it getting campy, even?" I'm highly enjoying the first Manhunt via STEAM, because the stealth gameplay somehow feels more refined. It's hard to really put a finger on it, but in the end, there really was just no reason for me to keep Manhunt 2. Well, maybe except for the motion-controlled kills, which were really fun. Then again, I look at the fact that the store credit I got back was put towards my purchase of Final Fantasy IV DS... yeah.

Animal Crossing: Wild World (NDS) - At the time I was pondering selling Animal Crossing: Wild World back (which -- by the way -- along with Manhunt 2 and the soon-to-be-mentioned Nintendogs went towards the FFIV DS fund), I thought: "I never play this game anymore. I don't ever feel the need to play it again." It was that simple. There was nothing wrong with AC:WW. It was actually quite fun for the time that I put into it. However, it was also quite aimless, and that's what ultimately made me put it down. I stopped caring about getting bells to pay off my mortgage and started caring more about getting a Not Guilty verdict for Maya Fey, or trying to come to grips with Metroid Prime: Hunters' awful level design (at some point that might be on the chopping block, too, now that I think about it), or trying to unlock ROB in Mario Kart DS (never happened, sadly), or conquering opposing armies in Age of Empires: Rise of Kings (a great DS miniaturizing of the PC version; I very much recommend it). It's ultimately why I ended up disliking The Sims, after which I built four walls around my Sim in a one-tile space and set it to Fast Forward (since then I've never been at all interested in any Sims games).

Nintendogs: Chihuahua and Friends (NDS) - When I turned on my copy of Nintendogs, I saw Homer, my boxer, walking around with his little bandana. No fleas, surprisingly, even though I hadn't spent time with him in literally over 2 years. I felt a pang of guilt, knowing that I was about to erase this file to sell the game back. Then I realized that were Homer real, and that if I had treated him in real life the way I treated him in this game, he'd pretty much be dead right now (remember: TWO YEARS). Then I realized, after looking at my sleeping cat, that HOMER IS NOT REAL. I then finally realized that if I gave a flying flubb about taking care of this fake dog by way of this admittedly fun non-game, then I would have done so. Turns out, I'd rather take care of a real pet and play games on my DS. Nintendogs was lots of fun for the time I put into it, but I just didn't care to put time into it anymore and frankly, with all of these great DS games I have in my backlog, I never will. Bye Homer! Hi Final Fantasy IV DS, and damn you for ruining my backlog hopes and dreams!

Diablo and Diablo II (Windows) - I think I got conned on this one. Some jerk told me my discs weren't working and so he sent them back to me. Anyway, I sold them to another eBayer, and I couldn't be happier for it. Diablo is one of those things that I start liking a LOT, getting into the lore like any well-behaved geek, reading about its backstory, trying to eke details out of every nook and cranny in the game. And then after a few weeks I realize how much my index finger hurts, then I realize how much I hate doing nothing but pulling the Final Fight tactic of walking around and isolating each critter (left click) or waiting by the door and then hacking (left click) them to pieces (left click), one (left click) by (left click) one (left click). Which begs the question: What is playing a videogame, at its rawest core, apart from using your thumbs and fingers to repeatedly press a series of buttons? Why should I be so upset at Diablo when something like, say, Planescape Torment (I love that game), is very similar but with just less rapid and less frequent clicking? Then it hit me: I never, ever, ever, ever used my brain once while playing Diablo. So I stopped playing it. Then Diablo II came out, and my roommates in college were all over it, and so I forgot that I eventually hated the first game and omg i have to go to teh store and buy teh gam omg zaweosmsez and.... after a few weeks my index finger hurt again, and my brain was atrophying, and I hated Diablo II too. So eventually I eBayed them.

Epilogue: With Diablo III on the horizon, I felt pangs of regret. "Maybe I was too harsh on this game. Maybe I should give it another shot." I go through these things, you know. I was seriously contemplating giving Final Fantasy VIII another shot before I remembered that every battle came down to incessant Drawing and 9923984-second-long summons. But Diablo III was coming out! I should give it another try! Should -- nay -- must! So while I was in my hotel room after coming back from work one night, I downloaded the Diablo single-player demo which happily worked on my Windows XP laptop. For the first 30 minutes, I told myself, "Boy, am I glad I gave this another shot!" After that, my index finger piped up again and questioned why, after seven years, I had to bring back all of its repressed memories. My brain also gave me a wistful, pained look, and at that point it hit me: "You hate this game. REMEMBER?" And oh yes, I remembered. I remembered all too well.

Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii) - I was so sorely disappointed by this buffoonery. I was presented with summarily horrendous voice acting upon putting the disc in, but that was ok -- it's Sonic. Of course it's going to stink up the acting job. The art, though, was enchanting. The in-game visuals, while not "next-gen", were smooth, fast and beautiful nonetheless. Even the initially awkward, tilty gameplay was easy to get used to, and I was having a blast just going through levels at top speed, collecting rings and bashing enemies with my airborne attack. Then the stupid missions came in. "Collect 50 rings!" "Complete this section without getting hit once!" "Collect 50 rings without getting hit once!" "Find five special gems!" If you put all four of these goals into Babelfish and translated them from Sonic to English, the result would be: "You go back play level you just play real fast and had funs with, only this times you do it again! Many times! Very slow! Very not like the Sonic that is good, but like the Sonic that is bad!" Yeah. I hate you, Sonic and the Secret Rings, and I hope you fester and rot in the Used Games bin that I subjected you to.

More as I think of 'em.

SPOILERS for those who've never played FFIV in any of its incarnations (SNES, GBA, DS), just so ya know.

Alright -- perhaps I should change "musings" to "mild complaints", since this post will be focusing on my quibbles with the otherwise largely enjoyable Final Fantasy IV remake for the Nintendo DS. By all rights, the treatment is fantastic: Augments add a little depth to character development and take away the odd pool-party "hey, at the end, let's just get everyone back into the game" mentality of the GBA version. Not that I really minded that much, but it just didn't seem "FFIV" -- I kind of like having this new, additional development system over just letting you pull back old characters. I also like how everyone is represented in 3D -- so far I've not encountered one character who looks off-putting when compared to his/her 16-bit counterpart. Finally, the challenge is tasty. Some of the bosses are just vicious, even moreso than they used to be, and for once I actually got angry at the game because of one particularly cheap instance where I got hit by two debilitating frost attacks in a row in one battle on the Tower of Zot, killing my party and wiping out 30 minutes of progress.

There a few small things I take issue with, though:

- Choosing a spell in battle is less friendly a process. In the older versions, if you realize you fat-fingered and selected a wrong spell, you could press B and it would kick you back to the Spell menu with the cursor pointing to the spell you last chose. On the Nintendo DS, it kicks you all the way back out to the main battle menu, and when you choose the Spell menu again, the cursor rests on the first spell in the menu. This completely removes the ability to recover from a slip of the finger in a split second. Being that I play on Active battle with the fastest setting on, the extra second or two it takes to re-scroll through the spell list can be vital.

- Swapping rows versus defending feels kludgy. In the older versions, if you wanted to switch rows, you'd hit left on the d-pad in the battle menu and then press A. To defend, you'd do the same except you'd hit right instead of left on the d-pad. Here, both commands are allocated to the extended menu, which is accessible by pressing right. Now, whether your cursor appears on Defend or Swap Row depends entirely on where it was before you pressed right. Instead of always appearing at the top of the extended menu, or instead of the old way of choosing between Row or Defend being a no-fail proposition (since the two were completely separated from each other), now you have to get used to figuring out where the cursor will be when you open up that extended menu. It's not hard by any means, but it's very much a nuisance when you're trying to get used to it. More than once, when thinking and then settling on a decision to defend, I swapped rows instead of defending like I wanted to, putting my weaker back-row characters in the line of fire.

- Some of the leveling is borked, or at least one instance is. In the old days, my benchmark for getting Rosa back in the Tower of Zot was a 720HP. (Cecil was always around 1300 or so.) That was what I got her back at the very, very first time I ever played through the SNES version in 1992, and on subsequent replays I'd try to level-up so that I could get her back at a higher HP level. Whenever it dipped below that, I knew I wasn't doing my due diligence with my leveling. Now, I just reached that point again in this game. Cecil is at level 39 and has already eclipsed the 2000HP mark. Even Tellah -- who in years past I have NEVER ever gotten to anything above 700HP before he died -- was at 1045HP before he iced himself with the failed Meteor attempt. So one would expect Rosa to come back at a healthy mid-30s level, with 1000HP or more, at least. WRONG. She comes back at level 26 and is barely pushing 600HP. Kain, meanwhile, is only at 32, with barely over 1000HP himself. (Meanwhile everyone else is strongarming with numbers like 1300, 1900 and 2000.)

- The voice acting is inconsistent. Cecil's actor -- who is Yuri Lowenthal, by the way, the man who starred as The Prince in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Two thrones -- is remarkably and disappointingly flat in some instances. After the magnificent job he did as The Prince, and considering that Cecil is the game's lead character, it's just plain disappointing. Also, Cid sounds like Yoda at times. Rosa, meanwhile, sounds like she's 87 years old. (Kain and Golbez, however, are completely badass. I love the voicing choices made for them.)

- The 3D representation of the dungeons is great, but the camera distance is somewhat close to the map. Therefore, you really lose the expansive feel that the old tiled view in the 16-bit versions gave. It feels almost claustrophobic. Now, this is where the lower-screen map comes in, and by no means is it "worse" -- but when this is your first true console RPG (though true, Final Fantasy Legend was my truly first RPG -- but that joint was on GB), and you're so used to how this game looked from the old days, it's a bit jarring.

- Airship and chocobo travel is incredibly slow when compared to the old days. There's not much more to it than to say that these travel methods have all tested my patience.

Almost every single one of these gripes has to do with the fact that I'm so used to the way Final Fantasy IV worked on the SNES and then on the GBA. I had that game down to a science (almost, well, at least relative to all the other games I've played) and it's just jarring to see how it works now. As I alluded to during my camera distance gripe, these aren't necessarily "bad" things -- they're just really hard to adjust to for me. I will say that the way the magic menu works in battle IS a "bad" thing because it really does cut down on efficiency, but that's about it. Anyway, the point is, I really, really love this remake -- but even as it's the "best" version for my tastes so far, it still falls short of being the "perfect" version for my tastes. Such small tweaks go a long way.

Yadda yadda hundreth episode took way long to edit technical problems blah blah. We rattle through 100 items of... stuff. Worst games. Favorite moments. Significant industry moments. And stuff. Oh just listen to us talk nonsense in what is possibly the most aimless celebratory podcast in the univArse! But seriously -- we apologize for the long time coming. Files were messed up. Then files were fixed but then made too big. And laptops broke, too. A whole bunch of stuff. So we hope you enjoy this episode. It's absolutely not worth the wait because we're awesome and you aren't. ONE HUNDRED baby! Spartans! What is your occupation! "Blah! Blah!" Yeah. That's right.

The lone musical interlude courtesy of -- and no, it's NOT Chrono Trigger -- a whole bunch of mish-mashed NES tunes from four of the crappy games we mentioned. Can you guess what they're from?

UPDATE: Download fixed. I have no friggin' clue why the links haven't worked since the early 90's episodes. Instead of linking to an MP3 they link to some void javascript. Anyway, it's fixed now, and that's all that matters.

Download here.
File size: 54.4 MB
Running time: 1:53:21

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I'm a fan of this beta layout (beta.gamespot.com). It's not perfect, and I'm personally not sure about how much I like the left sidebar for navigating between different things. But aesthetically I'm digging the cleaner look. I'm a fan of the understated sty|e (i.e. completely plain) of the title bars for each section, though I think they could be smaller and still be as bold and effective as they are. I'm also happy that the site is finally moving to a wider template. The feed on the right is nothing original but definitely lends a more stalker, Facebook feel, one which many people seem to be raving (both positively and negatively) about these days. What I like most is how the blogs are condensed and collapsed so that you're required to hit a jump. It may seem counter-intuitive to require users to click an extra time to get to the content, but I like how it avoids creating an overly long (vertical-wise) chain of text that scrolls down for ages.

Just a warning: It's in beta, and thus it's performing a little slowly, so don't expect completely zippy browsing.

Good news everyone /Hubert Farnsworth

Well, good news for anyone who gives a rot about our podcast. It turns out that we don't need to re-record our 100th episode. However I still had some snags along the way, so only today can I actually get down to editing the thing hardcore. So hopefully you should see it up after this weekend. Is it worth waiting for? Well, it's just us rambling as we always do, cussing and yelping and listening to Tony berate his wife, who berates him right the hell back and then some. So yeah, it's worth waiting for. In the meantime, keep sending in your questions. I am leaning on NOT recording tomorrow to give myself a few extra hours to work things out, but who knows. Send stuff in anyway: mailbag AT trigames DOT net.

So much for quick standardization.

Last week I commented briefly (or not-so-briefly, depending on how long a two-paragraph comment seems to you) about how Wii Motion Plus, a technology I personally find great, needs to be standardized and handled correctly lest it simply become wasted potential. Then I gave them credit for at least bundling it in with Wii Sports Resort, thereby automatically putting it in the hands of several consumers, instead of just settling with hanging blisterpacks of the thing up on store shelves for people to buy randomly. It wasn't ideal, but at least by bundling it in with something, this takes it one step closer to either (a) bundling the thing into systems or (b) incorporating the tech into future Wii remotes.

Turns out, it might not matter much if you want to see it in your favorite third party's games. They're pretty pissed, it seems, and I can completely understand why: Nintendo kept this thing mum from them.

Excuse me, for a second, while I blow my second and third gaskets.

All right. Now that I've calmed down, I can understand a few things:

1) Nintendo doesn't "have to" do anything, least of all make its third party publishers happy. People are buying Wiis and Nintendo DSes in droves. Wii Fit is already hard to find. Wii Play is still friggin' in the top ten in NPD sales every. Single. Month. Most of us aren't Nintendo's market at this point -- the people who buy Wii Play, Wii Fit, and other FIRST PARTY products are. (Well, there's that little thing about Guitar Hero III... but I digress.)

2) Nintendo is making money off of item (1) hand over fist. Wiis sell at a profit as opposed to a loss. If all Nintendo did was sell a Wii and a copy of Wii Play, without selling any other titles, third party or otherwise, it'd still be making some semblance of money (though of course that's not the ideal situation).

3) Also off of item (1), we can derive that people will buy Wii Sports Resort any-friggin-way. If Nintendo never so much as got a third party developer involved in its business, the mainstream market would still likely have its hands on Wii Motion Plus attachments everywhere.

Ok. Now, take items (1), (2) and (3). Ball them up in your fist and -- are you watching? repeat after me! -- throw that **** out the window.

I'm betting that enough of you Wii owners are like me in that you want good third party offerings on your Wii. Think about something like The Force Unleashed with Wii Motion Plus, for instance. Think about another game like Zak and Wiki, now MORE accurate and immersive than ever before. How about a baseball game that tracks the height and rotation of your swing?

But now, we have to rely on third parties to not be angry to the point where they decide not to develop for the thing. Look at the quote from the ArsTechnica blog I linked to:

"We asked several third-party Wii developers about the Wii Motion Plus, and the general feeling was one of annoyance and betrayal. None of them said they had any advance notice about the peripheral, and we were told that they were as surprised as everyone else when Nintendo revealed its existence on stage," GameInformer is reporting. "That lack of prior notice means that, aside from Nintendo's own roster of games, users won't likely see any support for the device for at least six to nine months."

Now, perhaps the thing isn't coming out for six to nine months anyway -- Wii Sports Resort, with which Wii Motion Plus is debuting, comes out in Spring 2009. I'm not so worried about the time frame quoted as I am in the mindset of the third parties who feel annoyed and betrayed. Nintendo is in a much better place than Sega was during the Saturn launch, but nevertheless it smells very much like that situation. Remember that day? When Sega surprise-announced the availability of the Saturn had been pushed forward to the day of that very same announcement? "Hey guess what! You get this early!" But in doing so it only had a short list of retailers, and those who were left out were pissed.

This feels kinda like that. Oh hey -- we're working on this thing that, you know, you could have used for The Force Unleashed or at least made plans to, but yeah we didn't think you needed to know until now. What's that? You're almost done with the game and it's coming out in the fall and had you had advance notice you might have held off and put in some Wii Motion Plus action in there? Oh that's okay; don't worry about it. We'll still be selling tons of Wii Play this holiday season. What'd you say? That doesn't help you at all? That's fine -- we don't really care anyway.

I admit to making mountains out of molehills when problems like this arise. But looking at it from the developer's perspective, this is like a slap to the face. It feels disrespectful. Doing the right thing could only have helped Nintendo's success even more. Furthermore, it would have made ME happy in knowing that the company responsible for some of my favorite software decided to do the right thing and not succumb to its own arrogance (refer to Penny Arcade comic again). Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe in the end, third parties -- despite their anger -- will see Wii Sports Resort sell and realize that they have to hurry up and do something. Though, really, wouldn't it be nice if Nintendo had given them some preliminary dev kits by now? They wouldn't have to "hurry", leading to better games, and sooner, instead of either getting a rushed piece of crap carnival minigame collection not far after Spring 2009 or having to wait until 2010 to see what -- say -- Ubisoft could do with the thing.

I'm going back to my trailer.

Thought bubble: Would it be stretching to call the vaporized Phantom console "ahead of its time"?

I just read that THQ will be offering its catalog on GameTap, Turner Broadcasting's videogame digital distribution service. That includes Titan Quest, whose "Gold" version I had not two weeks ago purchased off of Steam for $20. Steam, for anyone who's been living under a rock, is Half Life developer Valve's own digital distribution service. The differences between the two services include games offered and pricing model (GameTap is subscription-based and offers some older console games; Steam is pay-per-game and offers only PC titles), but the message is the same: "Welcome to the age of gaming where you don't need to leave the house to get product."

The age of digital distribution is a fascinating one in which we can get what we want on-demand just by lifting a finger or two. For a long while, though, some of us remained skeptical that we'd see a reliable conduit for delivering our beloved videogames. We countered the iTunes and HBO On Demand arguments with the simple issues of size and bandwidth. MP3s are a few megabytes a pop while games can fill nine-gigabyte DVDs. Movies are (a) streamed, and (b) delivered over the same dedicated line used by our cable provider, not via the internet; games have to process a motherlode of variables.

Yet with Steam and GameTap, we're seeing two robust, high-quality services that manage your downloads efficiently -- and don't require you to install a single game once you've downloaded it, because it'll install itself. With Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, Sony's Playstation Network, and Wii's Virtual Console and WiiWare services, this same "instantly-available, no fuss, no muss" mentality carries over to our living room home consoles. Now we're seeing glimpses of a future where we won't even need intense hardware to play games that stream in from a server and run out of browser windows, with Quake Live and Instant Action providing a hands-on look at what we can look forward to. People have already been able to play Lair on their PSPs -- albeit not perfectly -- from the comfort of their toilets, thanks to the Playstation 3's Remote Play functionality. Can you imagine former Sony executive Phil Harrison's statement about a disc-less Playstation 4 -- made as recently as last year but still sneered at (I plead guilty as well) -- coming true, not only with regards to discs, but maybe hardware as well? Could we see a future where we need not buy hardware on which to play our games, but merely a simple box that connects to a remote server which does all the processing for us?

I've thinking about all of this on and off again, and in a fit of crow-eating I always find myself tracing these marvels back to one oft-mocked, failed endeavor: the Phantom console from Infinium Labs, now named Phantom Entertainment. Perhaps you've heard of it (no, the first line of this editorial doesn't count). Way back in 2002, a brash man by the name of Tim Roberts founded Infinium and announced to the world that he'd spearhead the development and distribution of a console that couldn't accept discs -- nay, wouldn't need discs. Everything was available online and ready to download for a subscription fee. Oh, and hey, it wouldn't require you to manually install the software you downloaded. You'd be capturing the essence of consoles for a seamless PC gaming experience.

Of course back then, the entire thing was a laughingstock. Quite a few people, myself included, didn't believe that the plan was feasible. Like so many other shortsighted dissenters, my gripe was that I was unconvinced that someone would want to sit through the hours it took to download a gigabytes-large game (...uh, Titan Quest found its home on my hard drive in 120 minutes while I was asleep, and furthermore it installed itself...) when they could drive to the store and get the game in far less time (...erm, have you seen gas prices lately?...) and have a physical disc in hand that wasn't contingent on a hard drive staying healthy (...see, Steam offers backups you can burn to disc...).

Rewind for a second and look at those parenthetical statements. For all the derision that it received back then, the Phantom console's completely disc-less plan has actually come to fruition in some capacity, and it works incredibly well. It's just that it's not coming from Phantom. That's not to say that the Phantom should have been a guaranteed success. Not all of its detractors were necessarily worried about the digital-distribution-only scheme. For instance, some intrepid investigators came up with highly suspicious findings when trying to get a closer glimpse of the company. It was also easy to see that, from a hardware standpoint, it just wouldn't hold up to the demands of the constantly shifting PC gaming landscape. After all, with such meager specs being offered up-front, how often would you have to open up your Phantom to get it re-jiggered for the latest, hottest games? Could you even open the thing in the first place, considering the whole "console experience" idea?

Yet, regardless of its failures as a hardware device, the concept that drove it is alive and kicking. No, Tim Roberts and company shouldn't be praised for highly flawed execution and lack of foresight in other areas. To be sure, it's not as if Infinium Labs was the only company that saw a future in digital distribution, either. It is, however, interesting to note how the driving force behind a failure as massive as the Phantom has become as successful and popular as it is today. Perhaps with the backing of brighter minds and a more effective, well-timed plan, we'd be seeing Phantom consoles in living rooms today instead of the empty shell of a product we're left with.

No matter -- the Phantom's spirit (is that redundant or what?) unwittingly lives on in our broadband-connected Xbox 360s, Playstation 3s, Wiis and PCs. For all of the things this joke of a console had going against it, the Phantom got that one thing right, and there's probably a grumpy, unshaven entrepreneur named Tim Roberts sitting in a corner mumbling to himself, "I told you so."

I'm predestined to never climb out of this pit of quicksand. It's not so much that the backlog grows at an alarming rate but more that I keep doing things to put it on the backburner.

Recently, I finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. It's a game I enjoyed quite a bit, though I found myself agreeing with some of Aaron's contentions -- namely that the cast of characters left me missing the people I encountered during the original Phoenix Wright trilogy. But hey -- I finished it, so that gets scratched off the backlog. My Etrian Odyssey 2 review was just over a week ago, and I just turned in my review for Wonder World Amusement Park (hint: save thine cash). So what do I do? Go back to Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and finish it, as dictated by my backlog schedule? Pick up Devil May Cry and try to finish THAT, also dictated by my backlog schedule?

No. How about, put in the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney just because I missed the old characters?

How's that for an excuse to procrastinate? Oh, and mind you, I'm also leveling up my characters in Final Fantasy VI Advance in preparation for the final dungeon. Stupid thing is, I beat the damned thing like three times back in the SNES days. I could probably live without seeing this one to the end, or at least not putting off my backlog for this.

Here's another thing I did while I could have been catching up on my backlog -- see The Dark Knight. Of course, it was totally worth it...

Oh, also, an alert to our podcast fans: we may have to re-record episode 100. Something disastrous may have happened to one of our files. Yeah. The good news keeps on coming, right? Friggin' christ... *sigh*

My laptop is back. I scooped the sucker into my bag and took it to the office. The techie there discovered that it wasn't the hard drive, but the laptop chassis that was faulty. He plugged it into another chassis of the same model and the hard drive sprang to life. I guess the proprietary HDD connector got knocked asunder and just wouldn't read the drive anymore. Luckily, this means that all of my data is intact.

It also means that I can get back to editing podcasts during the week. I'm in the midst of editing Episode 100 and recording some video of the lame bag-o-deuce games we brought up for the 100th Episode Bonus Video. Sword of Vermilion video, here we come! Speaking of podcasts, we did not record today. I am on call for work, meaning that at any point during the day I could get a call from the office to go in and help test or fix something, which would take an unspecified amount of time. Better to just save it 'til next week.

So, E3. I saw so very little of it, because I had no internet access thanks to my dead laptop. I got a glut of info on Friday, and here's what's jumping out at me:

- The Conduit (Wii) - I don't think this game got much coverage outside of IGN. It's a first-person shooter on Wii, and in my opinion, it looks like quite a bit of fun. The controls look dead-on, though with the advent of Medal of Honor Heroes 2, no first-person shooter on Wii should ever come with shoddy controls. I mean, come on -- just learn something from the studios that do it right. (i.e. NOT the Red Steel team.) This game looks like one of the rare occasions in which a third party developer tries to push the Wii's graphics a bit. The environments look a little crappy, but the character models look pretty spiffy, for once using normal mapping -- or something that simulates normal mapping. Their details, then, end up popping off the screen pretty nicely. I expect the environments to get better as development continues, and I'll be a bit disappointed in the lack of effort if they don't.

- Final Fantasy XIII (X360) - Wow. What a big win for Microsoft. As I own a Playstation 3, I would have been able to play this either way -- but if there are any enhancements that come to the game by way of Xbox Live, of course that might sway my purchase decision. There's also the fact that my Playstation 3 sits in the living room, and I usually like playing videogames from the comfort of my bedroom so that my father or roommate can watch television as they please.

- God of War 3 (PS3) - Yeah, it's God of War. Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to it. No, this wasn't a surprise and nor did I really care much about the trailer. It was like half a second long and just showed him being pissed off. The spoiled brat in me would have liked to see a little more.

- Wii MotionPlus (Wii) - Dual Shock. I hope Nintendo looks this up in the history books. Remember what happened? The original Playstation controller ended up getting completely dumped in favor of this puppy. The dual analog sticks presented a significant enhancement that designers could take advantage of. Splintering the market, though, was a risk. Do developers take the time to develop for a controller feature that not everyone would have? No matter -- by standardizing the Dual Shock as the PSone's controller, Sony ensured that this would become less and less of a worry. In this case, Wii MotionPlus is being bundled in with Wii Sports Resort. That's not the ideal situation, but it's better than what my skeptical side predicted Nintendo would do (sell standalone, and for some asinine price).

(Yeah, I'm taking two paragraphs on this. Sue me.) I'm not sold, though, on one of the Nintendo personnel's contention that "maybe it'd be best to keep the technology limited to a few games". I'm paraphrasing of course. But when I read that, the first thing that popped into my head was, "e-Reader". Remember that thing? Compatible with... how many games? What about back in the day -- Super Scope 6. Yeah. Besides, think of how beneficial Wii MotionPlus would be if used properly in games. Right now, a lot of people complain about the very vague approximation of your movements with the current WiiMote. I found the swordplay in Red Steel mostly dull and clumsy. What about those clumsy, unresponsive gestures that constitute "punching" in Wii Sports boxing? Now, fast forward to something like Top Spin 4, should this game ever surface. Think of it being played with Wii MotionPlus. Think about how much more responsive your top- or back-spin on the ball could be. Standardize this thing, Nintendo. If you're going to wait for a year before you do, at least make it affordable. And for chrissakes, don't make two games for it and let that be the end of it.

- Netflix (Xbox 360) - My sister has a Netflix subscription. I have XBL Gold. 'Nuff said. (For those who are still wondering, those who have XBL Gold and a Netflix subscription can use their Netflix account on their 360s without paying extra for the service.)

-Home (Playstation 3) - I'm not mentioning this because I'm excited about it, but rather because I felt sorry for those eager to hear SOMETHING about the software. Instead, there's a 30-second trailer and no release date. How much did they really progress on it? If a lot, they sure as hell didn't show it. Still, this isn't as bad as my biggest gripe, which as...

- Storage Solution, or lack therof (Wii) - A short story. Yesterday I went online with my Wii for the first time in months to do some WiiWare/VC shopping. I pick Lost Winds, but instead of being allowed to pay for it, I'm told to move my data onto an SD card. Wii, off. Mood, sullied. Yes, I have an SD card. Yes, I've moved data before. It's still immensely annoying, though. I was ready to play some of Lost Winds right then and there, and I really wasn't in a waiting mood. Now, if Nintendo let us play stuff from the SD card -- or if they had a mass storage solution available (like I don't know, a USB hard drive?), I wouldn't have this problem. Was this at all talked about during the conference? No. Instead we were regaled with tales of how much Nintendogs and Pokemon and Brain Age sold. All right. We get it. You're the market leader (at least as of the recent NPDs).You're making grandma happy. Now please make ME happy.

So, almost exactly a week ago, my 60GB Toshiba MP3 player -- a Toshiba Gigabeat S60, to be exact, a great device with a great interface and nearly-effortless Windows Media Player compatibility -- died on me.

Last Friday, the day after I landed back in New York City from my weekly Pittsburgh commute, I went looking for my digital camera only to find out that I couldn't find it. I likely left it at my friend Scott's house the week before, where I had gone to enjoy burgers on the Fourth of July, but I couldn't be sure. Text-message inquiries resulted in no responses.

Well, on the same Friday, I went to Circuit City. The night before, I won the Guitar Hero tournament that my friends and I participate in weekly and Triggy (the grand puba of the McAleer's Pub GH Tournament and all-around awesome hostess) was giving away a $50 gift certificate. I put this $50 to a new 80GB Zune. Problem 1 solved.

On Sunday, I was cleaning up my room -- which was long overdue for a good "put your crap away" session. Among the rubble I found my digital camera, safe and intact. Scott then called me literally minutes after to apologize for not getting back to me sooner -- he had been stricken with a nasty case of the E. Coli that was spreading around, and he had trewn upz on the subway. But he was better now, and even though I had already found my camera I thanked him for getting back to me. Problem 2 solved.

There exists, sadly, a problem 3: The laptop I was given by the company I work for is now brain-dead. The issue began Thursday, when I was waiting for my flight back to New York City in the Pittsburgh airport. Somehow, I got a BAD_POOL_HEADER blue screen of death. A reboot solved it, but then it happened again. Putting the laptop on the floor -- instead of my lap, where it wasn't completely lying flat -- seemed to do the trick for a moment, and I had noticed that whenever the laptop tilted more than slightly due to my very fast and very harsh typing, it would blip. The tilt was in the direction of where the hard drive sits in the laptop, and BAD_POOL_HEADER is -- I think -- a symptom of a few hard-drive or otherwise memory-related issues.

Getting home, the thing seemed to run fine and on Saturday, it withstood over 90 minutes of podcast recording.

Problem was, the podcast was longer than 90 minutes. That's right -- our backup 100th Episode recording was cut due to a Blue Screen of Death. That damned BAD_POOL_HEADER issue again.

Thankfully, as I hinted above, the laptop is ONLY used as backup: All participants record their own voice files on their own computer. In the event that one or more of our voice files gets corrupted somehow, the laptop is there recording a stream of every participant coming in through Skype. It's not as flexible, of course -- I don't get to tweak out someone farting or coughing or saying something to their pets -- but it's a sufficient backup, and this weekend, the backup is all that was lost. IF everyone's voice file is stable, which it usually is, then I should be fine to edit.

Except I can't edit it. That laptop that's used to record our backup recording; that laptop that I use courtesy of my firm; that laptop that blue-screened constantly -- is the laptop I also used to edit our podcasts when I was on the road at work. So why don't I just edit a little, save, edit a little, save, edit a little, save?

BECAUSE THE BLASTED THING WON'T EVEN BOOT INTO WINDOWS ANYMORE. Right after I enter my password and it starts loading up stuff, and yes I've tried it in Safe Mode both with and without Networking, it BSOD's -- only this time only with a STOP error code and no descriptive (but still ultimately useless) words like BAD_POOL_HEADER. Just STOP ERROR X0000B3 (9823498234 2398423984792834789 239842973569729625). Those numbers were made up, of course, but it might as well have been those.

But wait -- that's not the final state it's in. After multiple tries of rebooting, and getting kicked out again, and then trying to run the Hard Disk Drive test from the BIOS (it passed the first "quick test"), it froze. Now, when I press the power button, the fan turns on. But the hard drive activity light stays dormant, and the screen stays pitch black. It's done this 10 times in a row now, and I've given up. It's dead. I have to go into the office on Friday and turn it in for repairs. Along with it MIGHT disappear ALL of my files -- work-related files.

Not only that, but it was my window to the outside world. The client site I work at does not allow access to personal webmail and blocks 90% of the sites I visit on a daily basis (thank god ESPN and Ars Technica are still allowed). So that laptop was my only recourse. You know where I'm friggin' typing this post from? The PC that sits at the bell stand in the hotel I'm staying at. Soon some rotten little kids will want to come by -- and yes I know it's 11:15PM, but it's summer vacation for them -- and look up Sponge Bob or the latest Digimon or maybe even some terrible pornography that no kid their age should be looking at.

So I just left this rant to you, gentle readers and those who don't give a ratt's butt about me but find my ranting halfway-semi-quasi-entertaining, so that you know how annoying dead laptops are. For those who listen to the podcast, well, it'll probably be coming sometime next week or this weekend. For those who don't, well, if I don't answer your emails until I'm just about due for sleep (like right now), this is why. Because I have to play bellhop in order to communicate with the outside world.

Oh yeah -- and Wii MotionPlus: w00t ... that is, of course, until it's revealed that they'll sell it to us for $34.99 apiece and don't standardize it into the Wii's technology as they did the Dual Shock and Dual Shock 3, leaving developers to wonder whether or not it'll be worth their time to actually put the effort into it if no one's going to use it because it's not standardized. (Oh hey Xbox 360 hard drive! Do you think people are learning yet about how not standardizing things can bite you in the left buttock? No? Me neither.) /cynical (I actually love the idea, but I'll be pissed if they -- as I facetiously suggested -- don't standardize it. They HAVE to... even though you know Nintendo will make buttloads of $ even if they don't. Ok, they HAVE to for MY sake. :P)