So obviously I did not get to put up the blurb for Episode 74, as late as that thing is. And, I didn't get to upload episode 75. By the time I had finished cutting it together, my ride for the airport was here. Then I got home and forgot about it totally and watched LeBron miss second-half jumpers on his way to beating the LA Fakers I mean Lakers. So yeah. Tomorrow. Dinky swear. Why not tonight? BECOS I DUN FEL LIKE IT.

In any case, I'll let these two episodes gestate over the holiday break. Expect, though, to see a holiday episode too sometime next week. We're recording on Saturday, but again - to let 74 and 75 gestate, I'll be holding it until after Christmas. It's going to be THE INSANE EDITION, where all of the news pieces are either weird, stupid, or just plain ridiculous (that kid who got beaten to death by her drunken sister and sister's boyfriend who claimed to be imitating Mortal Kombat? Yeah...).

Send in your questions and/or comments - you know whare. mailbag AT trigames DOT net

Oh yes, and Jeff Gerstmann is still alive. He's reading Built to Last - or at least, it's sitting somewhere on his floor.

Props to the editing team - like an idiot, I misspelled "challenging" in the last paragraph of my Landstalker review. One quick message to Alexei Navarrovsky got that fixed up right quick. Thanks.

As for my next review, I'm working on Breath of Fire II. As fate would have it, the day I found and bought the Gameboy Advance port, I got assigned to it. Nice. HOLY BALLZAC I just deleted the blog entry with my Gamespot review archive. ...processing... ok, reposted it. Dammit. Stupid me. Why are DELETE MESSAGE and EDIT MESSAGE right next to each other...? Blargh. Back to the show.

Speaking of freelance reviewing, send your props to Mr. 6.8 himself, Sir Provolone. Super Mario Bros. 3 on Wii VC was his swan song. Here's to the future, Frank.

Last thing. Were I to make a T-shirt out of the four faces of the Trigames.NET podcast, which Black-and-White should I use?

I made an archive of all my freelance reviews here. It's accessible through the "whipping boy" link at the top of the blog (when looking at my profile page, not a single blog). The posted my Metal Marines review yesterday - James, you were oh-so-close with your score guess. Even with my thoughts as posted in a previous blog, it's still intriguing enough to warrant a slightly higher score than you guessed - case in point, I played it for about 90 minutes yesterday just because I felt like it.

These two weeks have been a whirlwind. I have to post the RSS feed including Episode 74 of the podcast, and I'm cleaning up editing for Episode 75 at lunch. I'll let 74 gestate since I did not give it fair treatment, and I'll probably put up a blurb in earnest instead of the "kthxbye" I posted for it. Sorry for all the delays.

Finally: thoughts on Manhunt 2 and Medal of Honor Heroes 2 (both for Wii) coming soon. One is meh, the other is fan-friggin'-tastic. And I don't care what anyone says about World War II shooters, the Wii, or about control schemes in general - MoH:H2 proves a third time over that first-person shooting is excellent with the Wii remote. Though it still unfortunately is no match for a good old computer mouse, it's insanely fun - especially when you have an Aim Down the Sight mode. (Which, sadly, Metroid Prime 3 don't gots.)

1) Please let me move in eight directions, not just four. That's just ridiculous. (Landstalker)

2) Since you're making me roam in a perspective with additional and potentially confusing depth, please don't have me slide around like an ice skater. (Sonic 3D Blast)

3) Please don't shove platforming in an isometric game. (Landstalker, Sonic 3D Blast)

4) If you break rule 3, please provide shadows under sprites so I know where things are on the X (east-west) and Y (north-south) axes. There is a friggin' Z axis now (height), you know. (Landstalker)

5) In fact, pleasedon't make any isometric game that requires precision jumping. (Landstalker, Sonic 3D Blast)

6) Please don't put passages or people behind isometric walls where you can't see them unless either you indicate their existence or they are supposed to be secrets. (Landstalker, Sonic 3D Blast)

7) If you're going to break rules 1 - 6, please at least be a halfway decent game otherwise, like Landstalker. (Sonic 3D Blast)

8 ) Why do you exist? (Sonic 3D Blast)

I've been struggling with Metal Marines for the better part of the end of last week and this weekend. It's an old Super NES strategy game that came out on Virtual Console in the last month. I believe it's almost as old as Dune II on the Genesis (that came out around 1992/1993). It's incredibly strange, but that could be because I'm used to stuff like Warcraft II and Rise of Nations (omg the best $5 I've ever spent... I'd pay $70 for that game, knowing what I know now) on the RTS side, and Fire Emblem and Advance Wars on the TBS side.

Metal Marines ends up being a little of both, I guess. Sort of. Not really. It's incredibly structured - very rigid. Here's the setup:

* Each side - you and your enemy - occupies one island on either side of the map.

* The islands are not symmetrical, meaning that one of you may potentially have a tactical advantage, like in any other game.

* You can only build structures on flat land. You can build them atop hills if they have flat areas. You can't build structures on top of trees, roads, ruins or scorched earth - even if the land is flat - unless you bulldoze that terrain first.

* Structures cost money, obviously. Here, money is the only economic resource, and it accumulates automatically. You can increase the rate of $-per-second by building Supply Headquarters.

* Attacking costs energy, which also accumulates automatically. Each unit has a specific energy cost. You can increase the rate of energy-per-second accumulated by building Factories.

* Building is in real-time. Attacking, however, stops the "building mode" and enters "attack mode". Everything in progress during build mode stops while attacks are in progress. That's why I said it's sorta kinda maybe turn-based.

* You really only have three offensive weapons: ground-to-ground missiles, the titular Metal Marines (giant walking mechs), and an ICBM (intercontintental ballistic missile). The other three weapons are defensive: gun pods and land mines, to defend against opposing Metal Marines and Anti-Air missiles, to shoot down enemy missiles.

* The goal is to knock out the other person's bases. You start with three. The opponent can have any different number of bases.

* You do not have direct access to the enemy island. Only through attacking can you ever see what's on their island.

With this in mind, here's how a typical game goes:

1) You place your three bases in strategic places around your island, and then the match starts

2) You use your funds to build whatever (AA missiles, ground missiles, marines, factories; building a factory or two immediately is advised).

3) If you're not quick enough to build a missile pod and attack first, at some point your enemy will attack. Here's what happens during an attack: between one and four missile launches will occur (you can upgrade missiles so that two missiles launch from a single pod). They will make their way to the target island one after the other - not at the same time. If AA missiles don't knock 'em out of the air, each group of missiles that hits will damage the square on which it lands as well as the eight surrounding squares. Since you can never see what's on the other side, and supposedly neither can the CPU, the first salvo of missiles fired in each battle is kind of like a game of Battleship. The game shifts to a grid map when you're in attack mode, and the enemy island is completely devoid of any information - so at first, it's complete guesswork. It can be really frustrating if the enemy happens to hit the mark with the first salvo and you completely miss any and everything.

4) After the missile salvo, up to three Metal Marines can be dispatched to a single square on the grid. When they land, they can only attack structures within the surrounding eight squares - everything else is literally blacked out. The marines cannot be deployed on land that is occupied by an active structure; the square must be empty, scorched, or occupied by a destroyed building or ruins. From there, the Marines have 60 seconds to lay waste to whatever they see. So, if the enemy base lies on a hill surrounded by gun pods, and the only flat land to deploy the Marines leaves the enemy base out of the nine-square range, there's no way for you to slowly but surely take down the gun pods and make your way to the base - because the damn thing is off-screen. However, what this means is that if you want to take down a certain structure, you can sometimes avoid being double-teamed by heavy defenses if you aim it so that they're blacked out. If a base is surrounded by three gun pods, you can effectively take two of them out of the picture entirely... which is completely nonsensical because, hey, they're friggin' surrounding the damn base. But I suppose it provides another tactical consideration.

5) Game continues like that: build, fire missiles, land marines, rebuild. You can never occupy and overtake their island, because you can never actually get there. You can raze the hell out of their property, but you can't park your guys on their space and start building stuff.

It's eight bucks on Virtual Console. Should you get it? Don't ask me - I haven't finished reviewing it yet :P It's certainly weird and disjointed, though. I'll be writing this one up tonight.

Ooga booga download here. (If it don't work try after 2AM EST.)

And read my reviews and crap. Yeah. Gnite.

If ever I could define a videogame with a sad puppy face, I'd do it for Golden Axe III. I don't know how many of you actually had a subscription to the Sega Channel download service. I know I didn't, and I was completely unaware that a third Golden Axe even came out until after Sega Channel died. Lo and behold, it pops up on Virtual Console, and I figure - hey - I can review this. Golden Axe ain't that great, but it's mindless fun. Right?

...right?

Apparently, Frank didn't like Golden Axe II. It had no charm. No personality. It was exactly the same otherwise, but since charm, personality, nostalgia - whatever you want to call it - usually serves to cover up aging gameplay, Frank deemed Golden Axe II mediocre (FIVE POINT OH).

Golden Axe III is ... well. If you play it, you'll find that they threw all kinds of new moves and tricks into the gameplay. So it's gotta at least be better than Golden Axe II, right? Well, what the hell good do new moves and stuff do if you shove it into completely stiff controls? I don't know how many of you remember how smooth the original Golden Axe felt, but as far as I recall, it was pretty smooth. Your guys moved at a brisk rate, the animation was solid enough for you to know that you swung that fat axe and hit someone in the gut. It was a little floaty, sure, but it worked for the time and it's still "okay" today, I guess. Golden Axe III took away all of that crap and replaced it with herky-jerky animation that looks like it all was pasted together by a seven year-old. The combat has been completely changed from a smooth, if overly simple, slicing and dicing affair to some chunky "Oh look, watch this same stiff-looking combo over and over again!" mess.

And you know how easy it is to throw someone in other games? In Double Dragon, all you need to do is to make them double over and you can grab them. It's clear to see. In Final Fight, just walk up to them. In Golden Axe it was just a canned animation, but here - even though it lets you determine when to throw an enemy - it might as well be canned too. That stuff happens so uber-randomly that you don't ever know if you're doing it correctly.

Oh, and remember how awesome it was to realize you were battling on the back of a ginormous hawk flying through the air? Remember how creepy it was to realize that skeletons were erupting from said back? What about the humongoid knights and dudes with the big stone hammers that stood there with their arms crossed and laughed at you? And - oh - Death Adder was actually a bunch of nasty, slimy snakes that slithered into a suit of armor?

Remember that??? Huh?? Huh?

...and then what do we get in Golden Axe III? Oh. We fight atop a giant (enemy) crab that's colored with some weird gray green goopy color. I know it's a crab because I can see the pincers in the background, but it took me a long while to realize it. In contrast, in the first Golden Axe, you saw the turtle's head and its eyes poking around. Same for the hawk. The realization hit you like a ton of bricklayers each carrying a bag of bricks. Holy crap - look at its eyes. This time? Oh. Pincers. And they aren't even pincing at anything. It's dead. The entire game just feels so lifeless from the backgrounds. The enemy bosses? There's none of that hubris, that menacing laughter. Even though it was a simple two-frame animation in Golden Axe, it conveyed such arrogance. Here, what do you get?

How about, "Ha, ha, ha, you are very good, but you will have to do better than that the next time we will fight against each other."

Or maybe, "Oh, very good old chap, if I do say so myself! But you shan't advance any further the next time our illustrious paths should cross, you see?"

Or better yet: "You have got a lot to learn before you beat me, try again kiddo."

Golden Axe lost its charm with Golden Axe II. Now, it's lost its soul. Pour out a little liquor for our fallen homey.

If you gots questions, comments or monetary donations, you know where to send 'em:

mailbag AT trigames DOT net

We're going to be cleaning up the whole Gerstmann dealie-o. Now that we have "facts," official statements and more insight (look up Croal, N'Gai and Up, Level), it should be a simple discussion of important takeaways and where Gamespot goes from here. We did our speculation and theorizing last week, so the only non-factual stuff here will probably just be dissection of official statements. That's always fun! Bag of Deuce returns (you probably already know mine; I reviewed it), as well as what we've been playing, news other than Gerstemon Snap, such as the newly Voltron-formed Vivactiblizzendivision and EA's statement that reviewers don't review casual games "properly" - or more bluntly, that casual gamers don't care about reviews anyway (one of those statements is probably right, and one is probably wrong; we'll let you figure out which ahead of time).

So, send.