Chris

Meteos is a falling blocks puzzle game, but it's one of the most unique ones I've played. When you line up three or more blocks of the same type (using the stylus in a similar manner to using the mouse in Bejeweled) they sort of grow these rocket booster things and start to lift off towards the top of the screen. The whole thing feels like it's governed by gravity and escape velocity; the more blocks you've connected at the same time, the more boost they have but also the heavier they are, and they need to be going a certain speed to break through and actually leave the top of the screen instead of just losing steam and falling back down. If you boost blocks which are underneath blocks that are already boosting upwards, they will hit the already-boosting ones from underneath and the momentum of the two masses will be combined, and the newly-combined mass will gain speed. I don't know if that made any sense. It's very difficult to explain, but it's very fun and VERY frantic. It's from the guy who did Lumines/Rez/Space Channel 5 and one of the high-ups from HAL Laboratory (Smash Bros., Kirby, etc.).

Oh man I can't wait for Meteos. I played it at E3 and failed to write a preview because I couldn't figure out how to describe it well enough in a couple paragraphs.

What do you mean, "isn't it too gimmicky"? I'm not sure what reviews you've read but, as with you it seems, all the ones I've read have been quite positive, and the main positive point I have seen stressed is that the game takes full advantage of the DS' stylus in a way that no other game has. Tycho perhaps put it best when he notes that "it is beautiful to look at and plays with a sensibility that feels classic from the outset. Imagine that gaming history had followed a very different course - with pen interfaces de rigueur when the immovable tenets of platform gaming had been conceived - and you will be very near the thing." This is in fact the opposite of gimmicky, and suggests that the game is married perfectly with its console host, a judgment with which I agree. Don't assume that just because something is nonconventional it is "gimmicky".

I don't have Topsy Turvy, but I see you are enjoying Kirby Canvas Curse, which I just picked up today and is a blast.

Nice Mine is modified with a black pen to say "Chris Remo-Nauts" and "Sincerely, Tim S."

What's Deadwood?

The corny lines (of which the worst by far I felt was the one where Batman reveals himself to that DA) did not to me detract from the film. They were incidental occurrences that, in a movie whose central vision did not particularly hinge upon letter-perfect dialogue, were not overly distracting.

Same here also.

It's fascinating to me that the US and Japan ads for Pikmin (1) are clearly exactly the same: http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_game_commercial.asp?ID=45 and http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_game_commercial.asp?ID=670 (except the Japan one has a hilarious extra voiceover saying "GameCube!" at the end). This post was half posted out of interest and half posted to pimp Pikmin. Play it, it fucking rules. Also Pikmin 2's vs. multiplayer is fantastic. EDIT: http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_game_commercial.asp?ID=2123 WHAT!? Welcome to France, I guess...

Well, that was pretty much the marketing sentiment behind Sonic.

Why the fuck do quotes like this ever exist ever!?!!?! Every press release or article about any kind of product release always has some fucking useless representative saying "The reaction has been very good" or "Demand is quite strong" or "We are confident about this product's success". I don't fucking care what the Head of Media of Virgin Atlantic thinks about a product SHE HELPED LAUNCH! This bothers me when I see it in any stupid story but it really hit a new level of frustration when it's about FUCKING VOMIT SACKS (, etc., shut up). SHUT UP.

That's a fair criticism, but also one that contradicts your "basic action movie" comment. A basic action movie would spend far more time and far more emphasis on fights, and would have surely taken a more confident and impressive approach to the fight scenes. I agree that those scenes could have been better, but it doesn't really bother me at all, as the film did not come off to me as an "action movie". My assumption is that Chris Nolan wanted to convey the shadowy and elusive nature of Batman in the fights. He may have succeeded and he may not have, but the point is that he was not simply taking a straight ahead action point of view. That is in fact what I feel to be the movie's strongest point: While Nolan's directing on a microcosmic scale, that is scene-to-scene direction, may have been competent but not hugely inspired, his macrocosmic direction, that is the overall direction of the film, was driven. I feel like he had a vision to enact, he was not simply trying to translate or adapt Batman to film. Rather, he is deeply familiar with the Batman character and has his own view of him; surely everyone, even people who do not read comics, have their own image of what a superhero is by way of both their permeation in our culture and the fact that no matter what comic nerds may tell you there is no such thing as a "definitive" version of a superhero--they are shared creations. It is certainly true that he was very much influenced by Miller's Batman, but there are surely differences. What makes this movie good, to me, is that everything feels like it deserved to be there. Nolan's Batman is a more realistic one than has previously been depicted; I have heard some take issue with that, not being comicky enough, but that's kind of the point. Batman Begins wasn't really an adaption of a comic book, it's a movie about a character who has become resonant and ubiquitous enough to no longer need be a comic book character. This is probably more true for Batman than for any comic book character with the obvious exception of Superman (who I find far less interesting anyway). I don't think this kind of actual vision has been seen in a Batman film since Burton's first one (his second sort of collapsed a tad too much into slightly generic comic book farce, though I still enjoyed it), and I think Batman Begins still tops that one.

If it helps people exercise, who cares if it's DDR?

I have by a factor of a thousand billion found clerks at GameStop to be the least knowledgeable of any game retail chain I've visited. I consistently have experiences with those guys that are practically laughable. At least I know about games. The worst is when I hear people being blatantly misinformed. GameStop is now only visisted by me as an absolute last resort, if nobody else has what I need in stock. EB I find to be more of a mixed bag.

I've never had that problem in the US. Working in various retail capacities I've sometimes been unable to understand my customers but I've never been faced with a clerk or cashier who couldn't understand me. And I live about as close to the Mexican border as you can get.

My interview to work at GameCrazy (honestly way better than your average game retailer, I haven't worked there long enough to have enough loyalty to be biased ) actually consisted about 90% of making sure I knew a lot about games and game systems. I got marked down when, during the "Pretend I'm a Customer and You're the Salesperson" phase, I forgot to mention that in order to hook up more than two controllers to a PS2 you need to buy the multi-tap since it only has two ports.

I am now a "game store clerk". I rarely talk to myself though.

Isn't there a taxi cab outside the hospital that takes you back? I seem to remember that existing since GTA3.

I think the point was that all of the townsperson voices were actually played by the same voice actor as Fred. That's what it sounded like to me, anyway.

Oh man, I can't wait.

I suspect that's not all Majesco's fault. I mean some of it is but also game retailers are fucking retarded. The amount of games they order is in large part proportional to how many preorders they receive for it, and in some cases a store will literally order either zero or one copy of a game if they don't get any preorders. It's pretty idiotic. It basically means that for a game like Psychonauts, they only way you're going to buy it is if you are specifically looking for that one game and nothing else. My friend who bought it had to drive to three entirely separate stores to find it. Someone who is just looking to buy a game, maybe Psychonauts, maybe something else, is guaranteed going to end up with something else because when they don't see Psychonauts on the shelf they're not going to drive all over town to find it.

They would have failed. Jedi are completely inept, apparently. It would have been like a big Three Stooges fight between the Dark and Light Jedi.

I really liked Garden State, but Natalie Portman was one of my least favorite parts.

I suspect it's more that they're trying to put a good marketing spin on the situation in regards to Psychonauts. NPD sales reports for Psychonauts are pretty abysmal...

Man that to me was really exemplary of the power of the Jedi. A bunch of goofballs who are too incompetent to avoid being shot in the back by some clones.