Everything happens during the holidays.

As usual, it's been too long between blog posts, but I think that it's better to have too much real life going on instead of too much internet life. I have also decided to be more inclusive of my musical life in this space.

The band  that I'm in is losing its keyboard player, but we seem to be making the adjustment.  I have talked to a few people about the position, but I have not spoken to anyone that I thought would be a good match yet.  We're in no hurry to put a new keyboard player on board unless they're really going to work out. For what we do, we need someone with traditional piano skills and modern keyboard chops.  Despite all the kids that get forced to play 'Fur Elise' until Zombie Beethoven rises from his grave to eat their fingers off, it's harder than you think to find a substantial keyboard player.  And even if you have classical chops - it's no guarantee that you also have the funk.

A big part of what I like about the holidays is that I get to help other people with video game shopping. I was happy to play the demo of The Legend of Zelda:Skyward Sword at the Nintendo Wii kiosk at Walmart this week, but not as happy as my son was. I only played part of one of the dungeons, but the demo also includes a bird riding section, and a boss battle (and my son played all three sections).  We explained to a few passers-by that you needed the Wii Remote Plus for the game, but that it improves the swordplay a lot. I had to stop playing after a couple of minutes since the controls are slightly different from Twilight Princess and I didn't want to pick up any bad habits just yet. I was also a lot happier being able to recommend the Xbox360 or the PS3 to people with younger kids now, since Microsoft and Sony have made real strides in the last year in widening their audience. But, my most favorite thing this holiday season is being able to answer the question "Is that Batman game any good?" with "Yes, it's awesome" after so many years of telling people to stay away from any licensed games that weren't "Goldeneye" for Nintendo 64. Oddly, the first Batman game in that series (Arkham Asylum) didn't spend too much time on Walmart's shelf, and I can't even tell you why. It's just as good.  Maybe it's because the original game wasn't a holiday season release, or maybe it's because there was some Gamestop promotion that overshadowed anybody else selling the game.

Other than doing some random cubing demos at the local elementary school holiday breakfast while all the kids were throwing snowballs, and at the top of the bridge at our local boat parade, my cubing activity has been somewhat minimal.

Ok, this is really about Sengoku Basara.

After having been reminded that I had not talked about it very much, except to cryptically refer to it inthe title of an April blog post, it seems I should get around to talking about Sengoku Basara, and its predecessor, Devil Kings.

When I got a PS2, it was the Christmas after it launched. I was all excited to finally have a DVD player and Tekken Tag Tournament and a way to play PS1 games that didn't involve putting the unit on its side. Despite the good reviews, I had avoided Dynasty Warriors 2. I somehow had gotten the impression that it was a strategy game and you were not directly controlling a character, but merely giving orders to an army out on a battlefield and watching it play out. When I first saw Command and Conquer on PC, I was turned off by the indirect control and didn't want to play a PS2 game where I just clicked on a map and shouted at the screen about how bad my troops were. So, I skipped the Dynasty Warriors series because of my misconception about the game, even though it had gotten good reviews. It wasn't a tough thing to skip this game as there were lots of other good games for PS2 that I hadn't played. Since I had skipped this I opted to also skip Capcom's Devil Kings when it came out, since the way it was marketed I thought that they were similar games. As it turns out, they are similar games, but I was wrong about both Dynasty Warriors and Devil Kings.

It is true that Devil Kings takes place on a large battlefield with many characters on screen, and there is some strategy to it, but for the most part, you control a single character and your so-called allied troops don't do a doggone thing other than get in trouble and make you have to rescue them. Most of the weapons in the game are fantasy versions of feudal weapons, and the characters that you play as all seem to have some supernatural power tied in to them. The Dynasty Warriors games are similar in that you control a single player on a large battlefield, and try to meet certain battle conditions. The biggest difference is that the Dynasty Warriors games take place in China around the end of the HanDynasty and into the Three Kingdoms period. Devil Kings takes place in Japan nearly 1200 years later in the Sengoku, or Warring States period.

A friend of mine had played Devil Kings because it had made it down to the bargain bin and it was a Capcom game, so he gave it a try. When he explained the game to me from his perspective, it seemed a little less like a strategy game and more like a conventional action game. I had mostly forgotten about the conversation other than to remember that he had a lot of fun playing it, and went back to playing whatever it was that I was playing. At the time, it was probably Devil May Cry 3 or Pikmin.

Some time later, probably around the time I was looking for a Gamecube copy of Killer 7 last year, I had spotted both Chaos Legion and Devil Kings for PS2 in the really cheap bin in a GameStop that I was driving past every Friday at the time. I couldn't remember with 100% certainty which of the two games my friend had already played, but I thought it was Devil Kings. Then, I couldn't remember if he had played Chaos Legion or not, but both games gave off a Devil May Cry vibe. Devil Kings goes so far as to use the same font for the title that Devil May Cry does. The character on the Chaos Legion box has that same steely gaze as Devil May Cry's protagonist, Dante, and it has some blurbs on the back imploring people that liked Devil May Cry to try Chaos Legion. Since they were both Capcom games and bargain priced besides, I picked up both of them. I didn't want to get one only to find out later that I should have gotten the other one. I started both the games, got a basic idea of the gameplay, and then called my friend back. He confirmed that Devil Kings was the game that he played, and that he had not played Chaos Legion. I got the idea from the opening movies that the art style of Chaos Legion would be much to my friend's liking, so I sent Chaos Legion to him later. (I never did hear if he liked Chaos Legion or not.)

So that leaves us with Devil Kings. As it turns out, the game is a lot of fun, and I had not played anything on PS2 that was anything like it except for the God of War games. Certainly, God of War does a great job of making you feel like you have to fight against an entire army yourself, and I really like the feeling of being able to tear into large groups of enemies (and not have the game slow down like Gauntlet:Dark Legacy does). I looked up some things online about the game, and found out that it was an overly Americanized version of a game they had made for a Japanese audience called Sengoku Basara. They changed the names of all the characters to presumably suit an American audience, they tweaked the attack system a little to make it more stylish like "Devil May Cry", and they made the map of feudal Japan into a more generic looking land mass so Americans wouldn't have to feel they were playing something based on history in the slightest.

Looking at it now, the game looks a little dated, with enemies popping in to view once you get close enough, and some fog in the backgrounds, but the gameplay is still fun. Each level has a map up in the corner to show you where you, your commanders, the enemy commanders, and where the bosses are. The camera is situated behind you and slightly above. It feels like a brawler, or like the aforementioned God of War, as you fight through hordes of enemies with swords and pikes and various other weapons from the era. (Of course, since I tend to play games without cultural context due to playing them at different times as everybody else, I was unaware that this and Chaos Legion is part of a genre referred to as 'hack and slash'.) A couple of characters have guns, but thankfully you are spared the tedium of endless reloading that the single shot rifles of the feudal era would have required. As you fight, you build up Fury Drive, filling up a bar that lets you unleash a super attack when completed. The controls involve two attack buttons, the fury attack button, a jump button, a block button, and a button that modifies your two regular attacks into some alternate attacks. There are a dozen or so characters to choose from but not all are available at the outset. Each time you play through the story of each character, you level up their attributes a little more. Nothing stops you from playing through on Easy a bunch of times to level up, but you only get 70% of the experience points that you would get playing on Normal, and you don't get the better treasures when you play it too safe. As you level up a character you can pick different weapons and different alternate attacks for them. Also, some treasures collected in levels help you modify your attack and defense attributes as needed, and you are given an opportunity to change them around at the beginning of each level. You are given your pick of enemies at each stage, usually one of two or three, but bear in mind that anybody that you don't fight could come up again later. By the last stage, you have no choice in who to fight since they'll be the only opponent left. You can't save in the middle of a stage, but typically the stages last only a few minutes. I really like that you can play a single session and still make progress. I also like that you can play the same level in different ways and potentially reap different rewards. Some levels even give you experience point bonuses based on meeting certain battle conditions.

The game got horrible reviews at the time, partly due to the heavy-handed localization. This seems ridiculous to me, since people playing Devil Kings were largely unaware that there was a corresponding Japanese game called Sengoku Basara, so I can't see why the localization mattered that much to the review score. The Japanese game has characters pulled from history - the leader Nobunaga Oda is the character in Devil Kings called Devil King.

So since Devil Kings was so fun to play, my older son and I were so excited that Sengoku Basara 3 was made available on Wii as Sengoku Basara:Samurai Heroes. The graphics are greatly improved, due in to no small part to Capcom porting their MT Framework engine to Wii as MT Framework Lite. (There is also a PS3 version, which runs on the full-size MT Framework engine.) Correction: Even the PS3 version runs on the 'Lite' version of MT Framework. Two player splitscreen co-op was included, many more stages are available, more items and weapons were included, some characters were added, although a few characters from Devil Kings are now NPC's, and an Ally system was added to single player mode. As you progress through the game, in addition to collecting items, you can collect allies. When playing in single player mode, you can take one ally with you. As you use them more, they level up their particular attribute. Some Allies are suited to fighting on certain types of stages, some have elemental attacks, some are suited to fighting certain types of enemies. Another thing that I really like in the game is being able to see on the map by color what areas you have already captured, and where the enemies are. All the character names reverted to the original Japanese names, so now my son and I now have confusing conversations involving Japanese names and the corresponding stupid American names from Devil Kings.

A little preoccupied, I think.

I had been working on a blog post for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 for quite some time, and had failed to remark on what I was actually doing in the game arena altogether. Also, I have been playing more music lately, and that seems to eat into my blogging more than gaming itself does.

Last Saturday, I picked up my third copy of Soul Calibur 2, the GameCube version. I really enjoyed the PS2 version, and didn't seem to enjoy the XBox version as much so far. Not that the XBox version is bad - it's just the only difference in the XBox version is Spawn, who I didn't really 'get' as a Soul Calibur character. The GameCube's exclusive character is Link from the Legend of Zelda. With all of the Twilight Princess and Ocarina and Phantom Hourglass nonsense going around at the house, I felt like I should see what Link was like in Soul Calibur, and I felt confident that we would get our $8 worth out of it.

Last Sunday I managed to get two completely different things done in the gaming arena. First, I went back to Sengoku Basara and finally unlocked Nobunaga.  As soon as I did, I was asked by my older son to turn off the Wii so that I wouldn't start a 'Hero's Story' with him. Second, I  went back and took another swing at New Super Mario Bros. Wii, only to finish the game and discover a couple of extra boards that I had missed.  It's really easy to skip World 8-7.  There's still a lot to do, but I was really impressed by how Nintendo managed to keep people engaged during the credits, and give players a substantial reason to get all of the star coins beyond just opening up the various hint movies.

I hadn't really played either game in quite a while, and I think the only thing I had going for me was a fresh approach - but sometimes that's all it takes.  I always hear that the number of gamers that finish games is a really low percentage, I never believe the numbers, and I'm always disappointed.

Summer Vacation in Hyrule

After being disgusted with the nature of Virtua Fighter 4 – or more importantly, disgusted with my inability to do the moves, I decided that it was time to get back on the Zelda wagon. I had finished Twilight Princess some time ago, but #1 son had made it about as far as the Gerudo Desert only to find that the disc stopped loading that area, and that we had a short circular scratch on the disk. Since Twilight Princess became one of the Nintendo Select titles, it was a little less painful to get another copy of the game. We both decided to start new games. Thanks to a mad rush to get through the game before school started a week ago, he is all the way to the last area – but I think that there are several battles at the end that have no intermediate save point, so I'm not 100% sure how close to the actual end of the game he is. He got frustrated with the last battles, and I encouraged him to go back and get the rest of the golden bugs, and to do the clawshot minigame. I am not nearly as far along, both because he has been playing a lot, but also because my younger son has started playing it.

There are some things that #2 son can't do that well, but they don't bother him much. #1 son did most of the boss battles for him, and some parts of the dungeons, but #2 son just wants to run around in the towns. He's not quite reading yet, so he doesn't really interact with the information on the screen that much. He's still excited about being able to chop a wooden sign in pieces with his sword. He discovered on his own that you can pet the goats at the ranch. Even more surprising, he discovered that if you attack a chicken enough times, you can control it for a few seconds. I know that he discovered it by himself, because if #1 had read it on the internet and told him, he would have thought that you had to attack the chicken with your sword (which is much harder than it sounds). #2 son figured out a much easier way - Z-target the chicken and attack it with the Clawshot. I was unaware of the glitch myself – and when a 4-and-a-half-year old says "Dad if you shoot the chicken with the clawshot enough times you can control him" it's typically going to be met with skepticism the first time.

So, it got me thinking. As a gamer, trained by previous Zelda games, or Doom, or Quake, or Metroid, we're conditioned to 1) figure out where we need to go next, 2) go as far as we can until we reach some obstacle, 3) get the thing that allows us to overcome the next obstacle – be it a key, or a weapon, or some device that shows us a passageway that we couldn't detect otherwise, 4) surmount obstacle, and 5) repeat. This series of steps creates very linear gameplay, and it also creates a system where designers shoehorn a bunch of things into areas of the game to make sure you have all the weapons or items you're already supposed to have before you proceed. It doesn't always work – there are lots of fans of certain games that delight in finding and exploiting 'sequence breaks' – but it works most of the time if the person playing the game is trying to play within the perceived 'rules'. Sometimes it would be more fun to just be able to play around, but often we're so conditioned to doing things a certain way that you can't (the designer is too conditioned) or don't (the player is too conditioned) really do that.

I really enjoy playing golf games, but only the 'cutesy' ones. (Does Outlaw Golf count as cutesy?) I don't want to have to mimic a perfect golf swing, I just want to strategize how to get through a fairway and on to the green without hitting poor little animated squirrels in the head. My current game is Capcom's "We Love Golf" for the Wii, and I have to say that it was totally because Chun-Li and Morrigan are unlockable characters (and it was on sale). Often times, I have played these games wondering why they won't just let me wander around the course. You could switch between a walk-around mode and standard golf mode, leave collectible items around the course for you to find, post a sign somewhere on a shed about game techniques, or even put a little bit of extra fan service in terms of locations. You could get to play on the Racoon City Country Club course, or perhaps a series of locations from Street Fighter or Zack and Wiki. I suppose the reviewers would complain that "The only way to get all the extra bonus items is to wander around aimlessly in first-person mode, which is a complete distraction from the actual golfing." I don't like that Gran Turismo can't just figure out what cars that you have are eligible for the race that you just tried to pick and let you select one of them instead of the car that you just switched to three screens ago in the "Garage" because you thought that it was eligible for the race you just picked, but hey – that's just me. One guy's fun new mode is another guy's ridiculous distraction. (Did you know that there are people that have Smash Bros. Brawl and have never played the Subspace Emissary mode?)

I guess what I'm getting at is that it would be fun if we could just get back to the play aspect of playing games. I get annoyed when developers seem to forget that part, and sometimes I am envious of my younger son for being able to do that, even in the most linear of games.

Two New Fighters - Well, not really new.

I started playing two new fighting games, except they're only new to me. One of them has the number 4 in the title and a Greatest Hits label on it - Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. The other one is a release from last summer, Tournament of Legends. Both of the games have a SEGA logo on them, but I would argue that it's of no importance in at least one case.

I had played the regular PS2 version of Virtua Fighter 4 many years ago and couldn't get into it at the time because I was playing a lot of Tekken and I seemed to have bad habits from Tekken that prevented me from really digging into VF4. It also didn't help that VF4Evo came out for PS2 just weeks after I finally bought a cheap copy of VF4. In disgust, I traded in my copy of VF4 the next time I unloaded some games. I had only traded in games a couple of times, mostly to thin out my collection to stuff that I'm still willing to play , and I was clearly not playing VF4. I have tried this series several times, and it doesn't seem to click in like Tekken or Soul Calibur or the Street Fighter games do. I suppose that it could be argued that since I haven't been playing Virtua Fighter since the first one, some of the standard conventions of the game are foreign to me and it would take me a while to get into them. This makes sense, I seem to have a similar problem with the King of Fighters games.

So, I suck at it. I can't do the moves where you have to press two buttons and let go of one of the two buttons after a single frame. I haven't found a character that makes sense yet enough that I can move past the button presses and just play the game. But, I can see that this is a great game with lots of depth and strategy because I am familiar enough with Tekken and Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive to see that Virtua Fighter does a lot of the things that those other games do. In several cases, they are more simply and cleanly done in VF, largely because of the 3-button interface. I have a harder time with the combos in VF because they don't match into the muscle memory of the other fighters I have played. I decided to start with Goh, since he is a new character in this version of the game. I have even fewer expectations about him than I might about the other characters, and a strange fondness for him because he reminds me (appearance-wise) of Brian Fury from Tekken a little bit. They have the same manic intensity in their eyes.

As a side note, during the time that I was writing this, I got to play a little Tekken 6. Bryan Fury plays mostly the same, but for some reason he doesn't look as good. Something is wrong, perhaps he fell down in the 'uncanny valley' a little. My favorite new character is the quick and versatile Alisa Bosconovitch. The yodeling music on the sheep board is a laugh riot.

The other game, Tournament of Legends, was originally just supposed to be a gladiator game, made especially for Wii in an attempt to get the Wiimote and Nunchuck controls acting like your sword and shield. The preview of the graphics were somewhat impressive for a Wii game, but as I recall all of the characters were human. Before they had a distributor, the game was just called 'Gladiator A.D. '. In finding a distributor, developer High Voltage went with Sega again, having distributed some of their other more recent games. Around the time of making that decision they ended up changing the game to have more mythological characters in it. I can only presume that Sega wanted them to broaden their audience and go for a 'T' rating. The weapons and the attacks that were shown in the original version of the game were not changed much, only the characters themselves seem to have changed. It probably made the story of each character a little more interesting than if they had just been random gladiators or barbarians. My older son likes the idea of the game, especially being able to switch the weapons and attributes among the characters. While he is perfectly happy using the Wiimote and Nunchuck to control Tatsunoko vs Capcom, he switched to using the Classic Controller for Tournament of Legends after just a few playthroughs. I warned him that we might have to switch, especially if he felt like the motion controls weren't doing what he wanted. My biggest problem with the game is that the camera is placed oddly for a fighting game. The original 'Gladiator A.D.' version of the game put the camera mostly behind your character for single player mode, making your character slightly transparent so that you can see the stance and the movement of your opponent easily. Its revision moves the camera off-axis a little more than that, but it's more like 35-40 degrees now instead of 15 or 20, and the foreground character isn't transparent. Also, you are not always the foreground character, so depending on who is ahead in a round, sometimes the viewing angle switches. If there is a massive swing in the direction of a match, there is a massive swing in the direction of the camera. It's odd enough to play a fighting game from a wacky diagonal perspective, it's even odder to have to play it with your character sort of facing you and not being able to see what move the computer controlled character is about to do because one of its hands are being shielded by their body.

Between the attempted implementation of motion controls and the odd visibility issues, the game is not as engaging to play as most fighting games. The background elements are interesting, as each one has its own quick-time event required to dodge away from various environmental hazards, but after a while you start rooting for the Kraken or the Giant Crab to just take out the two fighters and end the match. The armor system for the characters is also innovative and interesting, but it's hard to direct an attack to a specific area of your opponent when the controls are hard to deal with in the first place. It would have been nice if they had taken advantage of the Wii Motion Plus technology, or at least offered it as an option, but there is the concern that it would 'break' the game and confer too much of an advantage to a Wii Motion Plus player against an opponent with the standard controls. Ultimately, my problem with the game is that it's a step backwards in many respects and High Voltage could theoretically gotten some help in that regard. There's no particular reason that a fighting game for Wii has to look worse than the GameCube version of Soul Calibur. Granted, High Voltage is not NAMCO, but there's no reason they couldn't have gotten some help from Sega. The controls feel sluggish – again, Sega could certainly helped them out with this as well. How a fighting game plays has so much to do with the feel of the controls and the pacing of the action. I'm sure that Sega's AM2 team was busy with Virtua Something-or-another, and I'm sure that even if AM2 had given High Voltage some pointers, they wouldn't have seemed as important as ideas that came from within the team. I really wanted to like this game, and I will still hold out hope for new companies to make a good fighting game every once in a while. Maybe High Voltage Software can take what they learned in making Tournament of Legends and refine it into something that will get their partners at Sega to take notice.

Cubing in Public Places where Alcohol is served.

Cubing in public where alcohol is involved is a hit-or-miss endeavor. For me, operation of the cube itself doesn't seem to suffer at the one drink level, which is about as many drinks as you will ever see me have. Since I'm still just trying to solve it in the 30-40 second range, but while talking, answering questions, being distracted, or working with really bad lighting conditions, one drink is not going to mess me up as much as other things might.

At a private party where everybody knows half of the other people there and many friendly conversations are bound to spring up, my Rubik's cube schtick is usually fun for a few minutes. People that might be inclined to coolly dismiss my demonstration as intellectual grandstanding when sober might be more vocally appreciative after a couple of martinis. One or two people may be really motivated to learn something. I don't know if that's still the case once the alcohol wears off.

In public venue where alcohol is involved, you have the same challenges with the sober crowd, but magnified. Since I had taken up cubing again, it had happened rarely, but I did have to deal with it a couple of times in the last month or so.

As it happens, I play in a band on weekends. We've just gotten to the point where people know who we are and want to listen to us, but it's not like our fan base is universal. A big chunk of the music we play is stuff that was popular 25 years ago, so the average twentysomething may not appreciate us that much if they rebelled from their parent's taste in music. It also might be noted that for whatever reason, a bar crowd may tend to want heavier music to listen to than the standard radio pop fare. Since we play 80's music, I bring a handful of cubes with me in case a fit of nostalgia breaks out, and some people that I knew from high school don't even recognize me without a cube in my hand. There is a bar that is local to us that we have played at a couple of times with mixed results. We didn't even think that they liked us at first. But, they asked us to come back, and my real cube anomalies were both from that second evening.

We showed up around 11 o'clock, which for middle aged people with kids and day jobs is clearly after bedtime. We were scheduled to go on at midnight, and did not really bring any of our own fans that evening. (It's probably past their bedtime, also.) The band that was already playing sounded to my old ears like early R.E.M. They were a 3-piece with a really big guitar sound, but the vocals were hard to discern. It was loud enough that it's hard to talk to the person in front of you without leaning in and talking directly into their ear. I was listening to the band, standing next to the guitarist and saxophone players from my band and nonchalantly fidgeting with one of my Rubik's cubes. One of the women who was playing pool there walked past us, and gave me a derisive look that let me know that I should not talk to her and how dare somebody try and foist a cheap trick on her or subject her to intellectual grandstanding while she's trying to drink and play pool.

Leon, our guitarist tried to liven things up by suggesting I give her a quick demo. "He's really good at it," he says to her.

I stupidly try to open with the same phrase that I would if there were a normal amount of background noise and I were dealing with a person receptive to the idea in the least. "Satisfy yourself that the cube is really scrambled." She has no idea why I am saying this to her, and I am stupid enough to repeat myself, so she grabs the cube from my hand, annoyed, stuffs it in the layers of her shirt like it was her wallet, and wanders off back to her pool table and the drunk guys in the back playing with the punching bag machine. I was later able to retrieve it once I spotted it on a table in a back corner. Luckily I was able to do so without uttering a word or walking into the back corner, and she treated me condescendingly like I was one of the frail, nerdy kids in high school that she use to spit on during her smoke breaks. She doesn't know the half of it. I kept my distance from her the rest of the evening, and tried to concentrate on playing a good set.

After we played, there was a couple that seemed interested in our band, and we all tried to talk to them while we were breaking down from our set. I gathered that they were not quite as old as we are, but older than the majority of the bar patrons there, and they seemed to like our music. At one point, while we were talking about the 80's music in particular, I showed them my Rubik's cube prowess briefly. They were adamant that if we played a show for them in the future, that I bring a cube with me and show their kids. Then, as a spur-of-the-moment thing, the wife in the couple grabs the cube from me and hides it on her person. I think the intent was to dare me to retrieve it, and having gone through the indignity of the similar situation not hours before, I didn't even have enough of a sense of humor about it to find it funny. The guitarist quickly attempted to retrieve my sense of humor, and sensing the awkwardness, my cube was handed over. In this second case, I'm sure the behavior was intended as playfulness, in stark contrast to the first situation where the interaction shouldn't have happened since the other party had no actual interest in the information available.

For those of you trying to satisfy your morbid curiosity about the music side of me that I don't normally talk about in this space on my blog, check out our band website at www.reverbnation.com/pwl, or find Pee Wee Lewis & The Hues on Facebook.

Wait, here I am!

So I haven't been blogging lately - my plate has been full with non-gaming things like going to the beach and band practice.  As far as gaming goes, I have been lucky to play a quick round of Pikmin or Pikmin 2 challenge mode just before bedtime.  My younger son Bubba has been hogging the Wii lately despite his lack of platforming skills and only wants to play Super Mario Galaxy 2.  Since the game has been in the machine a lot, sometimes Bubba tells me he wants to see me play.  I finally beat the last Bowser battle only to find that there's another galaxy waiting for me.
I was pretty excited to hear Nintendo's official announcement about their new console. I am glad that they decided to make it compatible with both the old controllers and the old games, because if I had to go through another cycle of buying controllers in this economy I really don't think I could. The only problem I'm having is that the new name. "WiiU" - am I supposed to think of college, Homer Simpson, or what I now have stuck in my head?



Just like I already have the remix of the Yoshida brothers song "Kodo" completely associated with the Wii, Blur's "Song 2" will be stuck in my head just for the "Weeee Ooooooo" right at the beginning of the song.