Bwana asks for more about Disgaea, although under confused pretences. (Weezie has not played Disgaea. We had an email thread back when it originally came out where we discussed it's hard to find nature, and he talked about buying copies for later EBayage - maybe that's where the confusion arises.) Anyway, I can talk about it some more - the obvious caveat is that I haven't played through all that much of it, and so it's not a review of the whole game. It's very much a "tactical RPG" in the Final Fantasy:Tactics vein. You have a group of characters who possess various classes, stats, and skills. You equip them with stuff and then send them out into turn-based combat. This advances the story and generates experience and money to buy more stuff. Rinse and repeat. It's in 3D but you can only rotate the camera in 90 degree increments and there are two preset zooms. The camera is static enough that presorting geometry is certainly feasible - although on a PS2 I doubt they need that. The story is unusual and told with a nice touch of humor. You start out as a prince of the Netherworld who's been asleep for two years (I have no idea if they explain why later). In the meantime, the King (your father) was killed and the nobles have begun to fight for control of the Netherworld. You set out to reclaim your birthright, kicking whatever ass that takes. The story has a fair amount of snappy dialogue and even seems to have survived translation pretty well. (The voice dubbing is slightly annoying - but I've heard a lot worse.) It's broken into "episodes" (I'm currently partway through Episode 2) and my favorite bit of humor so far was the anime-style "In the next episode" teaser at the end of episode 1. I dug around on the web and found the script for that little bit. (Duh - this is a spoiler. Think people! :-)) Etna - Finally, the time has come for Prince Laharl to pay for all his evil deeds. Laharl - Hey... Etna - Now, Etna will fulfill the late prince

Note to SFFan in Nippon: Yes, I see that work has begun on a film version of Foundation. Do us all a favor: assume it's going to suck until we hear otherwise. It's likely, and if it DOESN'T suck, it will be a pleasant suprise to all. But if you go and get your hopes up . . . well "fool me once, shame on you" comes to mind.

I have to give props to whoever scheduled E3 and Memorial Day this way relative to each other. Just enough distance that stringing them TOGETHER into some road trip of unimaginable proportions is impractical - but still close enough that when you come lurching out of said post-E3 road trip you can just careen right into the holiday weekend. Hope everyone had a good one - we didn't do a whole lot, but I'm basically back on my feet and ready to make a go of the summer. :-) The TV is all fixed up, the UberRemote(tm) has learned all of the new hardware codes, I found the secret trick to having two TiVos in the same room (more on that in a sec), I've caught up my Magic Online league, I cleaned up my den which had been pretty trashed with E3 and TV issues, and I picked up a copy of Disgaea over the weekend. So a few stupid TiVo tricks of note. 1) If you look in the manual it's possible to set a "remote channel" so you can have two remotes, two TiVos, and each TiVo only talks to one remote. Then you can program those two separate remotes into an Uberremote if you have one. It's a pain, but it did work. 2) You can enable a "30 second skip" on any TiVo. Start playing a recording, and then press Select - Play - Select - 3 - 0 - Select. The TiVo will bong three times (if you have the sounds on), and the "next track" button (the one with a fast-forward symbol and a vertical line) will become a 30 second skip. It looks kind of like this >>| As for the anticipated deluge of "why two TiVos", the answer is pretty much why not. We bought the NEW TiVo because it will record High Definition TV. The old TiVo still works just fine, so why not keep it around. They can record separate programs, and it's more disk space, so there you are. Thanks go to Monte for pointing me at The Kingdom of Loathing, a web based online RPG kind of game. It's intentionally cheesy, it's funny, and it's free. I like Disgaea so far - it's turn based tactical combat a la FF:Tactics or Advance Wars (much closer to FF:T because it's an RPG mechanic wrapped around the tactical combat gameplay. It's got a neat sense of humor, and the mechanics seem pretty novel and interesting. This is an old game, but it was pretty hard to find, and Atlus reprinted it last week, so I snatched a copy. In case it's not obvious, I have a certain tendency to just mention games in passing. If somebody is curious about the title, just post a question and I'll be happy to babble in more detail. I'm also still playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong but it's gotten pretty tough. I have a tendency to play that in 5-10 minutes spurts and then move on to something else.

I finished the GBA version of the The Sims yesterday. It's odd enough that a Sims game has an ending, but it's a pretty crazy one. Nontheless - I quite liked the GBA version. In many ways it's a better console game than the two "bigger" versions for PS2 et al. The good news is most of the enhancements seems to be folded into the Urbz, due out this fall. I also picked up Mario vs. Donkey Kong and I've played the first two worlds. I like it - it's old school gameplay, but creative fun. And it's not stupidly, punishingly hard (which is a trait that often goes along with the phrase "old school" in video games). I try not to talk too much about politics here - I just don't think blogs are a great forum for those sorts of discussion. However, I'd be greatly remiss if I didn't point you at the text of Gore's speech yesterday. Powerful stuff, and well worth reading regardless of your political leanings. This link is to moveon.org, but they didn't add anything other than a few odd paragraphs in bold. I read it on Salon.com, but you have to watch an ad to see it there. I do have to agree to a comment I saw on another blog that said "Where was this passion in 2000?"

A smartass would point out that the very last post is A) over two weeks old and B) contains a promise to update more often. And unfortunately for me, I'm a smartass. Suckage. In my defense, it's been a very busy two weeks. So a quick outline. Two weeks ago today, Lee and I drove down to LA for E3. There was three days of E3, followed by 4 days of the "Big Honking Road Trip 2K4" where I tooled around California with a couple of my buddies from Virginia and went to Hooters. THEN, on the last day of that I picked up my new HD TiVo. THEN I broke my television while trying to fix some settings that were blocking using the HD TiVo. Then I had to repair that somewhat, arrange for a professional calibrator to fix the rest, and stay home while he did that. Woot. Then this weekend was the Prerelease tournament for the newest Magic set (Fifth Dawn), and my friend Tony bought an Xbox so I got another free 2 month Xbox Live account and bought Project Gotham Racing 2 to race against him. Oh and during E3 my server machines barfed, so I couldn't update the web page or even get email during E3 or BHRT2K4. Whew. I think that's it in the super short form. Some of these topics obviously merit more discussion. Most obvious point: Enterprise in HD is AMAZING. I thought HD hockey was good, but Enterprise is just totally insane. Any TV retailer worth their salt needs a TiVo with some of the last eps on it. Does anybody in my readership actually give a rats-ass about Magic? I could discuss Fifth Dawn more, but I don't think anyone cares. If you do, comment below . . . . Lastly, my current Live Gamertag is ChromaticGnu. The problem with using the 2 free month cards is that they never release the GamerTags I use - so all the variants of HiddenJester are blocked up now. Anyway, if any of you have a Live account send me a friend req. And if you have PGR2 let me know, Tony and I would like to have more than 2 people in our races :-)