We've mostly recovered from the Tiki Party on Saturday (with the notable exception of my sad Burnout 3 save which got nuked). The house is basically clean again (well, I need to run one more load of dishes, but that's minor) and I fixed the toilet that got broken. The scary giant inflatable monkey was deflated (verdict - Heisenberg says it's still scary even deflated) and life goes on. It was a fun time, hope everyone else enjoyed it as well. In other notes Chapter Three of Playing Cops & Robots went out to those reviewers who sent back Chapter Two. It was a bit slower because I held it for a while while I did major surgery on Chapter Four. Chapter Four isn't quite out of the ER yet, but I'm past the start enough to feel the segue from Three to Four is now solid. Chapter Four is the first place where the current outline diverges markedly from the first draft - in fact the original Chapter Four splits into the current Chapter Four and Chapter Five. If you reviewing for me and you don't have Chapter Three that means you owe me comments on Chapter One or Two :-) I've been very quiet on both blogs in June, which is a bit ironic because it is the first month in quite a while that I felt productive. A couple of things brought that about, mainly me adopting a fairly fixed schedule. I actually have a schedule I've drawn up now that rules my Monday - Friday workweek and it says when I should be writing versus web surfing, versus doing dishes and fixing toilets. That sounds stupid - it took a while for me to try it, but it lead to another interesting trick. I've been using the Getting Things Done methodology and it was helping - but I was unhappy with how much writing I was doing. One problem I was having was that I only had one "context" really - at any time I could tackle any problem. Or read RSS feeds. And it all seemed sort of equally important. The schedule let me create artificial contexts - and the difference has been huge. So now I have a "Domestic" context and a "Writing" context, and if it's 9:30 in the morning I know it's time to stop reading web crap, and time to stop messing with whatever and just write (and I mean write in the looser sense - including editing and the like). I can not worry about domestic crap because I know it has time coming up so I can glibly slide things onto a Next Actions list and off my mind for an hour of writing time. Anyway, for some reason cutting through some blockage professionally dried up my blogging impulse. I'm hoping there's a steady state in between - we'll see. On the gaming front I must admit that I'm quite enamored with Canvas Curse on the DS. That's currently a Gamefly rental, but I wouldn't be surprised to find in a few days that I buy it. It's the game that Yoshi's Touch and Go is the tech demo for. Don't get me wrong - I'm still angry at Nintendo milking it that way - Yoshi's is a travesty and they shouldn't be selling it. But I admit Canvas Curse is fun. And I'll probably go ahead and buy Meteos this week - I've already read two positive reviews and I'm inclined to buy anything from Mizuguchi. So much for my "no more DS titles that aren't pre-screened" line - although I could be snarky and say it only applies to first-party titles. I've also fiddled with Jade Empire and Bard's Tale briefly before circling back to concentrate on Sly 2 and GTA:San Andreas. I can talk more about any of these titles if anyone asks. There's also an interesting discussion about Gamefly impacting my game impressions. Here's a short version - I sent back Jade Empire at a point where I would not have quit playing a game I had already invested $50 in. I expected Gamefly to save me the occasional $50 purchase. I'm somewhat surprised to find out it raises my quality bar. Moving my buy/don't buy decision bar from before playing to after five to ten hours of playing is a very interesting thing. Again, I can talk more on this point if anyone cares.

How in the world did I miss this story in March? Georgie stop it!. Please! We're begging you! You managed to finish the prequel on some sort of "high note" (admittedly by lowballing your first two shots but we'll take what we can get) But c'mon now? 3D? WTF?

Karin and I just watched episode 6 of Samurai Champloo and boy were we surprised to see a cameo by Chuji! (He plays the European, naturally!) Good work Jeff!

So let's get this out of the way - I agree with a lot of Nintendo's overall thrust about games getting too complicated and too hard. Having said that they have really started to foist off a bunch of crap on the consumers - tech demos with no lasting gameplay. Especially on the DS - a platform where they don't quite seem to know what they want to do with it. Let's look at a few Nintendo titles I've rented or bought lately. Yoshi's Touch and Go - This is pretty neat when you first play it. It's at least ten minutes before you say "So are there only two different levels in the game?" It's probably another ten before you realize that yes - that is the case. Polarium - This was at least a half hour before I was convinced I saw the entire game. Hey it's neat because you're drawing a line with the hand-crampy too small stylus! You couldn't possibly move from one tile to the next using a . . . dpad. Well. Moving on. WarioWare Touched - OK these next two hurt the most. Wario Ware Touched is . . . OK, but a large part of the brilliance of the original WarioWare was the sheer variety of simple one button games. Everything in Touched is one of two games - connect two points with a line, or cut something into two pieces with a line. It was kind of neat but I don't think Karin or I played ever after the first week or so I owned it. WarioWare Twisted - Hey look everyone! Nintendo can have experimental peripherals strapped onto old consoles. WarioWare Twisted continues to degrade the WarioWare franchise by A) severely cutting down the number of mini-games (each stage only has a handful - if you play a given stage twice you'll see about 90% repeats on the second playthrough) and B) making the games all very similar. You either rotate the console clockwise or counterclockwise to make something swing, or fall or whatever. And it's never clear or consistent whether you're rotating an object or the entire world. So the entire game amounts to "rotate one direction. If that doesn't fix the problem quickly rotate the other way and hope you have enough time." WarioWare was one of Karin's favorite games. It's taken three releases of steadily increasing mediocrity (The GameCube one was good, but it was just a rehash of the GBA version. It's not worth really owning both) but the next WarioWare isn't a must-buy, it's a rent-first. Pac Pix - OK in all fairness this isn't Nintendo directly - this is Namco. I actually quite liked this the first time I played it. The second time I realized I was about halfway through the entire game. The third time was when I realized that the world progression was set up to make you play levels repeatedly. But it's another "neat" DS title with absolutely no staying power. So now the hype train is pulling out of the station for Kirby DS (whatever cutesy name) - the one where you draw rainbows. From what I've read so far it's like Yoshi - but with more than two levels! Whatever. Nintendo officially has a "Pshaw" from me now. I'm not buying another DS game without having rented it first or a good review from a friend I trust. I've been burned enough on them passing off ten minutes of gameplay with no follow-through as an entire game. Now we read that Nintendo doesn't even know what the Revolution controller is going to be. The internet is awash with gyroscopes and touch screens, and squeezable controls and all these crazy rumors but here's the deal - the only thing we know about the Revolution is that it can play NES, SNES, N64 and Gamecube games. That means it can't stray too far from the Gamecube or N64 controller - both of which are moderately sucky if we admit the truth. I'd take the GCN controller over Microsoft's gargantuan "Duke" original controller - but not over a Type S. Nintendo - I'm all for new gameplay, but I'm tired of seeing your lab prototypes as full price games. I'd rather see a solid execution of basic gameplay than crazy ass gadgets. It's like Nintendo is trying to pack Kentia Hall into their handhelds. Just stop it and make another Zelda, OK?

So over lunch I was watching the Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense which I just got from Amazon. They were playing Burning Down the House when I realized Sony could totally destroy Microsoft. All they have to do is license this song for the PS3 ad campaign! "Dreams walking in broad daylight Three hun-dred six-ty five de-grees Burning down the house" Change the name to PS 365 - and that's clearly five better than Xbox 360! Who wants a paltry 360 degrees when they could have 365? (That sound you just heard was me making Bwana's head asplode - even across the Atlantic Pacific* ocean) *Correction provided by JP Porthos, latin dancer extraordinaire.