Unfortunately I still haven't figured out the convoluted airship hanger deal. This is a side-effect of one of Kingdom Hearts' greatest strengths: pacing. Even at times when the next goal is not explicitly declared, it is easy enough to figure out by wherever you haven't already been, and the game's events proceed one after the other in rapid fashion. Never a dull moment.

Progress: Deep Jungle

I haven't played a Pokémon since Red. And before I started playing Pearl, I was of the opinion that today's punk kids didn't know what the real 150 Pokémon were all about. Now that I've sampled what the new iteration has to offer, I know better - it really hasn't changed at all.

This is good, because the core Pokémon game is simple and fun. You've got levels and stats, types that are super- or not-very-effective against one another, and special abilities with different powers and effects. Don't have the right type? Go catch one! The story? Who cares! Any excuse to have little creatures beat the shit out of each other is fine with me.

Sure there is more to the game than there once was - a clock, for one, with different monsters appearing at different times; more items, more types, more abilities, obviously more Pokémon. And I'm sure there are a ton of special features that I haven't really bothered looking at. But the basic gameplay remains intact, and, ten years later, is fun all over again.

Progress: 1/8 badges

I decided to finish the Mission Mode today, and definitely used some hints toward the end. One of the missions was, here's a big stack of blocks, make a chain with red as the tenth matching color! Jesus.

Where the Basic and Advanced puzzles are split into 60 individual scenarios, Mission and Active Puzzle mode are in six parts, each part consisting of ten sequential challenges. It is possible to put the DS in closed sleep mode at any time, but you can't up and quit playing and jump back in the middle of the "mission" or "course," which makes it at least seem more intense. What's more, the Active puzzle mode doesn't have any hints!

I'm only halfway through it and it's already starting to kick my ass. Very cool.

Progress: Active Puzzle Course 4

At the NOA employee store, remotes are $30, and Wii Play (bundled with a remote) is $36. I needed a replacement remote - and I figured, for six bucks, what could the harm be? Now, having seen all that Wii Play has to offer, I think I would rather have kept my $6.

Wii Play consists of nine minigames. In order of appearance (from a fresh save file, the games must be played sequentially in order to unlock them all):

Shooting Range
Oh sweet! Duck Hunt! Wait... where are the ducks going? No! Come back ducks! Damn it. As it turns out, Shooting Range is a dullish and rather long series of aiming and firing challenges.

Find Mii
Where's Waldo would make an awful video game. But if you take the basic concepts of pattern recognition and apply them to more creative premises - finding duplicate Miis, searching for specific Miis, looking for Miis exhibiting a particular behavior - wouldn't it be a lot more fun? Well, no, it isn't.

Table Tennis
Take the Tennis game from Wii Sports, make the playing field much smaller, and replace the ability to control the orientation of the racket with manual paddle movement. Don't try to move the paddle faster to make a more powerful shot; you will only overshoot your target and miss completely. Really, little more than a graphically sophisticated Pong.

Pose Mii
The only interesting part of this game is figuring out what the hell you're supposed to be doing, so I won't ruin the fun for you.

Laser Hockey
Surprisingly tolerable! Move air-hockey mallets around to knock the puck into your opponent's goal. Pro: the whole thing is stylized with colorful lasers and particle effects. Con: the puck does not react to force, so playing it fast is simply impossible.

Billiards
Nine-ball!?

Fishing
Difficult to understand, and even more difficult to pull off, especially when the huge warning text that claims you're not close enough to the television covers half the fish pond. First fish I caught gave me -50 points. Negative 50 points!

Charge!
Tilt remote forward, wait for game to end.

Tanks!
A game of satisfying complexity and reasonable control, but is just too damn hard. It plays like a two-axis shooter, ala Robotron: 2084 or Geometry Wars, with movement controlled by the D-pad, or the stick if you've got a nunchuck, and aiming controlled by simply pointing the remote (I expect the Alien Syndrome (2007) remake to use a similar scheme). The problem is that just as you take out enemy tanks in one shot, so too do they defeat you in a single blow. So between the impossibility of moving fast enough to dodge an incoming shot, the fact that the rounds ricochet off walls, and splash damage, everything past the first handful of stages is an exceedingly difficult endeavor.

All of these games can be played by one or two players. I played through them all with a friend, and each game had both of us almost invariably begging for the end. We actually played Laser Hockey and Tanks! twice each, but even that was pushing it.

It's not the production values, it's not the execution, and in most cases it isn't even the control setup. The bottom line is that Wii Play is just fundamentally flawed: all of its games suck. They aren't fun. Buying it for any reason other than the controller inside is a mistake.

Progress: Complete

It's a real shame that massively multiplayer games have to have other people in them. No matter how good Burning Crusade is - and it is good - it cannot overcome John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Even discounting players who are total asshats, there is no shortage of bad players, healers who can't keep anyone alive, tanks who can't keep a monster away from the party, damage classes who seem to have misplaced their damage abilities. I know I'm far from the best Mage in the world, but some people I've grouped with for should-have-been-easy dungeon runs make me look like the goddamn king of Sparta.

Nevertheless I still enjoy galavanting around Outland, burning ogres and earning dough. An aspect of BC that the designers clearly worked very hard to improve upon is endgame solo and small-group play. As I have hit upon previously, there is a ton of stuff to do at level 70, and unlike the level 60 content in the original game, much of it seems attainable. Whereas before I was a little bitter about bleeding money every month for little gain, I feel better about recurring payment this time (though I am still in my first month).

Progress: Level 70, 388 Engineering

Frankly, the intro was awful. First there was a nonsensical cutscene that was really a music video; then a tutorial section which takes forever; then a series of vague errands in the starting area, mixed in with ridiculously difficult minigames that command absolute perfection over the very controls that have just been introduced. And I shouldn't have to say that the mix of Final Fantasy and Disney characters makes for a very awkward narrative, but it certainly doesn't help matters.

Luckily, Kingdom Hearts has excellent gameplay mechanics on its side. It's a welcome approach to an action RPG - most of the numerics, like health and mana, are replaced by simple gauges that are much easier to approach. Movement and camera orientation felt rough in the beginning but I'm starting to get used to it. And, hell, there's magic! Magic is cool. The combat is fun even before the main character (Sora) meets his party members (Donald and Goofy), and party combat is even more exciting.

I'm just scratching the surface of the game and I can already see incredible depth. Highly customizable party AI; a wealth of items, for using, equipping, and collecting; and the Gummi Ship workshop, which I still don't understand much of, but given my airship fetish I fully intend to explore.

Progress: Wonderland

Sometimes, the game can be fairly fast-paced, with stages of engaging space robots in mortal combat flowing one after the other. But all too often, levels are interrupted by vague missions that require backtracking to search for a specific, but ambiguous item. And though it seemed like the cutscenes and dialog were letting up for a while, as the game reached its final phases they came back in full force.

There are a slew of secondary weapons, that could, in theory, spice up the otherwise repetitive gameplay. But the majority of them are completely useless. A lot of them don't even have a good chance of hitting the enemy, let alone doing more damage than a primary attack.

The ending? So bad, it's funny. Over the course of the game, the Orbital Frame (the fighting robot)'s AI, "ADA," is developed as a robotic character gradually learning humanity. After defeating the final boss - then being accosted by another, more powerful robot, but escaping (the final scene is a challenge to survive for about 30 seconds until the last cutscene jumps in) - the main character asks ADA what she is going to do next. She's going on a mission to Mars. Main character asks, maybe, if after the mission-- but ADA clarifies, that the mission to Mars is a suicide bombing, where the orbital frame will be detonated to take out an enemy base. The main character is upset by this for a few seconds, then leaves the robot and reunites with the game's other two-and-a-half characters.

In total ZOE was about 4 or 5 hours long. Being introduced to the game was exciting, and the later boss battles were challenging and pretty cool - other than that, it's just bad. Worth the $10 I bought it for, but probably not much more.

Progress: Complete

Back when it first came out in 2001, a buddy of mine bought Zone of the Enders because - and this is the same reason everyone who got the game got it - of the included MGS2 demo. But one day he actually started playing it, and let me give it a shot. I remember how fluidly it controlled; at this point, 3D games in general usually played very rough, and a game about flying robots? Seemed like it would be impossible. But ZOE nailed it. Flitting about, pot-shotting mechanical enemies, and slashing things up with a beam sword was a joy to control, as I remembered it.

Six years later, after resolving to join the 21st century and get a PS2 of my own, I decided to try and relive that experience. After all, for ten bucks, what could I lose? I knew going in that the rest of the game was vapid and meaningless, but had high hopes for the fighting-robot action.

So has ZOE's control scheme stood the test of time? Well, sort of. Parts of it are executed very well; auto lock-on, swift strafing movement, the distance-sensitive switch between close- and long-range weaponry. Other parts, though, show their age. Manual aiming is a chore, and camera movement is basically impossible. And, thus far, the game reminds me of PN03 in that there are pretty much two enemies throughout the entire game. Two hours in, fighting them is already getting repetitive.

As for the rest - yeah, it blows. Every aspect of the story is irritatingly poor: from lengthy dialog sessions set in the first-person view of the cockpit (the only on-screen action is subtitles), to insipid banter between the young, emotional hero and the robotic pilot program, to terrible and regrettably frequent voice acting, to Hideo Kojima's trademark direction of having at least as many minutes of cutscene as gameplay.

I mean, sure, it could be worse. But it was a coattail-rider then, and is entirely forgettable now.

Progress: EPS.2

WoW's only shortcoming in my opinion was the lack of endgame material, a goal they worked on throughout the game's release but were always a little behind on. Burning Crusade fixes that problem - with wide, sprawling geography for level 70 players to roam around in (flying mounts are way fun), no shortage of quests, and a wealth of small-group dungeons that any fool can find a team for.

After Nagrand, I made a small pit stop in Gnomish outpost Toshley's Station (BC also has an admirable supply of Star Wars references), then moved on to the Netherstorm zone. Netherstorm has a Goblin town working on a space rocket, called Area 52; the Outland capitol of the Ethereal race, Stormspire; the ruins of Kirin'Var Village, where the ghosts of the first Azerothian mages to come to Outland still linger; and is in general just super cool. I got a new helmet from the Goblins that is a rocket, and reached level 70 on Sunday morning.

Now, my plate of tasks is fuller than before, if anything. I've got to work on a chain of quests to get my key to Karazhan, could use some more cash money for a faster flying mount, and really doing quests is still a load of fun.

One of my favorite quest lines from the original game was the Razelikh chain. It begins by talking to the ghost of a fallen champion, and then takes the player (and his groupmates) to several different zones, gathering materials and making preparations for slaying the demon lord. There are other quests that send you to location X to pick up object Y - this was different: upon arriving at Azshara, you need to find a demon hunter, and borrow some tools from him to help you find enchanted crystals and such for your demon-slaying weapons. Then back in the Blasted Lands, you have to use the weapons to remove the demon lord's lieutenants' protective barriers, and take them out to unlock the way to his throne. It's very long, and feels very epic.

I bring this up because there are a lot of quest lines in Burning Crusade that resemble this. There is an ultimate goal (usually, yes, killing a demon lord), and you must help in planning the attack or collecting the proper components, ala your favorite fantasy story. Each of these quest lines could stand alone as a solid plotline, and there are several (dozens?) of them now. I was helping a guildmate level yesterday, and a mask dropped off some warlock enemies; it began a quest line that had us infiltrating and then destroying a demon staging camp, performing some reconaissance by a portal through which a demon was summoning other, lesser demons, perform sabotage on the portal's equipment, and then fight the demon himself with the help of some gigantic tree guardians. The coolest part is that, even though we did it together, most of it could have been done by a solo player.

This wasn't the first like this either; I gained experience on a bunch of quest lines that ended in the approach of a demon lord in his lair. And I hotly anticipate finding even more like this in my ongoing quest for more money.

Progress: Level 70, 387 Engineering

Of course, I should have expected that, like the Wii browser, external media (MP3s, MOVs, etc.) won't play. The you tubes also don't work because of Flash version issues. Couple these problems with a slew of layout and Javascript rendering errors and you've got one of the poorest browsers out there. Don't even start with me about the handwriting "recognition" interface.

There is a limited utility simply for having a portable browser, but for casual browsing this is no good.

Progress: Will probably never use it again