Live from dorkclub.com! One night only! Tune in to this very space one week from today (Wednesday, January 2) for The Official DORK Club Law & Order Season 18 Premiere Liveblog: Writer’s Strike Edition. Festivities begin at 9:00 PM PST and continue until 11:00 or until I get bored.

There may or may not be something new here before then, as family obligations continue.

Tribes: Vengeance was pretty good, I guess. It certainly continued the Tribes legacy of having a demo that included all the best parts of the full game. While it left a great first impression, though, it never quite graduated to anything deeper than Unreal Tournament with jetpacks. Don’t worry, Ken Levine, we don’t hold grudges around here. Oh, and thanks for BioShock, by the way.

After the good ol’ boys at Dynamix got good n’ fired and saw their landmark series ripped from their grasp, four of them got together and formed Garage Games, which has been steadily pumping out casual-friendly games powered by their Torque Engine, a Tribes 2 engine derivative. Still, they couldn’t leave jetpacks and disc launchers behind. It was in their blood, you see. Now, Shacknews got its grubby little mitts on a leaked alpha video for a game from Garage Games that can only be described as “Tribes-esque.” According to “timaste,” a Garage Games employee commenting on Shacknews’ news post, the video represents just three months of work. I’m positively giddy to see it after another three.

Truly, it’s a Festivus miracle.

I’ve never liked comic books. In fact, I mostly despise the entire medium. Super hero comics, the industry’s bread and butter, are little more than juvenile fantasy fulfillment featuring characters with backstories tangled up in decades worth of convoluted continuity. Feel free to quote this right back at me after my next epic Transformers update. Individual issues are too short and too expensive, taking months, if not years, to resolve their cross-promoted, soap opera-esque story arcs that leave no lasting effect on characters or their world. Good is good; evil is evil; and despite publishers’ hype, nothing ever changes. In short, comic books are dull.

At one point in 2002, I think, Toastyfrog.com was decked out in a Watchmen theme, even if Archive.org has no record of it, the site’s title character asking, “Who toasts the toastyfrog?” Only vaguely aware of Wikipedia, I turned to Jeremy Parish to find out just what Watchmen was. After all, he had just revealed himself to be more of an expert on the subject than anyone else I knew. Amazon had informed me Watchmen was a 12-issue super hero comic book series that had been collected as a single novel. I had heard about the book before, briefly mentioned in blogs and forums, but always assumed it was just another super hero comic series among many, no different from X-Men or Spider-Man. Its title certainly did little to dissuade this perception. Parish quickly put my fears to rest in an e-mail, assuring me that Watchmen was entirely self-contained with a beginning, middle, and end – not part of a larger comic book continuity – and though it involved super heroes, was tightly scripted and generally excellent. Around this time of year while home from college for winter break, I bought the book to help kill time during the holidays. What I found beneath its bright yellow cover completely changed my reading habits and perception of the medium. I just finished my fifth yearly reading of Watchmen and still managed to uncover plenty of new discoveries hidden between its pages.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it can only exist as a comic book (which makes the fact that it’s finally being filmed after so many failed attempts by Zack “300” Snyder all the more troubling). Its pages are littered with a tremendous number of tiny details that foreshadow future developments or outright reveal major plot points long before they enter the narrative proper. Newspaper headlines, graffiti on distant walls, and seemingly insignificant characters shuffling through the background all enrich and flesh out the world, providing hints of what’s to come and filling in what’s already happened. Because you can spend as much time as you want studying a single frame or rip through the pages reading dialogue bubbles and avoiding all else, Watchmen effectively rewards you in direct proportion to the energy you invest in it. It’s a surprisingly interactive experience and a book that takes full advantage of its medium.

It also manages to translate many cinematic techniques, including montage and slow motion, to its paneled pages of still images. The panels are treated like shots from a camera, and only things a camera could record – images, sound – show up on the page. There are no thought bubbles or internal monologues. The book is actually a multimedia experience, despite being limited to images on a page. Besides its blatantly filmic techniques, Watchmen also features excerpts from a character’s autobiography, police reports, internal company memos, and Tales of the Black Freighter, a lengthy comic-within-a-comic that recounts a pirate tale with themes and events that echo those of Watchmen itself. Pirate comic books are very popular in the world of Watchmen.

After all, there’s no need for super hero comics in Watchmen’s alternate version of 1985 where super heroes are real. Or rather, a super hero is real. The only vaguely human collection of energy now called Dr. Manhattan is all that remains of a research scientist accidentally bombarded by an unhealthy dose of radiation in the New Mexico desert. Dr. Manhattan has become the US government’s own personal demi-god, leading to radical advances in technology – electric cars and airships, for starters – and acting as a nuclear deterrent against the Russians. In fact, the good doctor single handily won the Vietnam War for the United States. America loved then-president Nixon so much, that even in 1985 he remains the nation’s commander-in-chief, the 20th amendment repealed.

Other super heroes exist, although there’s little super about them. They existed a full generation before Dr. Manhattan’s accidental creation, in fact. This first order of heroes has long since stepped aside – the lucky ones retired, the not-so-lucky ones are dead or insane – so that a second generation could follow in their footsteps until their vigilantism was made illegal following a 1977 police strike. Nite Owl, a sort of Batman equivalent – wealthy and with a secret basement full of gadgets – has found himself impotent, quite literally, in fact, since giving up costumed adventuring. His former partner, Rorschach, is a hard-boiled detective with a penchant for violence, the inkblots on his mask shifting into a new position in every panel. He continues fighting for justice for a world that no longer wants him, hunted by the police for the two murders they can pin on him. He would be a villain in any other comic. When The Comedian – think Captain America crossed with The Punisher and The Joker – is thrown from his highrise apartment window to the street below, old friends and enemies that haven’t spoken in eight years suddenly find themselves back in each other’s lives as they search for answers and try to solve the murder of their fellow hero, even if he was never quite their friend. Someone’s killing masks, and Dr. Manhattan has fled the planet, leaving the Russians free to invade Afghanistan and heat up the Cold War.

While it deals with global conflicts, Watchmen’s plot primarily uses the escalating Cold War as a backdrop to the ever-deepening mystery behind The Comedian’s murder. This is a complicated book that hops between characters and subplots as often as it leaps through time. Alan Moore wanted to write the Moby Dick of comic books and with Watchmen he succeeds, both in its sheer complexity and in its literary value. The book seriously considers the kind of person that puts on a mask to fight crime in the dead of night and concludes that this is probably the last sort of person in the world you would want protecting you. It takes a psychopath to jump between rooftops at 3:00 AM dressed as an owl, and a special sort of sickness to think it’s doing any good. In fact, Watchmen challenges many of the assumptions of the super hero comic book, which is partly why I’m so captivated by it. It takes a cold, hard look at extraordinary men in spandex as protectors of society and suggests that perhaps society should be thinking of protecting itself from them. Without getting into the finer details of the plot or spoiling any of its most affecting scenes, Watchmen challenges your moral beliefs and your very definition of a hero.

Like Moore’s earlier work (V for Vendetta, Miracleman), Watchmen is a book about personal beliefs taken to their extreme. It doesn’t necessarily provide us with any heroes or any villains either. This is a complex work that deserves a place on any respectable bookshelf, even on one owned by someone with complete contempt for its medium and genre. This book made me appreciate the potential of comic books, which should be called comic books and not “graphic novels” or “sequential art” or any other made-up name to justify the fact that adults read them too. Like video games, comics books are a medium that was first designed as simple pulp entertainment mostly targeted at children, but has since evolved into something more.

I’m glad I sent that e-mail five years ago about a few jpegs on a version of a website that Archive.org assures me never existed. After Watchmen, I read nearly all of Alan Moore’s other books and moved on to discover Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Art Speilelman, among others. As an introduction to the medium, it’s hard to ask for a better candidate than a book that breaks all the rules, points out how ridiculous they were in the first place, and continues fullsteam ahead to tell a story that stands on equal footing with the best from any other art form. Having finished my fifth reading of the book several hours ago, smiling with each new discovery and revelation, I look forward to next year’s reading and the new insight it will bring. Everyone should read Watchmen now, before Snyder’s movie, regardless of its final quality, colors their perceptions of the book. Even if you’ve already read it once, twice, or a dozen times, dust off your copy and read it. This is a work that single-handedly endeared me to its very medium and each year it seems just as fresh, exciting, and poignant as the last.

No words. Too funny. Apologies for content-less YouTube update. SERIOUS REVIEW post later today.

P.S. There’s more.

Megami Tensei Online: IMAGINE is a strangely subtitled Japanese MMORPG set in the Megami Tensei universe. Tokyo is once again at the heart of Armageddon and it’s up to you (and thousands of other players just like you) to “save” the world. For the uninitiated (which I assume is everyone reading this site) Megaten, as fans abbreviate it, is a long-running Japanese RPG series that focuses heavily on demon summoning, character customization, and player choice. Think of it as Pokemon for grown ups. The games are distinctly Japanese, always set in Tokyo (as far as I know), and deal with mature religious themes. It’s no surprise then that the series never made it outside of Japan under Nintendo’s watchful eyes. In fact, the series really didn’t make a name for itself in the West until the last days of the PS2… Well, lastish days. At this rate, the PS2 will never die. If you care enough, and I’m sure you don’t, check out Hardcore Gaming 101’s ridiculously in-depth series retrospective. The Megaten series itself is divided into multiple, subtly different sub-series, including the Persona series and Digital Devil Saga. Various FAQs assure me IMAGINE is set between Shin Megami Tensei and its sequel, but the game’s opening cinematic ends with the title of “Digital Devil Story: IMAGINE,” so exactly where the MMO falls in this Adventure Island/Wonder Boy-esque nomenclatural nightmare is anybody’s guess.

The game’s been in beta for a while now, and is freely available to download and play, so I’ll assume none of the Japanese text in the registration process referred to an NDA. IMAGINE is actually entirely in Japanese, what with it being a Japanese game and all. Still, this hasn’t stopped me from slowly fumbling my way through the game with the help of a few online resources. I eventually managed to create a character named 肉サラダ, which Babel Fish assures me means “meat salad.” I chose the arm computer that best suited my ugly avatar and set forth on my fabulous adventure.

The game begins with a tutorial in what I assume is some kind of VR simulation. The green walls comprised of moving code sort of gives it away. An old man doing his best Big Boss impression walks you through the basic gameplay and sends you to violently murder some unsuspecting slime monsters. Several more tutorials follow, teaching you how to loot fallen enemies and use the game’s menus. Thankfully, besides the old man’s Japanese rambling, each tutorial is also illustrated with large, clearly labeled pictures for those of us unfortunate enough to not understand the game’s moon language.

Eventually, after completing some parts of the tutorial and failing horribly at others, I left the virtual world behind in favor of post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The game begins in a town populated with friendly demons from other Megaten games (which may or may not use models ripped from PS2 entries in the series) as well as other human characters. More tutorials and helpful tips are present here, but I’d had enough dealing with NPCs and my questlog was already full of missions with objectives I couldn’t read or understand. It was time to do some killing.

Despite the language barrier, it’s obvious that IMAGINE is an excellent game that does a remarkable job of translating Megaten’s single player mechanics to an online space. Combat is fast and requires well-timed blocks to avoid being steamrolled by even the weakest enemies. Moves and abilities take time to use, and there’s a great deal of strategy involved in timing attacks and blocks to maximize damage output and minimize damage taken. The game’s skill system is also incredibly deep, with dozens of different skill paths to choose from in order to mix and match your way to a fully customizable class. The game’s a bit grind-heavy, especially when you don’t understand the language and therefore can’t do any of the quests, but combat and customization are both incredibly rich and fun. Atlus, bring this game to the US; I will buy it. Seriously. Just market it as the closest thing we’ll ever get to a Pokemon MMO and everyone else will buy it too.

Like other Megaten games, demon summoning plays a major role in the game. Regardless of your class and skillset, you can initiate conversations with enemy demons to coax them to join your ranks. Succeed, and you gain the ability to summon and level that particular demon. You can only have a single demon out at a time, but you can carry up to six with you and store an additional 50 with the correct NPC. Of course, demon fusing also returns in IMAGINE, allowing you to fuse multiple demons into a single, potentially more powerful creature. Wandering around town and inspecting high level players, it looks like nearly all of the the series’ massive roster of demons has returned. Leveling, customizing, and fusing demons is incredibly rewarding and adds an extra layer of character customization to an already deep game. It’s easy to imagine myself spending hours raising and fusing demons in order to create the perfect companion.

Unfortunately, this game has no chance of every coming out in the United States or any other English-speaking part of the world. It’s a shame too, as even strongarming my way through the experience with only a basic understanding of what’s going on, it’s abundantly clear that IMAGINE is a clever title with more depth and creativity on display than any other MMO in recent memory. It looks like 肉サラダ is stuck on Japanese servers with players he can’t understand for the duration of the beta.

Instructions on how to download the game and register an account can be found in this handy NeoGAF thread by MedievalManIII, who was my questing buddy and fellow ignorant American during my stay in the ruined Tokyo of 202X.

My love for high quality video game instruction manuals is well documented, with personal favorites being the manual for Diablo and Knights of the Old Republic. It looks like I can soon add No More Heroes, Suda 51’s latest commercial failure, to that short list. The pseudo-comic book captures the game’s over-the-top, cel-shaded visuals perfectly. Only time will tell if the English manual lives up to the high watermark set by the Japanese version. (Hint: With Ubisoft publishing the game, it won’t.) Truely, this update would do Jorn Barger proud.

For those of you with poor memories, Mythos is the excellent “casual MMORPG”/true successor to Diablo’s throne from Flagship Seattle, Flagship Studios’ very own Blizzard North. Yet another impossibly massive patch hit the beta servers a few days ago, introducing a wealth of new features including guilds, character respecs, Elite and Hardcore modes, and achievements (AKA the best addition to gaming since Spacewar! created the medium). With the new patch came additional invites for current testers; I still have one left and the first person to speak up gets it.

I love this game. Sure, it might not do anything we haven’t already seen a few dozen times before, but it does a lot, and it does everything very well. Despite still being labeled as a “beta,” the game is already more polished and fun to play than Hellgate: London. I foresee many, many Mythos updates in the future. You’ve been warned.

As much as I love posting all these lengthy reviews to the index, I’ve decided to once again segregate especially long updates to their own pages, conveniently listed under the new [recent] section there on the sidebar. This should also help distinguish between SERIOUS REVIEW and INTERNET BLOG updates, although it probably won’t affect the frequency with which either appears. Welcome organization with open arms, reader.

As you’re no doubt able to tell, a fresh Super Mario Sunshine review wherein I bitch and moan about the game’s failings is now online. This review actually turned out rather smashing, if you don’t mind my saying so, which is obviously not always the case. Regardless of their final quality, however, rest assured that I spend a great deal of time working on these things. First, I play through the game, jotting down tidbits that may prove useful later. Next up, I ignore my hastily scrawled playthrough notes and write a new set of notes summing up my thoughts and feelings on the game in order to get an idea of the general shape of the review itself. Finally, I use these two sets of notes to generate an outline, which I more or less adhere to (less, more often than more) when I write the review itself.

Be sure to leave a comment insulting my terrible handwriting!

I had planned to have a second review online today to take full advantage of our return to an article structure, but as is often the case with my plans, things didn’t go so well. It turns out my old Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike review isn’t nearly as good as I remembered it, and I certainly don’t remember the game well enough to write a new one just yet. Ah, well. Bonus points to anyone able to deduce the thematic connection between Rebel Strike and Super Mario Sunshine.

Super Mario 64 is unquestionably one of the most groundbreaking games ever made. It revolutionized 3D gameplay and analog control, rewriting the rules of 3D game design and reintroducing the world to its plump, Italian hero. Mario’s newfound agility and precise handling made for a game where it was fun just to move around – climb the trees, swim in the water, jump real high. While this sense of wonder is no longer present today – the game’s innovations have become so ubiquitous as to be undetectable – the game is just as fun to play now as it was when the Nintendo 64 first launched. Super Mario 64 DS manages to faithfully reproduce the N64’s flagship title on a handheld console, and includes a wealth of new content to boot. While this portable version doesn’t control as well as the original, the new levels, bosses, and gameplay features still firmly establish it as the definitive version of the game.

In making the jump to 3D, Super Mario 64 reimagined series conventions in an entirely new light, coming up with clever solutions to transform tried-and-true 2D gameplay elements into something that worked well in three dimensions. The overarching worlds that thematically bound stages together in earlier Mario titles, for example, became massive levels that offered a variety of objectives within their wide boundaries. The non-linear elements of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World remained, as these objectives could be completed in any order, each one rewarding you with power stars which in turn opened up additional levels. Objectives ranged from series mainstays such as boss battles and dangerous platforming aerobatics to newer challenges like foot races with friendly NPCs and collection-based scavenger hunts. Regardless of the means, however, the end was always a few minutes away, and these bite-size challenges work perfectly on a portable platform like the DS.

As just a straight port, Super Mario 64 DS would be an impressive feat in itself. All of the original content remains intact, with a few slight tweaks here and there, and surprisingly, this DS iteration also incorporates a great deal of new content. The total star count has increased to 150 from 120. Each level now includes a new star, earned through a new mechanic that has you collecting five silver stars – often beating them out of an enemy’s grip – in order to make a power star appear. Additionally, the game also sports a handful of new levels, though each is significantly smaller and far less intricately designed or interesting than the game’s original fifteen. Each new level, however, also includes a new boss fight. Each boss battle is an exhilarating matchup against a super-sized Mario enemy and offers a nice change of pace from the game’s samey Bowser encounters. Best of all, Super Mario 64 DS features significantly better graphics than the original, with clean, detailed textures replacing the Nintendo 64’s muddy, undefined blurs of color. The textures used on the character models are especially impressive, providing additional depth beyond their simple polygonal structures.

In addition to Mario himself, Super Mario 64 DS also introduces three new playable characters: Luigi, Wario, and Yoshi. You actually begin the game as Yoshi, introduced in a nice Easter egg for anyone who obtained all 120 stars in the original, who must first save Mario in order to unlock him as a playable character. Luigi and Wario are then unlocked later. Each character has their own unique attributes and abilities; Luigi, for example, can float through the air with a spinning helicopter jump while Wario can use his brawn to smash through large objects. Mario’s original abilities have also been divvied up among the newcomers: Mario keeps his patented winged cap, allowing him to soar through the skies, but the vanish cap is now in the hands of Luigi and Wario now holds the metal cap. Oh, and now Yoshi can breath fire.

Thankfully, the game doesn’t force you to micromanage your character selection or constantly switch between character on the fly. In fact, you can only swap between characters in a new room on the first floor of Peach’s Castle. Because of this, most of the game’s puzzles don’t require you to use specific characters to overcome specific obstacles, and when they do, the game is usually kind enough to provide you with a character-transforming hat that allows you to play as the required character until you exit the level (or take a pounding from an enemy). You can therefore spend most of your time playing as the character you like most, and because each one of them moves and jumps differently, you’ll definitely find yourself favoring one of them over the others. Though, realistically, this character swapping mechanic only convolutes puzzles Mario could originally overcome by himself, it does help to add some additional challenge and depth to stars that were previously too easy to obtain.

Unfortunately, the game’s controls add much frustration and unintended difficulty to the experience, which is particularly damning given the original Super Mario 64’s high watermark for 3D analog control. Ay, there’s the rub. Despite throwing a multitude of different control schemes at you, none of them works as a suitable substitute for the analog Nintendo 64 controller, which should come as little surprise given the thing was designed from the ground up specifically for Super Mario 64. The control schemes really boil down to one of three options, none of them ideal. The first, and most useful option, maps your character’s movement to the DS’ D-pad, requiring you hold down one of the face buttons in order to run. This option isn’t particularly precise (though it does offer a sort of nostalgic comfort) and leads to frustrating deaths from misaligned jumps and unwelcome bursts of speed. The second and third options both involve using the DS’ lower touchscreen as a stand-in for an analog joystick, either by using the system’s stylus or strapping the poorly designed “analog nub” to your thumb. While both of these options provide true analog control, they are ergonomic nightmares unsuitable for extended play sessions. Regardless of your control scheme, unfortunately, Super Mario 64 DS simply doesn’t control as precisely as the original, but, thankfully, this only becomes a real problem when you reach the platforming-heavy later levels.

The game also includes a few dozen minigames that are only superfluously tied to the main game. By capturing rabbits loose in the halls of Princess Peach’s castle, you can unlock minigames that make heavy use of the DS’ touchscreen. While there’s little incentive to play them outside of beating your own high scores, there’s enough of them, and they’re each suitably simple and addicting, to act as a substantial distraction. Some are certainly better than others, including a Space Invaders-inspired sling shot game that has you flinging bombs as parachuting enemies. If nothing else, these minigames act as an interesting precursor to the sort of casual-friendly minigame collections that would become so popular on the Wii. Additionally, the game also includes a multiplayer beat-em-up mode, the inclusion of which feels like an after thought. Here, you collect stars and attack your enemies to steal their stars. Honestly, there isn’t much to it, and it isn’t worth investigating except as a curiosity.

Serious control issues aside, the large quantity of new stuff packed into Super Mario 64 DS makes it worth checking out for any Mario diehards. Even if you’ve never played the plumber’s first 3D outing, however, this DS version is the better of the two. The new playable characters, stars to collect, and minigames append plenty of welcome new content to an already massive game. The graphics are vastly improved over the first-generation Nintendo 64 title, regardless of how good you thought it looked at the time, and while it may not be the fresh, eye-opening experience it was in 1996, Super Mario 64 is still an excellent 3D platformer and one of the strongest games in one of gaming’s strongest series.

This image (alt text: “Halo movie stop-motion epic confirmed”) has tripled the site’s traffic over the last week. Clearly, images searches are valuable tools.

Rather than let this newfound traffic go to waste, as has always been this site’s guiding philosophy in the past, let me instead point all you disappointed Halo fans to my eBay auctions. Haven’t you always wanted the inferior PS2 version of Killer 7 or the stupidly overpriced Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II (now with no servers to play it on!)? Well then, now’s your chance! And look, a used copy of Ikaruga! Buy it now before it shows up for a third of the price on XBLA! RADIANT SILVERGUN SATURN ISO ROM XXX!

Clearly, project Figure Prints is go.

Tomorrow: Watch as I use 1500 words to say “Super Mario 64 DS is Super Mario 64 with more content and poor controls.”