As you may have heard elsewhere, I hung out with 1UP's contributing editor Jeremy Parish the other day, drinking in Lansing's many sights and sounds.  We'd stopped at the arcade to play Elevator Action Returns... you wouldn't believe how tough it is for two players to work together in that game!  We'd spent a lot of time getting stuck in elevators on the opposite ends of the screen, and even found ourselves getting flattened by them from time to time.  The end of the game was a mad dash to defuse a nuclear warhead and defeat the psychotic villain trying to launch it... we brought down the bad guy, but the missile launched anyway!  I'm still trying to figure out what the heck happened.

While there, we also noticed that Tekken 5 had been released.  It didn't seem like a vast improvement over the previous, underwhelming games in the series, but one thing about Tekken 5 DID really impress me.  The game is tightly integrated with the upcoming Playstation 2 release, featuring both PS2 controller ports and slots for MagicGate memory cards.  I don't know why you'd want to use a Dual Shock joypad when you've got an arcade-quality stick within your reach, but the memory card compatibility does have possibilities.  It'd be great if you could customize your character at home, then take your creation on the go and kick ass with him at the local arcade.

After the trip to the arcade and a delicious sushi dinner, we took a 180 and headed to a mall, where I found a most excellent joystick at GameStop.  Any fan of fighting or arcade games owes it to themselves to buy Pelican's Real Arcade Stick... it's a phenomenal controller that almost perfectly reproduces that elusive arcade feel, long sought out by game fans and Johnny Turbo alike.  It's compatible with all three currently supported game systems... you can even coax it to work with a Dreamcast if you've got the right adapter.  I popped in King of Fighters: Evolution and Vampire Chronicles to test them out with Pelican's Real Arcade Stick, and it made these fantastic games even better.  There aren't many good arcade joysticks available for today's consoles, and the few companies who've tried to make them have failed miserably (man, don't even get me started on Nuby's sad, sad Soul Calibur II stick).  This makes the Pelican Real Arcade Stick a real rarity, a gem buried under a mountain of substandard third party game controllers.  If you're lucky enough to find one, don't let it slip out of your hands!

First things first... Merry Christmas, everyone!  I'll be back with another update sometime next week, after my Christmas vacation is over.

I've seen some pictures of tech demo footage running on the preliminary Playstation 3 hardware, and I must admit that even cynical old me is impressed by what they've been able to do.  I was convinced that there would need to be another monumental change in the video game industry, like the switch from 2D to 3D back in 1995, before we'd start to see video games improve visually.  However, the photos of a generic football game (Madden?) and a generic racing game (Gran Tourismo?) changed my mind in a hurry.  I was especially impressed by the detail of the players in the football game... they looked like renders taken from a big budget film or television show, rather than plain old video game characters.

It remains to be seen if the gameplay can evolve as much as the graphics in the next generation of systems, however.  Nintendo is discussing a completely redesigned controller for their upcoming Revolution console... apparently, this one's not going to have a directional pad or standard action buttons.  They haven't divulged any more information than this, but this vague description makes it sound as though Nintendo's new controller will be dynamic, adapting to whatever game has been inserted into the system.  This could be accomplished either with a DS-style touchscreen or a holographic interface, similar to the holographic keyboard which was in development for home computers.

I guess we'll have to wait until next year to discover what the future holds for gamers.

To be honest, I don't have all that much to say right now.  I haven't had much motivation for updating the site, either, but since I know there's still a few people who come here, I've written a new review so they won't feel like they've wasted their time.

Hopefully I'll be in a more verbose mood the next time I update.

The battle for supremacy on the video game gridiron is over, and it's safe to declare Sega the winner over its archrival Electronic Arts.  The makers of Sonic fought well against their competition with six years of great football games on the Dreamcast, XBox, and Playstation 2. 

However, in the end, Sega's victory was not earned through the superiority of its software, but by default.  When Electronic Arts realized that its crusty Madden series was bound to lose against the equally well designed but more reasonably priced ESPN line of sports games, the software giant took its ball (and an exclusive licensing agreement with NFL) and stormed home, crying like a knock-kneed, yellow-bellied sissy.

Congratulations, Sega!  You may have lost millions of dollars in sales thanks to Electronic Arts' underhanded scheming, but in the eyes of gamers everywhere, you're still the champ.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the pawn shop, where they were holding my reserved copy of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.  I took a detour down to a nearby Goodwill to scope out their supply of compact discs, and found something rather unusual hidden among the Christmas albums and outdated PC software.  It was an adventure game called Inherit The Earth, released by New World Computing for the Macintosh.  That doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, but there's an oddball twist to this King's Quest clone... it features an all-furry cast!

This quirky quality made the game impossible to resist, even though I don't get much use out of the Power Macintosh in the corner of my room.  If nothing else, Inherit The Earth gives me an excuse to wake the old girl from her slumber and put her through her paces.

While I'm on the subject of medievel quests with animal stars, there was a late Playstation release starring a daring fox adventurer, swashbuckling his way through a dangerous journey apparently inspired by the Nintendo 64 Legend of Zelda games.  Does anyone remember the name of this game, or if it was any good?  I recall seeing it at a video rental store once... I wanted to try it, but I never heard anything about it (even after a thorough online search) and wasn't sure if it was worth the three dollars.

So last weekend, I watched the Spongebob Squarepants movie... or as I like to call it, the exact moment when the franchise went down the toilet.  When you watch a cinematic extension of a popular television series, you expect the increased length and higher budget to enhance the experience.  In this case, however, these qualities actually distract the writers from coming up with the kind of wacky, wild humor that made the television show such a success.  They're so busy travelling down the tired path of cinematic clichès (a quest to prove the worth of the heroes, emotional near-death experiences, and pointless celebrity guests) that they forget all about keeping the audience laughing.  I went into the theatre expecting to bust a gut, but left with barely a bruise.

There are a few good moments in the film... nearly every scene with the wave cruisin', pectoral muscle flexin' David Hasselhoff was hilarious.  His appearance in the film perfectly merged Baywatch satire with the inventive saltwater silliness we've come to expect from the Spongebob Squarepants series.  There were also a handful of great lines, making fun of everything from tacky seaside souvenirs to the pomposity of NPR listeners.  Unfortunately, these brief flashes of inspiration came too infrequently to rescue the film from its mediocrity, much like the salmon which desperately flops around on the shore before it acknowledges that its glory days are over and that its dying moments will be spent in the crushing jaws of a hungry bear.

I can't help but think that the above simile not only describes the Spongebob Squarepants movie, but the franchise as a whole.  The television show is still fun to watch, but I've been tuning in less and less, suggesting that it may be time for Nick to stop wringing the sponge dry and concentrate on creating fresh new cartoons (preferably ones with characters you can tolerate for more than thirty minutes).

Oh yeah, I forgot this was a video game site.  All right, how's this for gaming coverage?  I rented Dark Cloud 2 a few weeks ago, expecting it to serve up the same boring gameplay and ugly graphics as its predecessor.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there was a whole lot more to the sequel... like a whimsical fantasy setting, a wide selection of playable characters, and a deep power-up system that lets you "spectrumize" existing items to unlock their hidden potential, or combine them to create new weapons and tools.  Even the voice over acting is pretty impressive... although after a couple hours, you'll start to wonder when Max will dig a black mask out of his overalls, defiantly point toward his enemies, and shout, "Titans, GO!!!"

That joke bombed pretty badly with Jeremy.  Hopefully, someone somewhere will appreciate it more than he did.  I'm not holding my breath for that, though.