The 100th, and final, episode of You Don't Know Jack's online game is now up. Here's hoping they resurface soon, either on the Wii or Xbox Live.

Final Fantasy XIII coming to Xbox 360. My god. This is the best news ever. This saves me close to $500. Well, no, I guess it only saves me the $400 I would have paid for a PS3, since I still need to pay for the game itself, regardless of system. But yes, I would have bought a PS3 just to play Final Fantasy. Just like I got my first Sony system, the original Playstation, just to play Final Fantasy. And just like I got a PS2 just to play Final Fantasy. And if I hadn't already had one, I would have bought a DS to play the Final Fantasy remakes. So this is great news to me. No need to overcome my strong desire for Sony to fail and buy a PS3 (Sony called the Wii an expensive niche product today, even though it's sold more units and costs less than the PS3. Now that they don't even have a Final Fantasy exclusive, what is the PS3? Expensive without a niche?)

And as reports come in, it looks like the release will be day-and-date with the PS3 release. Holy fuckin' shit, indeed. Honestly, did this leak out at all? I hadn't heard any Final Fantasy XIII port rumors in a long time, am I just not following the video game blogs as obsessively as I should? Or did my inattention actually make this happen?

Other than that, nothing too groundbreaking, but some cool stuff still came out from Microsoft's E3 presentation. Portal: Still Alive coming to the Xbox arcade, pretty much a port of the original Portal, with a few extra levels. This would have been exciting at launch, had it spared me purchasing the Orange Box just to get Portal, but too late for that now. I'll probably buy it again, though, as long as they add a reasonable amount of new content to the single-player mode (new online modes don't interest me). A massively-multiplayer online version of 1 Vs. 100 has the potential to be awesome, especially with real prizes on the line. And at last the Netflix partnership we all knew was in place is official; I'd be more excited if I wasn't already streaming Netflix Watch Instantly to my Xbox with an unofficial plugin, but it will be nice to have an official solution that actually works well (vmcNetflix is great, but freezes up a lot).

But, yeah. Final Fantasy XIII. Wow. I've been getting bored with these big new product presentations, like the last couple Apple announcements, because there's no surprises. And then, bam, Final Fantasy XIII goes multi-platform. Amazing. I recently started playing the original Final Fantasy, with the intention of playing through the entire series. Now that will be a lot cheaper to pull off.

Ticket to Ride vs. Ticket to Ride vs. Ticket to Ride. Once the novelty of Grand Theft Auto IV wore off, I've found myself getting my video game fix playing Catan virtually exclusively. But with the release of Ticket to Ride, that's where most of my video game time is now being channeled. I think long-term I'll stick with Catan, but Ticket to Ride is certainly addictive. Especially the neat little train graphic that reveals your final score. Unlike Catan, I've never played Ticket to Ride in its original board game format, but I imagine scoring might be a minor nuisance (not as bad as Carcassonne, I'm sure). But since it's release last week, a day has not passed when I did not play multiple games of Ticket to Ride (I've gotten in a few rounds of Catan, too). It helps that a game is relatively short, 15 minutes or so playing off-line. I'm sure online play probably doubles the time needed; I haven't played yet online, I wanted to get the basics down pat, first.

One complaint I have, is I have lost multiple games because I got colors confused. Nothing's worse than saving up red cards and suddenly realize you're trying to build an orange line. Ditto purple and blue. I notice they mention this at the above-linked review, so it might be an issue above and beyond my color-blindness. Early on, I also made some mistakes about city locations; the name of the city would appear right above a dot, and I wouldn't realize until it was too late that the label actually applied to the dot towards the left. But I soon got that figured out, and even the color issues aren't as bad now that I'm aware of the problem, and since the colors are static, I've pretty much memorized the more troublesome routes. Catan, to its credit, has a color-blind mode, optional offline and standard to ranked online matches, which helps me out.

But yeah, if you have an Xbox 360, check out both games, if you haven't already. I always feel a little silly, having bought an expensive video game console, only to spend most of my time playing simple board games on it. But they're hella fun, and Catan in particular is brilliantly executed, and the computer AI makes for a skilled opponent, mostly.

Game & Watch, a retrospective. Hard to imagine that those things cost $53 when they first came out. I don't think I ever owned one myself; I held off on joining the hand-held gaming revolution until the Game Boy Advanced. But had this super-keen ad ran in the States, I just might have taken the plunge:

UPDATE: You can enjoy some Java-based classic Game & Watch gameplay here.

The applications are in from the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas class action settlement: 2,676 claim to be offended. Personally, I printed out a settlement form, because I was in the class covered by the lawsuit, but I decided it wasn't worth the loss of self-respect that would come from lying under threat of perjury and claiming to be offended. Of course, I was only getting $10; had I somehow been able to find my receipt and could have collected $35, I might have gotten over my reservations.

My favorite part of the article is on page two, talking about the depositions of the game-buyers who did claim to be offended. Brenda Stanhouse, negligent mother, claims to have not been aware that the game features prostitutes, or that you can kill said prostitutes and steal back the money you paid them for sex acts. "I'm aware that there is killing in the game," she explained, "I wasn't aware of the stealing." Good god, stealing, you say? Next, they'll be dancing!

According to the article, a lawyer is trying to get the settlement thrown out. And I wish him good luck. The part I object to was having to affirm that I was in fact offended. If I bought the game, I should get the money. Just leave it at that.

I wonder if Brenda Stanhouse's son got GTA: IV.

I haven't talked a whole lot about Wii Fit, which is odd, considering how excited I am about it. I suppose that's because the last game I wrote a lot about was Jenga, and I ended up not even purchasing that one. But no fear with Wii Fit, I've already pre-ordered it from Amazon (and in an unprecedented, for me, move, I paid extra for two-day shipping). Which is a good thing, because it looks like if you didn't pre-order, you ain't getting it. I checked my local Target, and they weren't taking pre-orders. The guy behind the counter said it would be one of those "under-the-radar" games, to which I could only shake my head and have pity for him. Hope he remembers that conversation when he sees the mob at the door on May 19. I don't like dealing with Gamestop if I can help it (though to their credit, they do carry some relatively obscure stuff), and ditto for Circuit City and Best Buy, so I decided to go the Amazon route instead of picking it up on release day.

Anyway, I suppose the takeaway is that Wii Fit is going to be huge. It really taps into the needs of Nintendo's target audience of non-gamers, and fills a real need of the typical gamer (a point well-illustrated in the hilarious video found here), and looks to be a lot of fun. I'm not convinced just how intense of a workout it will deliver; I suspect it will be underwhelming on the cardio front, while I fully expect the yoga component to kick my ass (EA has already announced a more Western-fitness-based game for the balance board). But in any case, at least there's the crazy-Japanese-wackiness factor to consider:

I'll be sure to share my opinions when I actually have the game.

Controversy has been swarming in the video game community since last Friday, as the news leaked out that Jeff Gerstmann had been fired by Gamespot, a video games news and review site I rely on extensively. I first heard the news from this Penny Arcade comic, and upon learning the details (Joystiq seems to be keeping this post up-to-date with the latest news on the subject), immediately lost a lot of respect for Gamespot, and deleted their bookmark, vowing not to return (though I have, to read various posts about this very scandal).

To summarize, Gerstmann gave Kane & Lynch a bad review. Said text review was reedited, the video review was removed from the site, and Gerstmann was fired shortly thereafter. Coincidentally, the Gamespot home page was inundated with ads for Kane & Lynch at the time. The rumors quickly spread that Eidos, maker of Kane & Lynch, pulled their advertising, and pressured Cnet, parent company of Gamespot, to fire Gerstmann. Whether true or not, Gamespot's reputation has taken a major blow.

I hadn't posted about this previously, since there's plenty to be read about the issue online, and I really have no way of knowing if Gamespot really succumbed to advertiser pressure to fire Gerstmann, or if he was fired for legitimate reasons. But Joystiq has now presented a comparison of the original and edited review, and as this will probably be the only objective evidence the general public will have to determine if Gerstmann's editorial freedom was compromised, it's a major discovery. Having read the article, I am now convinced that Gamespot has no journalistic integrity.

The edited review had a disclaimer: "Editor's Note: This review has been updated to include differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions and a clarification on the game's multiplayer mode." So tell me, how does changing the sentence, "So whether you're doing the shooting yourself or hanging back and letting your men do the dirty work, the game is a real letdown," to instead read, "So whether you're doing the shooting yourself or hanging back and letting your men do the dirty work, the game is a real disappointment, especially when you consider how well this same sort of stuff worked in the developer's previous squad-based game, Freedom Fighters." That to me reads more like shoehorning in praise for another of the advertiser's games than clarifying anything.

Several edits involve Gerstmann's criticism of the game for its ugliness, its gratuitous profanity, using lazy cursing for shock value and to avoid crafting gripping dialog. I had much the same reaction to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which makes me wonder if Gamespot's corporate overlords feared similar complaints might be raised against GTA: 4, which will no doubt spend a pretty penny on Gamespot advertising. I imagine Jack Thompson would have a field day, with this evidence that the gaming community will not tolerate dissent on the issue of violence or profanity, were he not too busy being disbarred.

I will say, I don't think Eidos pressured Gamespot directly to fire Gerstmann. They pulled their ads because they didn't want to advertise on a site that says the game is crap. That's reasonable enough. I believe Gamespot themselves made the decision to fire Gerstmann, to avoid future controversy. I don't know for a fact that's what happened. But reading the changes to the review, I can only conclude that their editor's note attached the the amended review was a lie, and thus I cannot believe another word they say.

As a fundraiser for Child's Play, a group of masochists have started Desert Bus for Hope, agreeing to play Desert Bus in exchange for donations. They currently have to play the game for 71 hours.

For those unfamiliar, Desert Bus was part of an unreleased Penn and Teller video game, which eventually surfaced on the internet. The simulator, part of Penn and Teller's mission to create games "stupefyingly like reality," involves driving Penn and Teller's tour bus from Phoenix to Las Vegas. The bus can't go over 45 MPH, and the drive, played out in real time, is 8 hours long. The bus drifts to the right, so you can't just leave it to play on its own. Once you reach your destination, the bus turns around; complete the round trip, you get a point (Desert Bus for Hope, then, is on track to a four-point game, which I assume must be some kind of record). Sadly, it's the best part of the Penn and Teller game.

The Atari 2600 is 30 years old this month. Makes me want to break out one of my classic-gaming anthologies and fire up some old-school Atari, and wonder how I ever found those games fun.

And speaking of Atari anthologies, when are we going to see E.T. in one of those collections? That I would pay for. They could do a super-deluxe version, sort of like the Showgirls DVD. Can video games be so-bad-they're-good?

I apologize for the delay in updating the Wii/Jenga Confluence News of the Week (WJCNotW) feature, but I'd been waiting until I had more to report (one article does not a round-up make). But for now, this is all I got:

Physics nerfed for Jenga.

Consider that one more giant flashing red warning light over the Wii-Jenga enterprise. Of course, it could be that the physics aren't so nerfed as the blocks are hella heavy. Like steel girders. Maybe in the fantasy land of the Wii, the limits of our puny human muscles are no longer relevant, and Jegna Tower can rise high and strong, unfettered by our twitchy human nervous system. Truly Wii Jenga will be the 21st century Tower of Babel, a true testament to the majesty of mankind. Silly Nimrod, you can't reach heaven without a wiimote!

But all that said, I should make my standard disclaimer: I withhold judgement until I hold the shiny disc in my grubby little hands.

I would so totally buy Sousaphone Player.

Viva Pinata coming to the Nintendo DS. Quite interesting, seeing as Rare, developer of Viva Pinata, is owned by Microsoft. Though as Microsoft is not yet in the handheld videogame market, partnering with Nintendo isn't too strange.

Viva Pinata was heavily influential in my decision to purchase an Xbox 360, as a game which proved there was more to the console than first-person shooters. I must admit, I haven't been playing Viva Pinata much, mostly because it's a very difficult game. I think I need to start my garden over, with more careful planning, and fencing to keep pinatas from fighting (good fences make good pinatas). But it is a very cute game, perhaps too difficult for the kids that make up the target demographic, but then little kids probably don't care if they get every variety of pinata, and will enjoy watching them fight. And who doesn't enjoy watching two Whirlms doin' it?

Well, it's Wednesday night, preview night of Comic-Con 2007 has concluded, and I'm already exhausted. I think it's going to be a long week. The crowd tonight felt more like a Friday. I think the sold-out Saturday is going to be a harrowing experience. I gotta admit, going over the schedule, I'm not as excited as I've been in past years. But I said that last year, and once the Con was here, I perked up considerably.

So tonight, I took the trolley down to the convention center, arriving right around 6:00, and moments after I got in line, they opened the doors. The line was quite long, but as usual the Comic-Con crew was quite efficient, and within ten minutes I had my badge and was heading downstairs to the main exhibit hall. My plan for Wednesday was to hit the video game booths, hoping I'd have more of an opportunity to get some hands-on time with the demos. And this strategy worked out pretty well. I got to play Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix, an upcoming Loony Toons Xbox game (I would have much rather had a go at the DS version, which sounds awesome, but didn't see it around), Dewey's Adventure, Godzilla: Unleashed, and Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure.

Puzzle Fighter is a workmanlike remake of the original puzzle battle game, and I anxiously await its arrival on the Xbox Live Arcade (I was told it may be released next Wednesday). The AI opponent was ridiculously easy in early levels, but the difficulty can be adjusted. I do intend to represent at the Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix tournament Capcom is sponsoring.

The Loony Toons game for the Xbox 360 stunk. Looked okay, but I was bored within 30 seconds.

I was somewhat unimpressed with Godzilla: Unleashed for the Wii. But maybe I just didn't understand the controls, particularly the motion controls. The graphics looked acceptably good, though not spectacular. Overall, I think it would be a great bargain game, but at the $50 list price, I'll probably pass, and just wait for King of the Monsters to come out on the Virtual Console. Or take a look at the Xbox 360 version (the motion controls for the Wii felt tacked on).

I had no trouble getting time with both Zack and Wiki and Dewey's Adventure, most likely due to their appearance as kiddie games. Dewey's Adventure, I was surprised to find, was pretty fun, once I figured out the controls. What I played of it was a bit on the simple side, but made great use of the Wii's motion-sensing. I was planning on skipping that one, but now I think I'll give it a shot. I couldn't really form an opinion on Zack and Wiki, as the controls didn't seem to work; I couldn't even use the remote as a pointer reliably. I'm guessing the sensor bar wasn't working properly. The graphics really looked quite primitive, but the adventure game genre seems so well-suited for the Wii, and seeing as some of the game's fans are quite vocal, I certainly wouldn't dismiss it from my brief time with a flawed demo.

Beyond video games, I covered much of the floor, just getting the lay of the land. I did stop at the Peanuts booth, to purchase this year's Con-exclusive T-shirts. I got both designs (Pig-Pen and Cowboy Charlie Brown) in an XL, and when I got home and tried them on, they were comically snug on my belly and man-boobs. My mother laughed hysterically at the sight, to an extent that irked me. I'm suspicious that they accidentally sold me a women's shirt; I may stop by the booth tomorrow to look into the situation. Or maybe I'll just lose some weight (it would be good motivation; I really loved the cowboy design). Elsewhere, I bought a book dedicated to Ralph Wiggum, one of those impulse buys you see by the cash register at the bookstore; I bought it to give as a gift next week, so I'll have to read it quick.

Anyway, that's my report from preview night at Comic-Con. I will bring you breaking news from the Con as time permits, but as I'll be busy, tired, and have limited access to a computer (my brother-in-law will be sleeping on the floor in the computer room), there's a good chance I will maintain radio silence at least until Sunday. If you're at the Con, you can find me at the Gumby panel. The rest of the convention, I'll be wandering the halls, asking people how long until the Gumby panel starts. (I kid Gumby because I love, but in all seriousness, what I'm most excited about by this year's convention is the chance to get a sneak-peek at the new Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score)

I've never played Pokemon in my life, but I did enjoy reading Penny Arcade's account of the recent Gamestop Pokemon tournament, and the response from a young tournament participant.

Updates to some recent posts:

I went ahead and converted some Lord Buckley clips to MP3, to update my Lord Buckley playlist on Imeem, attached to this post. The conversion process didn't seem to harm the sound quality noticably. I just couldn't sleep at night knowing Marc Antony's funeral oration wasn't included in my Lord Buckley playlist. So what happens when I upload the files? Most stream fine, but "Marc Antony's Funeral Oration" is only available as a 30 second sample. Can't find any logic as to which files are or are not streamable, with parts of an album streaming fine while other selections from the same album don't stream at all. Fortunately, "Willie the Shake" has the same speech, though it's not my preferred version. I do enjoy his discussion with the interviewer afterwards; I intend to work the phrase "every fox has got his box" into my conversation as much as possible.

I just posted an installment of my patent-pending WJCNotW feature, so it's probably too early for another one, especially one that lacks Wii convergence. But I do feel the need to share this with you all: Omegathon, video game uber-challenge associated with the geekfest Penny Arcade Expo, will be kicking off not with the pre-announced Pac-Man, but with Jenga. Like, the physical blocks on a table. I just have to wonder how many spoiled online gamers will petulantly knock the table over in disgust at some point.

Another hands-on with Wii Fit.

Welcome to the latest installment of Wii/Jenga Confluence News of the Week (WJCNotW):

Ars Technica asks: Is Jenga on the Wii as bad an idea as it sounds?

Excuse me? Did you say bad idea? I think you meant to say frickin' awesome idea! Jenga FTW! The bird mentioned in the article, however? Sounds pretty weak. And I agree with Ars that price will make or break this game. $20 is a bit too optimistic though. My prognostication skills tell me $30 will be the release price. But given their financial situation, they might go as low as $20, just to generate cash quickly, like a crack addict.

Oh, and Steven Spielberg? If you mention Jenga again in conjunction with your lame-ass new Wii game, I will seriously bitch-slap you. I think a first-person shooter based on On the Lot would have a better chance of success.

So, I reported that rumors of a discontinued $499 PS3 were swiftly debunked. Now, I have no idea what the hell's going on. Other than the fact that Sony's head is still up their ass.

A hands-on with the Simpsons video game. If I'm not too excited about the movie, I am anxiously awaiting the game. Looks like a first-rate effort.

A toes-on look at Wii Fit. Apparently, the official spelling is two words, now WiiFit, as I've been referring to it. In any event, Joystiq's reaction makes me hopeful. They didn't seem too impressed, but they seem to be reviewing it as a game, not a lifestyle tool, or whatever you want to call it. But they do acknowledge this, adding that, "like Brain Age, it's likely a title we'll never really love but still play it over a year after its release."

Now, I played Brain Age yesterday for the first time in awhile, and Dr. Kawashima's head pretended not to know who I was. That hurt. But I do think Wii Fit is something I would use with regularity. I managed to keep up with EyeToy: Kinetic for about two solid months, and that thing simply didn't work: I had to light myself up like a Christmas tree for the camera to see me (every light on in the living room, plus three halogen lamps pointed directly at me), kept bumping into the ceiling fan because I needed every inch of the room to play, and still the camera missed half my gestures, so I always got bad scores. And most of the non-aerobic exercises were just a glorified fitness video, offering no feedback. So what I noticed most in this early evaluation of Wii Fit was a lack of comments about things not working. So I am very excited about this product. If only they could pull off a holiday release, but given their now-baffling inability, eight months in, to make enough Wiis, I'm relatively sure Nintendo couldn't pull that off.