ok i'm gonna get into the meat in a minute. the meat regarding video games, of course. but let me point out a couple of things

1) the arcade fire covered the yeah yeah yeah's song 'maps.' if you do not care, move along. if you _do_ care, and i think you should, it is pretty easy to find using google. so, go find it and listen. i really, really like this song, both the original and the cover.

2) in 40 years, computers will take over. or uh, something. maybe this deserves its own post.

3) finally, as a segue into what i really wanna write about... i give you hamlet - the text adventure game. if you don't know what a text adventure game is, you can read the wikipedia article here.

so i've played considerably fewer video games in recent months. i think my last major video game update was this appropriately titled post from may. since then, i obviously purchased ncaa 06 (sorta like) and madden 06 (haven't touched at all), but i really haven't even dug fully into paper mario 2. so, what the hell is wrong with me? i stayed home from classes to rip through metroid prime and zelda: wind wake (as if i needed an excuse). asian and i used to play rise of nations all the freakin' time. i even got pretty far into metroid prime 2 (though it is still in the "to beat" pile). so... what happened?

i have a couple ideas, both of them pretty lame.
1a) i watch lots of sports, and i have one tv. i tend to watch sports over playing video games. is this wise? jury's out. i'd like to make it a moot point, but i don't have room for another tv right now.
2b) i'm lazy. turning on video games requires getting up, turning on seinfeld requires pressing a remote. god its so lame to say this. good thing i overcame it in a big way last night.

so i've made a few video game purchases in recent weeks. let's start with the more recent one. i just bought battalion wars for the gamecube. i've played 6 missions thus far, and this game has it all. it isn't incredibly easy, it requires a great deal of strategy, and it's got this visual and audio style that is just so f'n cool. it seems cartoony and a bit childish, but you have to be paying attention and able to think ahead in order to get far in this game. ok, so what is this game? it's essentially a squad-based war game, shown from a 3rd person view. you're a commander, on the ground in a war zone. you run around, tell your infantry, bazookas, tanks, helicopters, etc where to go in order and who to attack, in order to cause the most damage and be the most effective. you can take over any of the units you want and do some of the fighting on your own, too. the computer AI for both the enemies and your grunts is pretty impressive, which makes the game, i think. anyways, it's excellent. i haven't felt like "man i wanna go home and play this game" in a while, but i feel that way about battalion wars.

now is probably a good time to mention that i also have been revisting paper mario. it's still really, really fun.

so the other video game purchases have related to a new system i bought. i finally caved and bought a nintendo ds. the ds is the newish dual screen portable from nintendo. it has a pretty sweet feature set and a couple of games just came out that made it a system that i just wanted to have.

the first game is called advance wars: dual strike. this game comes from the same universe as the aforementioned battalion wars, but instead of being a commander on the ground, you're a general above the fray, moving units like chess pieces in a very well-executed turn-based wargame. if you have a gameboy advance or a ds or a gamecube, you should get into the advance wars/battalion wars universe. it's just so well done - each game (there are 2 gba games, 1 ds game, and 1 cube game) has perfectly balanced units, each game is extremely playable, and each game walks you through the basics and then sets you loose in a pretty difficult set of levels. you can look through metacritic and see that all four of these games garnered very strong reviews (mid 80s and up) across the internet. that is the definition of a strong series of games, i believe.

so the second game is nintendogs, a remarkably simple game that is at the same time pretty fun. you'd have to be a heartless monster to not like this game, to be honest. the premise is so basic - you have this money, and you buy a dog and buy stuff for your dog. you take your dog on walks, you pet it, you teach it tricks, you go to disc/agility/obedience contests and make more money. with this money, you buy more dogs, more stuff, or whatever. the beauty of it is how well it utilizes the features of the ds. you can speak to your dog through the microphone and it will understand your voice. you pet your dog by using the stylus on the touch screen, and the dog reacts to exactly where you are touching it. it's just well thought-out and well done. this game pushed me over the edge on buying the ds, because i knew jen would like it and, while she was hesitant at first, she has really fully embraced this game. we now have two nintendogs, a shetland sheepdog named bradley and a yorkshire terrier named doc. jen faithfully gives food and water to them every day, and she also takes them on walks and enters them in contests (though i think i'm better with the disc contests than jen is.... hehe).

nintendogs is only the first of what i expect to be many simple nintendo games that will be coming out in the near future. these are games that will bring in people, such as jen, who do not normally care about video games. nintendo wants to expand video game culture and make it ubiquitous. games like nintendogs show that it is very possible that this will happen.

a quick side note: the controller for the next generation nintendo system, due out sometime next year, is the next logical step in this progression. you can read about it here and really see the potential for games that everyone can play, not just people like ... me.

so, i've made a couple of moves that should have me playing more interesting, non-sports video games in the near future. i'm all for this. sitting on my bed and playing paper mario and having the tribe game on my computer (8-0 over the white sox last night!) was a pretty fun experience.

also, civ IV is coming out soon...

maybe i should play less video games.