I think what allowed me to stop playing the original Sims was the realization that I was spending a lot of effort keeping my Sims diligent about their chores, all while my entropy was turning my own domicile into primordial soup. Perhaps it was more of a chili. It matters little. I've been playing Sims2 occasionally and I'm feeling confident that it's similar enough to the first that it won't hook me anew. It is, however, new enough to warrant a thorough exploration. Some of the new events and animations are very amusing and I'm glad I decided to check it out.

Hmmm. In other news, this is likely my last post at GWJ. This place is incredible and I've had more fun than anyone really has a right to without getting a hangover. I just wanted to thank Certis and Elysium for making room at the table for me. I'd like to thank the rest of GWJ staff, Pyro, Spunior, ColdForged, Hoochie and 1Dgaf for raising the bar with every post. And I'd sure as hell like to thank you readers and forum folk, even you lurkers, don't think I don't see you back there in the shadows. My Xbox Live buddy list is a who's who of smart and funny gamers who actually like to play games. That, alone, is proof enough that GWJ is a success and is only getting better. I'll always keep a special place in my attic for all of you. Wow, that sounds terrifying if you don't know the context, huh? If you don't know it, just ask, someone will point the way.

I don't have much to say about that game where you race and smash things up that hasn't already been said. It's great fun to finally be able to take those turns wide, crushing another racer into a concrete abutment, and not having to apologize. While playing Project Gotham Racing 2 on Live, a discussion would inevitably occur regarding everyone's definitions of "clean racing". It was all so much applesauce, because the fact was, we were playing a videogame that didn't much punish you when you redirected the course of another into a guardrail, whether intentional or not. No matter how eloquent and persuasive your defense of "clean racing", somebody was still going to make a Ferrari sandwich out of you. And when that happened, you had better be hosting the race, because nobody else is really going to care when you start whining. Now, thanks to EA's little racer, not only am I no longer subjected to whiners getting tapped on their bumper, but I can exact my revenge when I'm the victim. And I assure you, I am always the victim. Of course, this is all pending one's ability to actually play the game on Live.

In the forums I made this joke where I said "Challenge Everything? Indeed. More like Everything's a Challenge!" Hahahaha. Get it? Did you see how I flipped the script there? Oh man. Priceless, right? If you guys want to use it, I'm totally cool with that.

Due to the overwhelming number of requests I made to myself, I have brought back two beloved characters for another performance. My Game Cube (aka GCN) hasn't seen much use lately. I poured about 40 or 50 hours into Tales of Symphonia before the siren song of NFL 2K5 lured me back to my X. It's not even like I have to unhook one console to play the other, either. I can push two buttons and be back in Cubeland. However, Nintendo seems to be in its software slump for the time being. Where is that big N that I saw at E3? Glancing at the upcoming releases I see such tour-de-forces as Jimmy Neutron: Attack of the Twonkies, Carmen Sandiego: The Secret of the Stolen Drums, PSO Episode I & II Plus (again?), Bad Boys: Miami, Power Rangers: Dino Thunder. BTW, what's up with the requisite colon in all videogame titles? Remember when the colon used to be the most feared object of punctuation? Nobody really knew how to use it. All you knew was when you dropped a colon into a sentence you had to chuck in a few semicolons to keep it fed. Now it's used as the divider between a franchise about which you don't care and a plot-line that probably should have been left unexplored. Where was I? Oh yeah, I need to buy Pikmin 2.

I'm not sure whether I'm teasing gamers, mutants, or the designers of console controllers in this comic. I don't harbor any ill feelings toward any of them. Perhaps it's more of a celebration of all three. Yeah, that's it. It's a Labor Day (Labour Day for our Canadian friends) celebration of interactive entertainment, Darwinian genetics, and industrial design!

I'm posting my special Back-to-School edition of Infinite Lives so you can check it out, now that the server's back up. I'll comment on it a bit later.

So you might as well go look at the comic first, otherwise it'll just seem more like an illustration for this paragraph. I love my GBA. I love that it fits in my shirt pocket. I love that I can play RPGs, and racing games, and puzzle games in the car (usually when I'm not driving), or at the train station, or, as I did at E3, while waiting in line to see a preview of another game. My only real complaint now, since they fixed the screen with the SP, is that it only fits in the hands of the faerie folk. If I play a game, especially if it requires a lot of attention to the shoulder buttons, I know I'm in for hand cramps of epic proportions. I am aware I just praised the GBA for its compact stature and portability in more or less the same breath as I whined about the same features. But just as the GBA already folds in half to minimize its footprint, can't we have an even bigger GBA that folds up, perhaps, four or five more times? I'm thinking something along the lines of a transformer GBA or a Hoberman Sphere GBA. Clearly it's the GBA that has to change because my hands are spectacular.

I don't know how you guys have done it. How long has it been since the first rumors of Half-Life 2? Remember the discussion around those enigmatic crowbar advertisements? It seems to have struck our forum in April 2003. It is now August 2004. We've watched the source code get leaked (the announcement of which melted our site). We have seen footage from two E3s. Children have been born and regimes have been toppled since we first got whiffs of the sequel of all sequels. Still, you guys wait, distracting yourselves with the throng of "lesser" games all while keeping one eye on the ever-fluctuating release date. As I understand it, Half-Life was one of those seminal games for many of you. It more or less actually spawned gamers. I understand the desire, nay need, that you have for this game. What I don't understand is why you're still sitting there waiting quietly. Shouldn't you be staging some sort of game-in at your local EB by now or involved in a letter-writing campaign to Gabe? You do still want to play Half-Life 2, don't you?

I didn't buy Doom. I don't know that I will buy Doom. I've never been much of a FPS fan and I never played any of the previous Dooms or Quakes (or even more than an hour of Half Life). I'd certainly like to watch someone play or check out the demo, but I think I'll save my money for something else. I did, however, buy the latest installment of something I have a love / hate relationship with. The screenshots weren't much to look at, but it promised some improvements that I simply had to take advantage of. I haven't put enough time into it to give any first impressions yet, but I expect I'm not about to beat it anytime soon.

As is my custom lately I'm going out of town on Friday. This time, rather than relying upon hotel Internet, which I know doesn't even exist in this universe, I'm just going ahead and posting it tonight. I've been spending a lot of my free time losing on ESPN's NFL 2K5 HTML WYSIWYG FYI etc. In fact, my profile is free for the downloading now if you need a good laugh. You will encounter some of my patented moves such as: send every player in motion except for the one you intend to give the ball to; never ever ever run the QB forward; and the quick-release long bomb to the most uninhabited area of the field. (Elysium, if that was an improper use of the : and ;, please feel free to edit.) If you're still nervous about playing against me, I've included a quick glimpse of the most frequently used pages of my playbook. Have a look, but, remember, I can always FLIP them and totally throw you a curveball (mixed sports metaphor).

As gamers, we're an obsessive lot. We usually know about an upcoming game from the day its development is announced. We analyze and critique screenshots. We participate in beta testing, both open and closed. Some of us have probably even spent more hours playing a game before its release than those purchasing it ever will. We know what "gone gold" means and use it to help adjust our monthly budgets. Perhaps the most obsessive act of all of this is our fundamental need to own the game the moment it's available for sale. We've been waiting for the game for, sometimes, years. One would think that allowing the game an extra day or two for shipping and retail logistics wouldn't be very difficult. I'm just as guilty as everyone else showing up on Tuesday, pretending to casually ask, "So...when is [brand spanking new game] coming out?" even though I know full well the actual minute it was supposedly released and which regions of the continent have already reported physical sightings in stores.