Not too long ago I posted about Budget and Time Warner not being very good at communicating what happens on their website to the real people who also work for them.  In order that none may claim me to be a negative Nancy, I’m going to post about one company that seems to have gotten it right: Papa John’s.

At first I was afraid to order pizza from a website.  It’s the kind of thing that requires instant communication to the human beings in the brick & mortar location.  If it’s not done right, your pizza could take hours to get prepared, or worse yet it might not get made at all.  If this required the manager to check his e-mail or something, it would not go well.  But after the time I called in an order for pick-up, and they decided to deliver it (and Stephanie called me from the apartment just as the cashier was trying to find my order in the computer), I decided I’d try to remove the idiot answering the phone in a noisy room from my pizza-ordering process.

I’ve now been ordering Papa John’s online for over a year.  That’s a whole year without hearing “Thank you for calling Papa John’s, please hold.”  In that time, I’ve only once had an order messed up, when I got pepperoni instead of pineapple.  Even in that case it was printed correctly on the receipt, so I think the guy making the pizza just didn’t read closely enough.  This is a problem that could easily be solved by replacing all the humans with pizza-making robots.  The kind which will someday take over the world.

My only real complaint is that I can’t use the coupons they send in the mail when I order online.  But usually they have the same deals or better online so it’s not that big of an issue.  On the plus side, you can take advantage of the system to some extent.  For example, Stephanie and I prefer to get pizzas with pineapple and bacon.  A large 2-topping pizza is $12.99.  Now, either through an unadvertised online promotion or a glitch in their system, a large Smokehouse Ham & Bacon specialty pizza is $11.99 (with ham, bacon, onions, and green peppers).  You can remove or substitute two toppings from a specialty pizza and still get it at the same price (I’m not sure if the rule is 2 toppings, or half of the toppings).  So if we substitute pineapple for onions and remove the green peppers (or substitute extra cheese), we now have the original pizza we wanted, with an extra topping or two, for a dollar less.  And when there are deals such as “free cheese sticks with a large specialty pizza,” which there usually are, we are able to take advantage of them (we technically have a specialty pizza).  So now we’ve got extra toppings and cheese sticks for a dollar less.  Funbelievable!

Stephanie and I finished Super Paper Mario over the weekend.  It was a pretty good game I guess, although it had quite a lot of reading.  Voice actors next time please?  Anyway, what I was going to mention here is something that’s pretty unique to the Paper Mario games (at least the last two, I don’t remember if this was the case with the first one).  After you beat the game, you are given the option to save, and then you can go back into the game and still do stuff, with the final boss defeated.  It’s not a “second quest” type of thing where you start the game over and play through a harder version.  And it’s not that you start over just before the boss, with the option of backtracking.  You’re actually in the game world, and the final boss is defeated, and the people are no more on the edge of doom.  In fact, some of the former bad guys can be seen around town, moping about how they messed up but they’re going to start over fresh and do things right this time around.  There is even a challenge that doesn’t open up until after beating the game.  Although really there’s not that much of a point then, I still think it’s kind of neat that you get a glimpse of the world restored to order that you can still interact with.

I just finished playing through Resident Evil 4 last night, and even though the game came out over two years ago, I’m going to post my thoughts here.  For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it is a survival/horror(/action?) game in which American agent Leon Kennedy (who is possibly homosexual?) must save the President’s daughter (Ashley), who is being held hostage in Europe (Spain I think?).  In his adventures he discovers that a mind-controlling parasite has infected all of the locals, causing them to attack him relentlessly.

I should preface this by saying that I have only played one Resident Evil game before, which I think was Resident Evil 3 on the Nintendo 64.  Whatever game it was, you start out in a burning building and I never really got past three rooms before getting too frustrated by it (I had only rented it).  If it werent for the extremely good reviews the game has received, I might have had the same experience with Resident Evil 4.  This game was just not very accessible to new players.  There is nothing resembling a training mission or in-game tutorial.

One of the things I didn’t like was the feeling of scarcity that you don’t typically have in video games.  For instance, you can actually run out of ammo if you’re not careful.  And you’ll play some parts of the game over and over again because you keep dying because health items are so rare.  And I usually had to play for about an hour between save points (counting the times I died and restarted).  I think as a survivor/horror game this was the intention, in order to put you in suspense.  According to the Wikipedia article, though, this game gave out many more health and ammo items than any of the previous Resident Evil games.  I didn’t find that to be the case until I was into the second disc.  Of course this could be because I had learned how to play the game well by that point, or because I had read the weapon upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs and figured out how to pick which weapons to buy/upgrade.

As for the graphics, which are often heralded as the best the GameCube has to offer, I wish they had used all of the screen.  The entire game is forced into letterboxed widescreen.  I guess this is because the GameCube only outputs 4:3 graphics and they wanted 16:9, but I wish they had included an option to render it as anamorphic widescreen (so that it would render the 16:9 view fullscreen, so that it would look correct when stretched to fill a 16:9 TV).  I mean, Eternal Darkness was able to do that four years earlier on the GameCube.  Letterboxing the display means they are just throwing away 25% of the pixels that the system can output.  And it means I need to zoom in on my widescreen TV, making the graphics look more pixelated.

When I finished the game it said I had played for 27 hours, but I don’t think that includes cutscenes.  If you include cutscenes, and all the times that I died and restarted, I probably played the game for twice that long.  So for twenty dollars I definitely got my money’s worth.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a great game, but in my opinion not as great as most of the reviews say it is, mainly due to a lot of frustration (especially at the beginning of the game).  I’d give it 8 or 8.5 out of 10.

mah fat baby loves tuh eat

We finished The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess over the weekend.  I’ll try my very best to avoid spoilers, but I do have to tell you that at the end of the game you find out that Ganondorf is Link’s father, and Zelda is Link’s sister, and they had a retarded inbred love child at the end of Ocarina Of Time and that is what the Ooccoos are descended from.  Sorry, I couldn’t just keep that to myself.

We clocked in at just under 60 hours, including finding all the heart pieces, which I am proud to say did not require GameFaqs (although we did use the assistance of the fortune teller to find three of them).  That also includes hunting down all the Poes, something for which I did use GameFaqs (but just for the last ten).  If there were some way in-game to tell if you got all the Poes in a given area, I wouldn’t have cheated.  But with the entire game to explore, I just didn’t have the patience.  In Ocarina Of Time, there would be a Skulltula icon beside the name of each area on the map for which you had found all the Skulltulas.  Something like that for Poes would have been nice.  A way of changing day to night would have helped too, since most Poes are only out at night.

The weirdest thing about the game is that Link is not left-handed (something I wondered about last May).  If you’ve not heard about this, allow me to explain.  The game was developed (as a Game Cube game) with a (canonical) left-handed Link, just like Link has always been (except when facing east in A Link To The Past, naturally).  When they decided to move the game to the Wii, they found that people wanted to control a right-handed Link.  But all the maps had already been designed for a left-handed link, and they didn’t have time to change them.  So they did the easiest thing possible—they flipped everything in the game.  What you see is a mirror image of how the game was designed.  Link is right-handed.  Most other characters are left-handed.  Characters will shake hands with their left hands.  The layout of Hyrule was supposed to (approximately) line up with the map from Ocarina of time (i.e. desert and lake on the west, Kakariko village on the east).  The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Maybe they thought no one would notice that, but I used the location of the sun to determine if it was morning or evening, and that messed me up a bit.

Lastly, I’d like to mention the Wii’s notorious battery usage.  After going through two sets of batteries in about a week’s worth of Wii Sports and ten hours of Zelda, I bought some rechargeable batteries (the kind that claim to work 4x longer in high tech devices).  For the rest of Zelda (about fifty hours of gameplay), I didn’t need to recharge the batteries once.  This could be because the batteries actually last longer (hey, anything’s possible, right?).  But I think the main reason is that I played with the pointer functionality turned off.  Since using the pointer basically turns the Wiimote into a low-res IR video camera, I think that drains a lot of battery.  I set it to not use the pointer because: a) I kept selecting the wrong things in the menus, b) “calibrating” it to my TV actually made it worse, c) I hated having a fairy on the edge of my screen all the time, d) when I went into first-person mode I had to hold my hand awkwardly to look around, and e) if anything was on my coffee table the view to the sensor bar would get blocked.  Now I can add another reason to play without the pointer function, if any other games give that option.

In conclusion, if you’ve been avoiding Zelda games in the past because the great fairies weren’t topless, then Twilight Princess is the right game for you.

A little over two years ago (over Thanksgiving of 2004 I think), I began reading The Baroque Cycle, a series of three novels by Neal Stephenson.  In all, they total out at around three thousand pages.  Last night I finally finished the third and final book.  I’m not sure if I’m just a slow reader or if the books needed to have a lot of useless information taken out or if I just don’t allocate enough of my time to the task of reading.  Probably all of the above.

Part of the slowness is a result of the reading level, which is on par with The Lord Of The Rings, which I spent about a year and a half on (I think I spent a semester or summer on each book, including The Hobbit).  Both were filled with long, descriptive passages where you read five or six pages before anything actually happens.  Which isn’t to say that I disliked either set of books.  But sometimes I would get tired of them and put them down for a month before picking them back up.  Now I’m just looking forward to being able to read other things that are hopefully a little faster in pace.  Next up is The Chronic[what!]cles of Narnia, which shouldn’t take me nearly so long.  We got a single-volume copy of the whole set for Christmas last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids.  But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal.  The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth.  The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead.  Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron.  Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold.  This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest posits of its precious Element.

This weekend Stephanie’s parents came up and we spent most of the day Saturday at the Renaissance Festival.  It was the first time I had ever gone, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it was a lot of fun.  There were a lot of people there in costume (i.e. not just the people that work there), which I was a little surprised to see.  I guess I just don’t get the whole costume-wearing thing.  I know some people really like to wear costumes, and they come to things like Renaissance Festival, Star Wars conventions, Rocky Horror Picture Show, comic book conventions, football games, etc.  I’m sure psychologists would tell you there is some reason like “my father didn’t hug me enough” behind it.  But I just don’t get it.. but hey, it’s not bothering me, so.. ya know.. whatever floats your boat.

Something else that kinda surprised me was the content of some of the shows.  I mean, it wasn’t anything that you wouldn’t see or hear on primetime TV, but something about it being live with little kids present, in a place that is also considered somewhat educational, made it seem a little unusual.  Of course, they mark those shows in the program as LC (“Loose Cannon”), meaning parental discretion is advised, so it’s not like there was no warning.  I guess it was the Tortuga Twins’ tights that bothered me the most; that should be considered indecent exposure.  I mean, let’s just say that if it were on Survivor they would have to blur it out.

I brought my camera but didn’t end up taking too many pictures, even though there was lots of neat looking decoration.  I guess we just spent too much time running from show to show, since there were many things to see.

Today I am going to review web browsers for Windows Mobile (formerly known as Pocket PC, formerly known as Windows CE).

Minimo
Mozilla’s attempt at a mobile web browser is in version 0.016, so I think it is more of a proof of concept than an actual, usable web browser.  The website claims that “Minimo has been focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, small screen usablity, and porting to small consumer devices.”  Well I think it fails, fails, and fails, respectively.  The install file is larger than the Opera install file (8MB vs. 6MB).  It takes a good 30-45 seconds to launch.  The browser takes forever to load pages.  Scalability to my 240-pixel-wide screen is handled poorly: fonts are left much too large, and God forbid there be an image on the page.  And worst of all, it will invariably crash after viewing about four or five pages.  I stopped using it after the second time it crashed and took down not just Minimo, but my whole OS (with no Control-Alt-Delete, I was forced to let the battery die in order to use it again).  On the plus side, it is the only browser that works with Google Maps (although it uses some kind of proxy site—it’s not actually connecting to Google Maps).

I give Minimo a rating of 0.016 out of 10.  Maybe in a few years it will be a usable piece of software.

Opera Mobile
Opera is the web browser known for running on lots of different devices (Wii and NDS included), so it’s no surprise that they have put together a nice little browser for Windows Mobile.  It is much faster than Minimo, although I can’t say that it’s faster than Internet Explorer (unlike its full-size cousin).  I have mixed feelings about this browser.  There is a weird thing where zooming to 100% causes the browser to go into a completely different rendering mode.  On the text-only version of my site, for example, putting the size to 90% shouldn’t change much, but it actually causes the margins and borders to be rendered completely differently.  It seems the default (100%) zoom level is going through some special optimization, while 90% just resizes the text and renders everything else as-is.  This makes 90% zoom-level better for sites that are designed with a mobile device in mind, and 100% is better for the rest of the web.

Other than that, I have a strong suspicion that images are cached in their full-sized form, rather than caching the resized version (which would generally have made the program faster).  In general Opera seems to do a slightly better job than Internet Explorer on most pages, but it is slower and has some rendering issues.  The real question is this:  will I pay $24 for it after the 30-day trial period is over?  Probably not at first, but if I miss it strongly enough after a while I might.

Pocket IE
Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile is actually pretty good at what it does.  It has some rendering problems, just like any Internet Explorer, but I’ll take those over the stability problems of Minimo any day.  The best thing about Pocket IE is that it is much faster than the other options.  I guess working in the same building as the people who designed the OS will help you stay a little bit ahead of the game.  However, the browser does have some real problems dealing with long pages (Wikipedia is almost unusable on Pocket IE).  In the past I have avoid this by using Google’s mobile proxy, which basically strips sites down to just text.  Overall though I haven’t had too many problems.

So to conclude all this, the ideal would be to have both Opera and IE available, as they have different strengths.  But I’m not sure if Opera is enough better than IE to justify spending any money on it.  And if you value your life at all, stay away from Minimo, at least until the most significant digit of the version comes before the decimal.

Disclaimer: these tests were all conducted on a Dell Axim, running Windows Mobile 2003.

Today at work, I did absolutely nothing productive.  Now some of you might think, “Yeah, right.  It just feels like you did nothing productive.”  But, truly, I did absolutely nothing at work today.  Everything I touched turned into waste that I threw out at the end of the day.  So to pass the time of this interminably long day, I came up with an idea for the post that I am now making.  (And yes, I do realize that a similar question was posed on “The Office” in Season 2.)

If you were going to be stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life, and were allowed to take five movies with you, what would those movies be?  Ground rules being that any mode of movie is allowed be it VHS, DVD, reel-to-reel, etc, and compilations or multi-disc movies count as a single movie.

My personal TOP 5 (“High Fidelity” geeks are enjoying this) are as follows:

5:  Sahara
Matthew McConaughey...need I really say more?  However, I will humor you.  This movie is excellent in my opinion.  The relationship between McConaughey and Zahn (Al in the movie) is hilarious, and neither of them is bad to look at for two hours over and over again.

4:  Anne of Green Gables Box Set
Ok so there really isn’t a box set, but it is a movie divided into three parts (the last one being absolutely fictitious and not from the books), and I want all of them.  It’s my list, so I make the rules.  It is a wonderful story, and has sentimental value between Kip and myself.

3:  Legally Blonde
We all know that deep down inside, we all wish we were blonde.  The movie is so funny, and cute, and corny, and great that it has to be on everyone’s’ list.

2:  Pride and Prejudice  (The A&E version only, any other version is a sheer abomination.)
This movie is by far one of my favorites.  I love the book, and this is the most accurate adaptation I have ever seen.  The acting is phenomenal, the clothes are classic and accurate, and the actors themselves really fit the parts (can you say Colin Firth is Mr. Darcy).  The music is excellent as well.

And at the top of my list...

1:  Kip and Stephanie’s Honeymoon Video from Hawaii
If I’m going to be stranded on an island for the rest of my life without my husband there in person, I at least want to be able to see the two of us together while we were both very happy, in a beautiful location.  I would miss him too terribly to not have some part of him there with me.  I’m sure all of you are thinking that is the dumbest, corniest pick yet, but I don’t care.  I love Kip!!

Now it is your turn.  Post your lists if you dare allow the rest of the world (or at least our readers) know exactly what kind of person you really are.

Stephanie and I went to see Jackass: Number Two over the weekend.  We were the only people in the theater, which I can’t remember ever happening before.  I guess there aren’t that many people who want to see Jackass at 10:40 on a Saturday morning (our movie theater has $4.00 movies before noon on Saturday, so that’s about the only time we go to movies).  So anyway, the movie was... about what you would expect.  If you liked Jackass, you’ll probably get a kick out of the movie.  I am not sure what compels normal, sane people to watch this movie.  The whole movie you’re saying “Idiots!” at the screen.  Oh and they upped the amount of nudity from the last movie.  Unfortunately, this is probably a bad thing for most of you, since it was all of the male variety.  If you haven’t heard about some of the things in the movie, let me run down a few of them.  There’s the part where Steve-O shoves a huge fish hook through his cheek and then goes swimming with hammerhead sharks.  And another part where he attaches a leech to his eyeball.  Come to think of it, most of the more disgusting things I’m describing involved Steve-O...  There is the “fart helmet”, which is kind of like an astronaut helmet attached to a tube, and I’ll leave it to your imagination how the other end of the tube is used.  But when it is used, he starts throwing up in this helmet, which is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.  For a minute I was afraid I was going to throw up just from seeing and hearing this—I can’t remember any other movie ever having that effect on me.  There’s also an anaconda pit, where Johnny Knoxville and one of the other guys get repeatedly bitten by anacondas, by the end their arms are covered in blood.  On a lighter note, there was the medicine ball dodge ball—in a small, dark room, with something like seven guys and five medicine balls.  And there are lots of people getting attacked by bulls.

Well I left out a lot, and I’m not going to attempt to assign a numeric rating to this movie.  That would be pointless anyway—I think you already know if you’ll like it just from reading the title.

Recently a few friends of mine have posted their top 20 or top 25 favorite games of all time on their blogs.  Not to be outdone, I have compiled this list of my top twenty-six games of all time.  :)

26. Metroid:  Should I have included this?  I never truly played the game as it was meant to be played.  I just entered the “Justin Bailey” code and explored to see how far I could get.  This was how I would frequently spend several hours in the afternoon when I got home from school.  But this game was more or less my introduction to video games so I think it must be included.
25. New Super Mario Bros.:  I ranked this game kind of low because it is very recent and may not stand the test of time, but the game was fantastic.  It was a little on the easy side—I mean, I managed to get everything in the game without using any FAQs.  But it was great, and I liked that they resisted the urge to include elements like flying from SMB3 and SMW—you actually want to get fire flowers again!  What I’d really love to see next is New Super Mario Bros. 2, such that NSMB2:SMB2::NSMB:SMB.
24. Half Life 2:  Another one that might be higher if it weren’t for the fact that I am just now playing through it, but it has every indication of being a favorite.  With PC games I don’t mind waiting until they are cheaper and patched.  I consider any PC game straight out of the box to be more like a public beta than a final release.  But I’m a console gamer at heart.
23. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time:  This may seem a little out of place, but it was a really fun beat-em-up game.  Not sure how well it would stand up now though.
22. Mario Kart: Double Dash:  This game was lots of fun as long as you played it the right way—two people to a kart.  I can imagine that I wouldn’t have liked this game so much if I hadn’t played through it with Garrison.  It suffered from the same problem as every other Mario Kart though: once you unlock every track you don’t really want to play anymore.
21. Goldeneye 007:  A classic.  Caverns and Frigate were my favorite levels.  I got all the cheat codes.  That was not an easy task—to get the last one I played the same stage (Facility on 00 Agent) over and over for like four hours straight!
20. Unreal Tournament:  The only FPS that I spent significant time on in multiplayer.  Morpheus r0x0r3d.
19. Donkey Kong Country:  The game that pushed the limits of 16-bit gaming to new levels.  I remember being on the phone with Peter as we tried to figure out where the last two secrets were, in order to get the coveted 101% rating.
18. Metal Gear Solid 2:  The only game for a Sony system that will make it on this list, this game was really cool.  I haven’t played MGS3 yet, maybe some day...
17. Super Mario Bros. 3:  What list would be complete without this game?  This was the upper limit of what an 8-bit system could do.  I have to confess that I never beat the game without Game Genie until I played the Super Mario All-Stars version much later.
16. Banjo-Kazooie:  3D platformers never managed to take hold like they did in 2D, but I liked them a lot, and this one was lots of fun.  I don’t really have a problem with collecting five thousand tokens in every level.
15. Animal Crossing:  I would be remiss as a list-maker if I didn’t include this game, even if it calls my sexual orientation into question.  Non-simultaneous multiplayer!  A game that you never really beat, you just sort of get tired of playing it!  Interesting sidenote: my in-laws love this game and have two avatars each.
14. Final Doom:  For those unaware, Final Doom was the Doom 2 engine, playing two complete, 32-level games (TNT: Evilution [sic] and The Plutonia Experiment).  I also loaded the “Ultimate Doom” levels (the original game plus a few new levels).  Anyway, I remember playing this when I was in high school.  Anytime I hear a song from Live’s “Secret Samadhi” album I think of this game, because I listened to it while playing for a while.  I also had a lot of fun creating a few Doom levels, and playing multiplayer with Garrison and Peter.  Of course, this was back in the day when you had to have no less than four phone lines to do a 1-on-1 death match: one for each computer and one for each person so that you could decide when your modem should call their modem.  Fun times.
13. Mega Man X:  I liked the X games much more than the main series, although I do have fond memories of holding “left” on controller 2 with my foot while playing Mega Man 3.  I remember X2 and X3 being pretty good too, but I never owned them, so only X1 is represented here.
12. Roller Coaster Tycoon:  Countless hours freshmen year of college were spent designing wicked roller coasters.  So much fun.  I’ve recently gotten Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which is the same thing but 3D and you can ride the rides.  Only difference is I have less free time now.
11. Super Mario 64:  The first thing I did was climb a tree.  The second thing I did was jump in the moat.  So much freedom!  It was amazing!  I’d really like to see a remake of this game with modern graphics (kind of like Super Mario All Stars did with the original SMB games).
10. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest:  The best of the DKC games.  Graphics were actually improved from the first game, and gameplay was expanded, and the difficulty went up a little bit to more or less exactly where I would like it to be.
9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem:  This game was amazing, with an unusually good storyline.  I went back through it two summers ago and still enjoyed the story.
8. Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time:  An amazing game, with innovative controls that allow you to easily do things that look incredibly cool.  Unfortunately the sequel sucked.  Anyone know if the third one was any good?  I never bothered to give it a try..
7. The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time:  Link made a transition into 3D flawlessly.  I can’t wait to play Twilight Princess this year.
6. Metroid Prime:  Another great transition to 3D (despite what Ryan says).  This game really felt more like a first-person Zelda game than a first person shooter.  All the exploration from Super Metroid was still there.  I didn’t like the sequel quite as much because it felt much more FPS-y, even though it was a decent game.
5. Super Mario RPG:  This is the only RPG I’ve ever really played unless you count the “sequels” Paper Mario and Paper Mario 2.  Owning only Nintendo systems has made it difficult to play them..  I really enjoyed watching Garrison play Skies of Arcadia though.
4. Super Metroid:  I remember the day I got this game I played for like six hours straight without a Player’s Guide or anything, made it all the way to that big room in Maridia where you use the Grapple Beam to get across the top of the room to the door going up, and there’s a platform under the door and you can use the grapple beam to spin all the way around it.  I eventually beat this game with 100% in less than three hours to get the best ending.
3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island:  My favorite Mario game.  The graphics were a nice break from what everyone was used to, and the levels were really fun.  Too bad the “Yoshi’s Story” pseudo-sequels weren’t very good.  But now they’re actually making a true sequel for the DS!
2. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker:  A lot of people shied away from this game because of the cartoon graphics, which is really a shame.  This is definitely my favorite Zelda game.  I loved the exploration and the vastness of the world (even if it was all water).

Drum roll please!

1. Super Smash Bros. Melee:  The best game to have in a dorm, hands down.  Junior year of college was awesome because of this game alone.  Garrison and I even organized tournaments.  I put the tournament posters back up on my site today, in case you’ve never seen them.  I wonder.. will we still be playing this game thirty years from now?  The gameplay is perfect and I think the graphics will hold up (unlike.. say.. Smash for the N64).  I am concerned that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be unable to live up to this game.  I guess time will tell.

Some honorable mentions go out to the following great games, left out to give the list more variety: The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble.

It is now year 20X5 of the history of the cosmos, and something terrible has happened.