In case the media wasn’t pervasive enough and you missed it, Windoze Vista goes on sale at midnight tonight. Stores are actually going to be open to sell it at the stroke of doom midnight, which is pretty funny. I am not sure who they expect to line up – most existing Windows users can’t run it on their existing hardware, and Mac users all bought this three years ago when it was called OS 10.3 Panther.

Hope springs eternal, I guess.

Every once in a while you run across a video file that has been written with a Codec From Space. The file will have a .mov or .mp4 or .avi extension, it will report itself as such to whatever the hell media player you use, but when you play the thing … nada. The video codec is something from Edgar’s Software, and for all intents and purposes are you fucked.

That is why you need to get yourself a copy of VLC Media Player. IT is a brilliant little piece of code that lets you watch pretty much any video file, period. And, as if that was not enough, it lets you transcode (woo!) and file you have and – if that wasn’t cool enough – stream the thing to the goddamn net (woo hoo!).

Oh, and it is free. You need this. Now.

6000: The amount (in U.S. dollars) that Richard Nixon won from his shipmates during his first two months in the U.S. Navy.

Perhaps you are a Young Geek In Love. Perhaps you are dreading the whole Valentine’s thing because you are terrified of getting the wrong gift for the object of your affections. This is understandable – the day is a veritable minefield, waiting for you to make one wrong step.

Kaboom.

Luckily, there is help. Just in time for that most dangerous of media-driven non-holidays, Lexar is offering free laser engraving on their Lightning USB drives. What could be more romantic than a personalized 4GB thumb drive, etched with words that come from the heart? Plus, every time your paramour uses it, there is an obvious “plugging in” motion … an act that will become subconsciously associated with you. And that, my friend, is a good thing.

Last year in These Very Pages there was a pointer to a rather good article that noted that the recording industry was putting money into the pockets of key members of Steven Harper’s conservative government. Now we have some idea of what this kind of payoff gets you – regular access to the people in government who are responsible for copyright law. People who – just coincidentally – just want to rewrite the law to take away your “fair use” rights in regards to music you have legally purchased.

That’s what I call value.

This little web-based game is exceedingly odd – absolute worst-in-class graphics (albeit with a cool art-school vibe), but with a really cool gameplay mechanic that I have never seen before. Add in a “leveling up” method that is exactly the opposite of pretty much every game in the world, and you have a real keeper.

The game is called Stick Remover, and you (surprise!) remove sticks by clicking on them. That’s it. The goal is to keep the yellow star above the limit line at all times, and every stick you remove – for points, natch – makes the structure a little less stable. And instead of needing to clear a certain number of sticks or points to get to the next level, you chose when to move on yourself. You can stay on a level as long as you want, but if you crash, you lose a life. Essentially, you to the next level whenever you lose your nerve, not when the game tells you to. At the end of five levels the game ends and you get your score.

The presentation looks like something a fifth-grader would do, but the physics of the whole thing are awesomely done and the leveling method keeps you coming back to try again and again. Just one more stick, dammit … just one more stick.

If you know people who have a Wii then you will eventually get to the point where you hear them talking about their Mii. For the uniformed, a Mii is a fairly simple little avatar that you get to design on your Wii and it represents you in some games (like in Wii sports), stands in for you in the online gamespace and even shows up randomly in games that you would never think to look for your Mii in due to graphical inconsistencies or style clashes.

Like the Wii itself, the Mii has caused a lot of controversy in the gaming world. The main issue here is that the Mii models and usage thereof follow Nintendo’s stated goal of “simple and fun”. This buts up against the worldview of the average teenage boy who thinks that “cool and edgy” is more important in a game than actual fun, and the pissing matches in the forums and on the gaming boards are pretty much raging flamewars at this point. You have the “it’s fun, you asshole, so shut up” brigade versus the “you must be gay, you fucking Mii homo” gang and it is not pretty.

That is not the point of this post.

The point is that you don’t need to have a Wii to play around with a Mii. Joystiq has a little flash-based Mii maker that lets you goof around with the same settings you get on the console. It’s fun (so shut up, asshole) and there is also a surprising amount of accuracy you can get with the simplistic feature set if you take the time to do it. If you need proof of that, just check out the Mii Lebowski. I mean, it’s eerie.

There are boys of a certain age who get wistful about The Transformers. Not the Johnny-Come-Lately versions you see now, not that bastrdization known as the GoBots … the original “holy fuck are these ever cool” Transformers.

I am one of those boys. Which is why I am staring with unabashed lust at this product which is an iPod dock that just happens to be an exact copy of the original Optimus Prime, even made from the original molds. Really, with this you could almost do without porn.

The operating term at this point is “wistful”.

What you might have missed this weekend:

- visual evidence of the videogame industry’s attitude towards females

- January’s book of the month

- a link to a delightful archive of “furturistic” magazine articles from the first half of the last century

Also, the Penguins handed the Leafs their sorry asses on a platter.

I am constantly fascinated by the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” … the wild ravings of “science” writers of the early- and mid-twentienth century who eschewed all common sense when making their predictions for the way we would live in The Year 2000. Often it seemed that the opportunity for funky cover art was much more important than mechanical realities when deciding what life-changing technologies we would all be enjoying 50 years down the road.

So it was with some serious glee that I found this most excellent archive of pages from Mechanix Illustrated (and it’s later incarnation, Popular Science) … the undisputed leader in futurism back in the day. They have the aforementioned covers, lots of articles about the requisite flying cars and vacations on the moon … but the real gems are the stuff that they actually lucked out on (the remote control car starter is a good one) and the stuff that was perfectly mundane while still being completely fucked.

Enjoy.

11: The number of Canadian-born players in the starting lineup of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

If there ever needed to be any more evidence of how the videogame industry pigeonholes the female half of the population as second-rate … no, third-rate plebes, take a look the way Electronics Boutique addresses the issue:

This is offensive on so many levels, I just don’t know where to start.

Missing Links is not a book that is rife with social meaning … or chock full of breathtaking swipes of a literary paintbrush … or based on daring subject matter. It’s a novel by a sportswriter – albeit one who tells a good story – and if that combination led you to a stereotype about how this book would be crafted or move itself along, you wouldn’t be far from the mark.

It is not a subtle book.

However, it is a fun little read, the characters are memorable and interesting – certainly unique – and the ending was just far enough away from where you expected it to go that you felt rewarded when you got there. Hell, there was also a very light touch with a couple of pieces of foreshadowing regarding minor plot pieces that were really quite nice and unexpected when they paid off.

Okay, correction: It is, for the most part, not that subtle of a book.

None of that is the reason for the monthly kudos here, however. I am singling this out because Reilly does something fairly brave with his intial foray into fiction. He breaks the First Rule Of Writing Any Sports Book: Thou shalt not write in such a manner that a reader needs to be a player or a fan of the sport in question to easily read the damn thing.

MIssing Links is written with a narrative and a vocabulary that is very much like a golfer talking to other golfers – there is little or no attempt to hold back on the jargon (or explain said jargon) and the situations and placements that the characters find themselves in are instantly familiar and understandable to the sticks-and-balls set, but might just leave anyone else wondering, “well, what the fuck is going on there?”

There are pluses and minuses as a result of this choice. The pluses are a hardcore appeal to the, well, hardcore, and a kind of flow and pacing that you just can’t get when you stop to explain things every paragraph or two. The minuses are mostly in the form of a restricted marketplace and narrow audience that you end up when eschewing things like approachability and inclusion. When you are selling books for a living, those minuses are pretty huge canyons in your business plan. Whether the this was a really brave or really stupid choice, I don’t pretend to know, but the book gets mention here for it either way.

If you golf, read this. Period. On the other hand, if you don’t golf and have a couple of winter evenings to spare, and dont mind working through at least the first third of something that might be anathema to you, I would be interested in what you thought of the whole thing. Am I way off base here, or is the book not workable for people who aren’t addicted to this goddamn game? Most libraries have the book, and there is an opportunity for a “guest geekback” here – the floor is open if anyone wants to take it.

17: The number of Canadian-born players in the starting lineup of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Despite virtually no publicity, most of the Best Buy stores in Canada sold through their Wii stock this morning, but Toys ‘R Us and Zellers locations are confirmed to have stock for tomorrow. Toys ‘R Us might be your best bet, they have 20 units at each store. Zellers locations outside of major cities often get only 2 or 3. Plan your Saturday accordingly.

Meanwhile, there are lineups at Target and Best Buy stores in some areas of the states already, with more than 30 hours to go before the Sunday openings. Somewhere there are Sony execs grinding their teeth right now. If you listen real hard, you might hear them …

There have been a fair number of emails floating into my box regarding the discussion of Guitar Hero this week. These messages are pretty much divided into two narrow categories:

1 – Dude! 80s tunes fucking rock!

2 – What does it matter who makes the game? It’s pretty simple, so what is there to screw up?

To the denizens of the first school of thought, I say “Amen”. I can already hear the goodness in my brain. Pyromania. Cum On Feel The Noize. Bad Case Of Loving You. Turning Japanese. White Wedding. I Will fucking Follow.

Hang on, I think I just wet myself.

For the people in the second camp, thought, you just don’t get it. You also haven’t really played the game. You have seen the game. You have watched the game. You may even have dicked around with the game for a couple of minutes down at ye olde Best Buy. And for you, the misguided and unenlightened feebs, I give you ten reasons that Guitar Hero is a transcendent game, one of the best of all time, and the kind of game that could have been a complete dud if anyone else was at the helm and missed out on hitting these little touchstones …

10: The little things. There are so many little details that would be easy to overlook or ignore when putting together a game like this. The songs play, the frets light up, what else do you need? The thing is, if you cross all the “i”s and dot all the “t”s then you go from “music game” to “awesome rock experience”. Case in point – the decorated fretboards that each on-screen avatar has. No one would have thought to complain if every player shared the same generic rock fretboard. But the fact that each player has a design that fits their look and bio is a subtle touch that puts you in the shoes of your onscreen doppleganger – one of many little touches that break down the barrer of “a video game” and let you live the moment.

9: A genuinely inclusive game. There is a not-so-subtle belief in the gaming biz that for the most part women aren’t interested in joining the fun, don’t care to game … and the few females who do want to play are all under the age of 10. The industry – from the advertising to the marketing to the content of games – completely ignores half the population. This is not only stupid from a business point of view, but it is more than a bit insulting too. Guitar Hero is a game that is not only approachable and enjoyable by everyone, but the designers had the brains to offer a nice selection of strong female characters to select and play. Not surprisingly, GH is one of the few games that you will hear wildly enthusiastic comments about from both sexes. There is no pandering, just a sort of “well, isn’t it obvious?” attitude based on the idea that the game might be attractive to everyone. No, it isn’t brain surgery, but there aren’t very many companies who get it. Harmonix does.

8: The scoring display. The makers of heads-up displays for automotive applications could take some cues from Harmonix. The GH display is simple, unobtrusive, and the most functional thing to come down the pipe in just about forever. See, when you are trying to hit that goddamn powerchord change at the end of the solo in Crazy On You, you can’t be taking the time to look over and see if your bonus multiplier is high enough to go for Star Power. And thanks to the brilliance of this little piece of screen design, you don’t have to. The scoring meters make subtle little shakes as they change state – not enough to distract you, but enough to let you know what level you are at. The colours of the scoring meters also change as you hit different bonus levels, once again a little change that lets you concentrate on the frets while just knowing what is going on. It is an absolutely brilliant design – a perfectly elegant solution to a situation that I have seen screwed up many times by many companies. They nailed it.

7: The playlist. The song selection in both the first and second editions of Guitar Hero is fun, irreverent, eclectic, interesting and (most important part of all) fun. It is really easy in music games to get into a rut or a “safety zone” with the song selections, and the tag team of Harmonix and Red Octane sidestepped that neatly by going for fun and interesting challenges first, and worrying about cool factor or popularity pretty much not at all. The upshot of it all is that even when you do hit the rare song that you don’t really care for, the game is still tons of fun. Songs that you would be iffy on if you heard them on the radio are suddenly much more appealing because of the outright good time you are having playing them. Even songs that are dripping with cheese (*cough cough Sweet Child Of Mine cough*) have a sudden new cachet that you would have never imagined. And best of all, you are going to find some songs that you either never heard of and instantly love, or awesome songs that you had forgotten about and are suddenly fresh and new because of the approach to the game. That is some bona fide musical love.

6: The animation. It is easy to ignore everything but the actual game mechanics in a music or rhythm game. And why not? If you are playing properly, you don’t have time to watch the eye candy on the rest of the screen. That’s right – you don’t, but the people around you certainly do. Harmonix understood that this is first and foremost a party game, and that there are probably going to be people sitting around watching and waiting their turn. Taking the time and effort to make the on-screen concert fun and engaging was not something they had to do, but that little bit of extra effort makes the people who are not playing the game that much more involved. And more involved means more fun.

5: Practice mode. There are very few videogames that allow you to practice certain spots within the game over and over until you get them just right. There are even fewer videogames where you feel the need to do this. The fact that GH both has and needs this function is a testament to both the immersive appeal of the game and the thoughtfulness of the designers. It adds to the game and validates the appeal of the thing all in one step.

4: Two words. Free Bird.

3: Co-op mode. The original Guitar Hero was gobs of fun, and the inclusion of a “head to head” face off mode was a nice touch. But anyone who has played in a band can tell you this: Making music is cool, but rocking out with a buddy or a group is fun squared. Hell cubed. Not only does the new co-op mode in GH give the songs more legs and some variants in play, but it takes the “band” experience and hands it to you on a stereo platter. The first time you go for Star Power in tandem with a pal, you will know exactly what I am talking about.

2: Encores. The idea of “hiding” the coolest songs as “encores” and only revealing them as the players continue to wow the “crowds” at each venue was a stroke of genius. Yeah, it’s just a game … but the first time the crowd chants for more, you will get a little chill, and hitting the “yeah, baby” button to walk back out onstage and rock them one more time with a fucking anthem is an actual rush. And, not coincidentally, that brings us to …

1: A complete and utter sense of craft. This game was not “programmed” or “developed” or “made” … it was crafted, lovingly created to go past game and become an experience. Honestly, the first time you see the guitar controller you are bound to think that there is a bit of “Fisher-Price” about it all. And the game starts and the menus are decidedly juvenile, and you are holding the “Little Starz” plastic guitar and you say to yourself “yeah, right” …. and then something fairly magical happens. The combination of the exquisite timing of the songs – the bonus events happening right at signature moments in each number – and the feedback of the crowd and the quality of the recordings all comes together and suddenly, no matter how uptight you might be about it all, you are shaking the guitar and bobbing your head and then you are on that goddamn stage and you are king of the fucking world. Really, it’s magic. And it would never happen if every one of these little details wasn’t taken care of with this sort of attention to detail … this sort of craft.

It’s an art.

A lot of people seemed to enjoy Warp Forest when back when I first posted a link to it. If you are one of those people, then you will be glad to hear that the game has been updated, this time with the ability to construct and save (and trade!) your own custom levels. Enjoy.

1,000,000,000: Apple’s profit (in US dollars) for the first quarter of the 2007 fiscal year.

After three weeks of drabs and dribbles coming into retailers on a semi-random basis, look for every major electronics retailer to have Wii consoles in stock this weekend.

The hot-off-the-press-but-not-yet-delivered Sunday circulars for Target, Best Buy, and Circuit City (that’s down south, in the U.S. of A.) all have “Wii in stock Sunday at 8:00 am” banners on them. See, having friends in the newspaper biz actually pays off sometimes. I haven’t seen any of the Canadian flyers yet, but if historical precedents are any indication, the chains in the Great White North will have matching stock on Friday morning. If you are hunting a Wii (and a lot of people still are) look for line-up placards at you favourite store tonight.

You’re welcome.

Yesterday’s mention of an as-yet-unannounced 1980s version of Guitar Hero was met with a fair amount of enthusiasm. The internal image of rocking out to some Def Leppard or – music gods willing – some Ratt is just too powerful for people of a certain age to ignore.

Rest assured that (short of some kind of a corporate disaster) this will happen.

Sadly, every silver cloud has a shitty dark lining … and this is no exception. The big hair edition of Guitar Hero will be the last one to be developed by Harmonix. It might also be the last one, period. To grok how this might pan out, you first need to get a handle on one of the stranger parts of the videogame industry – the roles of the “publisher” and the “developer”.

(Note: If you are already hip to this, you can skip down to the next paragraph)

The vast majority of videogames today have both a publisher and a developer, those roles usually being filled by two different entities that have corporate ties of varying degrees of strength. There are exceptions – Nintendo and Blizzard both develop and publish their own games – but or the most part this has become the norm. The developer actually does the “work” on the game – the programming, the writing, the testing, etc etc – and the publisher acts as the promoter, the financier (sometimes), the distributer, the overseer, and the general grand poobah of what is going on. Sometimes a publisher will contract a developer to make a new game based on a property or license the publisher owns, sometimes a developer will start up a game and then look for a publisher – very risky, that – but in some way the two entities need to get together to make things happen. Sometimes the publisher and developer will be different companies within a common corporate structure, as in EA and their assorted studios around the globe. This method has worked well enough that it is now the norm, but that doesn’t mean it is perfect. Sometimes it goes very wrong.

Guitar Hero may become a case in point.

Here’s the deal: There was a company called Red Octane that had a nice videogaming niche – they made all sorts of input devices for music and rhythm games. Dance pads, drums, that sort of deal. They worked a lot with a developer called Harmonix, who developed a lot of (surprise) music and rhythm games for a publisher called Konami – things like Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution Party. One day the gang at Red Octane got an idea for a super-fun guitar playing game, and thought that – instead of pimping it to some publisher – they should try producing it themselves. Being smart guys, they called up Harmonix – the best music game developer in the business and a company that Red Octane already had close and fruitful ties with.

The rest is pretty much history – Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix and published by “new kid on the block” Red Octane. Ditto for Guitar Hero II - a title that had so much buzz and had so many pre-orders that the big boys had to sit up and take notice. Activision pretty much handed the Red Octane guys a blank cheque and two pens (in case the first one ran out of ink while writing all those zeros) and between the time that Guitar Hero II was announced and it actually hit the street Activision owned both Red Octane and all of their intellectual properties. Activision gave our heroes at RO all sorts of assurances that it was a financial transaction only, there was no intention of killing the golden goose with corporate meddling, they would still be kings of their own castle, blah blah blah.

Yeah, right.

As soon as the (still secret) work on the 80s edition began, Activision threw a fit. Why are you using Harmonix as a developer? We have plenty of fine develpment companies in the Activision family! The rather obvious argument that Hamonix was being used because they are awesome fell on totally deaf ears, and Activision proceeded to castrate Red Octane. Whatever the fourth installment of of Guitar Hero is going to be, it will be developed by Neversoft – an Activision company that both fucked up the really cool idea that was Gun and also destroyed the Tony Hawk franchise on the PS2 with that gawdawful Project 8. Nice choice. Neversoft is so experienced in the music genre that they are begging for people to fill jobs online. The remnants of the Red Octane gang are so pissed that most of them are bailing on the whole mess, and Harmonix has already said that Activision and Neversoft can go fuck themselves if they think Harmonix will bail them out when the cock the thing up.

So enjoy your 80s edition when it comes. It will probably be the last Guitar Hero that is any fun – and it might be the last Guitar Hero, period.

55: The percentage of American adults who know that the sun is a star.

There was an item on These Very Pages earlier in the week that looked ahead to some yummy videogame offerings that are coming down the pipe. This led to a bunch of messages from vaguely pissy readers, wanting to know what else was out there – apparently tossing out three bona fide gems wasn’t enough, and you greedy bastards want more.

Fine. Here, for your shopping and/or budgeting enjoyment, are some more can’t-miss picks for all three of the systems that I gave an unqualified “buy” rating to before the holiday season.

If you have a Nintendo Wii:

Sonic And The Secret Rings: Poor Sonic. He used to be so cool. Then he went 3D and was suddenly, well, lame. Sega’s newest offering with for their hedgehog mascot looks like a 3D game, but Sonic is essentially on rails and what you get is a pretty awesome 2D platformer with some non-essential 3D visual trappings. Welcome back, Sonic … we missed you.

Bust-A-Move Bash: It’s Bust-A-Move, and up to eight people can compete head to head. ‘Nuff said.

SSX Blur: The SSX snowboarding franchise has become the de facto king of the genre – Nintendo let the 1080 titles get stale, and Amped just sucked. Now SXX twists the knife with a wicked control scheme based on tilting the nunchuk to cut and carve, and waving the Wiimote to trick. Every Wii owner needs this game, and every SSX fan needs a Wii.

The Godfather – Blackhand: The holy grail for Wii developers right now is a seamless integration of the Wiimote to shooting and combat games. Could this treatment of the Corleone family saga be the one that makes the leap? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it looks gorgeous and lets you relive a really awesome story from a whole new viewpoint. What else do you want?

If you have a Sony PS2:

Burnout Dominator: Burnout is the best “arcade” racer on home consoles, period. Eventually a Burnout title will come to the next-gen consoles … but for now Dominator is a PS2 exclusive and easily the best Burnout yet. The racing style harkens back to Takedown, the “burnout” meter works like it did in the original, and life is good. Very good.

Winning Eleven 2007 – Pro Evolution: There are some of you reading this who prefer the FIFA franchise to Winning Eleven. You are fools. Winning Eleven is the best treatment of footie ever, and with new teams (Man U .vs. Man City!) and an eight-player online mode (eight-player!) even the most hardcore of FIFA freaks now needs to come back from the dark side.

God Of War II: This type of game is not everyone’s cup of tea. I can appreciate that. However, if this sort of action does appeal to you, then you owe it to yourself to look at this game. It is visually superior to everything on the PS3, has a spectacular control scheme, and features giant set-pieces that most of Hollywood can only dream about.

Final Fantasy XII: No, it isn’t an “upcoming” release per se. But a title this good deserves some after-the-fact loving. Beautiful, epic, innovative, gripping, moving … just pull out an adjective and it probably fits. It is an experience to be savoured.

If you have a Nintendo DS:

Trioncube: It is tempting to call this a Tetris knock-off and dismiss it out of hand. But, while there is a block stacking/matching mechanic at its core, the game has themes and characters that are every bit as mental as Katamari Damacy. And that, friends, is a whole lot of wacky.

Lunar Knights: There was an adventure game on the Gameboy Advance called Boktai which required you to go outside and play in the sunlight now and again – an optical sensor in the cartridge would “absorb” sunlight and allow you to perform special moves and attacks that were not available otherwise. Really. I personally thought that this was pretty cool, but a lot of people failed to agree with me and just got pissed off at the game. The game is more or less back, except that the “sunlight” part of things has sort of been replaces with a day/night awareness. Now you just have to play at certain times instead of in certain places. And yeah, it’s still pretty cool.

Wario – Master Of Disguise: All of the mini-game madness in the WarioWare games has distracted people from Wario’s heritage as a platformer hero gone wrong. This little problem should be corrected when Master Of Disguise hits the shelves – it has all of the butt-scratching goodness that you would expect, along with some fresh mechanics courtesy of the DS touchscreen. Wario rules.

Clubhouse Games: Another cheat – it isn’t new, and has been out for a couple of months, but every DS owner needs a copy. This is “pick-up-and-play / got a few minutes to kill” gaming at it’s best, with a veritable raft of card and board games both familiar and weird. Online play is a bonus – there is always someone to knock heads with over the chessboard or the backgammon table, no matter where you are. Lots of unlockables, too, so there is always something more to do. You will definitely get your money’s worth here, and if you spend any time in airports or riding transit … pure gold.

No, I don’t have a link. And there is no concrete info that you can have. Just file it away for future reference, and remember – you read it here first.

There are people who would opine that I am the poster boy for the “get a life” geek brigade … but that just means that they haven’t seen this guy’s home theatre. I am assuming that he doesn’t get out much.

55,000,000: The total annual amount (in U.S. dollars) that will be paid to David Beckham each year to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy.

January has typically been seen as a dead time in the world of videogames – everyone shoots off their big guns in November and December for the xmas rush … leaving sad dribbles and dregs to fill the calendar through the dark days of midwinter. These are the times when we normally get things like Big Mutha Truckers III.

Ugh.

This year, however, the mid-January release calendar looks positively abundant. Either the videogame makers skipped a page or two on their calendars, or the semi-massive tectonic shift in the gaming firmament (hey Sony, how does it feel to be in distant third place?) means that everybody is scrambling for every tiny blip of market share.

My bet is on the latter. Calendars are hard to screw up, even for EA.

All of which means that this week is packed with goodies. The best of the crop:

WarioWare – Smooth Moves: The bizarro and frenetic mini-game series comes to the Wii. Get ready to hula hoop, pick noses, chop fish, drive karts, and scratch scabs … all in 5-second bursts. Should be in the stores tomorrow morning.

Phoenix Wright – Justice For All: A lot of people were bummed because the first Phoenix Wright game was hard to find. Too bad – it was a grand-slam combination of innovative game play and clever scripting. Plus you got to yell at your DS. Be warned – this one will be just as scarce, so if you see it, buy it. OBJECTION!!

World of Warcraft – Burning Crusade: Ravening geeks the world over will be lining up at 12:01 on Tuesday morning to buy this – and yes, some stores will be open to cater to their bizarre needs. The guys at Blizzard will need to carry two wallets, one on each side, so they don’t tip over from all the money they will make. I personally know three different people who have booked vacation time this week so they can play without annoying real world distractions. Available in both regular and wildly overpriced “collector’s” editions. Yikes.

All three of these are top-notch buys – I would rate them all at least a solid 9 out of 10. Phoenix Wright would be especially good for those new DS owners who got Nintendo’s brave little handheld and one or two games for Christmas, and now want to explore new frontiers.

Get shopping.

Okay, I’m sorry, but this is just fucked.

What you might have missed this weekend:

Nada. Zip. Zilch.

I know – it’s tragic. Next weekend will be better. In the meantime, you can soothe the pain but playing with some puppies here. I like the summer puppy the best.

24: The percentage of all user passwords that can be guessed by combining a list of 1000 common password roots with 100 common password suffixes.

One quick note about the mainstream press coverage the day after Macworld: You now have a quick and handy guide to how “savvy” any particular reporter / columnist / media outlet actually is by how much space and time they give the “Apple TV” in comparison to the “iPhone”. In the long term, the TV product might be the more important initiative to both the tech industry and consumers. But the phone is a shinier toy. This means that know-nothing losers will strictly talk about the phone, while those with actual brains will devote just as a many minutes and lines of text – if not more – to the television product. Keep that in mind today as you see and hear the news blurbs that wander across your particular infospace.