Every kid and his brother’s friend’s sister’s cousin’s dog has heard of Rock Band by now. I can’t remember very many times when I’ve seen every person walk out of a store on the same night with the same purchase, but that best describes the scene at the local mall a couple weeks ago when a shipment of this game came in. The masses have reached a consensus on Rock Band so overwhelming that it brings to mind the days of the NES and Super Mario Bros. 3, the game everyone had. Maybe if more things were so agreed-upon, we could all come together over make-believe, online rock concerts, and the world would finally know peace.

Yeah, I think Rock Band really is that great. So much work went into its making that I’m leaning towards its inclusion in the next ‘Top-100 games of all time’ list. I’m still the same bitter, jade-colored ball of cynical angst, but when you get to be part of history, even I can put that aside for a minute.

Medical simulations are something that surprisingly few commercial developers have ever cared to tackle. Why is that, when EVERY ONE of us can claim a vested interest in our bodies? I would attribute the dearth to the fact that realistic human anatomy didn’t come out so well from a 256-color, 320×240-pixel , DOS-based, keyboard-interface machine… oh, wait. Those were the machines that DID carry the only few well-known, play-doctor sims. Could it be a genre that is viewed too intense, gory or scary for impressionable children, now that representations of the ooey-gooey are not so limited?

Not for Atlus. Gotta hand it to them: they know how to take command of the smaller, serious games markets and make a smart, hot-selling product every time. It’s how they popped out Trauma Center: New Blood for Wii, which I find to be the most invigorating of Atlus’ three forays into the O.R. thus far. It’s punishing and aggravating, but, as a totally original story made from the ground up for the Wii, it’s a REFINED sort of punishing and aggravating. Skillful nunchukery lets you switch instruments at a speed lightyears beyond the stylus approach on DS, which, incidentally, also required that you switch instruments lightyears faster than you were able. With the addition of a second player, I’m sure you could even move at the speed of real doctors and still be OK. One further little personal observation: for tools like the drain and the laser, the implementation of rumble — something I had all but ceased to notice since the N64 bowed out — is completely unique and as life-like as possible.

Nintendo still being first and foremost a family-friendly company, they do what they can to get around some of the hair-trigger content, like covering up nudity, omitting certain organs and diseases, and keeping the palette away from “blood and guts”, but these formalities don’t harm the end product.

New Blood is indeed a welcome transfusion.

A little bit of techie wisdom: every computer monitor you own is a native HD display. That means you don’t need an expensive HDTV if you want to play a game at its highest resolution — you just need a way to tell your monitor, “hey, talk to my console”. That’s where the “Xbox 360 VGA HD AV cable” comes in (a little redundant, so we’ll just go with VGA cable.) Lacking a cable television connection in my room, I just bought myself a monitor to play games (saving a fair chunk of change compared to a TV of the same size), and I need something just like this. It may not be very exciting, but it’s highly practical.

People take their pretend superstardom pretty seriously these days. It’s not hard to see why when the media-endorsed variety requires sore little more talent. In fact, I can confidently say that watching a really skilled person pretending to dance (à la Dance Dance Revolution) impresses me a lot more than watching certain ‘celebrities’ pretending to have a talent, while actually driving drunk or preaching some crazy-ass religion.

Guitar Hero is one of those pretend things that has become its own respectable talent. That’s one explanation as to why Guitar Hero has become the runaway success story of the new millenium. Another is that it’s pretty friggin’ fun and I should can all my college-practiced analytical BS.

In any case. You need a pretend guitar to play the thing. And it’s surprising that with the huge success of the games, now joined by Rock Band, the controller alone is really hard to find. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, or high enough into the top-shelf inventory… but now you won’t have to. It’s available online, here, right in front of you. I couldn’t be making this easier — at least, for owners of the Xbox 360, which has the aptly-named X-plorer, pictured at right, which as we all know is the best-looking one anyway.

Now you can decorate with the stickers you SHOULD have used the first time.

It had three show-stealing arcade installments, and strong home ports of each — okay, so the Saturn version was hurting bad for stronger hardware, and I hear the third game on Xbox was a bit iffy. Anyway, it made one innovative foray into keyboarding practice software — well, typing zombies to death in a contest of words-per-minute was a little strange when you had a Dreamcast lightgun lying next to you, still hot from II. Don’t forget, there was the theatrical release… that no one saw, but that the trailers assured took place on a tropical island and had nothing at all to do with any video game in the known universe.That about sums up Sega’s House of the Dead line, which a few years ago, after so much half-assed horror-filmesque effort, seemed to have vanished without a trace. It certainly was no slouch for sales, because whether I have figures on hand or not, I know how many of my dollars went into the Jeep-sized coin-op arcade cabinets. As with the Jurassic Park machine, the second I set foot in a video-operated recreational environment, I was drawn to the a big black box with a screen with the high cause of shooting zombies inside it.

So how is it that the Wii was bequeathed a compilation of House of the Dead II & III and I didn’t know about it? Damned unceremoniously, that’s how. I’m not sure I’m getting out enough, but since there’s not even an image from the sellers here for the thing, the release seems like a weak jab destined to quietly fade into undeath. Take this advice from me and get it while you can. I know I will.

Nintendo didn’t produce one of their hardest challenges in game form, they just marketed it like one: The Quest to Find DS Games, starring about 400,000,000 North Americans in the English-language version, with extra levels of difficulty when the Western world develops a huge crush on Nintendogs and stuff. Released about two-and-a-half years ago now, the game, set at Christmastime, followed main protagonists Mom and Dad on their trips to every retailer in a 30 kilometre radius as they tried to procure one hen’s tooth, a.k.a. a DS game, while closely monitoring each store’s Supply meter (which always was exceeded by the Demand meter). An elusive cast of antagonists, including near no-shows Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Lost in Blue, foiled many attempts at getting the perfect gift under the tree, and many foiled shoppers have never deigned take up the challenge again.

Which is a shame, because I’m sure some people forgot the games they never had. By a happy marketing coincidence, some of them turned out to be more fun to find than to play. But not this one: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I understand completely that you didn’t want to pay 80 dollars on eBay for this game back when the profiteers were having their way. I understand it is still hard to find all three games of the trilogy, and now that the fourth, brand-new game is out, it seems too late. I realize that the girl on the cover looks like she’s contracted some kind of oral disease. But if you do anything with your DS (and you should be playing games on it, you perv), this is the ONE game worth tracking down.

Seriously, first the worst? Not true, not at all.

The rain is pouring down this Sunday night. Uninspired, I decide to look up a game to cover. A few clicks of “Next Page”, and there’s a familiar sight: Harvest Moon: Magical
Melody. I prepare to wax nostalgic that I played it so much, my Gamecube’s laser burnt a hole
through the disc, or melted it, or some other lie about it, but then I notice something. Everyone seems be up on how great this game is. Little guy Natsume’s effort to rise up on any console, regardless of its prospects, wielding nothing but faith in a good formula and never altering it for
image, popularizing it in the conventional ways, or even localizing it fully out of the original
language, is rewarded as it should be with glowing reviews in just about all cases.

JUST about. One of them has no reviews. It doesn’t even have an image! And that’s a real shame for Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, being shunned just because it’s a bit different. I’m going to give you fellow simulated farmers the benefit of the doubt, here, and say you just didn’t hear about it, or recognize it underneath the new banner and the hi-tech fantasy coating. Just look: I have to text link to it! I never have to do that. It’s boring. Not like Innocent Life, which is neat! Pretty! And portable!

I find this situation so dire, I’ve decided to embed the trailer that came out almost a year ago, just to convince any naysayers. It may be in Japanese, but if you know Harvest Moon, you know that’s just how puritanical and culturally-unadulterated it is
(note my efforts to distract from the bad translation, the only drawback of HM). Won’t you be the first to review Innocent Life?

Radio in my area is not what I typically call “good”. The “music” of today is mostly responsible. Even amid the value of free sports games and news broadcasts, you have apoplepsy-inducing commercials and banal banter. However, over short periods and on suitable stations, listening to the radio can sustain the idle mind without bringing on the psychic break caused by “no-repeat workdays”.

Aside from the uncontrollable suckage of the medium, this is just nifty to have: the little iFM PSP Tuner, with a LCD and controls styled to compete in the business card-thickness category of today’s featherweight electronics. Now PSP owners don’t have to reveal that they don’t own an iPod underneath that Roxy coat or inside that Lululemon bag - these controls are good enough to handle all the PSP’s music player functions. I have to admit, I would probably use my own PSP more to aural ends were I able to conceal the apparent shame of being a college student who owns one… not to mention, were the battery life longer, and the controls at all intuitive, the storage cheaper….

It’s still a better value than a cell phone.

Love ‘em or Loathe ‘em or just Don’t Get ‘em At All, if you’ve had brain life in the past ten years, you can’t help having learned the name of at least one Pokémon (no, BESIDES Pikachu). Come on - think back to the first wave of trading cards, pencil toppers, keychains, movies, and oh yeah the Game Boy games that sold them all, and tell me you can’t remember what Bulbasaur looked like, maybe even in algae-green shades of dot matrix. I played it, I had the counterfeit, Korean variety store-bought cards by Q-Boy, and I knew I could print stickers of my team at Blockbuster if I had any money.

My fall from the wagon? I dunno. I personally haven’t counted myself a fan, not now, not ever - a typical sort of fan holding nothing short of a Ph.D in Pokémon Breeding Customs and Gender Differentials. I just don’t have room in my heart for 12,937 fictive critters, and I don’t totally get the heavier theological/mythological direction they’re taking - they’re still named Piplup and Turtwig, for fig’s sake. But something in the name of more than Pokémon, that will be fun long after (if ever) the fad dies out, is Pokémon Stadium.

My best memories of this title include asking my circle of not-necessarily-sober friends at every get-together if we could play the “Minigame Stadium”, as though it was a game unto itself. Really it is, as this mode has all the elements of a conversation piece, a bonding exercise, and a ripping good time pressing buttons and pushing sticks rolled into one. Little else offers such accessible, yet competitive hand-to-eye folly for four people and four controllers this side of Goldeneye, and we’ve all played the crap out of Goldeneye.

If something endures about Pokémon to me, here it is.

Stackable Danish invention LEGO this month celebrated its 50th anniversary and avoided a buyout by Wal-Mart, or something like that. Over that half-century’s time, the brand that lets you exchange the heads of hapless yellow people has sustained interest across the world, adapting at every step to the day’s cultural changes. I can’t think of another toy that can boast the same, because I selectively block any thought of Barbie from my mind. Maybe it’s the intrinsic appeal to the human impulses creative and destructive, or maybe it’s because if you say LEGO several times in quick succession it starts to sound really funny, but people just love the colored plastic blocks and the articulation-challenged organisms that live amongst them.

What better way to express the qualities of LEGO than to build a virtual replica of a much-loved universe and have its fans inhabit it? That’s what Lego Star Wars sought to do. And it worked - so well, that the be-all, end-all compilation, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, came to be. Because I occasionally make contact with the outside world, I can vouch for the highly-prized Stupid-Fun factor of this game as played by two people. Pursuing the storylines of each movie in the franchise is purely optional to enjoyment of this game, but recommended, as goofing around in the single room of the Cantina bar for too long makes you look like you have a mental problem. If you ever wanted to see all six Star Wars films re-enacted by silent plastic people in about 10 minutes, and downplay the gravity of some of the most epic scenes with their utter cuteness, then this is the correct choice of pastime. LEGO MANIAAA!