I’ve been beat up about the size of my television for quite some time. I’m still chugging along with a 27″ beast that I bought for $200 back in college (or older, I can’t remember). It’s served me well for a long time and continues to deliver a color picture, and most of the time that’s all I ask. I’m not a big TV-watcher as it were, so having a huge picture and crystal clarity is not that important to me. Even watching DVDs doesn’t bother me. But on occasion, the gaming experience can be a bit problematic.

As I’ve discussed before, the surge of active gaming creates a very interesting puzzle of the gaming environment. Games require more and more space to enjoy, especially if you’re playing with other people. The Wii especially requires you have space, even if only two people are playing together. Add two more for some four-way action and you need damn well close to a gym to play comfortably. And along with space you need a good screen size to insure that everyone can see. I can’t really fix the space issue, but the TV size problem is starting to take its toll on me.

Of course, gaming with others happens far less often than not, so I’m not about to buy a new TV just to cater to being able to play with friends. That’s just silly. But for Christmas I got a game that needs a big TV. Not because it’s so grandiose that it justifies one, no, it needs a big screen because it was designed poorly.

The game is PuzzleQuest. I’ve mentioned it a few times before and I’ve even called it a sleeper hit and still stand by it. It’s a really fun game. It’s one of those games that when I first played I said, “why didn’t I think of that?”

PuzzleQuest combines the old game Bejeweled with a basic RPG, so you get a huge dose of puzzling while getting a good portion of RPGing. It’s a great blend. The game revolves around matching up different icons a la Bejeweled. There are different icons each representing different things, either magic power, experience, attack, or gold. But unlike Bejeweled, you’re competing against the computer (or a person) and trying to defeat the other by draining their energy.

You drain energy by matching up skull icons. Your character can also use spells to attack and heal. Spells require magic power that is received when you match up different colored icons. You can use gold to buy items like swords and armor and experience advances you levels, naturally. It’s a very basicRPG that doesn’t require much thought but adds just enough motivation to the puzzle that you need to think about what icons you need to match up and when. Whereas in Bejeweled you just need to match up as many colors as you can,PuzzleQuest requires you consider your opponent when playing.

The RPG part of the game comes when you travel around a map in order to complete quests. The quests follow your typical RPG pattern of finding items, saving people, and slaying huge baddies, like dragons. The map, plot points, and characters add little to the overall game. You can really just cruse from point to point finding enemies to fight and have a blast.

But now to the sore spot. PuzzleQuest has been ported to just about every gaming platform there is, I think. I first played it as a demo on the PC and got hooked. I asked for the game forWii and got it for Christmas. I popped it in and found that the game was pretty much a direct conversion of the PC version, which was probably a conversion from some other system. This is fine and all as it means the experience is the same, but when you’re playing on the PC you have a nice big screen in front of you…on theWii it’s a little different, at least at my house. The game has a lot of text and labels and my TV just isn’t big enough. You can barely read the text or other icons and labels. Thankfully the game is easy enough that you can play and have fun without having to read much, but even then the game screen feels very cramped. It’s one of the few times where I wish I had a bigger TV.

This is a little game that requires a big screen…at least if you’re looking up the console route. Considering this is a common puzzle game, the point-and-click of the computer is by far the best way to play. It’s nice to have a casual game you can play on the couch and all, and play other people that are close by, but it can’t compete with the PC experience. Thankfully, this is a “budget” title and even theWii version is only $30. I’ll probably be buying the PC version too if I can find it. It’s one of the few games I think I can enjoy and justify actually buying it twice.

So if you have a yearning for some RPGing but don’t want the investment a Zelda requires, then PuzzleQuest is a great way to have fun and get your fill. It’s easy enough newbies to enjoy and have fun while veteran gamers can put as much strategy in the game as they want. A good buy (and cheap buy) if your gaming library is getting a little stagnant.

Typically in movies, the special effects or a completely ridiculous chain of events will “take you out” of the movie, the point where you sort of snap out of the trance you’ve been in and go, “what the hell?” It’s the point where you almost lose all faith in the movie. With exception to comedy movies, this is usually the Achilles heel of movies. It’s hard to not have it happen at some point in the film, and when it doesn’t happen you know it’s a great movie.

National Treasure 2 is not one of those great films. Now, National Treasure isn’t meant to be great high drama. It’s a fun action/adventure movie. Frankly, this sequel is not as good as the first, but I can count the number of sequels that were better their prequel on one hand. Although to the picture’s credit, it wasn’t the special effects or even the crazy plot points that took me out of the movie – it was the product placement.

Product placement is far from new, but we’re seeing it more as people watch movies on-line, off DVR, and play more video games. Sometimes you don’t even realize it’s product placement, which is good. When movies take place in Times Square, you are less apt to notice ads because it’s within context of the scene. Films like Transformers take it just a wee step further by showing you a Chevrolet logo every 10 minutes…but even that I could get past, after all, the robots needed to be some sort of car, right?

National Treasure is the first movie in recent memory (and possibly ever) that actually broke my suspension of disbelief because of the number of blatant product placements. There were so many unsubtle placements that it literally took me out of the moment to go “wow, could you be any more obvious?” Maybe I’ve just been watching movies too long and now go into a movie entirely differently than I did even five years ago. But even then, here’s a movie that I’ve never seen before, opening night, and the lasting memory in my mind are the products…?

The advertisers are high-fiving each other right now. If anything, this article is proof that product placement (kinda) works.

But as a movie-goer and avid film fan, if this is the future of movies then I can tell you now the number of movies I see at the box office will be even fewer than I see now, which is 99% fewer than I saw just three years ago. A side note, that I discovered the student price for a ticket is now $8. Wow. There’s reason #1 why we see less films now than before.

To help prove that the product placement worked and that movies are officially heading down the tubes quicker than ever, here is a short list of products/advertisers I remember from the film.

• Apple, all you need is a Macbook and iPod to hack the government
• Mercedes, everyone drives Mercedes, right?
• Aquafina, the official water of treasure hunters
• Dell, when a laptop won’t cut it
• Microsoft, because MSN is the only web site on the internet

There was also a great car chase in which a beer truck was used. I didn’t recognize the brand because it was European, but placement all the same. Oh, and Ferrari is in there too, but I consider that less product placement because does Ferrari really need to advertise? The car was there to tie in the previous film more than anything.

So next time you head out for a night at the movies, don’t be surprised if afterwards you have this overwhelming urge to test drive a Mercedes while enjoying a Pepsi. Of course, while I noticed these products and brands, I’m not really motivated to buy their products. Yes, it gets them exposure, but if anything it almost makes me less likely to buy their stuff because they made me mad by interrupting my movie. Asses.

We all have bands we love and are passionate about, maybe even obsess over. For myself, I’d say “my band” is Guns N Roses. When I met my wife back in high school I thought “her band” was U2. I know she still loves U2 and there are a lot of U2 albums adorning out CD shelf, but little did I know that U2 was merely a front.

No, her “real” band is New Order. New who, you say? That’s what I first said too. I would come to learn that New Order could be one of the most important bands to ever come along (and that’s not pandering).

New Order is one of those bands that you may not know off the top of your head, but you’ve certainly heard one of their songs. Even naming songs like Blue Monday, True Faith, and Regret probably don’t mean much, but if you heard them you’d know them.

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Classified as part of the New Wave movement of the 80s, I’ve come to find that “New Wave” was just a convenient label. New Order, I think, is better qualified as a dance/techno band. Actually, New Order could be responsible for creating electronic dance music…club music…as we know it today. I also came to find that I was tied to New Order more closely than I could have ever guessed even before I knew who they were. My love of Moog music made me only once removed from New Order in the timeline of electronic music.

My little history aside, Jen’s history with New Order dates back to since I don’t know when. We were both too young to recall the height of their popularity and their debut on the music scene in the early 80s, but since her I’ve had to endure many New Order experiences, including a jet setter trip to Chicago to see one of their few US concerts. I now know more about New Order and its members than I ever wanted or needed to know.

New Order’s lead singer, Bernard Sumner, has been the center of her band affection for as long as I’ve known. She knows the birthdays, the grade school history, hell, she even knows where he goes to buy chocolate. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I should have been born in England.” You can certainly call it an obsession.

The place for New Order fans on the net was a forum called New Order On-line. It was pretty much the only place to talk about the band, the members, and the music. Having been a lurker on the site for a long time, Jen quickly found that the message board was run with an iron fist. In essence, the forum ended up being a place to only talk about music and technology, not about the people. But Jen, being a fan (and a girl) was most interested in the lives of the people that made up the band, specifically the singer/guitarist, Bernard.

Left unsatisfied with the current state of places to talk about the people of New Order, we combined our powers to create a web site. A place that is less about keyboards and mic stands and more about the lives of the people that make the music interesting.

The result was Barney’s Angels – a forum dedicated to New Order and Bernard Sumner (Barney), and quite possibly the truest form of a fan site ever. I don’t exactly recall where we got the name, I think it was a play on something someone had said in a forum or blog somewhere. Eitherway, it had a good ring to it.

And the site didn’t need to be complex. They just needed a forum, so a forum they got. The site is really just a message board with a nice face. Combine that with the power of Flickr and you got a good hang out spot. The formula is simple, technically. Everything else relies on the members themselves…the Angels. The site took off, relatively speaking, and then what was a crazy obsession finally got validated somewhat unexpectedly in the Summer of 2007.

Author David Nolan, who wrote the book “I Swear I was There,” which told the tale of the first Sex Pistols show, wrote a new book about, of all people, Bernard Sumner. The book entitled “Bernard Sumner: Confusion…” was released in August and accounted the life and times of the lead singer. The first chapter of the book is called “Scuttlers & Suedeheads.” The last chapter of the book is called, “Barney’s Angels.” I kid you not. And there on page 186 in what is to-date the definitive Bernard Sumner biography, is the story of Barney’s Angels…or as Jen likes to remind me, “the book starts with his mother and ends with me.”

We’re all fans of something but rarely does it ever seem to pay off significantly. Obsession usually just sucks money out of our pockets and that’s about it. We take joy in the fact that we are the “experts” amongst our friends, whether it be in music, computers, toys, cars, cartoons…whatever. We spend our money to make that happen but most of us never get past our own inner circle. But Barney’s Angels goes to show that obsession can pay off if you keep at it and find some way to show off. You don’t need bells and whistles either, just passionate people…obsessed people…that like to have some fun.

I’m treading down a pebbly path, but here it goes. In the world of sports women always get the short end of the stick. Most popular, mainstream sports are played by men. Men play in the MLB, the NFL, and the NHL. It’s a boys club, always has been. And the stereotype is that women are nothing more than a pretty face on the screen interviewing the waterboy on the sidelines.

How does one go up against the men? The Schwabs if you will. It’s all just facts right? So the more facts you know about a sport, the more of a fan you are? Knowing stats back to 1972 proves you belong? An endless pit of figures proves your experience? But anyone can study enough to memorize stats, no?

Much like real sports, video games have been the stereotypical playground of boys and manboys. Girls have been (and are still) the minority in gaming, but recently girl gamers have gotten some press around the blogosphere. From Halo clans to Guitar Hero shredders, the girls are gaming and they’re loving it…and they’re good and they can prove it.

Since sports is nothing but names and numbers, it will always be hard for girls – or anyone for that matter – to prove themselves against the Schwabs of the world. They’ll never be accepted. But in the world of gaming one’s acceptance is granted with skill and ability, and not the “simple” ability to memorize facts, figures, and percentages. It actually doesn’t matter if you’re female or even a 10-year-old boy, if you beat people in the gaming arena then you’ve just proven your worth.

If proving yourself gains you entry into “the club,” then entry into video games is a much lower barrier for girls than regular sports.

…or is that just grabbing for straws?

It costs less to buy a web site domain name (.com) than it does to eat dinner, so whenever something hits me as sounding like a good web site, or even if it just has a good ring to it, I’ll buy it. The overhead of a web site is not a domain. Heck, it’s not even the hosting where you store all the files. It’s the labor involved, both the design and the nuts & bolts. But since that’s what I do the overall overhead for web sites is extremely low.

As if you couldn’t tell, I’ve been on somewhat of a retro gaming kick lately. Mostly good old Nintendo, the 8-bit variety. It’s become almost a passion at this point and certainly one of my new vices. I read a lot of blogs and come across a lot of web sites and forum posts discussing 8-bit gaming and the culture that surrounds it. Recently whenever I’ve come across an interesting link or site I’ll write about it here or in the forum, which has quickly turned this site in a retro gaming web site. I guess that’s fine and all, but I figured having a nice, organized place for all the 8-bit stuff I find on-line would be a good idea.

I thought to myself that there must surely be a portal site for old 8-bit gaming. I tried to find one with a little Googling but the quest resulted in mostly fan sites dedicated to old Nintendo. These are great and all, but some are less than pleasing to find stuff on and even they tend to veer from classic gaming and into the realm of newer games. I’m just looking for the articles, photos, media, and whatever else that revolves around the 8-bit gold standard.

Thus I announce the latest of my web site venture – 8BitLinks.com

And as the name might suggest, it’s just a bunch of links that lead to destinations focused on 8-bit items, whether it be the NES, Gameboy, or other things that revolve around the 8-bit “culture” as it were.

I’ve dumped many of my favorite 8-bit related links on the site already, but the success of the site will depend on visitor participation. So I ask all visitors to please share your own favorite 8-bit links. There is a convenient form on the web site where you can submit single web site addresses. There’s even a more convenient bookmarklet that you can add to your browser and click whenever you’re on an 8-bit web site – no form to fill out.

All the links submitted get to me eventually (for now) and get screened before they are added to the “big list.” My initial plans for the site involved a database, some sort of e-mail system, and approval system. But very soon into that thought process I stopped myself (which is rare) and opted for the simplest approach. No databases, nothing dynamic, just me copying and pasting links people send me. If links start to pour in then I’ll consider a different management technique, but for now this will do.

So I invite you to visit 8bitlinks.com and check it out. Pass it along to your gamer friends and if you are a gamer yourself, please submit your favorite sites or at least add the bookmarklet to your browser. That when you’re out and about and think “hey, the old gamers would like this,” just click the button and be on your way. No fuss, no muss.

If you happen to be a gamer with a web site or forum, please contact me using the e-mail address on the 8bitlinks.com web site so we can do some more involved link swapping or banner sharing. Things are still evolving at this point…can you say “ground floor?” Ha.

Anyway, check it out. I appreciate your humoring me.

We’re all creatures of habit. When something provides consistent results we turn that something into our favorite go-to point. I caught myself in one of these situations the other day when looking for music videos on-line. The defacto source for videos is now YouTube. It’s quick, simple…basically Google for videos. You can find music videos, movie clips, trailers, jackass clips, concerts…anything you want. But YouTube isn’t always the best source.

YouTube is quick and we’re all so used to going to YouTube for everything we all forget that there are OTHER places to find videos on-line. Specifically in the realm of music videos, places like VH1, MTV, AOL, Yahoo, and other web sites offer music videos that are of MUCH higher quality than those found on YouTube. Plus, you are guaranteed it’s the legit video, not someone’s fan video.

Sure, record labels are getting a clue and putting music videos on YouTube, but now that I’ve hit this realization I almost feel like they’re giving in. I won’t argue the benefit of posting content where everyone is going (YouTube, MySpace), but when you’re a huge record label or band, people will find you one way or another. Music is in demand all the time…kind of like a convenience store. If you need batteries or toothpaste you can go to the convenience store. If you need music videos you go to…YouTube? Yes, but should we instead be going to label sites and the likes of Yahoo?

I’ll admit that YouTube is the only source for those hard-to-find videos and bootlegs from concerts, but for “official” videos it’s less than stellar.

YouTube, much like Wikipedia, has turned into internet Wal-marts. Places that have more-or-less brainwashed us to use them as the single source of information and resources. Much like Wal-mart has put many Mom & Pop places out of business, YouTube and Wikipedia are doing the same.

I’m not claiming I’m above all this – I hit up these places once a day guaranteed. It is convenient and it’s sad but true that we’d rather sift through a bunch of garbage to find one gem instead of going to the jewelry store to find a bunch.

But where the non-YouTube sites have really failed is making the videos accessible. It might not be “hard” to find videos on VH1 or AOL, but obviously that’s not all they do. YouTube is video. Period. One visit shows you exactly what you’re looking for without so much as a single click. I’m not sure design is a solution to this problem, but it might be a start.

Of course, when was the last time VH1 or MTV entered any of our heads when it comes to thinking about music videos? But that’s another problem entirely.

After coming across a report that Kevin Federline was once a Nintendo Master, it just so happens that I found some of my own “lost” letters from Nintendo. OK, so maybe they weren’t so lost as just shelved and forgotten. But I have them now in all their 15-year-old glory and just want to show that there were many of us lapping up whatever Nintendo had to peddle.

Back before you could Google for everything and you had to use SIRS for your school book reports, the only way to get your questions answered was by calling or writing letters to Nintendo, via their monthly magazine, Nintendo Power.

Chances are anyone that owned a Nintendo prior to 1995 had a subscription to Nintendo Power at some point. My subscription started in 1991 following their crazy popular Dragon Warrior promotion (if you subscribed you got Dragon Warrior free with a ton of maps and guides). I finally lost all hope somewhere in 1994 and let my subscription expire. I actually subscribed too long as I never owned a Super NES and NES games ended their run in the mag long before the last few issues I owned. Of course, come 1995 the Playstation changed my gaming habits forever and Nintendo was just a fond memory.

But back to the good old days…Nintendo Power had a section called “Counselsor’s Corner,” where players would write in with questions and Nintendo would publish answers and tips every month in response. Back then I always thought these so-called Game Play Counselors had the best job in the world, which of course was playing video games. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but that didn’t matter back then. All that mattered was that they answer my questions so I could get on with completing my video games.

Growing up with a Nintendo I never felt that I owned many games, maybe only 20 or so. I only got games for birthdays and at Christmas, so at most, two games a year. If I managed to scam enough money from mowing lawns or washing cars, I might have earned a mid-season cartridge purchase, but those were rare. Some of the games were tough. Some were not very good. And some were great. Even though these 8-bit classics look Atari-esque compared to the 3D wonders we have now, they were hard to master and conquer (just consider The Great Puma). So every now and then you’d need help and that meant going straight to the source, Nintendo.

Now I could have called their Power Player hotline, but long distance and pay-per-minute scams struck fear into my heart, knowing if mom and dad found out they’d certainly revoke whatever privileges I had at the time. The only other options was writing in letters, so I did.

Another section in each Nintendo Power magazine also featured fan art, usually in the form of drawings in envelopes. Since I loved to draw (and still do), I figured I had good chance at a two-for-one deal: I would get my game questions answered and maybe also have a shot at getting my drawing published in the mag. Maybe this was a lofty goal, but at the time it seemed pretty bitchin’ and I felt my chances were pretty good. Much to my dismay, I never got published, but that was a secondary goal at best.

I’m sure the first time I wrote them a letter I wondered if I would even get a reply. Getting mail when I was little meant the world, it didn’t matter who it came from. But a letter from Nintendo? That’s just cool. And once I got my reply I was thrilled. Not only did I have my question answered, it came on official Nintendo letterhead. Neato.

I remember having a giant folder and keeping all my Nintendo guides and letters together in it so I could get to them in a moments notice. You know not all games had save options like they do know, and we always feared leaving the console on pause for too long, as rumors of cartridges and consoles burning up didn’t sound too far fetched.

After all this time, while the Nintendo Powers are certainly in a recycle bin somewhere (I sold them all to Half Price books), the letters from Nintendo remained nearly unopened in the almighty Nintendo folder, along with my Dragon Warrior guides, Zelda maps, and various other documents of gaming goodness.

As to properly preserve gaming history, I put together all the letters from Nintendo in a convenient PDF (1.5Mb). Unfortunately, I don’t have copies of the original letters I sent in, but based on the responses I can pretty much guess what was in my letter. Most of the time it was a simple “how do I beat this boss?” type question.

So while I never got to say Thank You then, I’d like to say Thank You now to: Lori Hansen, Greg Wallace, Marcus Lindblom, Scott Melton, Kasey Curtis, Paul Reed, and Kirk Starr for helping me get through the tough times in life, and for having the best job on the planet.

Funny footnote: While searching on-line for some pics for this article I found a scan from a Nintendo Power that features photos of the Game Play Counselors. Oddly enough, the scan I found has a picture and profile of Kirk Starr, the man who led my through Golgo 13 with ease. And it was posted at his own web site…small world.