The coolest picture on the Internet

A couple weeks ago, I was being a horn dog and Googling under images with SafeSearch set to Off. There's a picture you can find (on your own) with a girl posing with a Guitar Hero guitar - and nothing else - and another one with a girl posing with a Super NES (with Zelda 3 in it for extra points) and the two controllers (again, and nothing else). I was searching for "xbox girl" looking for girls posing with Xbox or Xbox 360 gear. There's actually a market for this - gamers are usually guys (though girl gamers are becoming less uncommon these days, and not just on the Wii and DS) and they're usually nerds, so if a girl poses with some geek stuff, it's a turn-on. I dig it.

So anyway, I'm searching for "xbox girl" up there and found this:



Now is that not the coolest thing you've ever seen? First of all, they've got a chromed-out 360 and matching wireless controller (I've never seen that before) but they're using the 360 as a bed for the baby. Not the best for either of them but it still looks good.

Why I don't trust the weatherman

Since moving to NC, I've kinda turned into a weather nut, especially in the last year or so. I started with weather.com (The Weather Channel) and then moved onto Weather Underground (the weather site parodying the extremist group, not the extremist group, lol) as well as Google Earth from time to time (OK, its live weather is really lame). But still, while WU is slightly more accurate than TWC (it's got more localized coverage), it can still be dead wrong as much.

We've had some crappy weather the last week or so, but WU promised partly cloudy today with a week-long 10% chance of rain, dropping off at 0% by Saturday. So I was partly surprised when I woke up and we had some pretty heavy wind, and not long after, heavy rain. And the funny thing is, WU still says, and I quote:

Through 8 PM...a strong cold front will continue moving through eastern North Carolina. Scattered showers will move northeast along the front with amounts averaging only a few hundredths of an inch.

Scattered showers, my ass. It's pouring out there. I was thinking of going over to my brother-in-law's place, maybe playing some Rock Band, but now - no way. I'll just stay dry. And only a few hundredths of an inch? Where do they get these people?

There is one nice feature about the WU site. You can access the very same weather data your weatherman on the news has. Pretty much, anyway. I think WU's is easier to read. First, go to wunderground.com, plug in your zip code or city and state, whichever's easier. Now, WU won't always get your exact location if you're real rural - it'll get their closest associate. For example, we live in Chocowinity, NC and plugging in 27817 brings up Washington, NC. So it's not too far off, but it's still 6-7 miles at least. Anyway, you got your local page up... Over on the left, you click on Wundermap. This gives you a pretty Google Maps-based map. Below it, for best results, 1) uncheck "Weather Stations". 2) Move the second slider down all the way to the right. At the leftmost position its caption will read "Animate (Num Frames" but at the rightmost, it'll read "Stop (Num Frames)" but I think they're backwards (bad coding?). 3) Find your zoom level on the left side of the map and click on the ladder rung two down (zoom out two steps). Now you can grab this map and move it around. You can zoom in or out as you like.

My playlist

You've probably seen the playlist.com playlists that have been taking over MySpace for the last few months. Instead of just one profile song, you can have up to 200 songs at once. Here it is:

Now, you probably noticed it's not playing anything. You have to do that on your own. I didn't want my blog playing music automatically. No worries if you don't recognize half the stuff up there. I'll explain each song (though more may be added at any time):

"Wishmaster" by Nightwish - Awesome symphonic/opera metal band, perhaps their best song.


"Still Alive" by GLaDOS - This plays when you beat the PC/Xbox game Portal. It's great, and it's sung by the computer you fight.


"Key of the Twilight" by Yuki Kajiura - Japan's answer to Enya. New Age music which is simultaneously optmistic and pessimistic, kind of a yin-yang thing I guess, but her music is really good. And here you can hear it for free.


"Far Away" by Nickelback. First song by a popular artist or band. This is "our song" (Jen and I).


"Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce. Ah, the "last level" of Guitar Hero 3. This song is brutal, but it's also very beautiful.


"The Pursuit" by Evans Blue. The most underrated band of the deacade. This song closes their second album, and while it's all good, the ending is one of the most perfect endings to a song I've ever heard.


"Runaway Train" by Soul Asylum. Since this came out in 1995 or 1996 it's been my favorite grunge or perhaps just plain 90s rock song. Can't say I identify with it per se, but I enjoy the hell out of it.


"Salva Nos" by Yuki Kajiura. Ms. Kajiura has remade this song four times for a total of five versions. I wanted the fifth version but could only get the first version. Oh well, it still rocks.


"All Summer Long" by Kid Rock. The hottest song of the summer! Kid Rock samples Warren Zevon's "Werewolves in London" and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" in this rock ballad about summers past.


"Crazy B-----" by Buckcherry. I love this song. It's a little more profane than I'd normally prefer... I mean... "You're crazy b---- but you f--- so good I'm on top of it"... you just gotta hear it. It's not censored on the song, I just chose to self-censor here.


"See Who I Am" by Within Temptation. Another good symphonic/metal band's best song (in my humble opinion). They're no Nightwish, but they kick the crap out of Evanescence any day of the week.


"Wild Child" by Enya. Only because they didn't have "Flora's Secret". I make no apologies for being a fan of Enya... she just makes some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard. I've always thought she should sing for a metal band, like on the side.
But that's pretty much what Nightwish is, so I CAN have my cake and eat it too!

"Wander" by Kamelot. This symphonic metal band sounds like they're European, but they hail from Florida, USA.


"L.A. Woman" by The Doors - one of my favorite songs from the stoner poet Jim Morrison and his legendary band. Did you know the mid-song chant "Mr.
Mojo Risin'" is an anagram for "Jim Morrison"?

"Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Sure, I could have picked a better song, but this is the one we have on Rock Band, so it catches cool points.


"Jack and Diane" by John Mellencamp. Most people prefer Springsteen to Mellencamp but I was raised on the Cougar. Yeah, I know he doesn't like to be called that, but whatever.


"Small Town" by John Mellencamp. It was so hard picking just one, so I picked two.


"I Dare You" by Shinedown. Back to modern music. I fell in love with this song when I heard it at the end of WrestleMania 22 and I've loved it ever since.


"Stand" by Rascal Flatts is the best song on the country crossover band's album, and it's a shame it's been mostly passed over by radio, because it's absolutely beautiful.


"D'yer Mak'er" by Led Zeppelin. Did you know the apostrophes indicate pronounciation and it's supposed to be said the same as "Jamaica"? That's why it has that reggae song. Apparently it's part of a joke where the punch line is "Did you make her" but said to sound like "Jamaica" so it has a double meaning. I always just called it "Dyer Maker"...

"One Winged Angel" by... ah hell I don't have his name handy. The composer of the Final Fantasy games. This song is awesome, and it's the metal remix made for the straight-to-video Final Fantasy movie Advent Children. While the movie sucks, this song is great, and the movie does look good in HD.

//edit: Some songs have been added since I wrote this. Here's what's up with them.

"Addicted" by Saving Abel. We saw these guys at X-Fest 9.5 last month (October 2008). Good catchy song.

"I Tried" by Akon and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. The Bone Thugs made one of the best rap songs of the 1990s, regardless of what you think of rap. "Tha Crossroads" spoke to everybody about the frailty of life. They return with modern hip-hop/R&B legend Akon for another great song. Maybe not as timeless as "Tha Crossroads" but still a great song.

"Mad World" by Gary Jules. This slowed-down cover of the 1980s Tears for Fears song was used in the film "Donnie Darko". It's creepy but it fits.

"Faith of the Heart" by Russell Watson. This Rod Stewart cover is used as the theme for the newest Star Trek show, Enterprise (later Star Trek Enterprise). Well, the first verse and chorus are. It's the first Trek theme with lyrics, as the first two featured the famous "Final Frontier" speech and the next two just had instrumental music. Hell, sometimes I can't tell it's not Rod Stewart. In Season 3 (when they changed the name of the show) they added a techno beat to the song - this is the original. You can thank me later for not exposing you to that newer version.

Dark Reality's Backloggery

While browsing the GBATemp.net forums (where I go for DS modding news and information) I saw a curious image in a user's signature. It's like one of those trackers which shows the music you're listening to, only with games. I clicked on it, and it took me to the root site. This site is called Backloggery, and it lets you track games you're playing and your progress through them, either for bragging rights, or to show people what you're playing, or maybe so you don't forget about games you have played but haven't beaten.

So I said OK, I'll make an account, and get started. It's currently tracking 23 games I'm currently playing or have played in the last year (no sense in going back to my NES/Super NES days but I won't rule that out down the road), so it's kind of cool. At a glance you can see what I'm up to, what kinds of games I like, stuff like that. Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo DS, PC, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation - I didn't know my gaming was so varied. Though to be fair I play GBA games on my DS and I haven't played the PlayStation in years, but felt the need to add Final Fantasy VII because of its sheer awesomeness.

Backloggery also gives the user code to post a sort of visual log, though the code is only friendly to message boards. However, I am a nerd, and I can adapt it for this blog. Here ya go:



There we are. If you click that, you'll go to my profile and you can look up all the games I'm playing. I don't know how it determines what games are listed, maybe they change up. U in red means the game is uncompleted, I still have work to do. B in silver means I've beaten the game, but only the minimal approach. C in gold means I've completed the game, done everything there is to do. If you see the fourth icon, an M in a blue Superman-shaped icon, that means I've mastered it. I only put that on one game though. And of course the letters refer to the system. XBLA means Xbox Live Arcade, NDS is Nintendo DS. PS is PlayStation (the very first one). PC is... well, it's PC. Computer games.

So, if you're a gamer and you think you'd like to track your gaming progress online, similar to what I've done here, just click the image and make your own account. You can add me as a friend there, too.

PS - While I'm up here and on the subject of signature images, I'd also like to share another image I got from someone's sig on GBATemp.net that led me to make my own. It's like a bookcase of bragging rights, of brands and techs one is affiliated with (typically through ownership). I did not like the graphic that the site put out, so I took a screenshot and made various changes (e.g. N DS to NDS Lite and Windows to Win XP, AMD to AMD64, things like that). Here's that:



It's kinda lame... It represents some of my interests but leaves out related things I'd rather have. For example it has Subway but not Taco Bell, 7-Up but not Mountan Dew, no love for Deus Ex, Nero but not ImgBurn... but whatever. It's still cool and makes you tilt your head and read it all and pass judgment on me based on each item (if you're a geek).

Nintendo can keep the new DSi. Here's why.

If you haven't heard, Nintendo today announced the third DS model, DSi. Successor to the Lite and Phat (what we tend to call the first, bulky DS), this model most notably adds a camera. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, I don't quite think so.

Last week, a Japanese speculatory article was published in a magazine not typically associated with a lot of credibility. The article stated that Nintendo would announce a new DS, with two touch screens instead of one, a camera, and the ability to play music. The Internet went crazy over the news, at least in the portable gaming circles.

Portable gaming is pretty serious business. I own a Nintendo DS Lite, and my wife owns an Xbox 360. And I wouldn't trade her any day of the week. While the 360 is nice, there's something to be said about being able to carry your games with you. And then you mod it... Modding an Xbox 360 looks to be a lot of work, and then all you can do is play copied games. Tsk tsk. A fully modded DS can play DS games as well as games for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and NES. It can play some Super NES games, and it can play Sega Genesis games without sound. I hear it can play Sega Master System and Game Gear games flawlessly, but I haven't tried that. Also it can play multimedia (which a stock 360 can do anyway) and run homebrew applications. So there are a lot more options. And on the other side of the fence, the PSP is interesting in its own right. It's better for movies, and its games look better, if you prefer graphics to gameplay. It also, apparently includes a browser. You can get a few browsers on the DS (one is official, others aren't) but none of them are fully functional. A PSP can be modded, too, and apparently it can do even more, being a more powerful machine. But a PSP can only be modded into a better gaming/entertainment system, where a DS can be modded to basically be a handheld computer.

And now a portable gaming system is going to get a camera. It wouldn't be the first time; the Game Boy systems have had cameras, and even a printer! Neither were very popular, Nintendo would do well to remember.

So let's take a look at the DSi. The DSi is basically the same form factor as a DS. The hinges appear to be a little bulkier. The DS logo is completely gone from the outer shell of the DSi. The screens are slightly bigger. The DSi does not support Game Boy Advance cartridges natively, which means it also does not support the official browser, or the new Guitar Hero games. It also doesn't support GBA to DS linkage, a rarely used feature supported in some Pokemon and Castlevania games. As I said, it has a camera. It actually has two cameras. One is on the outer shell (reportedly 3 megapixels) in the lower-right corner, and the other is on the inner spine (reportedly 0.3 megapixels), where the mic is on the DS Lite. The speakers are changed; they look smaller but are said to be better. The power button is no longer a slider switch on the right side above the stylus slot; instead it's a button you push on the left side, under the D-pad. The power indicator light on the right shoulder is gone; on the DSi, three indicator lights will indicate Wi-Fi connectivity, charging status, and battery status, respectively. Most interestingly, however, the DSi will feature a Secure Digital (SD) card reader on the right side, where the power switch is on the Lite. This will store photos taken by the cameras, and can be loaded with music, which can be played through an updated home screen.

All in all, the DSi seems like a nice update to the 2-year-old DS Lite. But pitted against my fully modded DS Lite, it doesn't look as sweet. Here's why:

1. It's got a camera. Nice, but does it have a flash? I have a 2MP camera on my phone, and it doesn't have a flash either. The pictures are great in good lighting but terrible if I don't have good lighting. I expect no better out of the DSi. And a 0.3MP camera is worthless. No two ways about that. I have a fairly nice Canon Powershot from 2005 (4.2MP) which serves me quite well. My digital camcorder can take stills at 5MP, but I never use it because it's not very good, ironically. So I have three cameras, two of which I use. I don't see myself taking pictures with a DSi.

2. It doesn't support Game Boy Advance games. This is a huge turn-off for me. I can't stress that enough. My three favorite gaming franchises are Castlevania, Legend of Zelda, and Metroid, in that order. So let's run the numbers. Game Boy Advance has three Castlevania games, four Zelda games (even though 2 are NES ports), and three Metroid games (1 is an NES port). The DS has two Castlevania games, one of which is inherently broke (there's a part where you have to defend a character who is casting a spell which takes 30-45 seconds to cast... against two screen-clearing bosses), though a third is on the way. It has only one Zelda game. It has two Metroid games. One sucks and the other is Metroid-themed pinball. So the DSi can play less than half of the games the DS Lite can from my three favorite franchises. Also, since the Guitar Hero games use the Game Boy Advance slot to connect the guitar grip controller, the Guitar Hero games won't load on the DSi. I have the first one, and if you start it without the guitar grip, it tells you it can't proceed. The second one comes out in the next couple months and I fully plan to get it as well. I repeat: No Guitar Hero for DSi owners. DS Lite owners will have 58 songs to play on the go (25 in the first one, a reported 28 will be in the second one) by this holiday season. Guitar Hero is nothing compared to Rock Band, which Jen owns all over on the Xbox 360, but for portable... hell, I'm glad to have Guitar Hero! Again, not on a DSi though.

3. It plays Mp3 files. Wow. This might actually be neat to see. Oh, but wait. My DS Lite already does this. Yay for modding. I can also play video. If the DSi can play video, they haven't announced it. If one of the biggest new features of the DSi is that it can play music, that doesn't say much about the rest of the system. Being as that music playback has been an underground feature for years.

4. The power button is on the face. This is a huge turn-off for me. I see myself accidentally hitting it, and that's not cool. I've never accidentally turned off my DS Lite because the power switch is out of the way, not... in the way. Well it's not RIGHT in the way, but it's close enough that it's in a stupid position.

5. I have a perfectly fine, fully operational, fully modded DS Lite. It's awesome. Some speculate that the DSi will feature technological countermeasures to prevent modding. While that will end up bypassed soon enough, if true, it means that besides the camera, Nintendo plans to make the DSi more limited than the DS Lite, in which case it would not be upgrading, but downgrading.

6. Better features were passed over. Here is where I start whining. The DS has a touch screen... how about a text writer, for taking notes on the go, keeping a journal, or maybe writing poetry or a story? How about an address book? A calendar? All of these are software solutions they can add at any time with no hardware update required. I would trade the camera for a good text writer. And how about video playback? Video playing is sketchy on a modded DS, and all of the solutions to make the required DPG files are half-broken hacks which don't work half the time. If the DS could play video in an established format dozens of programs could write to without concern of failure, that would be awesome.

So, all in all, it's interesting that Nintendo has a new handheld on the market, but until something changes down the road, I believe I still have the best handheld Nintendo has to offer.

Oh yeah - you wanna see it? The North American website has no mention of the DSi; to see it, you have to go on their Japanese site and navigate without knowing what the site is saying.

Here's the link.

The page will load, and you'll be presented with a starting image showing off the camera. The tabs I'll refer to are along the bottom.

First (home) tab. Nothing but the other tabs to click on here. Look, and move on.

Second tab is first on the left on the Home tab (Home tab is the NintendoDS logo). This just shows off the camera, probably explains what they can do. Again, look and move on.

Third tab has two symbols and a dash (-) then a bunch more symbols. Here, you can finally do something! Click the icons in the upper right corner to change the view.

Fourth tab actually says DSi at first. We'll call it "First DSi Tab". This must be the new home screen, with a lot of new options to play with. Nothing to actually do though.

Second DSi tab focuses on photo manipulation. Move your mouse around the pictures to scroll. Cool, eh?

The third DSi tab will make you wish you knew Japanese, because it talks about what you can do with music. Looks like you'll be able to interact with it somehow.

The last DSi tab shows a new web browser (guess they overcame the 16MB RAM expansion requirement?) and something I can't tell what it is.

The last tab, the one that says DS Lite, is a lot of fun. On the left you have the DSi; on the right, the DS Lite. (This may seem backwards, but it's not. The Japanese read right to left so it's fitting that the new model is on the left, not the right.) Move the mouse around. You can compare the consoles side by side using the middle, which I guess is supposed to be like a mirror. If you click the icon in the lower right, you can see the top and right-hand side (no fancy mouse movement). Also, if you click the link in the lower left, you can read the specs. Well, if you could read Japanese, you can read the specs.

Thanks for reading. You now know as much about the just-announced DSi as I do.

Well, I'm 29 now... (The Rock Band cake post)

But don't all say Happy Birthday all at once. I'm not too thrilled with the prospect of only 365 days until I hit the big three-zero.

I've had a lot of cool birthday presents, but few match the cake Jen made for me this year. As some of you might know, I like to play Rock Band using the Guitar Hero X-Plorer controller to play bass guitar.

Wanna see it? Oh, I know you do...



This is it before it's finished, but the picture also shows the actual Guitar Hero controller for comparison. Here's the finished product:


Body... The D-pad is made up of a ring of chocolate frosting and four M&Ms. The whammy bar is a Pocky stick (Mexican shortbread stick dipped in chocolate), and the strum bar is a Kit-Kat. The green M&M represents the Xbox guide button, and the other two halves represent the Back and Start buttons.


Neck and head... each of the five fret buttons is represented by four M&Ms of the same color. The tuning knobs at the head are represented by four brown M&Ms - we didn't have room for all six.


The whole finished project.

If you want to see more pictures of the cake, for a limited time you can see the topic I made on GameFAQs' Food board. I say limited time because after so long of a post not getting replies, they'll purge it. I can re-post the other pictures here, I just haven't got the time right now.

And as with all pictorial blogs I post, you can click any image to see it full-size, if you'd like a closer look.

Oh yeah... under the frosting, it's a Devil's Food cake... mwa ha ha ha ha. It was good... We served it with Breyers Triple Chocolate ice cream.

The three best movie trailers ever

Who doesn't love movie trailers? Some say the trailers are the best part of the movie. People have paid to see movies just for one trailer. (Read on, one such trailer makes the list.) Trailers were so popular on Apple's QuickTime gallery that they required QuickTime Pro (a $30 license) to view some of their most popular trailers.

Almost all trailers have major spoilers, and most give away important parts of the movie being advertised. Many show all the best parts of a movie. The justification for this is that they're shown before a movie you are hopefully very interested in (as you paid good money for your ticket), and most people will forget the bulk of most trailers after the feature presentation is over, leaving them with a positive feeling about the movies advertised.

There are three kinds of trailers. The first trailer is not a trailer but a teaser. A teaser is usually about a minute long and often contains a lot of text, music, special effects, not a lot of bulk. The purpose is to let you know the movie's coming and to leave you wanting more. Next comes the actual trailer. These start at about two and a half to three minutes and contain spoilers and the bulk of the movie (lots of action if an action movie, the best jokes if a comedy, and so on). They're designed to make you love the movie, so you'll pay to see it when it comes out. Often there's more than one trailer. Sometimes they're rotated, sometimes one follows the other. Then you have the TV spots. Always about 15 or 30 seconds long, and there are almost always at least three or four of them. Sometimes different TV spots focus on different aspects of the film, sometimes they're just different teasers.

While almost all trailers are memorable at the time, most of them are forgotten after you see the movie. They no longer have any purpose, really. With the introduction of high-speed Internet, we can download them, or just watch them online, but which ones are worth watching months or years after the movie came out? Here are, in my opinion, the three most memorable trailers.

#3: Lord of the Rings Trilogy Teaser
I believe it was March or May 2001. Sept. 11 hadn't changed the world yet, and we were already being treated to an amazing trilogy, we'd seen one two years prior and were a year away from the second installment. Fantasy nerds and bookworms had read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was read in schools, but to casual readers, Lord of the Rings was rather slow starting. It was respected but not widely read, not by this generation anyway. Then this teaser came out. Longer than a traditional teaser, but then again, it was for three movies.

Fire, lightning, runes, and a cool little poem ("...and in the darkness bind them") isn't a bad way to start a trailer. Following it with an epic battle, horses running in the darkness, some randomly cool fantasy scenes - then it just drops off about a minute in. You get a cool, quotable line ("Even the smallest person can change the course of history") and then the title shot. That would be enough to satisfy the fanboys. It could have ended right there and been nearly as effective. But no. Let's show off closeups of the major heroes with a vocal choir singing softly in the background while title cards announce each film's release date. Christmas 2001 for Fellowship, Christmas 2002 for Towers, and, you guessed it, Christmas 2003 for Return. Another cool quote and the names of the main actors. Beautiful presentation and of course it got everyone talking.

I don't think Fellowship of the Ring really lived up to this trailer, but Fellowship of the Ring (the book) was always the weakest link, anyway. It's really just the introduction to the series, sets the stage for things to come, and of course The Two Towers more than redeemed the series. (Fellowship wasn't that bad, but still didn't live up to the trailer.)

#2. Star Wars Original Trilogy Trailer
The year was 1996. It was fall, maybe October, maybe November. Most trailers fill the screen, but this one didn't. This one put a tiny sqaure TV in the middle of the screen and said, in a 1960s Twilight Zone kind of voice, "For an entire generation, people have experienced Star Wars the only way it's been possible: on the TV screen." They just make TVs sound so bad. I'd watched the movies countless times, of course, who hasn't? And it was just fine on the TV. Of course anything's gonna look better on the big screen, but these movies were almost 20 years old and I'd long accepted that the best I'd ever see these movies would be on a big-screen TV (which I never did). Then this bad boy comes out. And then the X-wing flies out of the TV and all of a sudden the whole theater collectively gasps as the X-wing fills the theater screen, the volume goes up, and jaws hit the floor.

YouTube really doesn't give this trailer justice. Watching it online (and having seen it in the theaters, and having seen it on DVD, upconverted on an HDTV), it loses most of the effect it had in theaters, except for right when the X-wing breaks out, and at the end of the trailer when the Death Star blows up. The overall presentation isn't as good as the Lord of the Rings teaser, but overall it's more effective - and much more memorable.

And the best, most memorable theatrical trailer of all time... drum roll...

#1: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Trailer
November 1998, two years after the above trailer came out. There were rumors of a new Star Wars trilogy, but I hadn't heard them. I was too busy watching the remastered and updated Star Wars movies on VHS over and over, particularly A New Hope (the very first one, more commonly just called "Star Wars" - my favorite movie of all time).

The Lucasfilm logo would clue most people in. Not me. I knew Lucasfilm made Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but I assumed they made much more than that, so it wasn't like "OMG new Star Wars" it was more like "Oh cool, another movie from the guys who made Star Wars". Still, it had me at the edge of my seat. Of course, the music clued me in a second or two later. Then we get a whole bunch of cool sci-fi shots. The pod race, gunfighting in a big hall, space flight, the chromed-out ship parked in the desert, the queen with too much makeup and the funny hair, big robots, and funny creatures (Jar-Jar and Watto).

Then, as if it couldn't get any hotter, Samuel L. Jackson appears on screen and starts talking about a prophecy. If you don't guess that the little boy highlighted next is Anakin Skywalker, father of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, the guy who becomes Darth Vader, the baddest villain ever made in America (Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth is a strong contender, but we can say Sephiroth is Japan's baddest villain and Vader, America's). We then see Anakin meet a much younger Obi-Wan Kenobi, which is really special because, as we all know from A New Hope, Anakin's the one who (as Darth Vader) kills Obi-Wan so many years later. We then see Yoda, and for the first time heard that great quote that was repeated and parodied ad nauseum for years to come. And here it is again: "I sense much fear in you. Fear, is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to... suf-fer-ing...!" And then that badass double-bladed lightsaber, and holding it - our third Sith lord, after Vader and the Emporer from the original trilogy. We finish with some more cool shots and then the title card.

You know, I don't think there's a Star Wars fan alive who hasn't ripped on Phantom Menace. "It was a kid's movie." "It was Star Wars dumbed down for younger kids." Blah blah blah. But I can't say too much - I'm guilty of this myself. But there also wasn't a Star Wars fan who didn't fall in love with Phantom Menace as soon as they saw this trailer. This one trailer set the stage for six years of anticipation. We knew Anakin Skywalker was going over to the Dark Side. We didn't know who Luke's mom was just yet, although we had an idea. And we didn't know just how it was going to happen. Six years, though.

After seeing Phantom Menace in May of 1999, it was happy and sad. Happy, that we'd seen the first Star Wars movie in 22 years if you don't count the Endor movies (and most of us don't), but sad because it would be 3 years until the next one. Whatever was going on, as much as whatever job sucked at the time, I had Episode II to look forward to. We didn't know what it was going to be called, of course, and the announcement of the title in mid-2001 led to much speculation. Same thing after seeing Attack of the Clones. Another three years. And despite any real or inferred shortcomings of the Prequel Trilogy, no one can deny that they complete the saga.

Sort of. Lucas originally planned a trilogy of trilogies. Anakin's story, Luke's story, and Leia's story. I doubt any true Star Wars fans believed Lucas when he said he was done with it with six. Here he is now releasing that Clone Wars cartoon AGAIN. (As if they didn't already do a Clone Wars cartoon in 2005.) Like the rest of us, George Lucas loves making money. He may not know he's doing Episodes 7, 8, and 9 yet, but he will. And if (God forbid) he passes on first, someone else will. The movies are guaranteed to sell tickets. The money is there to be made. The economy is hurting right now. If 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm ever need a get out of jail free card, it's the third Star Wars trilogy. Mark my words, they'll do it. And it probably won't take them 22 years, either.