The Splatcademy Awards went really well, the contributions from our fellow podcasters were amazing. My only concern is that people will see how much funnier than us some of those dudes are, and will quit listening to our show 
I went to The Ross yesterday to see The Orphanage with some pals. It was a good time, I hadn’t been to that theater for several years. I think the last time was back in ‘99 or 2000 to see Princess Mononoke. Reactions to The Orphanage varied across our group, but I think most of us thought it was pretty decent. You can hear our thoughts in Splattercast #66.
Before The Orphanage, we saw a trailer for Persepolis. It’s an animated movie based on a well-liked graphic novel. I don’t know if I’ll make time to see Persepolis at the theater, but this trailer was very cool. It had a garagey cover of Eye of the Tiger playing and it was just really rockin’.
And lastly, I read about this music/radio site called Pandora over on The Stygian Hollows. I’m having a lot of fun with Pandora, it’s great because I like hearing new (new to me, at least) music but I don’t have the gumption or inclination to learn about music on my own. Pandora takes a single recommendation from you, a single band or song that you like, and produces a string of music that it thinks you will like based on that one piece of information.
One of my favorite sites, Hardcore Gaming 101, has a new article up on a bizarre Japanese indie game from the Super Famicom era: Hong Kong 97. It’s some wacky protest/commentary game about the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in 1997.
Check out episode #8, it’s super.
I finished Breakdown for Xbox this weekend. I got it used a couple years ago when I first got my Xbox, and it just sat on the shelf until now. HG101 has a great write-up on the game. It does a few things really well and there are a handful of very cool moments, but the overall package is less than stellar - which is kind of a shame, since there are those little nuggets of greatness in there. You can get it for $6 or $7 bucks used and I think it’s definitely worth that, just be sure to set the difficulty to “easy” otherwise the frustration-to-reward ratio will be way out of wack.
I also got the new Advance Wars DS game tonight at one of the Gamestop stores in town. Of course it was about 15% cheaper at the Wal-Mart that was a few yards away, but I had a gift card for Gamestop. The dude working the register told me the game was “totally awesome” and I trust his professional opinion.
I wholeheartedly recommend any of the Advance Wars games for either the GBA or DS. All of them are great and you’ll get tons of playtime out of them.