People in the US who pre-ordered Scribblenauts at GameStop were the lucky recipients (if they were still in stock) of the incredibly cute and awesome Maxwell Rooster Hat, as seen here:

Funny hats are always a key ingredient to WIN, and if I’m honest, picking up the hat was just as exciting as collecting the game itself. Which I was pretty dang excited about. The great thing is, the chickenhat is good quality — and stretches enough to fit onto my giant noggin.

Browsing Twitter, I found I was not alone in my appreciation for the awesomeness of the roosterhat. Click for the large size (totally worth it):

I will add more pics as they turn up, and if anyone who happens to read this would like to be added, post a comment with a link to your pic.

Photo credits
Row 1:
1: @lauraehall (me!)
2: @gotee12
3: @vznet
4: @vixorien
5: @sampagan

Row 2:
1: @rondhi
2: @ravensvoice
3: @nbcrescendo
4: @monique_soto
5: @matthewrex

Row 3:
1: @levihaag
2: @jugglerofgeese
3: @jaimeorourke
4: One of the Scribblenauts developers
5: @duckyvonkarma

Row 4:
1: @briguyd
2: @czarneckid
3: @bigopinion
4: @gogoroflcopter
5: @rosakam

STOP THE PRESSES, PEOPLE! Animal Crossing: City Folk is out on Sunday!

I am so excited about this it requires the use of caps AND multiple exclamation points!!

Look out fossils…HERE I COME.

p.s. I have just discovered an official contest which asks players to dress their pets as AC characters. Whichever Nintendo employee thought this up deserves an award of their own: “Most Awesome.”

I just finished playing Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village (DS), and despite having taken fewer than 10 hours in total to complete, it’s firmly among the top of the list of my favorite games of all time.

Everything about it is frankly just great. The story, setting and tone are engaging – you play as the Professor and his assistant Luke, invited to a village to investigate the mystery surrounding a very strange inheritance. The game is set in a non-specific time period, and Layton might as well be Sherlock Holmes (he even has a funny tall hat) except that there are cars around.

The music sets a great mood, too – one of my favorite tunes can be heard here (YouTube link).

I even like the way the puzzles are integrated. The characters just dig puzzles and want you to help them solve a few stumpers, for the most part…but perhaps there’s more to this odd habit than meets the eye. At any rate, it’s a change from other puzzle games I love (like the Monkey Island series), where you find yourself “putting different fluids in balloons so you can put them in a mail tube so you can flood a communications room so you can etcetera.” [1]

The puzzles were frequently challenging, often trick questions, and two or three times involved geometry, the answers for which I caved and googled. (Length of a side of a triangle, my foot!) Plus the illustrations are hella cute! [2]

Anyway, I finished the game so quickly because I couldn’t get enough of it, and by the end I was wishing there was more. Luckily while searching YouTube for videos of the cutscenes I found that Layton is part one of a THREE part series (not two as I’d heard before).

I do wish they would make a full length anime film or series out of these characters, though. It could be the new and improved Detective Conan/Case Closed.

While traveling I saw two Nintendo DS systems in the wild.

Stats:
- one pink, one white
- both wielded by young girls
- both used on public transport (train)
- I couldn’t see what game one was playing, but the other appeared to be set in a village – Harvest Moon, maybe?

The hunt continues.

Super Mario Galaxy is the only game that could make me want to throttle a penguin.

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” – Heraclitus

Conveniently, I woke up this morning to an email alerting me that a Wii Fit bundle was in stock at Circuit City, and would I like to buy one? Hell yeah, I grumbled sleepily, entering my credit card info before turning over and snoozing a bit more.

I got the confirmation email about thirty minutes before the site and trackers listed it as Out of Stock again, so hopefully that means I have dibs on a unit in a warehouse somewhere, and it wasn’t some sneaky trick to force me into paying for a back-ordered set.

Come to me, Wii Fit! You are mine!

It’s easy to feel down after reading the daily news headlines, but the story, “
Nursing home grannies take up Wii Boxing” is definitely a happymaker.

My upper arms are about as strong as wet spaghetti.

I do exercise, but it’s all cardio-based or involves jogging (not that I’m great at that either, but I am improving). I’m so feeble that every time I see a movie character dangle from a ledge or branch from the tips of their fingers, I cringe, knowing that I would have already fallen screaming to my death, like the Nazi lady at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who keeps reaching for the Grail.

I’d like to step up to the little white square and get (Wii) Fit. Apparently, so does everyone else in the country (or at least the 11.7 million Wii owners in the US, as of this posting), because it’s sold out everywhere. Using Wii Alerts has so far yielded zip, as despite successfully purchasing a unit from Target online as soon as the text message arrived, the delivery date was later changed to some time in August.

I’m about to enter the phase of calling stores and obsessively tracking their shipment arrivals, which now that I think about it is kind of a game in and of itself. It’s on, Toys”R”Us, and I’m playing to win.