Three things on the agenda for today.  I know everyone's time is limited, so we'll dive right into it:

I proclaim The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass to be the best damn Zelda game ever made.  Why has it taken so long for someone to make a nice fun little non-stupid-final-fantasy- RPG-like game on the DS.  This is why I bought my DS and only now is it starting to pay off (on a side note, if I'd bought Google stock instead of a DS I'd have several thousand dollars right now).   Praise aside, Zelda has some issue, most notably, and not uncommon for Zelda games in general, is that when you save in a dungeon you are placed back outside when you load.  I hate this.  Bad game designer.  Bad game designer.  Now, maybe there is some technical reason why they do this, but I'm more inclined to follow the old saying: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by sadism".

I also submit that Lucy, Daughter of the Devil is the best dang animated show on TV.  There are three things I love about the show:  1) The writing.  It's funny, clever and has a soul.  They pack a lot of story and humor into very short and quickly paced episodes.  2) The acting and voice style is very natural sounding.  It feels more like the actors are adlibing and I'd be surprised if they don't record all their lines while in the same room at the same time.  Most animation is done with the actors doing their lines at different times and even thousands of miles apart.  This kind of voice acting would be very hard to do in games due to pacing issues.  You want game dialog to be snappy with a flow and rhythm, but you also want players to be in control.  Problem is players don't do want you want them to do when you want them to do it.  Bad player.  Bad player.  3) The animation simple and crude.  It's a great style and could easily be done real-time in a game.  I also suspect that most gamers and game reviewers would savage a game that looked like this, which is really too bad.  When will we stop caring only about the technical testosterone level of a game.  Maybe this is why creative people like Loren Bouchard make cartoons and not games.

And finally, the TV show Heroes is dead and boring.  The first season was fantastic.  I loved it more than I've loved another human being, but dear god it should have ended.  Do we really need another year of the same story told again.  I just don't care about these people anymore and like most of the people in the real world, they are annoying and I wish they'd leave my house.  It's too bad U.S. networks can't create shows with limited runs.  Heroes would have been perfect as a one-year mini-series, but network TV executives need to club every show to death with the greed-stick containing a pointy syndication-nail pounded into it.