This is going to be a nerdy post. If you were somehow (unrealistically) expecting some sort of real inflection, not here.
I wish I had the morals to be against piracy. For an industry I'm so fucking obsessed with, I sure do love to exploit it and steal everything I can. Speaking of!:
Scribblenauts dropped a few days ago. It's a fun toy. Game wise? Eh.
For those that aren't super nerds: you can spawn anything into the game world by writing it down. (Aside from most proper nouns, copyrighted material, lewd jokes, etc). You use that mechanic to solve puzzles. I think the database is something like 22,000 words? The best use of this is just pitting fights. God vs. Kraken, Butcher + Meat Cleaver vs. Giant Enemy Crab, God + Skateboard + Shotgun vs. Baby, etc.
The actual puzzles are redundant, though. For a game where the big pull is creativity, you can use "God" and "Jetpack" to solve about 99% of the puzzles. Yes, doing it this way is playing it wrong. It's hard to think of a wacky way to get object A to point B for the hundredth time. The control is real janky, too. You have to use the stylus, and a lot of the time when you're trying to click on an item you end up sending your guy into a pool filled with piranha instead. A lot of the objectives are outrageously vague, also.
I'd recommend a rental, but do one better, and just pirate it. You can buy it if you love it, and enjoy it past making Cthulu fight Jesus.
Mario and Luigi 3 dropped as well, but it's got some silly good anti-piracy going for it. If a patch doesn't come out within a day or two, I'm going to either buy it, or a CycloDS. I think I'm just going to pick it up tomorrow, I fucking need that game.
At this point I'm almost done with it, but I feel I should mention Dissidia. I have something like twenty hours in it, it's okay. It's a lot better than I expected, but it's also not that great. The story is awful fanwank. Which is initially interesting, but not after ten hours of them quoting babelfish'd Nietzsche. The fighting engine itself is, for lack of a better word, weird. You basically tug of war your attack power with the opponent (Bravery, using bravery damaging attacks). Once you get it to an acceptable level, you use an HP attack, which temporarily lowers your Bravery to 0, and does the HP damage of whatever your Bravery was at. It goes a bit deeper, but that's the gist.
I'm trying to grind out so I can see the Shantotto scenes, but I don't know if the game is going to hold my interest much longer. The main storyline is literally worse than Kingdom Hearts' "original" swill. I was really surprised with how fucking awesome Warrior of Light (FF1) and Firion (FF2) are, though. This game is making me respect Amano's art a lot more, every character is more or less directly ported to 3D from his sketches. It's also helped me realize how awful of a villain Sephiroth is, especially compared to gold like Kefka. (Who is absolutely perfect in this game, by the way. God, I do not want to wait for a shitty FFV remake to get a proper FF6 one.)
Haven't put much time into Layton 2. I got to the first "WHICH COW IS ALWAYS LYING AND WHICH IS ALWAYS TELLING THE TRUTH" and turned it off. That was about a week ago. It's more of the same, I just don't feel like playing that type of game right now.
The last bit of game nerd spasms is just pimping a few awesome podcasts. First of all:
Life Well Wasted. He doesn't do these often, at all. One every two months is pushing it. However, because of this, the production values are pretty amazing. It isn't just three generic dudes circlejerking about the unimpressive gaming news of that week. It's timeless commentary about the industry as a whole. The latest episode was specifically about fandom: cosplaying, fanfics, etc. I don't feel like I'm doing it justice, but it's really the best gaming podcast out there. There's only five or so episodes, but they're all amazing. He also dumbs down a lot of things for people who don't read gaming forums 24/7.
I'm also still listening to GiantBomb and Mega64, but I've pimped those already. JpButton is another new one, which I personally like, but I could see someone hating it. The latest episode they discuss Manga / Internet Cafe's in Japan.
Started Co-Op again, which is always amazing. It's exactly the same as the 1-up show, just without EGM's backing. Which, really, makes no difference.
Lastly for serious, random newsy links:
Epic Mickey. I have a feeling this game will never see the light of day, or be dramatically different than the dark style, but fuck. This look and sounds so amazing. Oswald the Rabbit murdering Mickey in a post apocalyptic landscape of Disney Worlds? All over my tits.
Victor Ireland mentioning working on RPG Localization with his new company. He was the head of Working Designs. (Lunar, aka the best god damn localization team ever.) The latest game by his new company was like... a DS crime drama, so a real RPG would be great.
Super Metroid Eris. Fanhack, don't know if it's any good yet. Going to put an hour or so into it later on my PSP, if it's not too ridiculously difficult.
3D Dot Game Heroes. I don't know how they're getting away with the blatant plagiarism of Zelda, but fuck if it doesn't look awesome.
[Can you tell I'm losing my steam on nerding out?]
And not really game related: Nine was surprisingly good. It was also very surprisingly dark. The snake monster is absolutely the shit of nightmares. Which is awesome. There's a few scenes that are very memorable, particularly the record scene. So good. See this now.
I'm fucking done. Good day.