Back in 1978 I had a schoolmate whose dad owned a little independent movie theatre about a mile from my house. It was one of those that played first-run movies two months after they came out, with super low ticket prices.

It just so happened that the original Star Wars (before its rebirth as an “Episode”) made its way to that theatre - a watershed event in my life, since I could actually ride my bike to the place. Prior to that, the old, marvelous Cine Capri - with its high-backed, velvet rocking seats and enormous wrap-around CinemaScope screen that blurred the far edges of every movie (CinemaScope was long dead by then) - was the only theatre in Phoenix where Star Wars played, and deservedly so. It was way out in Scottsdale, and my parents were not about to drag me out there repeatedly.

Cassette tapes had just replaced 8-tracks, and I’d received a hi-tech cassette player/recorder (with a built in mic!) for Xmas. One day my friend surprised me with a audio tape recording of the entire movie. Given my obsession with the movie, I ended up playing that damned thing every single day - either actively listening or having it play in the background.

The result (after who knows how long, years I guess) was my unwitting memorization of every single line of dialogue in the film. Timing, intonation, inflection, accent, everything. Scary thing is, i still remember chunks of it. You can quiz me.

When the movie was re-released circa 1980 (with a stupendously exciting trailer for “The Empire Strikes Back”, mind you) I was the bane of all my friends, reciting the entire movie under my breath when we went to see it - multiple times, of course.

My point is … there is no point. I came here to talk about “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed”. Obviously the mere thought of Star Wars is enough to make me babble to anyone who’ll listen. I’m beholden to it for life, just like this guy. Good to know there are other quasi-normal people in my position.

On to “Force Unleashed”. This bugger has been released in a ridiculous number of forms: 360, PS3, Wii, iPhone, Nintendo DS, PSP, paperback, even a freakin’ toy light saber. Oh George, haven’t you made enough money?

I’m not about to try the thing on every game platform, but I have played it on PS3, DS and iPhone, and I’m about to opine.

On PS3, so far I like the game. You know how Vader and other nasty-ass Jedi Knights toss big boxes, pipes and other crap around? You finally get to try it yourself in this game. I have to say, it’s not as big a thrill as I’d have imagined, not yet, anyway. You can of course use Force Choke to crush the life out of baddies before chucking them off a precipice - that’s cool, too.

The PS3 controls are what you would expect from PS3 controls: a little awkward but easy to master. But it definitely doesn’t give you the feeling that you’re actually wielding a light saber. Hopefully the Wii version will satisfy that yen. (If not, there’s always Star Wars The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels coming up.)

You’re probably wondering just how in the hell the game could transfer to the iPhone. The only controls you have there are the touch screen and accelerometer. Well, forget the accelerometer - your sole method of action lies in tracing shapes on the screen. Each enemy has a little curly design above its head and you have to trace that shape on the screen, which in turn hurls a box at the baddie. Added to that are defensive swipes - you draw a diagonal line in the direction suggested by an on-screen prompt to deflect incoming objects and laser blasts.

That may sound silly, and it is. You don’t control your character’s movement, only his battle actions. But after feeling pretty stupid tracing shapes fervently on a tiny screen, I realized that in a way, it does actually feel sort of like swinging a light saber or pitching boxes around.

Especially in comparison to the DS version. On the bottom touch screen there’s a static image broken down into half a dozen quadrants, each representing a particular Force “power” at your disposal - i.e., Choke, Lightning, etc. You do get to control the movement of the character, with either the D-Pad or the buttons, but the characters are so itty bitty it’s difficult to know which way - hence, which enemy - you’re facing. So you end up pounding your finger on the touch screen madly - anywhere - while moving your guy, backing up, turning around, shooting Force lighting at a tree while being smashed by a Wookie.

Damn, I’m tired of typing. And if you’re still reading this, wow, kudos. My final opinion: The DS version is too frustration to consider shelling out 35 bucks for it. The iPhone is only 10 bucks, and it’s worth it - if only for the novelty of having “Star Wars: The Force Unleased on your phone. The gameplay is amusing enough, and it’s fun to impress your friends (or enemies).

As for the PS3 version I think, in comparison to most games on the platform (including the overrated Metal Gear Solid 4) it’s definitely worth adding to your library. If you can rent it from GameFly, even better (that’s what I did). For me, the opening of the game makes the game an absolute must: You play as Darth Vader, tromping around on Kashyyyk Kicking MAJOR ass with every Force power at your disposal.

Makes me wish Midichlorians were real and available via injection.

If “Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People” weren’t so dryly sarcastic and full of obscure pop culture references and bizarre non-sequiturs, you’d swear it was a point-and-click cartoon for toddlers. At least that’s how I felt as I stumbled through the first part of the game last night. Yes, stumbled. From place to place, clicking on everything in sight, with little comprehension of what I was supposed to be doing. Believe it or not, I’m already freakin’ stuck.

That’s of little consequence. I’m a huge fan of the Homestar Runner Flash animations. Created by brothers Mike and Matt Chapman, the world of Homestar Runner is, at first glance, so random it almost hurts; but as you become more familiar with the characters a strange feeling of inside-joke inclusion washes over you. You empathize with Strong Bad and his frustration with the moronic emails he reads. You understand why he wants to beat the crap out of Homestar all the time.

Sorry for the Wii/We pun in the title. I’m as sick of that crap as you are. But it’s irresistible.

As you’ll see in the video below, Wii MotionPlus looks extremely cool. While Microsoft will most likely need to build a whole new controller in order to do motion sensing stuff (rumor, of course), Nintendo just cranks out a little pluggy thing that snaps right onto the base of the existing WiiMote and voila, realistic light saber and ball-throwing control. Sweet. Question is, why now? You’d think it would have been easier to integrate those functions into the existing Wii controller before shipping the console. Rush to market much?

No matter, wii (!!) welcome it, this purveyor of great new gaming capabilities to come. O, let it be priced under $30.

As promised, here are last three vids of E3-tastic games.

Mirror’s Edge (PC, 360, PS3): This title was a surprise to me - I’d never even heard of it, then when I watched the video walkthrough I became an instant fan. Imagine what it might be like to be a UPS dude with no truck, delivering super important packages one by one while people are trying to kill you, and your primary routes involve leaping across the rooftops. In first-person POV. It looks fascinating. To get the full picture you need to see the developer walkthrough video.

I wasn’t lucky enough to be among the Press who attended E3 2008. But I’m still overwhelmed by the number of great games scheduled for release this year - thanks to Gamespot’s stellar coverage of the event. (Ah, to have such resources for a gaming site.)

There’s a whole bushel of games I can’t wait to get my hands on. I’m too lazy to list them all, but I thought it would be cool to post some E3 preview videos of a few of them, mainly for my own convenience. Oh, and you might enjoy them, too.

In no particular order:

Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii): Yeah, I play Animal Crossing on DS - wanna make something of it? If you aren’t familiar with the series, it’s sort of like a “trainer” RPG, ostensibly aimed at kids but there’s something weirdly fascinating about it nonetheless. Without going into too much detail, some of the new features include the ability to exchange email with friends in the real world, and the integration of the WiiSpeak feature. What did you say? You wanna step outside?

This is just too ripe. You may have heard rumors of a forthcoming game for the Wii’s online game-buying service, WiiWare, called Beer Pong. Yes, that Beer Pong. I’ve never tried the game myself (not a frat kinda guy), but apparently the gist of it is trying to toss a ping pong ball into a cup (URC, the college standard Ubiquitous Red Cup, likely coined by the venerable DB1), and then drinking the amount of beer appropriate for your level of success or failure. Can’t be too different from “Quarters” - an oft-played drinking game from my college days which I’d rather not think about.

Well, here’s the thing. The ESRB came up with a T (Teen) rating for the game despite the fact that - can you guess? - teens can’t legally drink. You can bet this snagged a load of panties into a bunch, so the developer, determined to keep the T rating, changed the title of the game to - wait for it - Pong Toss!

Okay, first of all: Pong Toss?? It sounds like a British euphemism for blowing chunks, praying to the porcelain god, visiting your good friend Ralph. That name completely flattens any allure the game might have had. Why would you toss ping pong balls into cups without an ulterior purpose? All right, I suppose it might be amusing for a little bit, but why - why, I ask you - why wouldn’t you just buy some URCs and ping-pong balls from the local 99-cent store and play the game IRL (”in real life” for you internet Luddites)? Would you rather shake a Wii-mote at a TV screen? It’s baffling.

Of course, my bitching is aimed only at Pong Toss, which turns the activity of “tossing pong” into a lame carnival game. There are already a few decent carnival games available for the Wii, so why on earth would you fork over another 15 bucks for what amounts to a simple mini-game?

I know what you’re thinking: “Who cares what the name of the game is? You can still play Beer Pong with it!” I agree with you, and that is obviously what’s going to happen. But seriously, people. Keep the name Beer Pong. Let the rating be changed to M (Mature) to keep the game out of the hands of impressionable teens (yeah, sure).

The game is obviously designed to be a tie-in with actual beer drinking. How cool is that? I mean, has there ever been a title in the history of gaming whose sole intention was to encourage drunkenness? It may not be the most noble of intentions, but one fact cannot be denied: Gaming is finally growing up. We ain’t in Atari 2600 Land anymore. The target market for Beer Pong will buy the game no matter what the dang rating is. Why worry about losing sales in the teen demographic? I seriously doubt an M rating would negatively affect the game’s sales figures.

Actually, I don’t really care about any of this crap, I just like to point out inanity when it crosses my path. If it’s $10 or lower I’ll probably buy it anyway, in the hopes that it might help me jump start a social life. Ah, self-deprecation.

Here’s a video of some people actually playing the game - sans alcohol. How fun it looks, how happy the players are! Joy!

[previous content excised for humility.]

There is another fitness-related game in the pipeline that will take advantage of the balance board peripheral that looks to offer a more stringent workout than Wii Fit: Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2009. A Majesco press release describes it thusly: “Players become new recruits in Jillian’s boot camp where they enroll in a unique training program composed of challenging fitness tests and an ever-changing series of workouts“. It’ll offer four workout options: Strength Training, Intervals, Hill Climb and Weight Loss, with three difficulty levels. (”Hill Climb” makes me shudder without even seeing it.) Jillian Michaels is the ball buster on TV’s The Biggest Loser (I’m not linking out to it … find it yourself).

Check out the Wii Balance Board Games Roundup blog for news on more upcoming balance-board games. Some of them look pretty cool.

All of this balance board talk makes me wonder when more interesting, practical and useful peripherals will come out. Meantime, here’s an obligatory link to the Wii Fit Girl. Watch it already.

It’s humiliating to admit this, but I still haven’t started with Wii Fit.

I made sure to pick it up right when it was released, with ambitious intentions. However, my indolence knows almost no bounds, and though my heart is in the right place, excuses for procrastination are astonishingly enticing. Perhaps if I enumerate them I can obliterate them. That’s the ticket.

One: Recently some talented new interns came on board here at PlayWhat. It’s great to have them, and the site content is finally growing exponentially. The trade off is that my editing workload has increased commensurately and I literally never stop working all day. Boo hoo, right. But the concentration expenditure is considerable, and by the time I get home my brain is crying to be coddled. This situation manifests itself in various ways: cereal for dinner, endless reading on Fark.com, and most often, passive visual entertainment. (Episodes of The Office are the vehicle de rigeur, often inducing sweet somnolence.) As proof that my mind is truly mush, even the thought of playing a game is tiring.

Two: Happy Hour.

Three: Dinner with the parental units (more often than I’d like to admit) gets me home far too late to willfully induce a sweat.

Four: I’m a “night person”. It’s quite common to see me starting to watch a third movie near midnight (with the assumption that it will lull me to sleep). Come 3 AM when I’m staring glassy-eyed at the credits, I know without doubt that I will be slapping the snooze button well into the morning and running out of steam at work around mid-afternoon. The results of this are obvious (see excuse One).

Tonight I”m going out to dinner for my sister’s birthday and will probably consume mounds of pizza. And pizza demands ice cream, which will result in my collapse immediately upon arriving home.

Things have got to change. This ought to be a log of my progress. But anyone could do that, right? Shit, another excuse.

I got on a waiting list, and they actually called me. So I now own my very own Wii Fit.

Tonight is the night. I’m dragging my lazy ass off the couch. Will Wii Fit make exercise tolerable? Will I lose a few pounds? More importantly, will I stick with it?

I’ll post fascinating notes on my progress here. Ultimately this will lead to a video review of some sort. Is my enthusiasm palpable?

All hail the Balance Board:

I’m not one to gloat, but - screw it, I am one to gloat. I told you so - each one of my millions of fans, I told all of you so! Behold my spectacular post, Wii want sex; oh, witness how my dream is coming true. Sex-related controllers and games are starting to appear for the Wii!

Pole dancing on the Wii, people. With the pole. Okay, so it’s not exactly an intimate personal device (a la the “Wii Nii” device suggested by one of you clever readers), but come on, a stripper-training game? “Wii Pole Dancing” will require the “Electra-pole” peripheral, and according to a company representative, the marketing for the game is going to “try and encourage both women and men to pole dance for ‘fun and fitness’.” Wii Fit this ain’t.

I could opine on the implications herein, but this is something you should really think through on your own. Check out this Gizmodo article, and make sure to watch the video all the way to the end for a hilarious surprise.

Mothers, hide your children. At least until you finish playing.