This morning I wandered around downtown Chicago taking pictures of the cast of WNEP's Soiree DADA as they... DADAed.

Far Cry: Vengeance has a certain "let's rush out a game to get it on the new platform" feel about it -- the main character has these "feral" powers that are never really explained, and is he supposed to know this Semeru guy? Anyway, whatever. The real question here is, how are First Person Shooters on the Wii? And based on this one, I think the answer is going to be "pretty good". I'm a FPS fan from way back, and having been raised on mouse-and-keyboard controls, I was never really able to make the leap to the less-accurate controllers of console FPSs. But the Wiimote feels very natural to point around the screen and KAPOW. And hey, this game is cheap. (And I've got a copy if you want to borrow it.)

Before you watch my story, it might help to know that Jean Baptiste du Sable was the first non-native resident of what is now Chicago. I had thought that it was just one of those names that people would sort of recognize as a Chicago-y name. Like Anton Cermak or Italo Balbo -- you recognize the name, even if you don't know that they're an assassinated Chicago mayor and a Italian fascist who flew to Chicago once (respectively). In any case, some conversations after the show revealed that that had been an incorrect assumption.

Anyhoo, the judges (two apes and guest judge Jonathan Messinger of the Dollar Store) liked the story barely enough (21 out of 30 points) to let me slip just to second place despite Jarrad's 30 point surge.

Next week's challenge is to choreograph and perform a dance to a randomly assigned song, with a randomly assigned partner from one of the other contestants. I got Jarrad and we were assigned Jump, Jive an' Wail by Louis Prima. Now this is interesting because a) Swing is very much a leader/follower dance (at least the way I learned it) and we're two guys and b) the challenge instructions emphasized that we should "tell a story" and this is a song that doesn't have any sort of narrative built in. Now, we are fortunate that I happen to be related to a great swing dancer. That's gotta rub off somehow, right?

Oh, and the story I told was not the one I polished and practiced on Wednesday night. I scrapped that one Thursday morning and decided to go for a more "Paul Bunyan" feel than a Native American mythos style. But as part of polishiing, I typed the first story up and so, as a special bonus, I'll include it after the jump. But first, everyone's stories...

Amanda - "The Bunny"
Brady - "Nessie"
Erin - "My Mom Killed My Best Friend"
Fuzzy - "Jean Baptisite du Sable"
Jarrad - "Boondiggle the Peasant Boy"
Jenny - "The Ticket"
Kristen - "My Father"
Margaret - "Clare and Isabelle"

I'll leave this here as a pointer until I get the site search working a little more comprehensively: if you came here looking for improv games or group games, you're probably looking for the Games List on the New Improv Page.

Well, we're more than half-way through this crazy show. Tonight's show's challenge is simply to "tell a story" and that's so wide-open that I guessing it's going to be an awesomely varied show.

I really owe Erica for being my sounding board last night -- I thought I had my story all set in my head, but I ran it for her just to check the timing (half of us went really long with the puppets and so the word came down this week that we really needed to keep it under four minutes) and I discovered that not only was it long, but it didn't make any sense. I had a lot of good parts, but they just weren't fitting together into a good story. So I did some re-thinking and, as so often happens, I had to kill a baby and chop out the part that had gotten me into the story in the first place. With a re-focus, and a cut-to-the-chase, I ended up with a much better story that clocked in at 3:50. So please, come to the show and laugh in the right places, but for a total of 10 seconds, please.

Due to some this and that at work, I now have a Treo 680 for a few days instead of my (lately becoming not-quite-so) trusty Treo 650. A small, but important, difference in Blazer (the Treo web browser) on the 680 is that you can turn off style sheets. Ostensibly for speed, it means I can finally get to my blogging interface from the phone. Of which process this post is the test, so I won't get too wordy, in case it doesn't actually work.

If you were one of the two people who read my sub-blog Fuzzy's Media Consumption, you don't have to anymore -- I've folded the existing content from that blog into the main blog and updates on my nigh-obsessive inventory of books, video games, and movies I've consumed will appear here.

The latest book, game, movie, TV show, and comedy album I've finished are listed on the main page's right side bar under "lately I'm ..."

I did not even know that I had been waiting for Beyonce to make a mod/hip-hop dance video. And yet, there it is and it's perfect.

Team Gerdes fave Steve Delahoyde made a commercial for Don't Spit the Water. There's a quick glimpse of Cutie Bumblesnatch in there, if you're quick at glimpsing.

Rayman Raving Rabbids is an engaging series of mini-games that utilize the innovative Wii controls in a variety of ways. The design and style of the game is delightful, with the grotesque "Rabbids" filling all sorts of roles, along with pigs, cows, and sheep. There's a slight, but reasonably satisfying framing device that ties all the mini-games together, and it ends with one of the most unsatisfying and frustrating FMVs I've ever experienced in a video game. It's all "our princess is in another castle" with no "just kidding". Seriously, after Erica and I had had a great time playing through the entire game (the story mode is single player, but we'd switch off playing the games and cheering each other on) and having a great time, I wanted to throw a controller out in the window in frustration at that ending. Jerks.

FuzzyCo grade: A- (and the minus is solely from the ending.)