greatest wario cha cha cha

Managed to get round to playing a bit of Wario World for GameCube, finally, and it's a slightly-retro blast, a 3D platformer often using stylish left-to-right scrolling with added screen depth for level structure. I hear it's far too short, but Treasure have made it simple and fun, and you gotta love 'em for getting back to the basics in an ever-stylish way. Plus, it's definitely more fleshed out than Stretch Panic.

Was stuck for literally hours at Circuit City last night trying to take advantage of their 'Buy Two Get One Free' offer on Playstation 2 Greatest Hits titles. My dream combo was Hot Shots Golf 3, Tekken Tag Tournament, and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but they didn't have Baldur's Gate, and try as I might, I couldn't find a replacement I really wanted and didn't already have. So I left with nothing, nothing, I tell you.

Got hold of the new Lisa Carbon album, Standards, which has a beautiful samba cover of Bowie's Space Oddity on it. Lisa Carbon is, of course, definitely _not_ German/South American electronic music genius Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart. I've been enamoured of his insanely prodigous output for years now, and actually wrote a little feature about the catalog of his Rather Interesting label which is available on subscription music site Emusic. Plus, his amazing Senor Coconut project has a new album out, including cha cha cha covers of Smoke On The Water, Riders On The Storm, and Beat It - I saw them at Ars Electronica in Austria in 2001 when they were augmented to a full band and just did Kraftwerk covers, and took some pictures. Anyhow, Atom Heart in all his guises = v.v.good, the official Atom Heart site has clips from his Martin Gore (Depeche Mode) remix as AtomTM, and that's amazing click-vocal-house, too. Goodstuff.