Having the DS transformed into an interactive cookbook is a novel idea, but only if it works well. With close to 250 recipes and a plethora of DS-specific features, Personal Trainer: Cooking works wonderfully and is a fantastic aid for making food. Nintendo even dug into its large game catalog and stowed a cooking-related game, Game & Watch's Chef, into Personal Trainer: Cooking as an unlockable.

It's all very intuitive once you dive in and check out the game's interface, which is easily controlled with the stylus on the touch screen. The in-game voice is clear, and the speed of the male voice can be tweaked to your liking. For easy browsing, all the recipes can be sorted by time required, specific ingredients, or region of origin. Once you're looking at a recipe, you can look at the list of ingredients, what utensils it requires, and step-by-step instructions. There are also pictures of the dish along the way, but they aren't detailed enough to be too helpful. The amount of food to be made can be changed by increasing or decreasing the serving size, which removes the math from cooking. You can even organize a shopping list that is easily accessible from the main menu to help you prepare.

Now, I sometimes get annoyed when the Japanese desire for perfection goes awry—I don't find triple-wrapped candies and ski resorts sans tree skiing cute. But sometimes it can pay off for foreigners like me. Case in point: used Wiis go on the market for around 22,500 yen, which is 2,500 yen less than a new Wii. I picked mine up for 19,800 yen, a solid 5,199 yen off retail price. And why was it $25+ cheaper than the used console to its left? Why, it was missing a stand, of course. And no, I don't mean that big grey stand. I'm talking about that dinky plastic sensor bar stand you probably don't use anyway. Damn! Now if only I could have found one missing its AC adapter, A/V cables, and sensor bar….who knows how good a deal I might have gotten!

The good news is, Toys R Us finally seems to be getting it. Unlike the awkward start times and massive lines of past events, us Pokemon fanatics are now given an entire week in which to leisurely mosey into a store, inconspicuously pull out a DS, and initiate the Mystery Gift transfer. I did it today, and I'm very proud of my brand new Shaymin. I can't wait to let him visit my ranch.

Is this the first time you are hearing about this event? Don't worry! There's still plenty of time to go in and grab your very own hedgehog, assuming you live near a Toys R Us. All the info is up on the official Pokemon Site but it is far from complicated. You walk into the store, fire up your copy of Pokemon Diamond or Pearl, select "Mystery Gift" from the main menu, select "Receive Gift", and finally pick "Get Via Wireless." This should then initiate the process. When it's complete, all you have to do is talk to the man standing in the Pokemart from within the game. Be careful though, if you've done events in the past, you may have to clear out some of your past "cards". This is done by selecting the "Check Card" option from the Mystery Gift menu.

Two developers from Platinum Games, Atsushi Inaba and Shigenori Nishikawa, were at the Con and they signed a copy of the MadWorld box art at the Sega booth.

I finally managed to stumble upon Aksys Game's small booth where they showcased the anticipated WiiWare game, Bit.Trip Beat. In a word, it is trippy (and bitty and beaty). The game is played with one Wii Remote being held like an NES controller and tilted forward and backward. Bit.Trip Beat is a lot of fun despite the fact that I couldn't discern what the hell was going on. I think I built up a multiplier. It is a weird marriage of Pong and communism. If I figure it out by the end of the Con, I'll write some impressions. If not, I'll add more depth in my next blog post.

Let's begin with my favorite place of the day: the Sega booth. I'll write in greater detail at the end of the Con on my theories of why Sega is so ridiculously awesome at the moment, but I'll stick to the facts for now.

The first game I tried was The Conduit, although I didn't play it for too long. Contrary to what Zach Miller says, it looks damn good. Its controls took some getting used to, but I like what I've seen so far. I'll get more playtime with it as the Con goes on, and you'll be getting some impressions on it soon.

With just a cursory look, I managed to identify over thirty games that I had interest in with release dates planned for this year. The list in no particular order:

House of the Dead: Overkill

MADWORLD

The Conduit

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Wii Sports Resort

Sin & Punishment 2

Personal Trainer: Math is nothing more than a workbook, a massive collection of simple math problems with blank spaces for your answers. It assumes you already know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide any combination of numbers 1 through 20. It never provides any useful tips to simplify calculations, complete problems more efficiently, or avoid common errors. It doesn't even tell you the correct answer when checking for mistakes.

Instead, the software is obsessed with speed. It records your time for each set of problems and constantly encourages you to work faster. Yet it never explains why speed is important to math skills. Will my life really be enriched by shaving half a second from the time I take to multiply 13 x 7? Even if you care about arithmetical speed, surely we can all agree that accuracy comes first, but helping players get the right answer is hardly the focus of this product.

Yes, it's true that Nintendo has been so wildly successful in so many new fields lately. Any company that can get 14 million people around the world to buy weighing scales and somehow see that as a fun thing deserves all the kudos the world can provide. But delivering video content to Wii users over the internet is a huge undertaking, one that I don't think will benefit the company at all.