So Maria and I went to check out GIANT ROBOT DINOSAURS a few weeks back. "Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience" is much more kid-friendly than the documentary series it's named after, in spite of featuring the occasional dead dinosaur corpse. It's certainly not as bloody, and definitely features 100% less dino sex. It also tosses in a guy playing the part of a paleontologist who talks down to the crowd as though they're all 9 or so years old. Be that as it may, the dinosaurs are impressive as hell. They're life-size, and despite the fact that they have these huge-ass platforms between their legs to keep them balanced when they walk, it's easy to ignore that and get caught up in the spectacle of how realistically detailed the design and movements are.

Okay, so they don't allow flash photography of any kind, and that means that, given the "dramatic" low lighting and constant movement of the dinosaurs, it's hard to get any kind of decent photography, even on the "sports/activity" setting. That having been said, I did my best. Here is my photo record of our dinosaur experience.

( Life-size robot dinosaurs that walk around and roar at you! )

It's a great show, albeit a little on the brief side. It clocks in at 90 minutes WITH a 20-minute intermission, and the ticket prices aren't all that cheap either. Not a lot of bang for your buck, but I do heart me some dinosaurs, and I had a great time with Maria. As I usually do, of course. We also got Dippin' Dots, which is becoming a tradition with us. And then went home and watched Jurassic Park movies. The perfect capper.

It's here! It's here! New game announcements and assorted awesomeness coming to your Wii and DS. Let's see what's in store.

- They start up with Shaun White Snowboarding. It's a balance board game where you use the board that came with Wii Fit to um, snowboard. Looks nice, and Shaun White does a good job on it, but damn man, I find the skiing and snowboarding mini-games that are included with Wii Fit to be hard enough! Coming later this year.

- Animal Crossing: City Folk. Oh YEAH. A holiday release of course. A whole new Animal Crossing that takes place in an urban environment. Said urban environment provides an academy, beauty salon, fashion designers, loads of stores and more. Wow, and it only took you four fucking entries in this series to do something different with it, congratulations assholes. You can even sell your own items in the stores to other players online, or go online and do activities with them while using the... wait for it...

- Wii Microphone! Well it's about damn time. Finally voice chat comes to Wii. It's a mic that hooks atop your sensor bar, designed to pick up sound from all around the room so that a room full of people can talk to a room full of other people for a true community experience. In other words, don't run the dishwasher while you play video games anymore.

- Next up some talk about a couple of third-party games we already knew about. Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the Wii. Wii-exclusive game based on the upcoming CGI movie and TV series. Check the trailer. It focuses ENTIRELY on lightsaber duels and nothin' else. I hope they make use of the MotionPlus... that's coming up shortly. Call of Duty: World at War is bringing the franchise back to the Wii with "Co-Op gameplay." They didn't say ONLINE co-op, but I can hope. Yeah, I'm always hesitant about these FPS titles on the Wii. Some do it great, some do it sucktacularly. These are both out for the holiday.

- Now back to Nintendo's own shit. WII SPORTS SEQUEL! "Wii Sports Resort" features frisbee toss, jet-skiing and more. And it's designed to work with the new Wii "MotionPlus." This plugs into the bottom of the remote and offers "true 1:1 movement reading for complete accuracy." If they use this on the Clone Wars game, we will have the best lightsaber action ever. Oh yeah, sword dueling is in Wii Sports Resort! Wait, how is that a resort sport? Who fucking cares, you get 1:1 sword dueling. This comes out... NEXT SPRING?! You little punks.

- Finally, Wii Music is here. They've been promising this game since the Wii was first announced, and now with the use of the MotionPlus I guess it's finally gonna become a reality, because they're showing the first signs of it since years ago. It's REALLY hard to figure out how this is supposed to work. It seems complicated - you can hold the wiimote under your chin and stroke with the nunchuk to play violin, hold up the nunchuk and strum with the wiimote to play guitar, somehow you can hold a wiimote upright and fiddle with the buttons to play a sax... I don't get it. Well, at least I understand how the drums function. Use the balance board to add foot pedals to the drum set and make even more elaborate beats. The game includes drum lessons, they say. I assume they just mean for the in-game drums, not real drums. You can also conduct an orchestra with the wiimote as your baton, and yeah, I don't understand this game. No release date mentioned?

- DS time. Guitar Hero: On Tour is a smash hit for... some reason... and so now "Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades" is coming and honestly, why do people want to play Guitar Hero without a guitar controller? Anyone? Anyway, the sequel or spinoff or whatever it is (they show no footage to speak of) lets you share your songs with people who have copies of the first one. Yeah okay. At least it's a new game announcement.

- Here's a game we already knew about, the somewhat-mysterious "Spore: Creatures." Obviously it's a spinoff of Spore, except we learn it's focused entirely on evolving your creature. Yeah I probably could've guessed that. Not sure if I should care because they don't spend any time talking about it. Another game we already heard about is the sequel to Pokemon Ranger, oh god, I don't care. All of these games come out by the year's end though.

- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars! MEGATON ANNOUNCEMENT ALERT! No screens or footage, but it's coming to DS "this winter" and will allow "the same free-roaming gameplay people have come to expect." It's also a "new game engine" so at least they're not just copying GTA Advance or something. 2D or 3D, though? No word...

- They close off the DS section with "Cooking Nanny," an electronic cookbook coming in November. Fabulous. (snore)

- On the sales side, the DS has more units sold than any other system currently on the market. It actually DOUBLES the next competitor, which is... the PSP. Yes, that's right, the PSP is outselling the Wii, which is the tops of the market in terms of home consoles. Huh.

- That's it. A much better conference than last year's, which only really announced Wii Fit and had no other games to speak of. This year, at least, some real announcements to get excited about: A microphone, an urban Animal Crossing, Wii Sports sequel, GTA for DS... but where was the F-Zero game for Wii that we still haven't seen despite it being announced months ago? Where was Kid Icarus for Wii, which IGN has announced like five times about being at this conference? I guess they're still holding back on us. Maybe next year...

See photos and even more details on this crap here.