The trailer for Sega Superstars Tennis, releasing next month for all current-gen systems, looks like a lot of fun. I've never played Mario's takes on this sport, but I imagine its characters were all able to perform the same maneuvers, just to different degrees (as in Mario Kart). By contrast, Sega's game confers unique abilities to each character, making it more reminscent of Technos' old Super Dodge Ball, which kept me awake until many a dawn.

Plus the variety of heroes who don't usually play together — Sonic, Aiai, Ulala, and someone from House of the Dead — warrants a look just for the sheer novelty of it.

Those of you in New England looking to prove your mettle should know about two upcoming events:

If you can't wait for the March 9th release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, then head to Worcester Polytechnic Institute on Saturday, March 1st, for a Nintendo-sponsored Brawl tournament. This event is hitting only four sites in the entire country — Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City being the others — with gamers competing for home theater systems, crystal-coated Wiis (whatever those are), and a thousand dollars in Best Buy gift certificates. (Hat tip to
nightskyre)

For those who eschew such modern offerings in favor of classic hits, head up to Laconia, New Hampshire (as I do every summer) to Funspot, a "non-profit corporation… established to promote and preserve the history of coin-operated arcade games" — through hands-on experience, of course! With nearly 200 machines from the Golden Age, Funspot offers an annual tournament to challenge the current high-score holders; it was there that Billy Mitchell achieved the first-ever perfect Pac-Man score. Funspot's tenth annual such competition will be held May 29th to June 1st — so break out the quarters, get your Dig Dug on, and kick some classic butt!

A special holiday message, from our friend Cats:

More geeky holiday goodness from me at Computerworld.com.

I have a confession to make: I love reading reviews. And not necessarily to better inform myself whether or not I should see/play/read a movie/game/book, but just to see different perspectives. Through reading hundreds, maybe even thousands, of reviews, I've come to a simple conclusion: professional game reviewers are in a poor position to offer advice on what people should play.

Your average professional game reviewer has a constant stream of games that they need to review. They don't purchase their games; they get them for free. Since they have so many games that they need to play, they tend to play games for the bare minimum necessary to write their review unless they really like the game in question.

Contrast that with your average gamer. When they start playing a game, they've already made an investment — anywhere from the $5 for a rental to $60 for a brand new Xbox 360 or PS3 game (and sometimes more with games that comes with accessories like Rock Band) and the time spent researching the game to see if they would like it. They want the game that they're playing to succeed, otherwise they've wasted their money and time, and so they're more likely to be sympathetic to minor flaws or a slow start. Once they've found a game that they really like, they'll spend hour after hour mastering it and learning all the little nuances to the gameplay.

However, the biggest and most unforgivable divide between the average gamer and professional reviewers is this: your average person only plays games that they think they'll like. When I was reviewing games regularly as a hobby, I noticed that I was giving just about everything I reviewed high scores. Why was this? It was because I was only reviewing games that I had purchased myself. By that stage in my life, I had a pretty good idea of what kind of game I would enjoy and only bought those.

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Today marks one year since my last day of unemployment — and what a day it was! Knowing I was soon to be initiated into corporate America, I spent my last day of freedom engaged in a task I'd long overlooked: completing the second quest of the original Legend of Zelda.

Oh, I'd finished this classic quest many times before, but it'd probably been 15 years since I'd last done so. In that span, I had periodically revisited the first quest, confirming that I still knew every square pixel of Hyrule's Overworld and Underworld — the result untold hours of my childhood spent exploring its ruins and poring over its maps in Nintendo Power. I was comfortable with this routine and found solace in the motions. But the second quest? That was a whole 'nuther story.

The second quest's challenge is twofold. First, it's simply harder: there are new tricks to learn (like walking through walls), strong enemies come at you sooner, and old men are as likely to rob you of your heart containers as they are to bequeath them. But second, and more important, is the unfamiliarity and strangeness of it all. Long before A Link to the Past brought gamers to the Dark World, this game's second quest took what was familiar and made it foreign. Though geography is roughly the same, everything about this Overworld is even less reluctant to reveal its secrets than before. And since the second quest is not the default adventure on which Link sets out, the times it'd been mastered and the players who have done so is all the fewer.

So I dedicated a Sunday to revisiting this brave old world, resolved to see my way to the end without any assistance, cheats, or FAQs. And you know what? I was astonished at how many memories came flooding back to me. Walking past a river, I'd double back and scrutinize the landscape, sensing something was out of place. Many bombs later, a gaping hole invited me into a dungeon, and I knew I'd found what a ghost of a memory had only hinted would be there. Altogether, it took me five hours to meet Ganon and rescue his captive princess. That may not sound like much in this age of 80-hour RPGs, but consider that the record time for beating the second quest is less than 40 minutes.

It wasn't the first time I'd beaten the second quest, and I hope it won't be the last. But that final day of freedom was perfectly spent revisiting my youth, slowly yet surely making my way to Spectacle Rock.