If you can’t tell by the sudden popularity of staff articles and other frivolous activities during updates, we are desperately short on material. Nobody wants to stoop to reviewing the newest releases in the Activision Value line for the PC, which basically leaves entire weeks with just one important release. I hate January, but maybe that’s because I refuse to own more than one pair of pants.

And yet, because it’s January, we can get away with one thing: a recap of 2003! Recently… well, not at all recently, because this was back in our holiday guide chat in November (the bawdy results of which you’re unlikely to see), the Gamenikki staff sat around deciding what our nominations for Game of the Year would be. Knights of the Old Republic was a popular choice for consoles, but an interesting trend revealed itself. Most of the nominations were for GameBoy Advance games. Indeed, 2003 was the year of the GameBoy Advance. Players of the pocket-sized portable will never get things better—the introduction of the GameBoy Advance SP to kick things off, WarioWare Microgame$, Final Fantasy Tactics, Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, finally seeing the greatest NES game make the transition with Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3—any way you slice it, 2003 rocked for the small world. If for some reason you haven’t looked into a GBA yet, the extremely solid lineup now should give you numerous great reasons. Nintendo should enjoy reveling in these good times while they can; in May, Sony looks to put a large cramp in future plans with the first serious effort at competing with the GameBoy since Sega backed away from the GameGear. The WonderSwan and the NeoGeo Pocket Color were both nice (especially the NGPC, which had some beautiful SNK ports of Metal Slug and SNK vs. Capcom), but never sold anywhere close to Nintendo. The PlayStation Pocket might get the sweat starting in ways the portable punch line, the N-Gage, never could.

Outside of the GameBoy Advance, the next-gen videogame world made small leaps forward in all areas during last year. The reflection at the end of the year shows how years into a console’s cycle, developers are finally getting a handle on the properties of each of the Big Three. Zelda and Knights of the Old Republic both received strong interest for Game of the Year, but the number of breakthrough titles in 2003 stayed very small. Instead, the average quality of each game seemed to rise; Gamenikki gave out more 8 scores for great, non-revolutionary fun than I believe we ever have before. Was SSX3 the shocking breath of fresh air in the snowboard genre? Not exactly, but that didn’t stop the game from being extremely entertaining. As 2004 rings in one of the final years for all-out support for the consoles before the next-next-generation, look for this trend to continue. Right now, it’s good to be a gamer.

And what would any January 2004 column be without a list of resolutions? Some of these we plan to seriously implement and stay with, while others are regrettably nice pipe dreams. First and most important on the list would be a change to review scores. Somehow over the many years of journalist evolution, the scores subtly shifted away from the original intent. Remember back in the day when a 5 wasn’t a complete damnation of a product but instead simply said the game was average? We’re going to try and bring those good days back with a vengeance. Now an 8 to the practically non-existent 10 will be purchases as always, but 5 through 7 will be rents. Even a score of 4 might be worth a few giddy thrills. The only games to absolutely avoid will be the lowest numbers. This will hopefully help filter through titles more effectively, since when you get a mountain of 7 games there’s no real indication which is better than the others—just that all are very deserving of a rental. When the new scoring emphasis kicks in, games that might have been a previously must-rent of 7 will get knocked down to 6, still above average (because 5 is average), and still a good rental choice. All this number garbage is making my head spin, but I promise the end effect should work out nicely. Oh yeah, and previews get new emphasis this year. Hopefully.

The final resolution for 2004 has to do with Cinenikki. Since I’m a huge movie buff, I hereby declare that some of my Tuesday purchases will get reviewed right along with the traditional review copies in order to expand the horizons of our coverage. With well over 500 titles in the Dave DVD Collection—and that’s after a few titles got recently trimmed off for some money—there’s got to be numerous films that received previously little coverage. Also, I’ll try and start reviewing what I just saw in theaters more often, add some articles and generally give the site a content tune-up. We will also probably hire a few new writers this year to help carry the new load.

So there you have it, whatever ‘it’ is. And in conclusion, February has too many holidays, not one of which is time off from work. That’s it this week from your pusherman, but the next time we run embarrassingly low on real content, you can expect to see me back and griping all over again.