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Cal Band's Videogame Halftime Show

Ok, so they're not the greatest musicians ever...but, I don't know that I have ever been proud of my alma mater's football-related shenanigans before. OMG. Band geeks are the best. I never thought I would actually say this but... GO BEARS!

Boys Who Crochet Are Adorable

Seriously. Girls just love boys like this.

(Found over at The Coveted.)

Run This Mattress, Baby

So you've heard of mileage running - booking multi-city marathon trips on an airline or airline partner to take advantage of fare sales and pricing in order to get the most number of mileage points per cent. It's something that I have toyed with trying - it's basically a game, a puzzle.

But then there's mattress running. That sounds a lot more fun, to me - sleeping in some featherbed at a Starwood hotel rather than crammed on an airplane for 18 hours. And potentially sexier, if done with a special friend.

Peter Moore Admits: He Is the Prince of Darkness

Go Brandon! In a really solid interview with Peter Moore, late of Microsoft, our intrepid reporter asks him the critical question we've all been dying to know:

[A]re you in fact the Prince of Darkness?

PM: Damn, my cover's blown! Let me just tuck the tail in back there!

I knew it!

The rest of the interview is JUST as thought-provoking. :)

Plus, it's kind of nice to hear Peter say that he never gave up on the Dreamcast. The love was real, people!

Hobbit Dollhouse

This makes me want to play with it SO MUCH - the Bag End dollhouse (as seen on BoingBoing.

It's so gorgeous!

I'm very envious of people who can create such detailed and marveous atifacts with their hands. I've tried painting and crafting and building but about all I can manage are simple line drawings and scarves. I can only knit in straight lines. But something like this, this is something really special. Doesn't it make you want to see little hobbit dolls living inside?

Actually, it also makes me want to film some stop-motion shorts or something... the detail is so amazing, and looks so great on film.

Celebrity Mii Contest!

Jason's holding a celebrity Mii contest! Deadline is Monday, December 11. Let's get celebritied up!

Awesome! Boku to Sim no Machi Announced

Hurrah! The game that Robin's been working so hard on has been announced at last. It's going to get the full Famitsu treatment! It's for the Wii! It's the cutest Sims ever! And boy do I ever want to play it *right* now.

The game is Boku to Sim no Machi (Me and my Sim's Town). Robin's been flying back and forth between SF and Tokyo and the Nintendo HQ in Kyoto over the last several months, and I know she's psyched that she can actually start talking about the game. And I'm glad too, because I want to hear more about it.

GameJew Takes on Education

My favorite internet star of the moment, GameJew (AKA Jonathan Mann), takes on education in the latest episode: GameJew Episode 7. He visits a videogame class at a technical college, then talks to a professor of interface design at an arts school, and finally ends by driving around a videogame bus to teach kids how to play co-operatively.

There's a wealth of interesting insights here - like the fact that the kids value winning over challenge, something that a lot of hardcore gamers may not understant, since one common critique that can lower a review score is that the game is "too easy."

The 3D interfaces designed by the teacher Jonathan interviews are also beautiful and inspire new possibilities for videogame controls.

GameJew is one of the smartest, funniest, most creative commentators on the culture of videogames today, and I urge anyone interested in that to check out his work. It's not always perfect, but I would argue that it never fails to engage.

Jews Play Games, Too

What do you get when you combine snappy songs, a goofy sense of humour, and puppets? GameJew of course, one of my new favorite shows. It's the brainchild of Jonathan Mann, who also created the Mario Opera.

He posts the episodes directly to Youtube. I love the music. Check out the tribute to Wii in the first episode - it's gold.

This is episode 3:

Playing With Strangers

I want someone to play with.

Ryan, myself, and several of our friends went to see the seminal Batman Begins on opening day and to while away the time we, of course, brought our PSPs and our copies of Wipeout Pure. Being in San Francisco, we thought we'd conduct an experiment and play with our little bundles of joy unabashedly in the open and hope that either a.) someone would approach us and ask us what we're playing in the hopes of joining in, or b.) a random somebody would just happen to be looking for a Wipeout game while we're sitting in the multiplayer lobby waiting to begin. Realistically, of course, the second of these scenarios is very, very unlikely to occur, and while we saw a few others jacked in over their miniature 16:9 displays, there was no spontaneous multiplayer. Which makes me weep. Mostly on the inside. Mostly.

To be clear, Ryan and I are in San Francisco--the, supposedly, most wired city in the country and we were seeing the show at the Sony Metreon where you'd assume other PSPers may possibly feel comfortable playing their portable systems in public. Granted, we're kinda dorky-looking and I can't blame people for not wanting to walk up to adult men playing with "children's toys" and ask for a game, but we've decided to be determined when it comes to spontaneous, public gaming and will continue to pull out our PSPs while waiting for dinner, in line for the cinema and on the subway in an effort to promote a method of open multiplayer that has an aspect no other multiplayer experience has yet to match: that of actually meeting flesh-and-blood people face to face. Is this a misguided attempt to surrounded ourselves with the like-minded in order to validate our own existence or is there something to really be said for taking gaming "to the people," as it were, as a social tool beyond just 0wnx0ring some n00b?