Gangnam Style: The 8-Bit Video Game

I could watch this all day.

The World's Coolest Entertainment Center

Looking for a unique way to display your awesome flat screen and all your electronic bells and whistles that go along with it? Igor Chak has created a beauty!



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This Is The Most Romantic Marriage Proposal Ever!

Seriously! I would marry this person in a heartbeat!

Post-It Mario

Here's a Mario (and Pac-Man and Tetris) short made entirely from Post-It notes.



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In Honor Of Comic-Con

Fellow geeks, I give you one of the geekiest videos to hit the net in a long, long time. Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, Joel Moore, Zachary Levi, Tricia Helfer, and more. This is actually part 3/3 of a series but it's the best one so just go with it.


Nerd Machine: Trailer Park Heroes Pt. 3 - Watch More Funny Videos

Stay safe at Comic-Con my geeks! (And if you win that special Dark Knight Rises screening, YOU ARE INVITING ME.)

Five Reasons You Should Be Happy You Won't Be Going To Comic-Con

This weekend is the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego. Unless you are living under a pop-culture rock, Comic-Con is THE place to be for all things pop culture: exclusive screenings and cast appearances, celebrity appearances from the obscure (Peter Mayhew shows up every year) to the huge. You may be feeling some envy for the hundreds of thousands of fans descending in San Diego this weekend.

Three years ago, after wistfully reading about all the appearances and programs for several years, I took the plunge and made the trip. A month's paycheck and half of my sanity later, I found it to be one of the most exhilarating yet one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. I can assure you of five reasons you are better off enjoying it from afar:

1. Only Bruce Wayne could afford it.
Comic-Con is a big source of tourist income for San Diego, and the hotels and restaurants know it. Not only do you have to make reservations up to a year in advance, you'll pay exorbitant prices for a hotel room. Unless you think ahead to bring your own food (and if you can find a grocery store in downtown San Diego), you'll wait in a long line for conference center concessions and eat an eight dollar slice of microwave pizza.

2. You'll get more information than Professor X's Cerebro.
Sure, all the studios and networks make sure they promote their shows, but it is information overload; do you really want to see all those panels about shows you may or may not watch? I waited in line for several hours to see the an advance showing of the of the reboot of the show V. Where is that show now?

Of course, there is the rare moment when you are present for an amazing reveal: one year, the cast of The Avengers movie was introduced and Joss Whedon was announced as director- but those moments are rare, and only if you've been patient waiting for entry. Which brings me to:

3. It's more crowded than three times the population of Gotham City.
Imagine the biggest crowd you've been in. Now multiply that by at least four. Shuffling along the exhibit hall at a rate of ten feet in ten minutes is exhausting. And considering all you've had to sustain you is the overpriced pizza.

The huge crowds mean huge lines. If there is a panel you want to see, you would have to get in line a minimum of three hours beforehand to possibly gain entry. And that's for a space at the back of the exhibit hall where the people on stage appear as small as ants and you end up watching them on the projection screens anyway. There are lines for the bathroom (yes, even for the men), lines for the water fountain, lines to enter the building, lines to exit the building, and lines to cross the street.

4. It used to be like the original 1940s Minutemen, but now it's more like the 1980s Watchmen.
Comic-Con doesn't necessarily have the same focus that it did in the past, which was originally Science Fiction/Fantasy/Comics. Sure, people love Community and Workaholics, but what business do these shows have with panels at Comic-Con? The Con used to be a large gathering for superfans with fringe interests to geek-out without consequences. Now, it seems to be a weekend in July where all of Hollywood just transplants itself in downtown San Diego.

5. The news travels faster than the speed of light.
Everything that happens at the Con is posted online the moment it happens. Twitter feeds (follow #sdcc), film and tv websites, and Facebook pages post everything as it happens. You can relax in the comfort of your non-crowded, temperate climate home, open several web browsers and follow everything. You may get a piece of news quicker than someone at a panel who looks down for a few seconds. You'll even get organized slide shows of the best cosplay costumes, and you can gawk at the pictures all you want without feeling creepy.

Then again, if you have a dispensable income, unlimited vacation time, infinite patience, ability to sustain yourself on one meal a day, and a super ability to not mind invasion of your personal space, why not go if for nothing but to have the experience. Even two years after my trip, despite the downsides, I still find myself starting sentences with "This one time, at Comic-Com..."

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Video Game Review: Humble Indie Bundle V: A Gift From The Gaming Gods

If you've mastered Angry Birds and Infinity Blade and want to step up your game (literally), then your dreams have been answered.

The Humble Indie Bundle V is now available, and if you have a Mac or PC and any inkling to try some of the most enjoyable and innovative video games of the last few years, you should sprint to your computer right now and get it. It's a pay-whatever-you-want bundle of some of the most popular indie games of the last few years, which is sort of like Radiohead releasing eight albums at once and asking you to set the price. The average price for the bundle right now is $7.92, which is less than what any one of these games would cost on their own.

And these award-winning games are amazing. The bundle includes Tim Schafer's beloved original Xbox classic Psychonauts, the heartbreaking time-bending masterpiece Braid, the spooky platformer Limbo, and what was for many people 2011's game of the year, Bastion. It also includes Amnesia: Dark Descent (which is supposed to be legitimately terror-inducing), the brutally challenging Super Meat Boy (in which the title character must save his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the clutches of Dr. Fetus), as well as Lone Survivor and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. That's more than enough fun to make you late for work every day at least through October.

And the best part? Proceeds from the sale are split between the independent developers whose passion, creativity, and hard work brought these to life and to charities such as Child's Play and EFF, a digital rights advocacy group. So when your spouse gives you shit when you're still up at 3:00 AM playing, you can tell her it's all for a good cause.

Check it out now at http://www.humblebundle.com!

How Mass Effect 3 Mass Affected Me

For weeks I've wanted to write a post about Mass Effect 3.

Anyone with a video game console has probably at least heard of the Mass Effect series. You may also have heard that the much-anticipated final game in the trilogy, Mass Effect 3, came out in March to rave critical reviews. Or you may have heard that its ending created an uproar, prompting massive backlash from fans, write-in campaigns, and even a promise from its creators, Bioware, to build and release an "extended" ending this summer to placate the fans upset by the current ending.

As a quick summary for the uninitiated, the Mass Effect series follows Commander Shepard, a player-character who tries to save the galaxy from a race of monstrous mechanical beings called the Reapers bent on exterminating organic life. Throughout the course of his saga over three games he must deal with the distrust and skepticism of other races in the galaxy, who have little experience with humanity and are distracted by their own concerns. What made the story unique was that the player's choices had long-ranging impacts that carried over from game to game. You could be a "paragon" or a "renegade," take sides in conflicts that could end or save millions of lives, and even lose main characters who would have had an important role to play down the road. It had the scope and the promise of a truly self-made story, and by and large it delivered.

I've been turning it over and over again in my mind, trying to decide what to write about. At first I considered reviewing the game, offering the Culture Brats community my thoughts on--and awe for--the experience I had just completed. Then I considered taking up the debate over video games as an art form, roundly dismissed by both Roger Ebert and my wife, neither of whom have put the effort into Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, or Portal that would render their opinions meaningful. I even thought of diving into the debate about the ending, and about who really owns a created work shared by the masses: is it the creator whose vision it represents (a la George Lucas) or is it the fans who have adored and adopted it as part of their lives (a la anyone who remembers when Han shot first)?

I thought about it, and thought about it more. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe that was the story.... that I can't stop thinking about the series. Now that I've completed it, I miss it. I desperately miss it.

Do The Dance Of Joy For The Perfect Strangers Video Game

Because if you haven't played the Perfect Strangers video game yet, you need to change that now.

What's stopping you?

Nothing.

Nothing's gonna stop you now!

Dragon's Lair Comes Home (Again)

The summer of 1983 was a bit of a turning point for me. It was my first year of junior high, that pivotal time when school and social circles become more cutthroat and you start to realize that you're not much of a kid anymore. Return Of The Jedi had just come out--concluding an obsession that lasted nearly half my life--and for the first time I was more aware of the zippers in the back of the Ewok costumes than the massive space battles I beheld. I was fat and nerdy, not sure how I fit into a world where everyone was suddenly trying to moonwalk. And unbeknownst to me, the final salvo of a childhood of quarter-filled pockets was unleashed.

One of my great pleasures was visiting the local roller rinks, pizza parlors, and bowling alleys, because that's where the video games were. We didn't have an Atari at home, so I would save up my change and wait for an invitation or a ride to anywhere a stray Battle Zone or Dig Dug machine was. I generally sucked at most of them (I particularly remember regularly embarrassing myself with Joust), but by 1983 I'd begun tiring of them. The old classics were still around--Frogger, Q*Bert, Donkey Kong Jr.--but it was harder and harder for them to compete with girls the other distractions of my 13-year old life.

Until, that is, I saw Dragon's Lair.