geekosystem

This afternoon, CNN broadcast a report on the Japanese rape video game scare, which it had previously covered on its website -- and which CNN, by virtue of its reach and influence, may have helped start.

Their TV report not only played on misleading us-vs.-them stereotypes about gamers and about Japan, but it brought much more exposure to what CNN itself called a "disturbing" class of games than they would ever have gotten otherwise, focusing as it did on an out-of-print 2006 game called RapeLay, which was never released in the U.S. and which has been sanctioned by Japanese game makers and law enforcement:

Even with a trailer just released this afternoon, The Expendables still lends itself better to a wall of boldface cast list than to a synopsis: Namely, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, Randy Coutre, Danny Trejo, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger ... in short, it's a freakish, Singularity-like concordance of great action stars past and present, with a skew towards 'past.'

As for the plot, it involves explosions and machine guns and evil foreigners and an unlikely team of "four and a half" (Jet Li: "not so funny!") combat-ready guys, so it seems like it'll be pretty hard to mess up. Trailer after the jump:

It's said that 4chan, for all its horrors, is the Internet's secret creative nerve center. 4chanarchive recently posted an epic thread from earlier this month that would seem to back that up: "Variations of Bel-Aire," a machine-gun fire of parodies of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. You can see the full thread here. (Warning: link NSFW.) 4chan being 4chan, a few are offensive, a few are less than inspired, and almost all are probably copypasta.  (It should be noted that when the Balloon Boy drama unfolded last October, there was a Fresh Prince parody within hours.) But a lot are great -- and geeky. Taken together, they show the creative power harnessed by anonymous thousands with beastly levels of pop culture knowledge. After the jump, seven of the geekiest Fresh Prince theme parodies, including Lord of the Rings, Pokémon, and Star Trek:

Yesterday a video emerged on the Internet that had the perfect elements for a viral sensation: the last scene in an apparent grade-school production of Brian DePalma's Scarface. Instead of cocaine, lil' Tony Montana had a mountain of popcorn. Instead of swearing, the tiny Michelle Pfieffer in a blond wig screamed "Fudge you, Tony!" At the end, an audience of proud parents clapped. As some outraged individuals pointed out, we've heard of putting your kids on a theater track early, but a tiny tots Scarface was more ridiculous than Rushmore's high-school production of Serpico. And, as it turned out, just as movie-magic fabricated.

Trees can breathe a sigh of relief.  The iPad moved one step closer to making paper unnecessary this week by finding a place inside the backpacks of every student at Seton Hill University, a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania.  The school announced yesterday that it would begin distributing the hot item to every single full-time student this coming fall.  Heck, all the incoming freshmen even get free 13"  MacBooks!

IGN has uncovered Will Wright's next project, and it's not a game. The king of procedurally generated content and creator of Spore and the Sim games (including Sim City, Sim Ant, and The Sims) is instead working with the former president of Nickelodeon and Spike TV to create a television series.

Well, "create" implies a certain level of completion. Wright prefers to give his audience the tools to create their own fun rather than creating a single experience. Or, in the words of Penny Arcade, this.

I'll be the first to say that I'm not into the pointless FPS-ification of the beloved side-scrollers of our past, which is why Metroid Prime just always seemed kinda off to me, despite a lot of people liking it. Maybe the memory of reading Nintendo Power's mini-guide to Super Metroid and grappling with the then-awesome 16-bit boss fights would've made me impossible to please either way, but it just felt gimmicky to try to cram the old, established mythology into yet another first-person shooter shell.

Which is why the newly-released Metroid: Other M teaser trailer, with snippets of gameplay footage, is such a breath of fresh air:

Today's xkcd prominently featured a plug for Miegakure, an awesome-looking 4D indie game that xkcd's heroic stick figure said "hurt his brain." Naturally, that sounded like fun, but when we rushed out to look for a demo to download, which seemed plausible based on the comic (in the first panel, xkcd stickman says "I just spent an hour playing a demo of this 4D game called Miegakure"), we were promptly hit with ... a battering ram of information-free blogspam. Presumably set up in response to the sudden surge of interest in the game sparked by the comic. Including this gem of opportunistic nonsense in a post titled "April Fool's Day: Don't Forget!" "...but most importantly don't forget to always treat her like a lady. If you're bored you can always search out a miegakure download or a varudu movie review." Damn you, xkcd effect! Anyway, we dug into it a little more, and here's what we found out: The good news is, Miegakure is real, award-winning, and looks awesome, and there's a demo video (after the jump). The bad news: it's not available for download, there are no public demos, and there's no set release date or platform yet.

Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine may remember the PADD, or "Personal Access Display Device," a handheld computer carried around by members of Starfleet: Well, it looks like there's going to be an iPad app that'll adopt a PADD-like look to help your social networking information live long and prosper. Also, look cool.

What follows is a recap of LOST Season 6, Episode 10: “The Package.” Lots of spoilers ensue. Check out the guest blogger's LOST-themed blog at thelostloophole.blogspot.com for daily LOST-related updates. LOST was back in full swing last night, with the tenth episode of the final season.  "The Package" centered on Sun and Jin in off-island action, and caught viewers up with scenes from almost every island Lostie. Let’s start with last night's flash-sideways:

This past weekend, from March 26-28, Stony Brook University hosted what is advertised as "the Northeast's largest convention of science fiction, fact and fantasy." Or, put another way, the university held one of the geekiest conventions you could shake a catgirl tail at, what con-goers already know as I-Con. And it was awesome:

Well, this is embarrassing: Earlier today, Google Wave's Facebook fan page -- which, despite being Google Wave's Facebook fan page, has over 40,000 fans -- posted a link to porn.

(We've pixellated the offending picture.)

The inaugural Penny Arcade Expo East sold out earlier this year, but I was never worried.  I'd ordered badges for me and my friend R in October.  And so, last Thursday, I made my way to New York Penn Station to begin my first weekend at that great gaming Mecca: PAX. I learned a few things from my first PAX and my second con:

With all the recent rumors making the rounds on the internet these days with regard to the Second Coming new iPhone Apple is said to be releasing this summer (such as that  Verizon and Sprint customers may be getting a godsend soon,) it can be rather easy to fall into the hype. Whether or not this talk should be taken as gospel is up for debate; While we have a few reputable sources, the folks out in Cupertino is notoriously tight-lipped about their major releases in just about all areas. But why the fuss over radio transmitters, which play a major part in the WSJ's report? It turns out the standards being talked about at length are game changers if (and that's still a big if) Apple makes the trip over to CDMA. So we ought to ask: What's the deal with GSM and CDMA and why do they matter?

President Obama is your new bicycle, or at least he was when that one particular example of many Barack-focused memes came to fruition. When it comes to revving up cool new memes, President Barack Obama is the name of the game, so it should come as no surprise that, aside from his feigning interest in mundane things, he also looks at awesome things like superhero gear (lots and lots of superhero gear). Blogger Dean Trippe has documented the details:

See Urlesque's curated gallery of awesome things that Barack Obama is looking at.