Bits : The Best and Weirdest of C.E.S.?
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Have you been trudging through the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center? Or have you been obsessively following the gadget blogs all week?
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Take a peek at a weird passel of new adventure games for Wii, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360 and PSP.
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Gabe: The Penny Arcade store has been updated with some new items. First we've got a brand new zip up hoodie.    It's got a slick PA logo on the front and Tycho's speech from the comic strip "I Hope You Like Text" on the back. We've been getting requests for a zip up like this for a long time. I don't want to sound like a used car salesman but my guess is that these will not last long.     We've also added a new sticker pack. This pack includes Tycho, Gabe, Annarchy, Charles, The Merch, The Fleshreaper, The Fruit Fucker and two bumper stickers.  The sticker pack is $10 but we've got a special deal going right now. If you spend $50 in the store we'll toss in the sticker pack for free.    Also, don't forget that you can now purchase prints of just about all our comic strips. If you're looking for strips with specific characters or games, Pennypacker is a great way to search our archives. I've had a few people ask me what my favorites are or which ones I think would make for especially nice prints. Tycho and I are each working on a list of our favorites but off the top of my head I'd say "The Hawk And The Hare" series would look pretty classy all framed up and hung on someone's wall.     -Gabe out
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Here are CNET Reviews' 10 favorite items from the past week, including the fastest gaming PC we've ever seen, beautifully styled speaker system and a Sony Handycam video camera.
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Love del.icio.us or hate it? Last week, we asked readers to send in their picks and pans, and we got a ton of responses. Mike Calore sorted through the results and created a list of rankings, including some surprises. In Monkey Bites
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Move over Japanese horror film makers: The best stuff is coming out of Korea these days. Get ready for some really weird, genre-bending movies. By Jason Silverman.
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Printing with Lightroom on Leopard...getting Photoshopped for Christmas...cell phones with 5x optical zoom...the optical triangle illusion
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Logitech International unveils the world's first computer mouse to use a sensor based on a laser. Also: Nintendo slashes some prices & hellip;. Sales of Boston Scientific's new heart stent dip & hellip;. and more.
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Also: Digital cameras are the hottest gift for 2004. [News.com Extra]
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What to make of the Macworld keynote, where the line is between geeky interest and geeky obsession.... What are the things that tie us all together as geeks? Plus, a song! Enjoy!
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Also: Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Also: Arthur C. Clarke's three wishes. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Weâve talked about popcorn here on Dinerâs Journal before, but today brings some actual popcorn news. For more on that, and a way to avoid becoming a news story yourself, Iâd like to present Mark Bittman, who writes the Minimalist column for the Times. I think the guyâs got a future in blogging. Take it [...].
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Also: U.S. cyberwar games turn into hacker melee. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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poll Pac-Man or Space Invaders? Frogger, maybe? Vote on which game was the best of that bygone era.
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Tycho:  We never sit down with the firm intention of making another Bioshock comic - indeed, we intend the opposite - but somehow Bioshock comics continue to be written.  One day, science will pierce these mysteries.  Until then, you'll simply have to endure more strips regarding interactive storytelling's electronic opus.  My recovery from this weekend's rigors would be quite accelerated if I were not up until two or more every night, which is to say morning, hacking and slashing my way through the new releases like some malarial jungle guide.  I put Bioshock to bed last night, and theoretically this should be cause for joy, but I suppose it's like finishing a pie.  There is a whiff of accomplishment, semisweet - but the pie is gone.  Without pause, I slapped the input stud on the video switcher before the final cinema faded to black.  Hurling the gamepad into a knitting basket, I dug deep into the faultlines of the couch, producing a wiimote/nunchuk pair.  I've now played enough of Metroid Prime 3 to know that they've washed the filth of Red Steel completely from the system.  For awhile, I was doing that thing we sometimes do, playing until "the next savepoint," which so frequently becomes "until the savepoint after that," only to meld seamlessly into "until I can no longer see."  They've been spinning the tumbler at Retro for awhile on this one, trying to define first person on Nintendo's weird little chimera, and they've drilled down with enough diligence to find it.  No doubt some measure of the enthusiasm directed toward the game is due to the fact that people are actually using their Wii again, but that shouldn't diminish what they've done.    People have seen Corruption for a couple years, now, builds that bubbled up at different press events, and it's been slightly different each time.  I think they've moved some of the interactions since I last played it - things that were mapped to the nunchuck's gyro before are now handled by the wiimote's pointing device, and I understand why.  Gestures are a very immersive, intuitive means of interaction, but when they fail (or when they fail to express us correctly) they are Goddamned infuriating.  In a case when your hand is actually "present" in the simulation - such as when your left hand is pulling, then twisting, then pushing forward - those motions need to be as authentic as possible.  They must have chosen the perfect translation of the pointing device over the more "correct" left hand interaction.  It creates situations where you are using a different hand than your character, but because the motion is really one to one it still feels pretty good.    That's the long way of saying what you could learn in five minutes, sitting in front of it.  This entire exercise has only stoked my ardor.  It is my intention to begin playing this game at ten, and continue doing so until light begins to creep under the curtains.