If you’ve never seen Attack of the Show on G4TV, it’s a daily news show starring Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn that features news on video games, viral videos, tech, the web, and other subjects that cater to the techies among us. If you have a geeky side, it’s a nightly show that’s certainly worth a watch.

In this video, Kevin takes to the stage to see if his expert level 98% completion behind the drum kit in Rock Band is enough practice to get him behind a real drum kit on stage with the band who recorded the track for the game.

If you can hear the Super Mario theme and feel like you’re home, then two things are true: you’re old and you’re a geek. Yesterday, while watching Attack of the Show, I saw a video of a radio controlled car playing the Super Mario Brothers Theme and thought it was awesome enough to add to my list of 44 Ways to Enjoy the Super Mario Theme.

After watching it a few times, I’m not so sure that I should’ve included it. The tones of the bottles during the test runs at the beginning of the video really don’t match with the tones when the theme is playing, making it seem like it might be a hoax.

What do you think? Is this a fake?

We used to play Hobin’s dice at big, Irish family reunions when I was young, and this past Thanksgiving, the Dyers introduced the game to #1GF!’s family. Even though I hadn’t played the game in 20 years, the game turned out exactly the same as it did when I was a kid. From kids to grandmas, everyone ends up having a rowdy good time.

While I don’t advocate illicit activities, the game is amazingly simple and fun, and holds a place as one of those fun family memories for me. If you’ve never seen your grandma getting rowdy at the dinner table, this is the game that will do it. Twenty years from now, I’ll guarantee that you smile whenever you think about it. I know I do.

With the October 28th Release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock just around the corner, I figured I’d check around and see if the set list was available anywhere yet. I know I shouldn’t be trusting interwebbian rumor, but several sites are saying that the game will include some of the bands and songs that I had been hoping for in the last two versions.

According to various sources, it looks like the game is going to include tracks from The Hellacopters, Backyard Babies, Tenacious D, Slayer (!), ‘Sabbath, Weezer, Aerosmith, I. Ron Maiden, the Scorpions, and it doesn’t look like I’ll ever get Foghat out of my head.

Its rumored to include over 70 songs, half of which will be performed by the original artists. That means we shouldn’t be putting up with as many crappy Danzig covers as we did in previous versions. It’s priced about $10 higher than the Guitar Hero II, but this one is set to include a wireless guitar controller.

Kubb is a fun yard game for 2-12 players that is similar to horseshoes or bocce that I first played while traveling in Sweden. The game can take anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours to play and usually involves a fair amount of taunting no matter what continent you’re on. Having uneven teams does not necessarily offer an advantage, making it a great outdoor game for cookouts or beach parties.

1000 Blank White Cards (1KBWC) is a card game for 3-6 people in which the players create all the cards used in the game. It’s so simple and fun to play that I can’t believe I never mentioned it here before.

One of the most common things that people say when I tell them about 1KBWC is that they’ll just make a card that says “infinity points” and win. Because they are thinking linearly in terms of a single winning scenario, they don’t immediately realize that there are a number of ways to creatively trump a seemingly unbeatable number of points in a game with flexible rules. A couple of simple examples are below.

A $16 way to identify people whose World of Warcraft obsession has gone a little too far…

(Clicking the shirts will land you in porn, and porn is NSFW)

Note: This post ended up having a link in place of the pictures because the image location of the shirts changed. Nothing like allowing the interwebs to fuck up the flow of a post.

The first week of vacation was spent on Christmas and family related activities which was a heck of a lot of fun. To minimize their shopping effort, I had given my parents a Christmas list of CDs and even marked all the ones that would be really easy to find. I then promptly forgot about it. As I opened each CD on Christmas morning, I was like Grandpa Alzheimer, getting genuinely shocked that they had found all these obscure CD’s that I really wanted. My parents actually went through the trouble of only buying CDs from my list that I didn’t mark as easy to find, including a CD that was a compilation of songs from the only LP that I miss losing in my house fire. It was a compilation of early electronic “music” from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. As if that wasn’t good enough, my sister got me a velvet painting of Mr. T, which now sits next to the first item removed from my burnt house: my Mr. T. head bank. Both now guard my living room against foo’s.

After Christmas, we tore into all of the new card and board games, and when we all weren’t trying to figure out the obscure rules to games like Munchkin and Killer Bunnies, my sister and I took stole a couple of hours to play co-op and head-to-head games of Guitar Hero II. There is a picture of the event floating around a memory card somewhere that perfectly expresses how we both felt at the time. I was seated and relaxed, my feet up and a pillow behind my back like an musician who needs a stool on stage. My sister, on the other hand, stood in a certified rock stance, with the pained and horrified expression of someone who was playing against the devil for their very soul. To even the playing field, I played expert to her medium, but I have to say that she solidly whooped me a couple of times.

After the first week, the Christmas festivities came to a close and my sister returned to her coast, leaving #1GF! and I with nothing to do but slow down and unplug. The average day would start by waking up naturally at 8 AM without nightmarish earworms being jammed into my brain by the one FM station that actually comes in on our clock radio. On the off chance that I chose to shower, the natural mental quiet would make the shower feel like a real shower, rather than the damp, looping, musical Chinese water torture that I face on most normal work days.

In the interest of conserving nature’s resources, I would usually skip the shower and transfer myself directly to the big, purple couch to enjoy breakfast and an episode of Jerry Springer. Afterward, a portion of the day would be spent on emptying the DVR, watching shows from Peekvid, or chipping away at six seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

My sister gave me three of the six seasons of the Canadian comedy on DVD for Christmas, and once we chewed through that hysterical shit blizzard, we watched the remaining three seasons by searching for them on Daily Motion (Shows are marked with season and episode numbers such like S01E01 for “Season 1 Episode 1″ so that you can watch them all in order.)

To tell you the truth, I may have overdosed on the show, because at one point while playing a web-based game, I told #1GF! that I sucked at the game because I could figure it “oot”. She stared at me and cautiously asked “Did you just…”
“I did,” I said, ” but I didn’t mean it.”

Somewhere around 2 PM, I would eat lunch, start talking like Bubbles from the show, and maybe remember to brush my teeth. Then, I would return to the couch until I got back into bed at 11 PM.

I didn’t think about work.
I didn’t check e-mail.
I didn’t blog.
I didn’t even turn on my PC.

And, now I have returned to the connected world once again. Welcome me back, bitches.

Saturday

What do you get when you combine a wireless mouse, a PC that’s hooked up to the TV, and a bunch of flash based games? In my house, you end up with a stinky, bleary-eyed couple who skips showering and orders out for food because they are so focussed on beating each others scores. Good times. Gooooooood times.

Sunday

After washing off a days worth of gaming stink, we raided Michael’s and Home Depot, gathering ideas for all sorts of new and useless projects to eat spare brain cycles. Although we did not go so far as to buy a soap making kit, we bought plenty of stuff that will probably end up being pulled from the back of a closet in a couple of years with a quizzical, “Now, what the hell did we buy this for?”

The grid below contains samples taken from over 50 songs from various styles, most of which should be relatively easy to identify for people who have had access to a radio at some point over the last 30 years. Your job, when you have a few free minutes, is to see how many that you can identify.

The catch? The samples are all drums.

Instructions

Clicking on will play the sample. Clicking on will give you the answer. If you were right, click anywhere in the box to turn it green. If you were wrong, click anywhere in the box to turn it red.

Scoring

When you’re done, marking all the colors, click “Score Me” at the bottom to display your score. Because you’re self-scoring, what you call a correct answer is up to you. It can be as strict as whether you know both the title and the artist, or simply whether you can hum a couple of notes. Have fun with it.

Score Me

It should be noted that while I am really, really handy with Perl, I wrote this all in . Because I’m really, really rusty in , you may have noticed a complete lack of posts over the last two weeks while I put this bitch together. It was partly because of the , but mostly because WordPress doesn’t really like to play with without some arm wrestling. I would like to have written it in Flash, but I was stopped by both the $400 entry fee and the fact that I’d probably still be working on it. As always, the only reason that I do this crap is so #1GF! and you might have some fun.

This has been one of those weeks where all I’ve wanted to do when I got home is sit in front of the PS2, mindlessly punching my way through rappers. Unfortunately, the console started freezing up couple of days ago, ending with my trusty PS2 no longer loading discs.

After instantaneously looking up new and used PS2s online, I found that even a used one couldn’t be had for less than $90. It was at that point that I became aware of my inner geek who said,

“Just what the hell are you doing? A real geek wouldn’t be price shopping for a new PS2 right now. A real geek would get a screwdriver and open that fucker up to find out what’s was wrong with it. It’s dead, the warranty was over 5 years ago, and even if it catches fire, you’re no worse off than you are right now. You’ve got a whole bunch of screwdrivers, a fire extinguisher, nothing to lose, and you’re standing here comparison shopping? I’m actually feeling ashamed of you, right now.”

My inner geek was right. I closed out pricegrabber, and did a little googling on PS2 repair. Eventually, I came across an excellent article showing how to take apart the PS2 to clean and readjust the laser. After successfully performing those tasks, I realized that the disc loading issues were due to a grinding noise coming from the screw that drove the laser up and down its guide rails.

If you hear a grinding from inside a PS2, the lube that you are going to need to fix it is not red lithium grease or plain lithium grease, which you can get at Wal-Mart in the auto section. No. The stuff you need is called white lithium grease. The problem is that while a few forums might mention that this is the stuff you need, no forum or article actually tells you where you can get it. Neither does Google.

I’m here to tell you. You can get White Lithium Grease at Sears in the Tool/Automotive section for about $3 a tube.

You smear the head of a Q-tip full of grease and run it along the two laser guide rails and on snake motor screw, and put the rest back in your tool box, never to be used again. You then gently move the laser assembly up and down the rails until it moves smoothly without catching. Once it does, reassemble the console and pop in your favorite game.

By doing this, you can rid yourself of $87 if not $126 worth of shame and get back into the ring.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that CircuitCity has a rolling, semi-secret sale on PS2, Xbox and GameCube games. There is a rotating inventory of good games under $10 on the CircuitCity website, but the inventory changes so fast that the stores don’t seem to have time to mark them down on the shelves. Last weekend, I went in to one of the local stores to troll the sale bin, and decided to have a few games that weren’t in the sale bin price checked to see if the bargains extended further than even the website indicated.

Sure enough, they did. I left the store with 3 games for me, and 2 games for other people, with a marked cost of around $200. I walked out of the store with all 5 games for a grand total of $40. While I’m not particularly fond of button-mashing fighting games, I remembered Def Jam Fight For NY getting good ratings on Gamespot. When it priced out at less than $9, I found it impossible to resist.

The basic premise of the game is that you’re the new guy in a underground fighting gang that sponsors underground fights and you climb your way to the top of the food chain. At first glance, the unique feature of this game is that the all the people that you fight are today’s Rap and Hip Hop stars. The other unique feature that I was unaware of is the game’s brazen brutality. I’m no stranger to violent video games, but after popping the disc into the console, I sat there slack-jawed and almost appalled at the absolute brutal nature of the fighting in the game. This is marked mature for a reason.

You start the game by creating your own character including height weight, build, skin tone, facial shape, nose shape, eye type, eye color, ear shape, and voice preference. In essence, if you’re a guy, you’re building a cartoonish model of yourself. From there, you have to learn one of five skills (street fighting, kick boxing, submissions, martial arts, or wrestling) from the gym master Henry Rollins. What Henry fucking Rollins has to do with hip-hop, I have no idea, but I find it both cool and corny that he actually sends text messages to me to get my ass down his gym to hone my fighting skills (the only person that I might’ve found more amusing in the role might have been Glen Danzig). Did I say my skills? I meant the skills of the 6’0, 210 pound, blue eyed, brown haired, street fighting character with the big ears and crooked nose that I created.

Once you’re “in the game”, the learning curve is a little steep, but once I got the hang of it, it’s pretty fun. There are the basic punching, kicking, and grappling moves, but game also includes specialized moves that can be purchased from Rollins. These moves are similar to finishing moves found in other fighting games, but without the complicated button mashing that is usually required to execute them. This should not imply that the game itself is simple, though. Each opponent has a unique style and takes me an average of 5-10 rounds to beat. While this type of repetition would normally have me shutting the console off in frustration, I find myself happily getting pounded round after round. What is more unusual about this is that I don’t really consider myself a fan of fighting games.

#1GF! finds it more than a little disturbing to watch her boyfriend get his ass kicked by Ice T over and over again, but I have to say that there’s something very satisfying about controlling a fighter that looks and dresses like you. And even if I felt a little bad about eventually kicking Ice T’s ass (he is the O.G., after all), I can tell you that there is immense satisfaction in watching that tiny version of me kicking the shit out of Sean Paul.

Pros:
New level of brutality
Very custom characters
Vast finishing moves with relatively simple execution
Paying back Sean Paul for his music

Cons
You have to buy clothes and jewelery
Long, long load times

Platforms
PS2, XBox, GameCube

Cost
$9 at CircuitCity

Rating
B+

Bombwars: You’re half of a pair of stick figures who like throw bombs at each other. It takes a minute to get the hang of, but it ends up being pretty fun once you start learning how to time your shots.

Unfortunately, playing more than two levels requires registration.

I don’t know how I found this, but this is a blog written by a 22 year old about his grandmother. It would be pretty queer if it wasn’t about a grandma who is seriously hardcore about her video games. No shit. I’m buying it hook, line, and sinker, too. If you watch the videos, you’ll see that you can’t fake that level of video game frustration without an acting certificate.

Check it: Old Grandma Hardcore

Big Money is a big time waster…and I found a 13″ TV in my basement. It’s not perfect, but it will be good for testing proof of concept on the cardboard projector.

The problem with going to the library for 3 hours on a Thursday night is:

• A.) You have no project due, you are not homeless, and you didn’t actually get a book.
• B.) You’re not done, yet.
• C.) You’re already involved with 4 books.
• D.) The scenery is all in your head, rather than in your face.
• E.) All of the Above

If you guessed, “Who is Flapdangle ding dong coo coo kids?” you are probably still in the stacks of survival books (I think it’s 796.41?) shooing away the bunnies and talking to yourself. You’d also be incorrect in a linear, logical sort of way. If you guessed “What is ‘E’, Alex?” you’d be right.

GTA4
The problem with staying up until 3:30 AM playing video games is:

• A.) You have to get up in three hours.
• B.) You’re not done, yet.
• C.) You’re proving to yourself and others that you are truly the equivalent of 2.3 of your puny Earth dorks. Muah ha ha ha ha!
• D.) Help.
• E.) All of the Above

If you guessed E.), circle gets the square.

Note1: If when you try to type things like c.) and d.) you have [Backspace] over C:\ and D:\, you may need to step away from the PC.
Note2: Libralicious is not a word. Lubricious is, though. Adding to my list of favorite words…