Mario and Luigi seem to be having a tough economic level to get through, as their coin count and the rest of U.S. video game industry sales have been slipping. The beginning of 2009 looked promising, until March when sales were down 17 percent from last year--which happened to be a big year for local game companies--proving the once booming game world is not immune to the recession or those sneaky Goombas. Eyes are on the falling shares, but no reset button needed--just yet--for local companies, as Nintendo's Wii leads console sales with 601,000 units sold, while Capcom's horror shooter "Resident Evil 5" is a best-selling game for the Xbox 360. more ›

Seattlest just got our stimulus check from the government—cha-ching!—and we're looking for ways to spend it that don't involve just handing it over to the oil companies. We thought we'd share some ideas: more ›

“Wow. Wii!” more ›

We love lists. Which is why we're a little sad that we didn't know about Amazon.com's UnSpun until we read The Paper Noose's post on Georgetown's place in the Top "Hip" Neighborhoods to Live in Seattle, WA. There's nothing we love better than completely arbitrary lists with no discernible criteria beyond kneejerk personal opinion -- except maybe passing them along. According to UnSpun users, the top 10 "hip" neighborhoods are: 1. Capitol Hill (surprise,... more ›

Remember the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the album that made the band—and the word "grunge"—a household name? A naked baby, swimming blithely in pristine water, reaches for a dollar bill—a dollar bill that's on a large fish hook. The image is memorable for its ironic, dangerous, clear message. Courtney Love didn't catch the meaning. Director AJ Schnack does. more ›

We're having a hard time deciding if this has any actual value or not, but it's certainly interesting to look at for twenty seconds or so. Sadly, we can really see it coming into play when we're trying to psychosomatic ourselves out of a meeting or something and into a day of bad TV, reading and trying (and failing) to play Wii golf from the couch. Is that my neighbor there with a runny nose? Sniff, sniff. I may have a runny nose myself.... Better stay home today. Three days later we're actually ill, but back at the office because we refuse to burn any more sick time. There's also no field for our symptom: general malaise. more ›

There's a potentially interesting article in the Seattle Times about a potentially interesting class at Seattle University that includes in its coursework a potentially interesting experiment. It's an experiment in "media deprivation" for a class called "Restorative Solitude." Ninety six hours, no media. Awesome. It reminds us of Chris Pirillo's Google Fast. In the teeny bopper world in which the article is set "media" are things like cell phone, email, internet, iPod, TV, at least those are the options in their "what could you live without" poll (we voted internet). Hat tip to the Times for realizing the futility of listing "newspaper" in there, at least, but that's a pretty narrow view of what constitutes media to the teenagers or young twentyish types towards to whom this article seems to be directed. more ›

--Got some loonies lying around? They may be spying on you. more ›

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. more ›

8bitjoystick called Seattlest out yesterday (which we love, btw, whether you do it on your random blog you expect us to magically find, or you have at us in the comments or you send us email. Please, tell us what we're missing and we'll consider it internally and then publicly enumerate the reasons why you're wrong.), and, befitting a blog about video games, 8bitjoystick is all over us for our lack of video game coverage. more ›

Seattlest survived Mindcamp yet again. This installment, the third, ran with a familiar form of organized mayhem, and that familiarity removed a lot of our enthusiasm for the event. While we still met a few interesting individuals and heard some interesting talks, we couldn't help but to spend far too much of our time at Mindcamp wondering if we should have joined one of three different caravans of friends in going up to Vancouver for some Canadian shenanigans. more ›