A python classic mini-machina:

and hit the jump for a brilliant, live, shred-tastic kid-powered version of the Halo theme recorded in someone's living room!

Best. Mashup. Evar.

Toys R' Us is having a promotional sale right now that gives you 50% off one accessory when you buy any other accessory of equal or lesser value. Click here to see the list of all the goodies; some suggested yummy combos include:

• Two Xbox 360 or Wii controllers for $60
• 26 months of Xbox Live for $75 total
• Buy the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player, get the 120 GB HD for $90 off!
• 8,000 Xbox Live Arcade points for $75

And so on. You get the idea. The Xbox 360 HD's, HD-DVD player, controllers, Live cards, Wii controllers and cables/cases of all shapes and kinds are all there to choose from!

In short:

• iPhone plays NES games now! Hit the jump for video.
• Again, my birthday cometh: I give you the NES/Atari combo port-a-thingy
• Not just one, but TWO PS2 no-solder mod chip memory card boot thingamajigs announced?!

Here we go: politics to industry jobs in neat bullet points!

• An excellent feature on working in the games industry in Japan; what salaries are like in the domestic one
• WoW virus proves a useful epidemiological study tool; not the first time a disease has slaughtered avatars, forcing people to play First Life in shame.
• Chores, meet game. Kids to fight over toilet scrubbing to level up to Lvl. 60 Brat.
• This guy is my hero. He carries a DS in his pocket to have politicians see what games are actually like, instead of letting believe Jack Thompson and the like without ever seeing the true violence of Nintendogs in person.
• Star Jones, on the other hand, is apparently an idiot-in-training under the aforementioned Thompson, and has set her sights on VG violence as a new talking point since she likes to be an authority on things she knows nothing about. Girl's gotta work, I guess...
• Rock Band to come to PS2, more tracks announced.
• Bigtime modder and bootlegger gets busted for, well, modding and bootlegging. Of course, advertising his "services" all over the place and working out of his home probably wasn't the best idea given the illegal nature of his "trade" and all...

July was a clutch month for all three major companies, and all their of their respective consoles. I'll spoil the surprise: the Wii and DS are still kicking everyone's ass, though for the first time there was a dip in their Japanese sales numbers, giving the competition a chance to catch up a bit, and possibly implying that a similar trend could happen here (at the normal Japan-to-USA-trend-migration-time of the approximately 27 years it takes us to catch up with their tech markets). While technically this means that the growth rate of the massive, staggering gap between the Wii and the fat unloved PS3 had a chance to diminish somewhat, this means less of a catch-up and more a shrinkage in the ratio of Wii:PS3's sold (from 4:1 to 3:1; whoop-de-doo).

Meanwhile, back home, things got interesting. Despite early predictions that July would be a huge month for the PS3 wherein it would outsell the 1.5 year old Xbox 360, that never quite happened. The RRoD issues for the 360 piss off fanboys, but people are more concerned with playing the library of excellent games than buying a non-RRoD-prone PS3 and playing Blu-ray movies on it for lack of any decent software. Of course, all three companies wasted no time in putting their own positive spin on the numbers, Sony in particular, but in the end it's the same as it has been: Wii kills the next-gen sales (fastest selling console evarrr in the UK!), Xbox 360 is selling well and will continue to gather momentum as the game library increases (Halo 3 anyone?), and the PS3 is too big, too expensive, and too boring for the masses just yet.

Perhaps the rumored price cuts for the PS3 will kick it in the pants...

Some bits to help us start the work week, since school is back in and working is a reality I have to face again.

• Want to play Halo 2 with your Wiimote?
• The top 25 best selling games of all time; no shock that Pokemon, Mario and GTA dominate.
• iPSP? PSPhone? What will they call "it"?
• A beautiful bit of history up for auction: the whole Atari marketing materials deadstock.
• A totally badass Korean Jet Set Radio PC knockoff game that I want.
• I don't care how much you love you Wii, DON'T get this tatoo.
• Arm-wrestling arcade game is so good, it breaks people's arms. Now that's a champ right there.

Whoever is responsible for this attack on Gay Gamer, I hope you get bitten by a Komodo Dragon. And are subsequently eaten. And maybe thrown up by said Dragon.

Seriously, it's one of my favorite sites, and this was so obviously a hate crime. Sheesh.

Great gallery of brick-pixellated Mario chalk art here!

DoCoMo commercial featuring their new motion-sensing (Wiimote-esque) cell phones. Predictably, I'm green.