Strewn across local news stations and gaming websites alike, film titan Steven Spielberg is gaining relatively high momentum regarding the lending of his name to Boom Blox, the newest children’s release title from Los Angeles-based EA Games. LAist recently got a chance to play around with the cute little block-shaped animals in what’s called in modern tech parlance, the “casual entertainment” sector of the gamersphere. Stepping out of the hardcore gamer paradigm, its quite apparent......

Today news broke that Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski is slated to direct the film adaptation of Bioshock, widely heralded as the best video game of 2007. This comes at an especially interesting time considering parent company Take Two Interactive (also parent to Rockstar Games, which just released a little title called Grand Theft Auto IV) turned down a multi-billion dollar buy-out offered by LA-based Electronic Arts earlier this year. Verbinksi notes in......

Image courtesy of gfixler via Flickr Last year, to the chagrin of thousands of gamers nationwide, the LA-based Electronic Entertainment Expo (popularly known as E3) was massively scaled down to exclude the public in what was widely considered one of the biggest industry flops of the year. While the gaming masses were offered an alternative convention in October called E for All, industry professionals (specifically press) were none too pleased with the scattered layout......

It's 5:00 p.m. in Santa Monica and the boys at the online video startup Bush League TV, who launch next week, are live online video-feeding one man's attempt to break the Guinness World Record for longest consecutive video game play. He'll be going for a minimum of 25 hours. You can follow them on Twitter, or better yet, sit at home on your computer and watch a guy named Jim play the video game for......

Via blogging.la | Video used with permission courtesy of IGN.com From the publishers that have brought us such high profile games as Grand Theft Auto, Bully, and Manhunt comes the fourth installment of Midnight Club from Rockstar Games, now taking on the City of Angels in death defying rice rocketeering. I don't know about you, but there's something about driving down Sunset at Doheny when there's no traffic that's pretty titillating, even if its......

Interesting news in the gaming world this week. The Hollywood Reporter's Paul Hyman notes that video game power house publisher 3D Realms Entertainment has announced the inception of two subsidiary companies called Radar Group (Scottsdale, AZ) and Depth Entertainment (Los Angeles, CA), both focusing on publishing titles that will ultimately become specs for TV and film. CEO Scott Miller uses the concept of the "storyverse" as a logical reason to homogenize the two markets......

This past week, LAist got a chance to travel up to San Francisco to check out the Game Developers Conference. GDC is universally known as one of the most fun and exciting of the industry's gatherings, where publishers, press, and lecture attendees convene to discover the latest in gaming technology. This year we got to see a ton of kickass stuff, including an exclusive look at the new Street Fighter title from Capcom and......

Another week in February, another Q1 with not many greatly anticipated games. But at least there's always news. This week around the internets, we've learned a few cool things that may pique some interest out there. Check out some news, game releases, and other info for this week after the jump.......

Today marks the beginning of the 2008 race towards raising the standard of gaming. As we mentioned previously, 2007 was a monumental year for the world of video games. Take a look at a selection of some of the highly anticipated games of the year, in stores today.......

With so many epic video game titles making their debut last year, 2008 has some pretty big shoes to fill. Several titles released in 2007 undoubtedly rank the highest among several industry top 10 lists; Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, and Mass Effect to name a few. These games have proven and will continue to prove that they will be quite difficult to surpass in quality. Such competition is exactly what makes the gaming......

Detail of creepy-cool clown mural painted by "Wizard" in 1975, which marks the entrance to fun! A few weeks back I promised to continue the photo essay of my next-door neighbor, the Redondo Beach Pier, where there is always something weird and wonderful to see and do. The Fun Factory is the next best thing to a cheesy, down-the-shore/midway arcade. Sure, Santa Monica Pier has its Ferris wheel, calliope and similar games of chance,......

Sometimes you see rock tonight and sometimes you want to be rock tonight. If the latter, every Wednesday night at the Hyperion Tavern in the Los Feliz/Franklin Hills area, groups of friends gather to unite as one, to test their skills, woo the crowd and find their glory in Rock Band. Wednesday nights at the shack filled with chandeliers used to be reserved for Guitar Hero zealots, now groups of four can hit the stage......

As you might have guessed, we're pretty big into gaming over at my house -- our console set-up includes the both generations of the Xbox, not one but TWO PS2's (one for the living room, one for the bedroom), a Dell XPS with a wide-screen monitor (for PC gaming), a Nintendo Gamecube, a Nintendo 64, an SNES, and a Gameboy -- oh, and possibly a Sony PSP floating around somewhere. Our 50" big-screen is optimized......

Holidays have you indulging a little more than usual? Just in time for those New Year resolutions and post-holiday diets, the Wii Fit is expected to be released in North America in January. Released earlier this month in Japan, Wii Fit sold over a quarter million units in the first week. The game was designed for families to exercise with activities like stretching, yoga, step aerobics, push ups, jogging and much more. The additional......

As traffic worsens on Ventura Boulevard, a new L.A. City report found that developers could add 3 million square feet of commercial space to the Ventura Boulevard corridor under current zoning rules. If you thought getting from Sepulveda to Van Nuys down Ventura was bad before. Umph... Not sure what to buy that ragamuffin who has everything this holiday season? Franklin Avenue found a great set of Lego-ish toys featuring people in casts, babies......

I feel at home at hip hop shows. I am in my element. I am around people who love the same kind of music I love. This past Wednesday night, however, for the first time in my show-going life I was at a hip hop show as an outsider. Nerdcore rap was something that I had only vaguely heard of, all I knew of it was rap with a whole lot of references to......

The Barcode Battler....

This is my first post on LAist, so I just want to start out by saying I'm thankful for Tony Pierce inviting me to contribute to the site based off of the WGA strike photos I've been sending him. Speaking of photos, I'm very thankful that the scary drugged out clown (pictured above) didn't attack me when I got "all up in his clowny grill" and snapped that picture at Tuesday's rally on Hollywood......

For many of you, this week is all about Turkey Day. For others, it's still all about The Strike. For me? This week will go down in history not because of the strike or Thanksgiving, but because the most awesome video game of all time, Rock Band, was released yesterday. I got my kit set up and ready to go within minutes, and began rocking out almost immediately. First impressions? The drumming element is......

Last night I was happy to make it to Lou on Medium on "Guitar Hero III", the latest video game to earn more than $100 million in sales in its first week. But I just got the thing last week, so I was just satisfied not to get booed off the stage... again. After feeling cocky about making a respectable run through Metallica's epic "One" and long time favorite Maiden's "The Number of the......

The more we learn about the Temecula shooting that left five people dead, the sadder the story becomes: three of the victims of Sunday's shooting were a mother and her two teenage daughters; the remaining two dead were the mother's boyfriend and his son. A group of men in a Honda Civic opened fire on the driver of a truck on the 91 freeway today; road rage may be the culprit. The victim sustained......

We* have just returned from the front lines of the of the cutthroat video gaming industry (okay, maybe it was just the GameStop at the Burbank mall) and I'm proud to report we have arrived home in triumph, bearing before us the brand new Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. It's here, and yes, it rocks. There were a shaky few minutes there when the controller took a few tries to connect, but we......

Flashy graphics and superfuturistic weapons aren't the only things grasping the attention gamers near and far these days. Riding along with the success of this past weekend's E for All video game expo, LA was home to this year's premier of Video Games Live, an orchestrated performance of some the gaming world's top musical scores. With renditions of everything from Tetris to Halo, this concert was definitely not as geeky as it sounds.......

Guitar Hero was in full-effect at E-For-All I must admit that after three bleary-eyed, sore-footed days stumbling around the Los Angeles Convention Center like Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas -- to objectively write about the E For All experience is difficult. On one hand, the inaugural show has been rightfully panned by most mainstream media outlets for a variety of reasons. Many big gaming companies, Sony, Microsoft, Activision, and Square to name a......

Ninitendo Wii demonstration units at the 2007 E for All Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center Nintendo extended an invitation for a female writer from LAist to meet Perrin Kaplan , VP of Marketing for Nintendo at the E for All Expo. I sent my R.S.V.P. and planned to check out the latest games and technology that Nintendo has to offer. Now I should tell you that I know next to nothing about......

Sure, the inaugural E For All doesn't really hold a candle to the bloated spectacle of old E3, but then again, the new low-key Santa Monica-based E3 doesn't hold a candle to the old E3 either. And sure the big guns (Sony, Microsoft and Capcom) didn't show up, the LA Convention Center's South Hall is only half full with exhibits, crowds have been disappointingly light and the power went out Friday night, ending the......

Kid Sister - "Pro Nails" Got my toes done up with my fingernails matchin Kid Sister, A-Trak & DJ Mehdi, Kavinsky, Cool Kids @ The Roxy Sunset Rubdown @ El Rey J.Lo & Marc Anthony @ Staples Dios Malos, The Movies, The Submarines, The Henry Clay People @ Little Radio Youth Brigade, Career Soldiers @ Safari Sam's Video Games Live @ Nokia Theater Rick Springfield @ House of Blues Anaheim Southern Culture on the......

Q. Other than being big black football players, what do Garrison Hearst, Barry Sanders, Eddie George, Daunte Culpepper, Marshall Faulk, Michael Vick, Ray Lewis, Donovan McNabb, Shaun Alexander all have in common? A. They were all on the cover of Madden football when they met tragedy and had to leave the game that year. The phenomenon is called The Madden Curse and yesterday when Madden '08 coverboy Vince Young was pulled for a "strained......

Photo essay from the Swerve Festival at Barnsdall Park....

Dan "Shoe" Hsu knows video games. As the Editor-in-Chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly, one of the most popular magazines in the world of gaming, it's part of his job. Shoe, 35, first dove into video game coverage in 1996. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in Statistics, he sent query letters to 30 different organizations in the rapidly-growing industry. "I was looking for a job, any job in the game......