Recently I was sorting through some of my old VHSs, looking for recordings of the first few minutes of Spice Channel movies, (you know, before the feed would get all scrambled) when I stumbled upon a caché of '80s cartoons I must have taped one Saturday morning as a kid. Immediately, I put my pants back on and began to revisit my childhood (except for the pants part). Lo and behold, there were all my old friends: Garfield and Friends, Spiderman and his Amazing Friends, Gobots… Though, truth be told, I wasn’t nearly as interested in the cartoons as I was in the commercials that bookended them. Yeah, we’ve all been to RetroJunk.com, but some of these ads really tore open the floodgates of my memory. Like most of you, I’m a hardcore gamer, but I prefer my games aged twenty years or more. So when I saw two of the all-time rarest commercials for two of my all-time favorite games, I quickly took my pants back off, captured the footage to I.N.T.E.R.N.E.T., and posted ‘em here.

How about something that looks a little different? Orb audio makes some reasonably priced speakers that don't look like anything else in their price range. The question is; is it all form over function?

Ever since word came out that EA's Medal of Honor would feature actual scenarios from the current Afghanistan conflict, including characters that are in the Taliban, the proverbial shit has hit the proverbial fan. The mainstream talking heads have lined up to cast aspersions on a fictionalized version of real events, chastising the publisher for daring to besmirch the honor of American troops by using real life enemies. While it's not clear where these same haters were when WWII games included Nazis or Japanese soldiers, we have once again seen the fickle and ignorant side of our 24-hour news cycle become infatuated with an industry that they pay no mind to in between manufactured controversies.

As if to throw more fuel on the flames, or perhaps to show that controversy won't stand in the way of quality product, EA has unveiled a new gameplay trailer for Medal of Honor that features an attack on an Afghan village that is practically crawling with Taliban rebels. It's not exactly the kind of video that was created to quell people's anger.

Excitement and confusion don’t traditionally go well together, but when Capcom released the first trailer for Mega Man Universe, that’s exactly what many of us felt.  A slew of Capcom characters brought together for pretty much any kind of game is good news, but none of us had a clue what those characters might actually be doing together.  The second trailer gives us a lot more info, and helps shift our focus from “What the hell is it?” to “When the hell does it come out?!?!”

Many people don't want big honkin' speakers crowding up their living room. I don't understand these people, but to each his own. The problem is, tiny speakers end up sounding like tiny speakers. Worse, most little speakers are poorly built, poorly designed, crap. Not so with Polk's new Blackstone Sub/Sat speakers.

Year in and year out, right around playoff time, EA Sports likes to use a specific sport's video game in order to predict which team will take the championship. Although the prognostications are in no way 100% accurate, they do seem to be right more often than they are wrong. As you may already know, the NFL season is set to get underway next Thursday night, and in anticipation of the kickoff, the EA seers have shaken up the Magic 8 Ball that is Madden NFL 11 to predict how this season will go. According to their sim, the road to the Super Bowl this year will go through Green Bay in the NFC and Baltimore in the AFC.

Remember Cool Spot?  He was that little red dot on the 7up logo.  Once in a while he'd do something in a 7up commercial, and it was usually pretty cool, as the name would imply.  But do you remember when he had his own video game?  Yep, a soft drink mascot with his own game.  It was the 90s.  Unfortunately the same can not be said for the "Make 7up Yours" guy.  Say, when's the last time you saw 7up?  Come to think of it...when's the last time you saw Orlando Jones?  Someone call Robert Stack.

With The Force Unleashed II right around the corner, many Star Wars enthusiasts might have been wondering what would be next on the agenda for LucasArts. Well, according to a report from IndustryGamers, it looks like the next project may be filling out unemployment compensation forms.

Japanese Street Fighter fans have been eagerly awaiting the reveal of the new characters to be included in the Arcade version of Super Street Fighter IV.  American fans, have been waiting just as eagerly, but since there are approximately as many arcades in America as there are Giant Pandas, we’re basically just waiting to see who the next DLC characters will be.  Both groups may have gotten an answer today, as Arcadia magazine has teased Yun and Yang as the next two World Warriors.

So maybe you've been thinking to yourself, "You know, I've always wanted to play Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but all of the platforms that it's available for aren't high definition enough!". Apart from having a weird thought process, you're actually quite right. Although many have praised the game's clevel level design and intuitive gameplay, the fact that it's only been available for smaller screened consoles (DS, PSP, and iPhone/iPod Touch) has limited its sales when compared to Rockstar's other releases. As if reading your mind, the developer today announced that Chinatown Wars will be coming to the iPad beginning next week.

A new trailer for the next Mass Effect 2 DLC pack, Lair of the Shadow Broker, has arrived.  Not only does it give us more exposure to Liara T’Soni, the Asari researcher with whom so many players found true interstellar love in the first game, it also gives a good look at the DLC’s new vehicle, the hovercraft.

Just before this year's E3, Warner Games announced that the classic Mortal Kombat franchise would be returning to its gory glory with a new game coming at some point in 2011. At that time, we picked apart the first trailer that came out for the game, finding a host of legendary (and not so much) characters that would be appearing in the game. A few weeks ago, a pair of additional characters were "announced" in the form of a few screenshots that showed that Cyrax and Kitana would also be in the game. Today, developer Netherrealm Studios has released another trailer for the game that instead of introducing new characters, shows some of the already-known characters beating the blood and snot out of one another. But since it's done in a shadowy light treatment, set to the music of Disturbed, should be considered to be "more artistic" than what we've seen before.

Back in July, Telltale Games made gamers and movie nerds alike very happy with the announcement that a episodic game based on the film Back to the Future was in the works. Shortly after that, the company posted an online survey, asking fans to weigh in on what the game should include and what it could leave out. Since then, the publisher has been largely silent on what we can ultimately expect from the game, but a story in today's USA Today has started to provide some details about it.

It feels like once the first early adopter went out and spent way too much on a plasma TV, the video game industry was done with SD.  The HD generation has brought an increased focus on visual presentation, resulting in some truly gorgeous gaming experiences that we could hardly have even imagined just ten years ago.  Sadly, it also brought an epidemic of games with tiny, HD-optimized on-screen text and menus.  These overlays look great on a 46” LCD TVs, but on a CRT TV, they’re often unreadable.  Rare famously patched the issue in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, but most publishers have essentially ignored this issue, and some teams, like those behind Mass Effect 2 and Dead Rising, have come out and stated that they would not change the text size.  One team, though, is finally addressing the problem before players even have a chance to complain.

The small company Audioengine may not be one many have heard of. They’re a “factory direct” type company that does the majority of their business through Internet sales. What makes them different from other companies of this type is that their products are well designed and sound fantastic.

For comics shipping 09.01.10 or The Week School Was Back In Session. Every week I’ll check Diamond’s shipping list to see what you absolutely, positively need to spend all your hard earned cash on at the Local Comic Shop.

I came back from vacation thinking the world would be different without me, but I was wrong. You see, the PlayStation Store continues to be the same as it ever was with another week of releases that are okay, but once again fail to impress. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great that Castle Crashers is finally on the PS3, and the season finale of Sam and Max is not something to be ignored. However, aside from a few demos, there's once again nothing here that begs for the attention Sony so desperately thinks they deserve. Oh, Theme Hospital. Right. Forgot about that one. Somebody call the Pope. I'm sure he gives more of a shit than I do. You know, I never set out to write this article every week with the intention of pouring Hatorade all over Sony, but they really need to wake the hell up. I know that Xbox just upped the price of their service by $10, but with all that entails, it's worth it. Sony's free service is barely doing the company and the customers any justice, and it's high time they started putting in more effort.

You can find the full list of what's available on this week's update below.

EPISODE 4: THE DEAD BABY JOKE OF PODCASTS

Relationships...ugh. This week, in hopes of softening up the room a bit, joining the show is a "lady friend" of the fellas'. Since there's only room for five people in the studio, though, Timmy had to go. Whether you play WoW, FFXI,  or chicks, this show'll have something for you. Guaranteed (not guaranteed).

Konami Brand Manager Pearl Lu (pictured here standing in a hole) was more than happy to show off Rush'n Attack: Ex Patriot for us. She demonstrated how to stab someone in the back with a knife, how to slit someone's throat with a knife, and even how to quickly duck into the shadows...while you wait for someone to skewer with a knife.

Pro tip: Russians HATE being stabbed with knives.