best buy

As an electronics mega-retailer, Best Buy isn't normally interested in anything but moving huge quantities of TVs, computers and appliances out of its gaping doors. But the Houston St. location in Manhattan did something unexpected last night: it approvingly looked the other way while video artist Borna Sammak took over every single HDTV in the store for to display his latest work.

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Spore. Spore, I said! Ever since that video of Will Wright's demo of this game appeared on the internet, I've been camping on the sidewalk in front of my local Best Buy waiting for its release date. As I lie here at night shivering in my sleeping bag, I can almost taste that succulent, procedurally-generated content, which is good because I am all out of food.

As you must know by now, Will Wright is the super genius behind a whole bucketload of games like The Sims, Sim City, and of course Sim [Insert Any Word Here]. He's currently working on Spore, a game he describes as "Sim Everything," in which you control the destiny of a species as it evolves from a single-celled organism into a race of interstellar travelers. One of the game's most exciting design elements is the use of procedurally generated content - you use the in-game editors to modify your species, and the game determines how it behaves based on your design. I spoke to Chaim Gingold, the game designer who created these editors, about the challenge of creating tools that are flexible enough to be powerful and still somehow smart enough to be fun—Jonathan Coulton

See also our extended interview with the man himself, Will Wright
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The scene Thursday outside of an Americatown, USA Best Buy. Photo by Matt McGee

What a day it has been. November 17, 2006: the date that will go down in history as the moment the world lost its collective mind over a new video game console. I'm as excited as the next guy about the sweet new hardware coming out this weekend, but damn...

I pose a challenge: find me a major online media outlet—local, national or otherwise—that doesn't have at least one mention of the insanity surrounding the Playstation 3 launch. With so many angles to choose from, it's going to be tough: there's the obvious low-hanging fruit in the unwashed hordes who, in forming ad-hoc shanty towns in parking lots around the country, sacrificed not only the $600 for the console and how ever much more for games and accessories, but also their dignity. But wait a minute, there's also the heartwarming tale of said unwashed immediately regaining said dignity (and an obscene profit) after, upon returning home, foregoing the urge to shower just long enough flip their just-purchased console on eBay.

The list goes on: armed robberies of Gamestop stores, Ludacris-hosted parties for the NYC refugees at the Sony Store, riots at a California Best Buy, shameful enlistments of the homeless to wait in line, a man hospitalized after running into a light pole in a mad dash for his place in line (a full day before they even went on sale) and my personal favorite, a first-hand account on a forum of a man who, along with his fellow campers, was robbed at gunpoint outside of a New York mall by a man hoping to take advantage of some tired, delirious gamers that may or may not have $600 in cash in their wallets.

Stay tuned for a similar challenge on Sunday when we do it all over again with Nintendo's Wii. Can't wait! —John Mahoney

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