– Friend of TIAW and frequent commenter, ‘unofficialitguy’ is doing a site revamp over at http://www.unofficialitguy.com/ . Make sure to check it out this Friday, September 25th. When the time rolls around I’ll edit this post with updated details but I wanted to make sure you all were prepped and ready to go. He’s also been added to our links list on the bottom left of this page. Can’t wait to see it!

– The long awaited DS game Sribblenauts came out recently and I picked myself up a copy. It is unbelievably fun at times but can be frustrating at others. As a 5 minute demo to show off for friends, it’s unrivaled. But when you really sit down and starting putting time into it and slog through the hundreds of levels, it starts to wear. Sure, you can create any object you want and use it to help you solve puzzles, but often those objects don’t act the way you expect them to or hope they will.

If I create a construction worker and put him in a backhoe and place the whole thing above a dig-able surface, I expect results! Instead he sits idly by twiddling his virtual thumbs (essentially). In fact, whenever you create any other human characters they either act as a guardian for you, an enemy of you, or neither and just meander around.

The game’s database is a marvel to behold with no stone left unturned, and as an appetizer the game succeeds tremendously, but hopefully this will flourish into a franchise. Maybe then they’ll focus on adding depth to what happens on screen instead of just deepening their glossary.

– Speaking of games, I recently played The Beatles: Rock Band for the first time. I had about an hour and a half with the game and went through 3 or 4 sets with a handful of songs a piece. It is what I expected: a Rock Band game full of Beatles music. But it goes so far above and beyond in terms of detail and presentation that it really blows all other music games out of the water. The amount of effort that must have been poured into this game is palpable in the background videos, loading screens, menus etc. It’s truly a sight to behold, and I’m not even a huge Beatles fan. (Though I am becoming one. It’s so much easier to comprehend just how much they did when you see it all in one place. And it helps when that one place is a video game franchise I already know intimately and love.)

– Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant! came out last week and I had the pleasure of seeing it. It tells the unbelievable true story of Mark Whitacre and his work with the FBI as an informant in a price fixing scandal involving one of the biggest companies in the food industry in the early 90’s. Sounds like a snoozer, but Damon’s performance as Whitacre is inspired. It’s a fascinating story that’s told so well that it is nothing short of riveting. Worth a watch for sure.

– I downloaded the song from the new Nano commercial. It’s a good time. You can find it HERE, track number 9, “Bourgeois Shangri-La.”