Instead of taking the overly comedic kiddy route, this short cinematic went for professionalism and still made me laugh. I love how they tackled the star power item in stop motion animation. Made by a group of college students in thirteen nights of filming, this video is one of ten short films competing in a Harley Davidson contest at this year's UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies video project. If you enjoyed the invisible trip down Rainbow Road, take the time to vote for them here. You don't need to make an account or sign up for anything, it just takes one simple click to support some fellow gamers.

Looks like video games are finally in the mainstream media for good. CBS has renewed their contract with the World Series of Video Games, and will televise matches for a second year:

"The 2007 deal will expand WSVG coverage to four separate hour-long events timed after the three major U.S. events and the finals in Sweden. They will air as part of the CBS Sports Spectacular on Sunday, July 29; Sunday, August 19; Saturday, November 17; and Saturday, December 15. Each episode will feature competition footage for featured titles such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Activision’s Guitar Hero II and EA Sports Fight Night Round 3. Segments on the competitors themselves will also be included."

I wonder how long it will be before video game events of this size get covered in Vegas regularly, with money lines, point spreads, prostitutes and everything else that's essential. I'm still hoping that one day Vegas can work out a deal with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to allow them to let multiplayer games be used for gambling. Video game gambling could tear Vegas apart. No more obnoxious sports betters and old dudes throwing away their retirement money. Anybody can be a gamer, so in ten years it might be the number one Vegas attraction. Prostitutes would ditch their pimps and take this up as a more profitable career, launching a whole new era of gaming. WSVGSTDs.

Maybe Vegas could even use this as leverage to lower the legal gambling age to help get in gamers while they're still young. Slot machine profits would rise drastically once again, but not because of bored wives. Half the ten year old world champions would need their moms to fly them to the events, and while their kids are out supporting the family with their trigger fingers, Vegas will steal it all back through their bored mothers at the slots.

Hopefully the televised show goes over well and we see this happening more and more soon. I don't see how there's any CSI crimes left to be solved, housewives left to be banged, or islands left to survive on. Even America is sick of American Idol, we need some new form of entertainment to take over television, and if we're lucky video games will claim reality TV's dying throne.

As the chief designer of Silent Hill 5, Masashi Tsuboyama has been closely watched over in the last few months. In a recent interview he confirmed that the Xbox 360 still hasn't been ruled out yet, and that a multi-platform release will be discussed. Despite Nintendo's overwhelming console sales, he did say that Silent Hill 5 will most likely not come to the Wii due to its family oriented audience of gamers. No surprise there, what I'm more worried about though, is that Silent Hill 5 is probably nowhere near complete or even playable if they still seem so unsure of which current generation consoles it may or may not be released on. Although, he did hint that we might see a trailer at this year's E3 in July, so another month and a half of waiting won't hurt.

Here's a new Japanese trailer for Eternal Sonata, showing the fast paced gameplay. It's hard to know what's going on for sure, but the interface looks simple enough, with attack and movement commands at the bottom, energy bars to the side, and life at the top of the screen. The enemies are entertaining, and their shape-shifting when provoked makes them even more intriguing. We get a sneak peak at an extra photography feature in the game, and then see several more stunning combo attacks. Eternal Sonata is expected to be released in America in August, but if you pre-order it from Gamestop now, you'll get one of the five new limited edition custom Xbox 360 faceplates for free.

The newest issue of PC Gamer magazine has an interview with the Hothead Games studio that's working on Gabe and Tycho's Penny Arcade video game. With years of great online comic content to pull from, and the exceptionally long title "On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One" they've got a lot of gamers excited with high hopes for the first installment in the series.

In the first video we saw the gameplay close up, and this video focuses on the characters and some of the different areas in the game. We even get a quick glimpse at the character creation feature and how easy it is to customize your character's appearance. Click on the zoomed in pictures below for the different pieces of artwork Penny Arcade made for the magazine's cover this month.

CNet's Crave put together a list of the best five game controllers ever made, and while you might not agree with their rank, they hit all the important ones. Since their list charts the peaks of the controller's evolution, they disqualified the Wiimote and Sixaxis for being too new. Here's their picks and reasonings:

• #1: Atari 2600 joystick: Featuring a simple stick mechanism for moving around and a red button for firing. It's not technically a gamepad, but it's so crucial to gaming history there's no way we couldn't mention it.
• #2: SNES controller: This exercise in ergonomics is a curvy, multi-coloured, multi-buttoned evolution of the angular NES controller. This was the first controller to have shoulder buttons -- a revolution that made an arcade staple like Street Fighter II a viable proposition in the home.
• #3: Nintendo 64 controller: This is one of the most important joypads ever produced. Not only did the N64's controller feature an analogue joystick, which made playing games such as GoldenEye realistic and subtle, but it also featured a pistol-like trigger button underneath.
• #4: PS2 controller: Nintendo may have started the analogue-stick-on-a-pad idea but Sony really took it to the bank. For many gamers, the DualShock gamepad is the best gamepad ever made. ... Having two analogue sticks meant you could play games in a completely different way to anything available before.
• #5: Xbox 360 controller: It was the first wireless pad to come as standard. Its comfy, solid design offers dual analogue joysticks and two analogue trigger buttons underneath. There's also a built-in jack for connecting a headset.

I'm surprised GameCube didn't make the list, I know a ton of people who claim it's the best controller ever made for the way it curves around your hand. Although its lack of symmetrical design can be annoying depending on what games you throw at it. I thought the PS2 had the best design by far for its time, but now that others have had time to perfect it, I actually like the Xbox 360 controller slightly more than the DualShock. I still can't get used to Sixaxis's weird trigger setup, and the Xbox 360 controller's simple curves and ability to turn your console on and off makes it the industry standard in my opinion.

Looking back over all the controllers ever made, which would you pick as your favorite?

Four months ago I confirmed this unbelievably obvious news: Square Enix probably won't have Final Fantasy XIII ready for a release before the end of this year. It was friggin' January then, and we all knew it already, but apparently there's still a lot of gamers who can't cope with this possibility:

"In fact, Wada says investors shouldn't expect the epic RPG until after their coming fiscal year, which means no Final Fantasy XIII in Japan until at least May 2008. North America will probably receive the game sometime in the fall of 2008."

There's no Square Enix enigma to unravel, they've got a lot of projects right now and Final Fantasy XIII is easily the most anticipated one of them all. And while we're on the topic of PlayStation 3 games people really want, Metal Gear Solid 4 is likely to not come out until March next year, so you can stop hoping for that game soon as well. It's called waiting, Nintendo gamers can tell you all about it.

A few years ago we had Read Dead Revolver, Gun, and a few other games re-exploring the wild west, and then killing Nazis became more cool and dead Indians went out of style once again. It's great how much politicians will moan about gangster games, but as long as the game's about textbook violence it's acceptable means of mindless murder with historic value. I loved Gun for the whole six hours it took to beat the game, I just wished it was longer. Riding through the hills and plains in search of gold, animals, and settlers in distress can only be done so many times before it gets boring, and the industry is nowhere near that limit.

Call of Jaurez is Ubisoft and Techland's revival of the ruthless wild west setting, and you play the same story from two different character point of views. Billy Candle grew up without a father and one day runs off in search of Aztec gold, leaving his mother and abusive stepfather behind. After two years of searching, Billy calls it quits and returns home, only to find his mother dead with "Call of Juarez" written above her body in blood. That's when Reverend Ray enters the story, and sees Billy standing above a dead woman and assumes the man to be the killer. Billy is filled with grief and fear, and runs away once again, and Ray is filled anger and disgust, and runs after Billy in religious rage.

With Billy Candle not knowing who his father is, I'm sure there will be a Luke-Vader ending scene, but it should at least be a bit more fleshed out than Gun's simple plot. Aside from a crappy interface, both the indoors and outdoors look immersive and engaging. Plus you can drive an arrow through your enemy's head for the most brutal headshot I've seen in a while. Call of Juarez also supports 16 person multiplayer shootouts, and it's only two weeks away from its June 5th American release for Xbox 360 and PC. This should be a great game to kick off the Summer with. Although, gamers in Australia must wait for the end of June, and Eurogamers won't get it until the end of August. The west is just too wild for you guys. Did the typical cowboy setting even exist in other continents? Cowboys on kangaroos would be so badass.

Hundreds of helicopters. Thousands of tanks. Endless amounts of explosions. And one cool holographic map to explore them all. With a setting of World War III it's hard to tell what military mumbo jumbo Tom Clancy will throw at us. With a lower over the shoulder camera, Ubisoft Shaghai plans to give us massive online multiplayer battles:

"A strategy game like no other, EndWar will allow gamers to lead their own armies against hundreds of others online in real global locations on the massive battlefields of World War III."

Built from the ground up for Xbox 360 and PS3, everything should look great, but EndWar also focuses heavily on sound. Their goal is to make voice commands dictate gameplay strategy just as much as your fingers can simultaneously control, which would offer an incredible online experience. Finally, the people swearing and shouting like lunatics will literally die off as their enemies just run in circles at their asinine commands.

I'd love to see a commercial where someone is bold enough to use the company phone line at work to call home and play the game while sitting in the office cubicle. All you would hear are typing keyboards and pages printing, and then it's interrupted with formation shout commands and orders to reload your guns. Everyone would stand up befuddled in curious fear for their lives, and then we'd see some in game explosions followed by a cut back to the office where a swat team has assembled in the office just as the gamer screams his war cry and yells "Fire the nukes!!" And then a quick and calm ending of "Rated T for teen, in stores everywhere on December 14th."

Here's a few images for extra ogling.

Last night was Ubisoft's Ubidays event, and more videos are starting to show up online. It won't be as dominating as Sony's Gamers Day event, but expect a few more videos. The trailer for Free Radical's Haze starts off with an emotional night scene, although this should go down as one of the cheapest plots of all time. You're in the future, your mom dies in a mysterious event, leaving your futuristic history a mystery, and then further in the future you join a mysterious fighting force, until you suddenly realize there's a lot of fucking mysteries in your life. That's pretty much what you'll read on the back of Haze's cover when it comes out this September for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. I'm always up for an excuse to use futuristic vehicles, weapons, and suits though, all I need is a decent gameplay video and count me in. Here's six brand new pictures to inspect.

Update: Ubisoft is reluctant to give away precise information, but Haze will either release for the PlayStation 3 this Fall before the Xbox 360 and PC releases in late 2007 or early 2008, or Haze may now be a PS3 exclusive.