Here at the Mercury, we have a somewhat interesting history with Donkey Kong master Billy Mitchell.

Actually, screw it. I’d write more of an intro to this, but like I could ever write anything half as amazing as the pearls of wisdom Billy Mitchell tosses off with little to no effort. Brave your way through the annoying G4 commentary here, and you’ll see what I mean.

Billy Mitchell is the best.

One of my favorite videogame franchises is the Oddworld series—a fantastically smart, inventive, and fun series of games that, frankly, I thought were over, defunct, kaput, dead. (The Oddworld games are also beautiful—warranting, even, a book collecting the artwork from the series.) But yeah, a few years ago, the developer of the Oddworld games, Oddworld Inhabitants, basically shut their doors; nobody knew what was to become of them, but signs didn’t look good. (The most recent Oddworld game—the excellent but depressingly underrated Stranger’s Wrath—didn’t do too well, leading to Oddworld Inhabitants’ frustratingly vague closure/refocusing/whatever it was.)

But now we have the unexpected news that there’s a new Oddworld game happening, so all is right with the world.

And there’s more unexpected good news: A game that was similar to the Oddworld series in all the right ways (rampant creativity, an engaging story, well-conceived gameplay, a gorgeous art style) was Beyond Good & Evil—which, sadly, was also similar to Stranger’s Wrath in all the wrong ways (i.e., nobody played it). Those who did play Beyond Good & Evil loved it, though, and so all is even more right with the world with Ubisoft’s promise of Beyond Good and Evil 2.

I play games a lot, but I also find myself burning out on them fairly regularly—at times, it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm for gaming, thanks to a constant deluge of unneeded sequels and creepy war simulators and shameless rehashes. But every once in a while, clever, original stuff like Portal or Bioshock or Beyond Good & Evil or one of the Oddworld games will pop up and remind me just how vibrant and unique and potent games can be.

Teaser trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2 is below.

Next time you need to relive yourself in Belgium, try to find a Place To Pee booth. It’s billed as the “Ultimate Urinating Experience!” This ingenious urinal combines the joy and relaxation of a long whiz, with the thrill and excitement of a video game!

Two side by side urinals are connected to video screens that are connected to a gaming system that offers a variety of entertainment options (including “Pee to Ski,” natch). Players control the games by aiming their flow at two sensors set inside the urinal bowl. Players can play with themselves… er… excuse me… by themselves, or they can go “head to head” (HA!) with the guy beside them.

There is a trick, of course. In order to play the game you need a full bladder and a strong stream of urine. Oh, and a penis. Apparently, attempts to include women in a Place To Pee by providing special paper funnels has been met with a resounding, “eeewwwwwwww.”

Here’s the video (yes, video) from Rueters!

“I though I had peed before, but since I used this cabinet I realize that I have never really peed before.”

Thank you, Mr. Drunken Belgian Man. Thank you.

One would think after my many years in the “writing” business, I would become a proficient and speedy typist. One would be WRONG. While generally accurate, my typing speed is more akin to a dope huffing hippie with six broken fingers. And I’m not being self-deprecating, because my theory was just soundly proven at the addictively fun site, TypeRacer.

The objective is simple enough: Who can type the fastest? You can either race against yourself to see what your WPM is, invite a friend to race against you, or race against others at random! The high scores are posted on the site, but what’s really fun is that you’re typing phrases and selections from cool books —such as Stephen Colbert’s I am Amercia (and So Can You)— and even movies like Blade Runner. FYI, the current high score on the site is 210 words per minute. Mine is somewhat less than that… like if you divided it by four.

Try it—it’s fun!

Bioshock is a pretty great game—smart and scary and gorgeous and original—and according to Variety, now it’s getting the movie treatment.

Unlike most videogame movies, though, it sounds like this one might not be terrible, and unlike Peter Jackson’s Halo clusterfuck, it sounds like this one might actually get made. Bioshock’s set to be directed by Gore Verbinski (who’s most famous for the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, but whose The Weather Man showed he could do smaller, less blockbustery stuff pretty well) and written by John Logan, who wrote Gladiator, Sweeney Todd, and that one lousy Star Trek movie about Picard’s eeeevil clone.

Bioshock takes place in an underwater city based on the free market principles of Ayn Rand, but things have gone disastrously wrong. Players control a pilot who crash-lands at a secret entrance to the city, called Rapture, and is drawn into a power struggle during which he discovers that his will is not as free as he’d thought.

“I think the whole utopia-gone-wrong story that’s cleverly unveiled to players is just brimming with cinematic potential,” said Verbinski. “Of all the games I’ve played, this is one that I felt has a really strong narrative.”

Ditto on that: Bioshock’s concept and story is incredibly strong and innovative, and while I know it’s foolhardy to get excited about any videogame-to-film translation, I’m still finding myself cautiously optimistic about the potential radness of a Bioshock flick. The full story is here, and you can go here and here for more.

Yeah. You read that right. Half a billion. By way of Kotaku and the Times comes word that Grand Theft Auto IV made $500 million in its first week of release, easily becoming the biggest media launch of… well, ever. (It obliterated the record, too: Halo 3, the previous record-holder, made $300 million in its first week, and to put things in perspective, Iron Man—a huge summer blockbuster if there ever was one—has “only” made a little over $200 million worldwide since its release on Friday.)

Granted, the game’s publisher, Take-Two, didn’t need to sell as many copies of the game as a movie would have to sell tickets in order to get to that astounding number—a copy of GTA IV comes in at $60, while movie tickets are around $10. But still, holy shit. This is just mind-boggling; no fewer than six million copies have been sold so far—3.5 of those on launch day alone.

I like to think of myself as someone who’s fairly up-to-date with videogame stuff*—that I appreciate how culturally significant games currently are, and that I have at least an halfway solid notion about how much more important they’re going to become. All the same, when numbers like these rise up and reinforce just what a huge pop cultural force gaming (and gamers) can be, I’m still kind of astounded.

And the game is just as excellent as Nex says it is, by the way. I’ve been playing it whenever I get a spare minute over the past week, and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Apparently, I’m not alone.

Also, I guess we should all start preparing for the apocalypse, if GTA IV’s critics are to be believed—with this many copies of the game out there, there’s no doubt anarchic lawlessness and brutal violence will soon take over our fine country, decimating the lives of good, upstanding Americans. PANIC!

*I also like to think of myself as a spaceship pilot, or sometimes a dinosaur! ROAR!

Even though they have like a billion other M-rated games on full view in their display case, Fred Meyer is keeping their copies of Grand Theft Auto IV behind the counter—meaning if you want to pick up a copy, you have to go up and ask them for one, kind of shamefully, as if you’re buying porn or something. It’s a weird feeling, and an unexpectedly shame-inducing one—upon purchasing the verboten game, you feel as if you’re now an unseemly character with fraying and/or neglected moral fiber, the sort of base, lowly person who requests only the most lurid of entertainments, who insists on purchasing merchandise that must be kept out of view from the general public.

In related news, we’ll have Earnest “Nex” Cavalli’s review of the game in Thursday’s Mercury. The short version: Go pick up a copy.

Grand Theft Auto is one of the few post-Super Mario Brothers 1 videogames that I have actually played, but it still took a little ‘splaining on the part of my colleague Erik Henriksen to convince me that Karl Lagerfeld’s involvement in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 4 doesn’t mean you can play as the famously eccentric Chanel designer, running around smashing car windows and such (kind of a bummer, actually). Instead you can play the game to “DJ Karl“‘s soundtrack (he’s an avid music fan and collector), leaving the criminal acts to the game’s main protagonist. Still, it’s a testament to Grand Theft as more than mere video game that they cast such a wide net to diverse corners of the current culture, creating a kind of snapshot of the times. Look for Earnest “Nex” Cavalli’s review of the game in an upcoming issue of the Mercury.

LAGERFELD: not that I couldn’t picture him smashing car windows.

Talk about memories! Mighty God King hit up some yard sales this past weekend, and came back with some choice classic Atari games—such as Gay French Mario Brothers, Wild and Groovy Moon Combat, Old Timey Cop with a Stick, Motorbike Kid vs. the Hot Rod Menace, It’s Fucking Checkers, and… WAIT JUST A GODDAMN SECOND!

See many, many more re-imagined games HERE!

Hypothetical question: Let’s say a friend of mine wanted to play bingo. She is a big fan of troll dolls and Elvis bingo markers. I, er, she is really jonesing for a game. Where would she go? Sunday at Thatcher’s maybe? Anywhere else?