By Gordon Elgart Do you remember classic brainteaser puzzles like the one where you have to put wolves and chickens on rafts, but only in certain combinations? Or the one where you have to draw things without picking up your pen, and without redrawing a line? Of course you do. Now, there’s a video game that features all of these puzzles, all wrapped into a story of lost treasure, murder, kidnapping, and other mysteries.......

Last week Numb3ers -- that Tiffany network show starring the reportedly-difficult-to-work-with Rob Morrow -- featured an Alternate-Reality Game (ARG) as a plot device. It turns out that this was an actual launch for an ARG, Chainfactor. The idea is this: a players find codes on l'Internets as well as in real world locales. Take, for example, the tip we got that a hidden code is hidden at one of the billboards or advertisements on......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

It would be so cool if the conductor replaced his baton with a wiimote at Play, a concert of video game music. The event features widely known songs from games in the Final Fantasy, Sonic, Zelda, and Mario universes, as well as slightly more dubious selections such as Chronicles of Riddick and Battlefield 1942. We can't say we've ever hummed along to anything from Morrowind, and the omission of Bubble Bobble is UNFORGIVEABLE, but we'll......

More mysterious criminal events in Fremont! This time, someone dropped a five-foot tall safe off a truck in the middle of the road. The safe had been pried open, revealing...... a collection of about 70 Star Wars action figures, still in their original packaging. Somewhere, a broken-hearted fan weeps. The yutz alert is on high after the horrific Virginia Tech tragedy: the UC Berkeley law student who posted a fake threat on a blog that......

When we were kids, we loved to play spy and hide behind trees with a water pistol to shoot one of our friends. Of course, some people would frown on that type of behavior because shooting people is kind of bad and violent and why can't we give peace a chance? So for those wishing to be a spy but do so in a nice way, this Friday will be the new and improved Cruel 2 B Kind game, the benevolent assassination game. It's taking place this Friday at 7:30 in SOMA. It's like those assassin games you hear about, except with good vibes....

A 21-year-old trainjumping transient from Portland fell out of a Union Pacific train that she and her rottweiler were hitching a ride on. The train was in Benicia and moving at about 50 mph at the time she and the dog fell out -- but she died not from any injury from the fall but rather, from drowning in the shallow puddle in which she landed. The dog was injured too, but they have no......

Cold? This?! Quit complaining. It's not so cold out there. At least you're not being chased by pissed-off giant insects on a ruined planet that's colder than ice-cold. Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition drops today for Xbox 360, bringing its third-person alien-cappin' happy fun time to y'all....

It's January 1, and here are the best things from the last 365 days....

Last night SFist actually braved leaving their apartment and went out to Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions Launch Party. Because whenever somebody offers us free drinks, we're there. Plus, launch parties are pretty fun in that you can play video games without feeling like an anti-social loser. So what does a launch party look like? And how good is the game? Well, after the jump, we got more photos and SFist Christopher has a brief review of the game....

Man, if you want to go drag-racing, don't kill members of a royal family -- the 18-year-old suspect burst into tears after a judge in San Mateo County refused to lower her bail from $3 million. The DA was unmoved, saying, "Highway 101 is not a video game and it's not a racetrack." That's right -- that's what 280 is. A rash of bomb threats! Yesterday, the Hall of Justice was evacuated and the bomb......

Our usual movie companion loves pinball with a burning passion. A burning passion! So all week, it's been like, "When do we get to see the pinball movie? When do we get to see the pinball movie?" Well, yesterday was the day, and our movie companion eagerly dragged us down 16th Street to the homey digs of the Li'l Roxie for DocFest's second showing of The Future of Pinball. The Future of Pinball is about......

Last week's winner, the Metro! Hilarious letter from a candidate for the SJ city council that 1) misspells Ron Gonzales's name and 2) gets the date of the election wrong. (Hey Metro, why aren't your letters online?) Gary Singh had a bitch of a time trying to get a burrito in SJ on May 1. Closing down the jailhouse law libraries, and no, the SJ Fourth Street Bowl will not be closing. Chinese youth orchestra......

Last week's winner, the Guardian (which now has no pictures of the current cover on its site for us to use to illustrate this post -- this is a picture from Sonic Reducer): How Tim Redmond set up wifi in his home. Robert Haaland, subject of the latest poorly-scanning Joe O'Donoghue poem, pens an op-ed on the Gap. Background on the (now-averted) school strike. Doesn't Janet Reilly kind of look like Tori Spelling? [picture is......

SFist interviews Chuck Jordan...

Our holiday horn of plenty continues to ejaculate forth yummy gift goodies -- this time, you've got a shot at winning a DVD of "Zatch Bell," a new (for US audiences) anime series, released for North American consumption by San Francisco's own Viz Media. What works well in Japan sometimes doesn't exactly translate over here. "Zatch Bell" passed its hundred-episode mark overseas, but it's made a much more modest splash stateside. The story concerns......

Now appearing 50% more often! San Francisco is not particularly happy with Sony right now. Law Geek Jason Schultz explains the rootkit fiasco to Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel of GETV, and while talented graffitti writers continue to be harrassed by the SFPD, Sony has no trouble spraypainting our town with 'viral' ads for the PSP. In other video game action, Electronic Arts is getting sued for stealing an idea for an independent game......

Josh Wolf captures the one, the only Frank Chu on tape. Listen and learn, people. Harder to capture is reclusive local author Laura Albert JT LeRoy. Also at large is the motherf**ker who vandalized Farmer John's coastside teepee. A former Seattle Chief of Police writes a column in the LA Times about legalization. Split the difference and we arrive at San Francisco's general opinion. Speaking of libertarians, Cal Berkeley's Republican rag the California Patriot......

Realtor-slash-blogger Matt Lanning points up a new information site, San Francisco Bay Window, for that rare beast known as a San Francisco homeowner. Hey, it's free to dream, right? Cheesecake Factory employees dreamed of being able to take breaks, and now their dream has come true. The video game industry is none too happy about Arnold Schwarzenegger signing Leland Yee's bill restricting minors from purchasing 'mature' titles -- the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association is......

Boy, have we got some bad Cow Hollow ideas for you! Have you guys been following the whole "turning Fillmore Street into a ski slope" thing? So Icer Event Management has decided to shave enough ice (12,000 cubic feet of it) on Aug 27 to turn Fillmore Street from Broadway to Green Street (and Vallejo from Steiner and Webster) into ski jumps. (A 14 foot lane will be left open for emergency vehicles and for people who live there to get home.) This is all for Jonny Mosely's 30th birthday, and to film footage for a video game. Hilarious! But wait -- it gets even better! Wait until you hear how everyone's reacting! There's a Hindu temple on that stretch of Fillmore -- and right outside their meditation room, the event planners are setting up the apres-ski lounge, sponsored by Otis. What's more: the monks don't drink. The Pac Heights neighborhood association isn't very happy either, especially because the weekend right after the skiing one, the Grand Prix is coming into town next. "People are incredibly disrespectful of private property at these events. It's a real intrusion. We view this in the same class as street fairs," fumes the neighborhood associate president. (Aw, come on, everyone loves a street fair!) They've tried protesting to (hottest supervisor") Michela Alioto-Pier, but she's told them there's nothing she can do, because the ski people have already gotten all the necessary permits. The ski people are slightly confused by the reaction. "We really, really do not want to upset the neighborhood," the organizer told the Chron. "This thing is going to be done well and in a first-class way." And -- here's our absolute favorite part -- "We want to show San Francisco as an exciting place to visit, as opposed to a place with a lot of homeless." What goes on up there North of Market??? ...

Sometimes, video games journalists seem vaguely Colbert-ish: earnest, confident, utterly out of touch. (Case in point: G4's "Judgment Day," with the slogan "all verdicts are final" -- oooh, the verdicts are final, OMG, they're totally the new Judge Judy.) But we're cautiously optimistic about "Reset," a new gaming news/lifestyle show, locally produced by Big Love Productions. Anchors include trustworthy fragdoll Kat Hunter (whose work SFist likes) and Raymond Padilla (whom we don't know, but......

Having recuperated from a recent bout of baseball-related mathematiasis, SFist comes to you this fine Monday afternoon from sunny Denver bearing a first-hand report of yesterday's Giants/Rockies finale at Coors Field, along with a look back at the Giants' performance in past week and a peek ahead at the week to come. The story so far for this year, with the Giants leading the Majors with .305 team batting average but languishing at 15th in......

EA Games got James Caan and Robert Duvall to reprise their Godfather roles, lending their likenesses and voice talent to a new video game based on the movie franchise. Lest we forget, EA Games has also come under fire lately for allegedly overworking its employees....

You know your movie stinks when even SFist, worshipper of all things crap, watches the trailer to your movie and thinks we're watching a substandard parody. Such was the case when we saw a commercial for Alone in the Dark, a movie which has a detective played by (recently seperated) Christian Slater going to a place called Shadow (freakin') Island. We laugh, but it's actually the latest installment in an empire that includes a video......

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion: Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for......

And the saga continues. Electronic Arts seems to have pissed off one too many geeks, and now that this story has gone public details are beginning to emerge that don't look good for the world's leading video game maker. San Francisco's Schubert & Reed LLP will be representing an unknown number of employees in a class action lawsuit that contends Electronic Arts had wrongly classified a large number of artists and developers as exempt from......

We haven't read the bios of every candidate for the Board of Supervisors (hell, there are twenty-two of them in District Five alone and we have a lot of other things to do - like studying all the propositions) but we are pretty sure that only one can claim to being an ex-yoga teacher. Or a sitcom writer. And that candidate would be David Pascal of District 2. His resume so far includes running the......

Citius, Altius, Fortius -- and Kotaku? What's being styled as the Gamer's Olympics, the finals of the World Cyber Games, are set to kick off tomorrow. Seven hundred video game players representing 62 countries, out of over a million who started out in the prelims, will converge on the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco to play an array of video games for medals and (more saliently) cash prizes totaling $425,000.......

Esseffist is not the biggest football fan in the world, but we definitely love video games. And while many have tried, nobody is taking John Madden Football's spot in the starting lineup. With their release of Madden 2005, Redwood City based Electronic Arts celebrates fifteen years of making the best-selling video game of all time. That's right - last year's version grossed as much sales as the movie Shrek (which was made nearby at Palo Alto's Pacific Data Images), and this year it promises to be even bigger. The Chron gave it the top rating - jumping, clapping dude. Esseffist is looking forward to putting Marcus Tuiasosopo in at quaterback and running the option behind Robert Gallery....