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.......

For those of you into gaming, or at least like to blow off some steam with your Wii (tee hee), we found out through Gamingbits.com that San Francisco will be one of the sites of the US Super Smash Bros. Brawl Tournaments. Fanboys and fangirls, commence with your tears of joy. Tournaments will be held in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, with the winners of each city going to finals in New York.......

We already decided to only leave the house for essentials this weekend, like liquor and toothpaste, so we were thrilled to stumble upon one last 'best of' list for 2007. Craftster, the hub for all things handmade has compiled the most comprehensive list of the best craft projects from 2007. A bonus of this forum-based site is that most crafters post step-by-step instructions and photos for making the projects they list. We're bookmarking this......

Meet the biker of the year....

Never having been huge fans of instrumental music, we were taken by surprise when we listened to Maserati's latest record Inventions For The New Season. Their own entertaining bio describes the music as a "post-psychedelic orgy of hooks molesting the tired cliche of math-prog" and/or "a post-disco drone machine bristling with the buzz-saw sound of 1,000 angry square waves nestled on a California king size bed of shoegaze swirl." We like to think of the......

According to Game Informer Online, Nintendo of America may be relocating -- and one of the rumoured destination cities is right here in San Francisco. More employment opportunities are always good, especially establsihed companies that can bring some economic stability -- not to mention fun aspects like more local video-game testing opportunities....

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary......

We in the labs like to make fun of San Francisco, but if there's one good thing about SF, it's that it's not LA. The videogame trade show E3 is going on this week down in the City of Miserable Angels, and we're very happy to be skipping this year and not having to deal with the smog and money and sweat and desperation. Of course, we're still scouring the internets for any hint......

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is so close you can almost taste the LA smog and the tangy sweat of desperation. In honor of that, this week's round-up is all videogame-related news. Nintendo gave bloggers-who-think-they're-funny a present on Thursday by announcing the new name for their upcoming Revolution console (warning: slow-loading Flash site). It's going to be called "Wii." Seriously. With a "distinctive ii spelling" that's pronounced like "we," "wee," "oui," and "Wheee!" Early buzz......

Tech news you should be interested in this week: Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its Vista operating system won't be released until January of next year (link from CNet news.com). Office 2007 is also delayed to come out in tandem with the new OS. PC manufacturer Dell bought gamer-targeted manufacturer Alienware (link from Ars Technica). Alienware will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and at least at the moment, Dell continues to sell......

We were just kicking back to watch our new Mac mini-based PVR announced at last month's MacWorld Expo, until we realized that it doesn't exist. This isn't meant as just an accusation of ThinkSecret.com's "sources," just a cautionary tale: there's the truth, there's what rumor sites confirm will happen, and every once in a while, they're the same thing. The rumor that started circulating last week is that Apple's new for-real-no-really-it's-happening-this-time-we-swear video iPod is......

I'm opening my Christmas gift from SFist now: the opportunity to write without the editorial "we" and with opinions I don't have to disguise with any pretense of objectivity (or being entirely San Francisco- or technology-related). Here are my picks for the best of 2005 and what I'm looking forward to in 2006: Best Gadget of 2005 The iPod Nano. As pernicious as my gadget fetish is, I still get more than a little......

Ah, is there no more universal gesture for our youth than sticking in a cartridge, getting a flashing grey screen, then pulling the cartridge back out and repeatedly blowing into it until Contra finally agrees to boot up? Modern gamers might seem a bit insular and antisocial at times, cooped up in the house with their polygon counts and tethered to wifi for FFXI; but the monthly meetings of the Bay Area 8-Bitters Fun......

We seem to recall Laurie Anderson pwning similar tech in the 80s, but The Lab (that nifty art/performance space in the Mission) is going to be showcasing some cutting-edge audio performance equipment that feels like it's straight out of a sci-fi novel. Michael Waisvisz and Robert van Heumen of STEIM (an Amsterdammish audio-performance-concocting center) demonstrate LiSa X and JunXion, software that creates "a sound field in the computer, where the performer can record and......