Oh, here there! Welcome to Press Start! The only weekly..uh, biweekly, uh…semi-regular…maybe…column about video games. In theory, this pig is a weekly column counting down the top five things in video games from the prior seven days. However, as of late I’ve been jackknife powerbombed by the real world, and I totally slipped off the map.

For those who (don’t care), you’ll find this son of a bitch regularly on Saturdays from now on. Enough with the bureaucratic bullshit. Let’s dance.

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#1: Microsoft Tried To Get In Conan’s Pants.
Remember last year when Conan threw up the deuces and left NBC after Chin McFuckerton took back his old time spot? Of course you do. This week an interesting little morsel came out of that news: Conan was wooed by Microsoft. Yes sir, they tried to get the grand ‘ole Irish bastard onto Xbox Live. Imagine that shit! I don’t know if that would have been a Biblical sized bomb, or a watershed moment. Last week executive producer of the Conan show, Jeff Ross, shed some light on the whole thing:

Ross said it was “interesting to sit and look at it,” Microsoft’s proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that “a lot of the conversations were, ‘Well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes – it’s this,’ and nobody really knew what it was.”

“So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know,” Ross said, later reiterating that “we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing].”

While it doesn’t seem practical at this juncture, I can imagine something like this heading down the road. Not necessarily on Microsoft Live, but why not online? As the integration of your televisions-computers-phones-video game systems march to the inevitable point where we have hardware in our head that projects digital hallucinations, something whacky like this shit is a given down the road. In my fanboy fantasies.

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#2: Legend Of Zelda Imagined As Hughes’ Movie.
A group of enterprising people have answered the question you’ve probably never asked: what would Legend of Zelda look like if it was shot as a John Hughes movie? I’m going to level with you; I’ve only watched a good three minutes of the five minute video. Why the fuck am I posting it then? I find the concept endearing. I’m a sucker for coming of age flicks, and goddamn it if I didn’t come of age while working through Ocarina of Time. My balls were all a-twitter for Sheik, and even though it was released markedly earlier, I enjoyed myself some Breakfast Club.

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#3: Kevin Butler Retweets The PS3 Root Key.
I used to think the Kevin Butler PS3 commercials were pretty fucking funny. They certainly dragged the PS3 marketing campaign out of some weird, abstract, pseudo-minimalistic realm and put a human face on them. It Only Does: Everything? Cool enough. At this point however, Butler has overstayed his welcome. Case in point: “Butler” has a Twitter account.

With this in mind, I was amused this week when everything went awry on said account.

Last month, the PS3 was cracked open and its soul, its root key was released to the public. Since then, hackers have been able to dance on Sony’s filthy Corporate corpus, and entire thing has been amusing to watch from afar. This week a Twitter peep Travis La Marr tweeted the root key at this Butler character. Understandably, whoever the fuck maintains the account had no fucking clue what the numbers and letters meant. I mean fuck, I wouldn’t have. Butler retweets them shits, and BOOM!, a whole good shitload of his followers were greeted with the PS3’s soul.

Well done.

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Well, all right. He wasn’t almost on Xbox Live, but Microsoft and Conan’s team were discussing the possibility.

Joystiq:

During the “Hollywood Creative Masters” session at CES last month, the executive producer of Conan O’Brien’s show, Jeff Ross, spoke on last April’s  short-lived rumor of talks to relaunch the show on a proposed Xbox Live channel (before the deal was made to bringConan to TBS), reports  Gamasutra contributor Chris Morris (who moderated the CES session). While Ross said it was “interesting to sit and look at it,” Microsoft’s proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that “a lot of the conversations were, ‘Well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes — it’s this,’ and nobody really knew what it was.”

“So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know,” Ross said, later reiterating that “we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing].”

Imagine if this shit came to fruition? My asshole would have burst out of its confines, splattering the walls in confusion.