That Guy With the Glasses reviews one of the best game shows of all time: Nickelodeon’s “Double Dare.” He even comes up with lyrics to the show’s theme song.

I’ve always been a fan of game shows. This was very evident when I was a kid; I had home versions of some of the most popular TV games of the day.

When I got my own Nintendo Entertainment System, I naturally acquired a couple of game show titles. Of the ones I owned, the majority were produced by GameTek, which has since gone the way of the dodo. The instruction manuals that came with GameTek’s titles often listed forthcoming titles on the last page. Alas, few of them ever came to be. “The Price is Right” was one of those vaporware titles.

So here we are some 20 years later, and today I found out that a “Price” video game will now be a reality. Ubisoft will release their take on the ubiquitous game show tomorrow for Nintendo’s DS and Wii, and on DVD-ROM for Windows and Mac.

Entertainment magnate Merv Griffin passed away this weekend. He is known for his eponymous talk show, which ran off and on between 1962 and 1986; and creating two of America’s most popular and longest running game shows, “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”

(For some reason, I thought he already passed.)

These are my links for 18 Jun:

• Daily Blog Tips - You don?t need to know much about SEO to realize links are the golden road to blog promotion.
• Fluther: Tap the Collective - A new twist on social question and answer sites.
• 25 Web Sites to Watch - The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.
• The great iPhone hunt of 2007 | CNET News.com - Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently gave free advice to a columnist asking how to get an iPhone when they go on sale: head to an AT&T store, Jobs suggested, rather than Apple’s own retail outlets.
• Mozilla exec calls Apple’s Safari plan ‘duopolistic’ - Mozilla’s chief operating officer, John Lilly, is calling Steve Jobs’ plans for building Safari’s market share “out of date” and “duopolistic.”
• Dell apologizes for remove-this-blog-post-or-else nastygram | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - A blog post at Consumerist.com offering tips on buying from Dell drew a nasty cease-and-desist letter from the company’s attorney and then, in quick succession, a chastened apology from a Dell manager.
• Microwave popcorn warning memo - Unedited memo sent out to City of Seattle employees.
• 15 Best Game Show Hosts - TIME Magazine ranks 15 best game show hosts; Bob Barker comes out on top.

Gadzooks! Over a week ago, Frankie tagged me for a meme of sorts… and I only now saw it. Better late than never, eh?

Apparently, I’m to list ten random-yet-interesting things about myself, and then tag ten other bloggers to do the same. Hmm. Okay. Well, I’ll oblige on the list part, but not on the tagging part; the majority of the people I would have have already been. Since I’ve got some time to kill before dinner, what the hell?

1. I was once on a game show called “Video Power.” The object was to get the highest score in a particular video game — mine was “Battletoads” — to advance to the next round and ultimately win the game. The show was divided into four rounds: rounds one and three were spent actually playing the game; round two was a trivia round; and the fourth round was the bonus round, where the day’s winner could run through a maze to collect as many prizes — mostly video games — as possible. I was eliminated after the first round; it’s hard to play a game when there’s a massive glare on the screen from the overhead lights.
2. Prior to my “Video Power” appearance, I serendipitously wound up appearing on a Nickelodeon variety show, “Outta Here.” Sitting in an end seat in the on stage audience afforded me the opportunity to play a game at center stage. I forget who the hosts were, but the audience warm-up was some guy named Greg Lee. I hear he hooked up with some thief named Carmen.
3. I once auditioned to be one of the kids who reviews books on “Reading Rainbow.” I was passed over. To my amazement, that show’s still in production.
4. Before I started balding, I went through a variety of hairstyles, including beyond-shoulder-length, blonde, and that sort-of trendy thing where I wore a baseball cap backwards and had curved spikes of hair sticking out just so.
5. I designed (and sometimes printed) every program for the National Capital Area Scottish Festival, an annual fund raiser for my high school’s pipe band, from the last ten years. I helped raise the bar for them by expanding the program from a single sheet deal to a 12- to 20-page publication complete with ads, original graphics, and on two or three occasions, full color covers. After this year’s festival, I decided this would be my last program.
6. I also launched the high school pipe band’s website back in 1997, a year after I graduated. In the seven years I ran the site, the site won a couple of minor awards among pipe band website circles. At the time, the site blew other pipe band sites out of the water with its professional look and frequent updates.
7. I lettered in pipe band my junior year of high school. The following year, I not only lettered again (You get stars after your first letter.), but was named band member of the year.
8. When I started college, I intended to go into journalism as a profession.
9. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I still play with Lego blocks.
10. I’m a fervent believer in the notion that a classic never dies. It’s why I still wear Chucks and play with my Super NES, which is in wonderful condition for its age.

So, there you have it: 10 things that may or may not be interesting about me. Hopefully, I won’t miss being tagged for things in the future, especially now that I (Finally!) got around to setting up RSS feeds in an aggregator that doesn’t offer a crappy user experience.

I’ve been a Jeopardy! fan for a long time, but I don’t watch it very often. I turned it on the other day and half-assedly watched until the final round. The Final Jeopardy! category was “Play & Film Titles,” and I was particularly amused when Alex Trebek read the clue. Check out the video below; if you’ve kept up with this blog in the last month or two, you’ll see why I was so amused.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Reading this entry on LiveJournal and can’t see the video? Click here.

Over the weekend, the mate bought me a refurbished PlayStation 2 plus two games. Yes, it took me long enough to get it — blah, blah, blah. This is the first new (to me) console system I received in about 15 years.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was an avid gamer and, admittedly, a Nintendo loyalist. I owned their three major platforms of the era: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Super NES, and the Game Boy.

I also found myself to be the owner of a rather uncomfortable affliction, which I called “Nintendo Thumb” at the time. (I now call it “Gamer’s Thumb Syndrome (GTS),” as it’s obviously not a Nintendo-specific problem. But as I said, I was a Nintendo loyalist then.)

GTS is the soreness that develops as a result of using a video game controller for extended periods of time, particularly directional pads and other small, poorly designed buttons.

Using the NES controller, I only experienced GTS on the left thumb. The red A and B buttons on the right side were concave and therefore distributed pressure to more of my right thumb’s surface, reducing the chance that a minute spot would become sore and/or potentially calloused.

In the very early ’90s, someone came up with a potential solution: padding for your thumbs. To that end, Hot Gloves were invented. Hot Gloves were fingerless (except for the thumb), day-glo colored gloves with extra padding in the thumbs. I received a pair of these prior to my appearance on the short-lived game show Video Power; they were a decidedly bright shade of neon green.

I couldn’t really say if they worked well or not. The gloves I got were a bit small for my chunky hands, and I think I gave them to my cousin as a souvenir. He was in the audience for my taping.

So, now I’m once again in the market for something that will relive my symptoms of GTS. Sadly, I don’t think they make hot gloves anymore, much less in my size.