Located in San Francisco's Mission District, where the trendy mingle with the low-income (or at least cross paths), the swank Foreign Cinema is playing host to the West Coast's Halo 3 event tonight. Much like our friends out East, we've got a few open bars, lots of random milling around with other game writers, and tiny, fancy hors d'eouvres. (You know the only thing better than mini-hamburgers? Regular-sized hamburgers!)

People who got to the event early or rushed the multiplayer area after check-in landed a spot with a 360 controller and a giant HDTV. And they're still going strong, hours into the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. The rest of us (read: losers) are getting to know how many drinks it takes our neighbors before they start leaking... secrets. San Francisco has played host to several individual game events in this anniversary of E3, and the assembled crowd is a who's who of gaming dorks journalists.

Partially confirming last week's rumor, the Seattle Times is reporting that the sales, advertising and marketing divisions for Nintendo of America, totaling about 80 people, will be moved to either New York City or San Francisco. Meanwhile, the rest of NoA headquarters will remain in Redmond.

The decision is being seen as a replacement for earlier plans to expand its Redmond, WA offices an additional 550,000 square feet. According to Jim Roberts, deputy planning director for the city of Redmond speaking to the Seattle Times, though NoA had the proposal ready to go before the city council for approval, executives said that they needed final approval from the company's Japanese headquarters. "For one reason or another, it's been well over a year that we've been waiting for them to proceed," he said.

Nintendo is reportedly looking to sell the aforementioned 550,000 square feet of property; one real estate broker suggested that adjacent company Microsoft might consider purchasing the land. Now wouldn't that make for an interesting change of hands?

It took a good four minutes to traverse roughly half the line that circled a whole city block around the Moscone center's South Hall. We know your time is important, though, so we sped the above up to double speed.

I played Pirates of the Caribbean Online at a media gathering last week; this post describes the event put on to keep us journalists entertained. While Capcom has thrown its share of parties -- publishers often dangle shiny objects to draw us journalists in -- Disney Online tied its in-game sword-fighting to a real-life fencing event.

Any event like this has food. (The tasty plantains paid dual tribute to the Caribbean of said online pirates and the largely Latino location of San Francisco's Mission District.) Beyond our stomachs, Disney Online tried to impress us with various props used in the movies, hidden behind glass cases, safely away from our greasy fingers. But the real spectacle was that they thought it'd be a good idea to give us all swords and let us spastically fight each other.

Okay, it was a little more controlled than that because the event was held at the Golden Gate Fencing Center. Olympic coach, Mike Pederson literally said that he didn't want any of our eyes on the ends of our swords. (I assume they're hard to clean off.) We all worked to live up to that goal, but our legal waiver aimed much lower.

Aspyr Media and Macworld magazine hosted their seventh annual MacBowl contest Thursday night. The Macworld Expo tradition pits Mac companies against each other while raising money through team fees for the San Francisco Unified School District.

This year's competition raised $24,000, while the total -- including previous years -- reached $146,000 donated to local schools. Mac gaming companies have historically been big team sponsors, although this year's limited gaming presence left just Freeverse and Aspyr with event teams, while Microsoft, Elgato, and many others fielded competitors.

Not enough bling in your pocket and want to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for free? Now you can. If you sign up to be a conference associate, you'll get a full Giga pass with privileges when you're not working (an $1850 value).

You'll be taking part in helping the conference run, and working extremely non-demanding jobs like:

A current Travelers Insurance TV commercial liberally borrows from Katamari Damacy, showing a ball of, well, stuff bouncing down San Francisco's hills. You could say Fallon, the ad agency behind the spot, ripped off Katamari, but we like the commercial enough to let that slide. We'll call it an homage, imitation being flattery and all.

The commercial opens with a guy -- let's call him Everyman -- walking down the sidewalk. He's on a hill in the overcast outskirts of the city, maybe in the Avenues or closer to Twin Peaks. For no apparent reason, other than eventually trying to sell insurance, he trips, and begins rolling down the street. Like Katamari, he runs into some people and boxes, picking up size until the ball eventually gets big enough to gather cars and trees.

The ball bounces through the city -- always downhill except once on even ground -- through Pacific Heights and the Fillmore, gathering motorcycles in Nob Hill, picking up a heterosexual marriage -- we have those sometimes -- in Delores Park or a similar green space, flying down California Street or an equally car-chase-laden road, and eventually crashing into a columned downtown building with a name we can't quite remember. We wish we could ride a katamari across the city; it's a record commute time.

Is it a rip-off of Katamari, and do you care if your hobby becomes a commercial? Or did Fallon just have Katamari-of-the-mind? Immersive games have changed our way of looking at the world, like if we notice a drainpipe on the outside of a building and think of climbing it, Splinter Cell-style. Carmageddon also rewired our minds for a few weeks, urging us to crash the family truckster into a van. (We restrained). And Katamari has changed the way we think about space; we often imagine rolling up our surroundings. What, you don't?

The full commercial is embedded after the break.

See also: Roddick takes on Pong in ad

[Thanks, Daniel Premo]

Former cellmates Nullsleep and Bitshifter have announced plans to embark on a world tour, blasting their blend of bleeps, bloops, and blizzasts from Boston to Brussels and back again.

If you're not an 8-bit believer yet, nothing will win you over except trying it out for yourself. To that end, here are links (1, 2, 3, 4) to some MP3s these torturers of Gameboys, Famicoms and other old-school video game consoles have kindly provided for downloading.

If you like what you hear, check the tour page and maybe even drop a few dollars in the donation bucket to help make it happen.