Recently on Offworld

Recently on Offworld, with a few weeks of Nintendo's excellent DS rhythm game Rhythm Heaven under belt, Lisa Katayama told us what the game has to teach us about otaku culture, while MIT professor Henry Jenkins talks with two former students about what The Legend of Zelda can teach us about morality & philosophy.

We also took a quick look into the latest game in the Nintendo's WarioWare franchise that will put all its chaotic potential directly into the hands of the players by letting them design and trade their own micro-games online, and learned more about finely tuning a zombie-onslaught in Left 4 Dead's forthcoming Survival Mode DLC.

Elsewhere, we saw that the world's finest games festival -- Nottingham, UK's yearly GameCity fest -- will be returning in October and will now be free for all, watched the original Metroid composer play his music live, saw the best Mario writing utensil never made, and read the wryly funniest Craigslist ad we've seen in some time, as one enterprising poster offers "Tetris lessons at affordable rates."

Finally, we saw that the fantastic retro art exhibit Famicase -- which imagines 8-bit Nintendo games never made -- would be returning to Japan in May (above, the pick of Famicase 2008), watched one man discover just how disorienting the holodeck-future will be inside EON Reality's immersive 3D room, and, in a sentence no one ever imagined anyone would be typing, saw one man's attempt to bring Matthew Barney's arthouse cinema series Cremaster to the world of LittleBigPlanet.