Riley and I were sitting around waiting for Berta and Abby to come home from ballet class when there was a knock at the door. It was the UPS lady!

She had a big brown box, and I knew what was inside. After signing for the package, Riley and I opened it up and checked everything out. Here are the photos of the event.

Some initial impressions:

I like the feel of the wireless controller. The power supply is freakin' huge. The hard drive attachement is cool. I can't hook this to my computer monitor without buying something extra.

Oh, no! It came with Kameo! I bought that Thursday! Wasn't I supposed to receive Need for Speed or Madden? That's weird.

Ok. Now I'm done writing, and I'm going to hook up this baby and see what happens.

I finally got my "Party in the Box" yesterday from the folks at Pepsi/Mountain Dew. It all came in a small box, but it was stuffed pretty full.

There were 5 hats, 5 t-shirts, two coupons for Mountain Dew, 5 postcard invitations, one movie advertisement, and a bottle of MDX beverage.

I was very surprised to learn that MDX is sugar-free. I hadn't suspected. Maybe it's just the bottle I got? Anyway, it's still just a tad too... green.

All of this confirms the more important fact that my XBox 360 should arrive next Saturday, a full three days before you can buy it at the store (assuming they have any left to sell you).

I wonder what game they're going to send me. I wonder if they'll sell any of the games at the store before the console is released. That might be useful.

What's with all of these people playing Mario?

Surely you've played, seen, or at least know about Nintendo's flagship game, Super Mario? Would you recognize the music if you heard it? Well, I would. As a matter of fact, I think it's probably one of the most recognizable pieces of video game music. There are few other video games that have produced music as memorable as Mario.

The only other games I can think of at the moment whose music I remember are Tetris, Crazy Taxi, Xenon 2, and The Killing Game Show. I'm sure there are more, but none of the ones off the top of my head come close to the recognizability that Mario receives.

Why am I bothering with all of this? Ok. Here's a short list of places where I have found the Mario theme being played that are not in the Mario video game itself.

London Symphony Orchestra
Redefined's Acapella from the University of Wisconsin
Impending Neskimos nu-metal release of Super Mario Bros. 3
Zombie Posessor's Video Game Covers
Blindfolded piano Mario
Guitar Mario (Good sound effects)
More Mario piano (no blindfold)
Amazing acoustic guitar Mario

Find any more Mario performances online? Leave a comment!

You guys should come play Legend of the Green Dragon with me. My character's name is Reorx. We can slay things in the forest and make big names for ourselves by leaving corpses of things in our wake. It's an all-click all-web game that requires no reflexes whatsoever, so you're sure to do just fine no matter your skill level at this sort of thing.

If you're lucky, I won't stab you to death while you're character is asleep. At the rate I'm progressing, though, you're likely to wake up in the middle and spit on me, to my death.

Tom's Hardware has a two-page article on my buddy Brian's Game Camp that gives it quite high praise. Game Camp is a summer program for teens run at the Austin Community College.

There's even a photo of Brian (eyes closed?) with his "campers" on the second page. This type of thing looks like a lot of fun, and I wonder where I would have been today had a camp like this existed when I was old enough to attend.

I'm sure Brian is showing the future game designers of the world the ropes. If Brian is anything, he's passionate about video games; especially video game development.