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Last night in New York City, Nintendo treated two of our CNET editors to some lengthy hands-on demos of major upcoming titles for the Wii and DS. We'll have impressions of our time with Wii Sports Resort and other games later on, but first we wanted to talk about New Super Mario Bros. Wii.… Read more

This is what we get for calling our show "The 404." Despite literally everything going wrong on today's show (sorry, live listeners!), we get it in gear for what turns out to be a hilarious show, thanks to CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy who comes in and saves the day. Today, Jeff previews us on the latest Nintendo Wii games, including the new Wii Fit Plus, Super Mario Bros, Wii Sports Resort, and more!

Caroline McCarthy of CNET News' The Social comes on the show today to give us her unique take on a bunch of different stories. First off, we want to apologize to ALL of our beloved live listeners. For one reason or another, our broadcasting engine pooped out and we were unable to broadcast live. All is not lost, however--you can still definitely download or watch the stream here! Rest assured that Jason Howell, aka Superman, is on the job. Thanks, Jason!

First up, Jeff tells us all about yesterday's Nintendo event, where he got a chance to preview a bunch of exciting new games, including the new Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. He also got a chance to try out the new Wii Fit Plus. Last year, when Jeff went onto the balance board to demo the original Wii Fit, the machine actually gave up and unplugged itself, committing console suicide, so we're all anxious to see if Nintendo beefed up this new version.

Caroline also surprises us with a very positive review of the new "Transformers" movie. It turns out that the movie is geared toward...teenage boys. Which makes us question why Caroline was there in the first place--what a cougar! She also tells us even more horrifying news about the upcoming Facebook movie based on Ben Mezrich's upcoming book, "The Accidental Billionaires." Caro tells us that Shia Labeouf and Michael Cera are being eyeballed to play the role of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but the rest of us think those are both terrible choices. Actually, maybe it should be Labeouf; his portrayal of Zuckerberg would at least be more believable than his relationship with hottie biscotti Megan Fox in "Transformers 2." There's NO WAY a woman of that caliber would even sneeze in Lebeouf's general direction!

Altec Lansing is adding to its line of Expressionist PC speakers with the Expressionist Plus, which goes by the model number FX3021 and carries a list price of $99.95.

The compact, 24-watt, 2.1 system includes a sub with a 5.25-inch driver and two angle-adjustable satellite speakers with 2-inch drivers.

Don Milks, Altec Lansing's Senior Manager of Product Management for PC Audio, says, "The Expressionist Plus subwoofer packs tremendous punch for its tiny size," and he declares this "the best performing $99 PC speaker on the market."

OK, Don. We look forward to … Read more

We applaud the folks at Hardware Secrets for their timing. Not a week after we launched our desktop power testing, an article at Hardware Secrets pops up covering the key efficiency component we're not testing: desktop power supplies.

We probably should have clarified in our post from last week that the EnergyStar certification for computers (PDF) has two parts: system efficiency requirements, and power supply efficiency requirements. Our tests cover system efficiency, but for reasons of time and complexity we don't test the efficiency of desktop power supplies. This is why we might refer to a PC as … Read more

Sub DiggerPlus is a new tool that lets you more easily view sites your friends have submitted to Digg.com. To use it you just drop in your Digg username and it lists all of the stories your friends have submitted in chronological order over the past 24 hours. You can then sort by topic, submitter, and the number of Diggs each story has. The real fun of the service though, is a feature that lets you hop to each site with back and forth buttons, emulating the feeling of navigating an old Web ring.

Compared to Digg's own … Read more

YouMail's visual voice mail app for iPhone may look less sexy than the sleek, crafted application interfaces we've grown used to, but in its first effort, functionality will be more important than form.

This last weekend, users of YouMail's freemium Visual Voicemail Plus service were able to start reading and responding to voice messages from iPhones. Like rival visual voice mail services, YouMail lets you manage voice messages like e-mail messages in exchange for making the service your default mobile answering machine. In addition to playing back voice messages in any order you choose, you're able … Read more

TubeMaster Plus seems like a good idea: find video and MP3 content, download it, and convert it to different formats. But the program's poorly thought-out interface and application instability will likely frustrate everyone but the most persevering.

TubeMaster Plus comes with numerous settings, such as an autostart feature, size restriction (helpful for excluding small downloads that are more likely to be advertisements), language, and browser monitoring. You can set the video codec to be used as well as the MP3 quality and default multimedia player. The program is organized into four tabs: Media Surf (a Web browser), Media Download … Read more