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Sometimes a video is so fascinating, so hypnotic, so awe-inspiringly strange, that it just doesn't leave your head. It stays for days and days, over a whole weekend, while the mind reels at the possibilities. Namco-Bandai's Muscle March is just such a brain injection of oddity.

Japan is a lucky country. It gets titles like Muscle March for WiiWare, while we get to watch YouTube videos instead.

Witness the rainbow-colored bikini briefs and posing polar bears...almost like Punch-Out!!, if Punch-Out!! involved slamming your shirtless body through walls while on psychedelics. The style is reminiscent of the best parts of Katamari Damacy, while not being as completely incomprehensible as Noby Noby Boy.

This conversion of an arcade game (we'll say it again: Japan is a lucky country) hits WiiWare on May 26. We eagerly await a U.S. release. If the Wii had more games like this, perhaps it'd be considered a bit more of a "hardcore" platform. Ahem.

(Via CNET Asia)

Facebook loses your uploaded photos temporarily. Wilson knows this due to his vigilant Facebook stalking. We're still running our motto contest, and right now it's split between "The nerdy dirty" and "Full frontal nerdity." If you can come up with something better, please send a voice mail to 1-866-404-CNET (2638). Please! We're an audio show, e-mails only go so far.

Poppa corporation streams March Madness.

More on today's show, we've got some news about the rise of pay-per-view porn on cable. We can't figure out why you don't just download it, but hey there's still a whole population out there that still watches movies from VHS. Speaking of watching stuff, our parent company CBS is going to be streaming March Madness online this year. Expect productivity to drop to nothing--as if the economy isn't bad enough.

Also, the economy has hit Google as well. They're announcing that they'll have to close two cafés. They still get to keep their free laundry, massages, lunches, dinners, snacks, stock options, etc. I know it's rough being a Googler. We're worried they're going to take away our Flavia machine. Finally, did you know that you pay an average of $3 per minute with your cell phone plan? Yeah, shocker right there. Wilson had to give AT&T his first-born child when he went over.

(Updated 3/13/09 to add new iPhone app.)

Watching the Super Bowl is easy: one game on a Sunday. But March Madness stretches across three weeks and more than 60 games. Short of being unemployed in this recession (not recommended!) you're going to struggle to be in front of a TV for it all. Unless you apply a little technology.

The March Madness on Demand site flashes some new moves for the 2009 season.

(Credit: NCAA)

March Madness' home on the Web is the NCAA's March Madness on Demand site. You'll find all 63 games streamed live, and if you install Microsoft's Silverlight technology you get higher-quality video augmented by integrated team coverage, interactive boards, and a "boss button" so you can bury it all and bring up a phony spreadsheet if The Man walks by. After a game, hit the site for highlights, a full game replay, and buzzer beaters. (Disclosure: CNET is a division of CBS, whose CBS Sports unit broadcasts March Madness.)

On the iPhone and iPod Touch there's a March Madness on Demand app that will bring you a live stream of all 63 games. It's powered by MobiTV and also offers game previews, post-game highlights, and tournament news updates. They say it will do all this over an EDGE or 3G connection and offer game audio only if you just want to listen in. It costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Many other cell phones can become miniature March Madness televisions this year thanks to MediaFLO technology. Rather than a glitchy Web stream, this is a dedicated digital video signal to your phone. It looks really good. You need to check with your carrier to see if you have coverage in your market and the right phone to receive it. AT&T has the rights to offer all the games, and Verizon will pick up East and West contests.

Back home on the couch, CBS Sports has the broadcast and there's some good stuff in DirecTV's Mega March Madness package if you're willing to part with $69. It will put up to four live games on your TV at once in a four-way split screen with the ability to switch between them, a streaming stats ticker, and interactive brackets.

And of course you can beam March Madness from your living room to any connected computer and most smartphones using one of the SlingBox variants.

This month in video game screenshots - March 2009 - photos

View the full gallery

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about March if you're a gamer. Now that highly anticipated titles like Street Fighter IV and Killzone 2 have been released, it's time to look ahead to March. We're starting to see a spike in the portable console games department as both the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS have various titles making their debut.

Highlighting this month's screenshots are Tom Clancy's HAWX, Resident Evil 5, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and Madworld. Make sure you check out all of this month's featured games in our slide show in addition to the five game trailers you should be watching.

What games are you looking forward to in March?

There's continued talk of a $100 price drop on the 80GB version of the PlayStation 3.

(Credit: Sony)

Another week, another rumor that a PS3 price cut is right around the corner. This time the fuel comes from Janco Partners' Mike Hickey, who, according to the site gamesindustry.biz, said in his latest note to investors that Sony needs to chop $100 off the 80GB PS3's price to "restart unit velocity at retail" and that "recent channel checks indicate increased speculation for a PS3 price cut announcement from Sony in the next couple of days."

To cap things off, Hickey added more brutal commentary:

"If Sony does not cut the price of their console, we expect the continuation of languishing PS3 hardware sales and the potential for publishers to accelerate their reallocation of resources away from the PS3 console."

In the same article, there's also some bizarre speculation that Sony will put out a PS3 sans Blu-ray player. This seems a little off the wall, considering that you wouldn't be able to play most PS3 games on a PS3 that doesn't have a Blu-ray player. Plus, the PS3 is basically a Trojan horse for Blu-ray.

Maybe what this really means is that Sony is working on a PS3 version of the PS2 that could play downloadable PS3 games and be backward-compatible for PS2 titles. (OK, I'm kidding, but see if you can say that sentence fast five times in a row with perfect elocution).

When all is said and done, we do agree with Hickey and other so-called analysts who say Sony has to cut the PS3's price by $100 to jump-start sales (duh, right?).

But we've seen specials recently where the PS3 is already selling for less than $350, so in some sense, a soft price cut has been in effect, though a flat $300 is what people are waiting for. The question is whether we're days--or weeks--away from an official cut.

What do you guys think?

Friday morning, I walked past a colleague's desk and--I swear--saw a basketball game on her computer screen. When I got closer, however, all I could see were a bunch of very official-looking bars and charts.

(Credit: NCAA)

She was working hard. Real hard. Then she laughed, hit a key, and flipped back to the basketball game in a clear indication that I'm either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn't exactly strike fear into the rank and file. Or both.

The "boss button" and silly office decorum strike again. For those of you who for some reason don't know what a boss button is, it's pretty simple: It helps you look at stuff on your PC at work that you're not supposed to be looking at. Hit a key, and the screen instantly flips to something that vaguely looks like something you should be looking at in the office.

Boss buttons (or keys) have been around for years, of course. Some Macintosh games back in the 1980s included them (though for most of us using Macs in those days, it was more like a "parent button" because we were supposed to be doing our homework). CNET's Download.com has a list of boss buttons, and there are even entire sites dedicated to them.

Come every March, thanks to office pools on the NCAA college basketball tournament, boss buttons are as common on desktop computers as personal e-mails and photos of your friends: They're probably not supposed to be there, but we all have them. NCAA.com has even provided a helpful boss button on its Web site.

Here's a thought: Let's stop all the silly shenanigans and make boss buttons a thing of the past. Get it out in the open and let people keep track of the office pools without worrying about getting into trouble. The average American is spending more time in the office than ever. And the average tech worker spends even more time than that. There's a reason all those Silicon Valley companies offer free food, subsidized child care, laundry, auto-detailing, and swanky gyms: So you never have an excuse to go home.

So cut those hardworking people a break. We're not talking porn here, folks. Let's put a TV somewhere in the office and stop all the sneaking around.

I know what the killjoys are thinking right now: This is a slippery slope! What's next: Christmas shopping at the desk? Sharing funny YouTube videos with coworkers? Where does the madness stop?

The ultimate office killjoys at Challenger, Gray & Christmas have even put a dollar figure on the money lost to people checking out the NCAA tournament while at work: It could be as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament. The Challenger estimate is based on "the number of people expected to participate in office pools, the amount of money they earn and the amount of work time wasted on March Madness related activities, whether it is trash talking at the watercooler or watching live videos of the games during business hours."

While I have no idea how much money Challenger wasted doing this research, it does have a few more tidbits: A 2006 Harris poll found that 13 percent of Americans aged 18 and older plan to participate in an office March Madness pool. The press release announcing the Challenger survey goes on for six pages. In fairness, it offers some workplace tips for dealing with the tournament. OK, some of them are pretty corny, but I appreciate the spirit:

•  Pick 64 MVPs. This is high on the cornball meter. Bestow MVP honors on employees chosen ahead of time...for some reason. No, I really don't get it either.

•  Team sweatshirt day. Relax the dress code for the first Friday of the tournament so everyone can wear the sweatshirt of their favorite team. At CNET, we'd call this "formal attire day," but I imagine that would be letting down the hair at a lot of offices.

•  Offer anti-tourney prizes. Basically, start something for the people who don't care about basketball. Sure. Gotta be fair and all that.

•  Offer flexible schedules. Umm, OK, I don't know about this one. The manager in me says, "Are you insane? It's just freaking basketball."

•  Organize a company pool. Done. I mean, CNET in no way encourages gambling on collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep a bracket posted. Good idea. But I should reiterate, CNET in no way encourages gambling on a collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep television in break room tuned to coverage. Duh! It's what I'm saying. Let's take it out of the closet. Do away with the boss button, and accept the facts: For 16 days, nearly all of us are college basketball fans. We pretend to know the starting lineup of Western Kentucky, and feign shock when Stanford fails yet again to make the Final Four.

And please, stop with the boss button. I know exactly what you're doing.

(Credit: NEC)

We've got to hand it to NEC and Nissan. As silly as we found the their SUV-inspired laptop, there's something admirably cheeky about their special edition that's supposed to match Nissan's March mini-car (aka the Micra in Japan), in all its striped insanity.

The pattern looks as if it was lifted from a drawer liner created by an overcaffienated interior designer of the '60s. It even comes with a slip cover made of the same material used for the car's seat upholstery, according to Digital World Tokyo.

We really shouldn't be surprised by any of this, considering that the laptop is NEC's LaVie G. As noted before, once it went down the Sanrio road to hell, all bets were off.

Analog TV, it was nice knowing you.

(Credit: Predicta.com)

Slowly but surely, the February 17, 2009, cutoff date for over-the-air analog TV gets an increasing amount of attention as we get closer to the date (just two years away). But an equally important date is just days away: February 28, 2007. That's the last day that manufacturers can ship or import any product that has only an analog TV tuner. As of March 1, all new TV and video products imported into the U.S. or shipped to retailers that include an analog (NTSC) tuner need to have a digital (ATSC) tuner as well.

The March 1 date is merely one step in an ongoing process. By federal mandate, over-the-air analog TV broadcasts will cease in the U.S. on February 17, 2009. From that day forward, you'll only be able to receive over-the-air TV broadcasts on TVs with digital (ATSC) tuners. To prepare for that inevitability, the FCC has setup a years-long schedule for transitioning the nation from analog to digital TVs. That's one reason why it's become increasingly impossible to buy large-screen analog TVs: Big-screen models were the first to fall under the digital tuner mandate, and it's been applied to smaller and smaller screen sizes as the decade has progressed. March 1 is the final deadline on the product side. At that point, TVs of all screen sizes need to have a digital tuner. Perhaps more importantly, any device with a built-in TV tuner needs to have a digital option as well. That encompasses a huge swath of products--everything from VCRs, DVRs, and DVD recorders to more esoteric PC peripherals such as TV tuner cards.

Of course, there's always a loophole. The FCC rules about the digital TV transition extend only to tuners that can receive over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts--ones you receive via an antenna. That's why the tens of millions of TV viewers who are cable or satellite subscribers should be largely unaffected by the 2009 over-the-air analog cut-off. Manufacturers can bypass the rules by simply omitting an over-the air analog tuner altogether. For instance, HD monitors such as the Panasonic TH-50PH9UK don't include any built-in tuners at all, just plenty of inputs for external video sources--leaving it up to you to connect your own cable or satellite box or even an outboard over-the-air tuner. Likewise, manufacturers may tweak an internal analog tuner to accept only a cable TV signal--rather than one from an antenna--thus skirting the requirements of the rule. The TiVo Series2 DT is one such example: Its tuner decodes signals from analog cable but, unlike the older Series2 models, not from analog antennas. As a result, the DT version is compliant with the post-March 1 mandate, even though it doesn't include a digital tuner.

So how will the deadline affect what you can buy in the store? In the short term, it won't. The March 1 deadline applies to manufacturers, not retailers. Whatever's on the shelf at Circuit City or Best Buy on February 28 will still be there the following day. But once the existing stocks of analog-only products are sold off, they won't be replaced. For TVs, that won't be a big problem. All larger (25 inches and up) HDTVs are already digital-ready, or they're monitor-only and thus exempt. For example, Best Buy already offers a 27-inch tube TV with analog and digital tuners for a scant $209--it just downconverts all the HD programming to standard-definition resolution. Look for digital tuners to appear in even smaller, cheaper TVs as the year progresses.

Perhaps more interesting is how the March 1 deadline will affect other video equipment with TV tuners. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2007, major manufacturers such as Panasonic, Samsung, RCA, and LG were showing off DVD recorders with built-in digital tuners. Fully compliant with the tuner mandate, they're exactly the sort of upgraded products that will be replacing the analog-only DVD recorders from the 2006 model year. Because the digital tuner costs more to implement, entry-level VCR and DVD recorders will likely follow the "monitor model" and go without a tuner, offering only line-in and line-out ports. Once again, if you're attaching them to a satellite or cable box, the lack of a tuner won't be missed.

One final reminder as we enter the home stretch of the digital TV transition: The hundreds of millions of old analog TVs already in use will still work just fine. All existing cable and satellite boxes--even HD ones--can still be connected to old analog TVs. However, viewers who watch over-the-air TV via an antenna will be able to purchase a digital-to-analog conversion box to avoid a loss of TV programming. (The government is even establishing a fund to help subsidize the purchase of such boxes, but details remain vague.) So while there's nothing wrong with upgrading to a nice, big, digital-ready flat-panel TV, there's no need to rush, either.