Wizard needs weekend plans, badly. Clever wizards know that the place to be this Friday and Saturday (June 27-28, 12–5 p.m.) is Evolution: 30 Years of Computer Games at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre (9 Ossington Avenue). 20 PC games are on display and available for play on their original consoles, showing how gaming technology has evolved since 1978. The games and PCs are on loan from the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario,......

The third annual Toronto Independent Game Development Jam ran from the 9th to the 11th of May this year with over 125 developers managing to produce 34 different games across the intense three day period, and their pain is now our pleasure as all of the successfully completed games have been released online. As if trying to produce a full game in three days wasn't hard enough, developers were asked that their game relate......

We should have known! The culprits responsible for the Pac-Man recreation on a streetcar shelter outside Kensington Market have stepped forward, and they're neither advertisers nor immoralists: they're Teeth (responsible for this charming bear-woman) and our very own Posterchild (who is something of a fan of video games). The two collaborated to put up three nearly identical installations along Spadina: one at Spadina and Harbord (pictured above, at top); one at Spadina and Queen......

On Friday, reader Russ Morgan spotted Pac-Man on Spadina. Someone had converted one of the panels of the streetcar shelters between Baldwin and Nassau to depict a stand-off straight out of the classic video game: to the south, a big pixelated Pac-Man; to the north, Pokey, a big pixelated orange ghost; and, between them, a big pixelated cherry power-up. The yellow dots that always line the streetcar shelters, untouched by the artist, magically became......

To those uninitiated to the ways of Next-Gen gaming, the huge lineups outside of the Yonge-Dundas square Future Shop and the Eaton Centre Best Buy could have seemed quite frightening. Are all these young, would-be hooligans planning a gigantic car heist of Gone in 60 Seconds proportions? Why are they eagerly talking about running people over, the Russian mafia, and a new targeting system that they simply can't wait to try out? Of course,......

If you're thinking about Space Invaders right now, you probably spent too much time in the arcades of the early 1980s. But according to homeowner Eugene Popov, the inspiration for this colourful garage door wasn't a youth spent feeding quarters into game consoles; it was a few years living in South Africa. He took the motif from the Ndebele people of northern South Africa, who are renowned for their distinctive traditional house painting with......

Photos (top, and bottom) by wvs from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The whole wide internet is getting crushes on it, so it's about time we wrote about Posterchild's brand new Bloor Street project: a portal! Posterchild—who, full disclosure, publishes Vandalist here every Friday—likes video games: his Super Mario question blocks from 2005 (which are pretty much exactly what they sound like) drew imitators and attention worldwide, most notably in Raveena, Ohio, where police called......

According to Rafael Fajardo, absolutely. In the midst of last Wednesday's snowstorm, Fajardo spoke to a half-filled auditorium at OCAD as part of the Faculty of Design's speaker series. He is currently the Director of Digital Media Studies and Electronic Media Arts Design at Denver University, as well as the Director of SWEAT, a collaborative of video game designers who strive to push gaming beyond the realm of entertainment. Fajardo sees video game design......

Today launched Dear Toronto, a new independent videoblog site by Adam Schwabe, Ryan Couldrey, and Rebecca Black. The trio had previously collaborated at BlogTO, but recently decided to branch out on their own to focus on strictly video-based content. It's only Day One, but Dear Toronto already has two posts up: one for Video Games Live and one for Art Attack. The videos vary between interviews and pure camera work, with whimsical music played......

Attention basement dwellers: on Wednesday, February 6, OCAD is hosting a free presentation by SWEAT, a collaboration of game designers, programmers, and artists dedicated to bringing socially aware video games to the general public. SWEAT has already produced games like Crosser, a Frogger-esque game about illegal crossing at the US/Mexico border, and is currently developing Juan & the Beanstalk, a game about the societal effects of illegal drug production in Colombia. The presentation will......

In what simultaneously has to be one of the most hilariously inspired and gut-wrenching punishments in the history of parental discipline, a local GTA father has set a new standard for puffing penalization. The man—an elementary school teacher known by the screen name "k_lid"—decided to sell his son’s Christmas present on eBay (a notoriously hard-to-find copy of the best-selling Guitar Hero 3 game) when he returned home from work early to find 15-year-old Isaac......

We don’t tend to post too often about video games here at Torontoist, what with basically the entire rest of the internet being devoted to it (well, that and anthropomorphic Star Trek slash fiction), but we do like to make special note when some pleasant news of local interest comes up, such as Toronto as a Half Life mod or the Toronto Indie Game Jam (Which we, er, forgot to mention this year. Our......

Last Wednesday, legendary Canadian music retailer Pindoff Record Sales sold off their 72-store Music World chain. Two days later, the new owners filed for bankruptcy protection and and will likely lay off 648 employees by the end of January. And so it goes. According to court documents, Music World plans an "orderly wind down," including closing stores and liquidating inventory. The retailer has been in dire straits for years, propped up by the Toronto-based......

Our most anticipated part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s new Future Projections programme, the Into the Pixel exhibition, had its opening reception last night at the at the Ontario College of Art & Design's Great Hall, where it will remain until the end of the festival. The exhibition is worth seeing, and many of the large canvases are striking when observed in the flesh. And while, yes, an exhibition of paintings is an......

Fan Expo is awesome. As awesome as anticipated by Torontoist late last week. Sure, the food is expensive, a bunch of the guests cancelled last minute, and Hobby Star is a huge corporate bully, but that doesn’t change the fact that Torontoist came within spitting distance of Adam West this weekend. In this three-day celebration of all things geeky, the biggest winner in the comics vs. sci-fi vs. horror vs. anime vs. video games......

Another spate of announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival, with in particular an entirely new programme announced, Future Projections. To feature installations, interactive film projects, and other film-related art work presented outside the cinema space and throughout the City of Toronto, it’s to work as a companion to the Wavelengths programme. Eight of the nine multimedia installations will be offered as free, non-ticketed events, with entry to the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery......

So there we were, all ready to write another post previewing the final weekend of the Sprockets International Film Festival for Children, when we realised that the film we wanted to bring everyone’s attention to, When the Show Tent Came To My Town, had already had all of its showings! Darn. So though we aren’t going to do a full review of the film, we’d just like to note that When the Show Tent Came......

Noble Parasites, the show closing Passe Muraille's 06/07 season, has the distinction not only of being the last play of the theatre's 39th season, but also of being the last play produced by the theatre under the leadership of longtime artistic director Layne Coleman. It was recently announced that Tarragon Associate Artistic Director Andy McKim will be taking over from Layne beginning next season. Happily for Layne, he is ending his term at Passe......

“Use more…waste less!” That’s the motto of the new barter-community web site known as SwitchPlanet. SwitchPlanet is now open to the public as a beta version (which might explain why the interface is a little less than intuitive). The site facilitates trading DVDs, CDs and video games with an online community of people who create lists of the items they want and the items they wish they had. The currency of SwitchPlanet is known......

Once a month Torontoist would like to encourage you to drag yourself off the couch and across the room to that nice, comfy swivel chair in front of your computer, to experience something from the wonderful world of streaming. Anyone who's visited YouTube or eBaum's World knows how gratifying watching two Asian kids lipsynch to Jessica Simpson can be! So in the interest of expanding your horizons (or at least giving you some way to......

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where to......

Techie things like an internet poetry engine and video games meet decidedly non-techie things like books and their authors at the Gladstone tonight. Darren "Typewriter Man" Wershler-Henry and Bill Kennedy are launching Apostrophe and Apostropheengine.ca (not quite up yet). Their site hijacks searh engine results and spins them into poetry. They'll be doing a live demo. Emily Schultz will be joining them with videogames, 80s classic Combat to be exact. Why videogames? Because her novel......

Happy New Year, film fans! Or, perhaps, not. For we’ve slammed like so much booze filled new year vomit upon the tarmac of the post-Christmas lull, in which basically nothing of interest is released in any format. Certainly this week fans of more high brow cinema will have to hang on like those last few drips of chunky bile saliva for Cinematheque Ontario’s winter programme, starting on January 13th, which we’ll probably talk about then,......