AOL's Robin Yang, Level Up's N'Gai Croal and Harmonix's John Drake play Rock Band

Our Twitter post of yesterday--"Playing Rock Band's Judas Priest album DLC at MTV's offices. Devil horns!"--pretty much said it all. MTV had originally planned to host journalists last Friday to play the first complete album available for download in its Rock Band videogame, Judas Priest's "Screaming For Vengeance," but it was cancelled at the last minute and moved to Monday. We arrived at 1633 Broadway shortly after 5:00 PM, at which point MTV publicist and skilled Rock Band guitarist Jeff Castaneda escorted us up to the room they call The Lab. Others in the room included MTV Games producer Marc Nesbitt and MTV flack Mariana Agathoklis, Harmonix PR guy John Drake and AOL GameDaily's Robin Yang, whose slender frame belied a zest for rock that would soon be unleashed. (MTV News' Stephen Totilo, displaying a stunning disinterest in corporate synergy, was nowhere to be found.)

Before we took the stage, we ribbed Castaneda for the absence of liquor and other stimulants. "Harmonix just went eight times platinum with the downloadable content--and we've seen the bonus schedule," we said. "So where's the Jim Beam? Where's the Cristal?" Castaneda laughed and volunteered to make a beer run. But we declined, because in truth, rock is the only sustenance we need. With Yang on lead guitar, Drake on vocals, ourselves on drums and a fourth, whose name escapes us, on bass, we kicked things of with "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." From there, we went into "Pain and Pleasure,"--a track whose deceptive simplicity concealed a drumbeat that initially caught us off guard before we recovered and settled into a stone cold groove--followed by the hand-wrecking challenge of "The Hellion" and "Electric Eye." Thankfully, our bandmates were there on two occasions to rescue us from the abyss.

To read the rest of Page 110's dispatch on rocking out at The Lab with MTV, click on the link below.

 The 1957 classic "The Sweet Smell of Success," courtesy of Film Forum 

For a while now, we've been meaning to find a proper home for some of the on-scene reportage that characterized Level Up's carefree infancy, when we would belly up to the VIP bar with Kaz Hirai and Sir Howard Stringer inside the Sony Style store on New York's Madison Avenue. Or firing a pump-action shotgun (the Serbu Super Shorty, if you must know) with Crytek founder Cevat Yerli at The Gun Store in Las Vegas. Or consuming steak and wine at the Morton's Steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles with Microsoft's own James "J" Allard, culminating in our infamous wager. Or playing Madden NFL 07 against Miss May 1998 Deanna Brooks--and losing--at the South Seas Hotel in Miami's South Beach during the runup to last year's Super Bowl. You know, the lighter side of being a videogame journalist.

So today, we're taking the wraps off of Page 110, our sometimes wry, sometimes breathless, but always observant occasional feature on the people, places and things we get to see as part of our job. The title has a double meaning; it's both an in-joke for the truly geeky and a reference to the pop cultural gap between the prominence of boldfaced names who appear on Page Six and those who can't get arrested there despite their stature in the world of videogames. The US Weeklys and the Gawkers of the world may not care about this stuff, but we do, and hopefully you will as well. Enjoy.

 Dilbert's Punchline mashups on the recently-relaunched Dilbert.com Web site

This morning, Scott Adams and United Media officially announced the upgrade relaunch of Dilbert.com., the companion Web site to Adams' long-running comic strip. With the relaunch of the original site via a soft launch last week, Dilbert has officially moved into the 21st century, with features ranging from Dilbert's Punchline (which lets you test your wit against Adams' by rewriting the punchline to that day's strip) to animated shorts. Adams was kind enough to spare some time for an email interview; here's what he had to say about Dilbert 2.0--and whether or not the nation's cubicle drone-in-chief has more of a future in videogames. Read on.

How long has Dilbert 2.0 been in the works?

The planning started a year ago. Obviously the technical work has been concentrated in the past several months.

What inspired it?

Dilbert is an early adopter, like most of my readers. I was the first syndicated cartoonist to include an email address in the strip and incorporate reader suggestions (1993), and the first syndicated comic to be offered on the Internet (1995). More recently we were the first to offer a widget for the strip. As the technology evolves, we look for ways to make Dilbert more participatory.

Many of the changes on the new site are a natural evolution, such as the color strips and the improved archive search. But the mashups are the exciting part. People like to talk more than they like to listen, and this makes Dilbert more of a conversation than a lecture. (More social, if I can use that buzzword.) You can see from the early volume of responses that the mashups are going to be huge.

How are the Cartoon Mashups going to work on your new site?

1. EGO...trip: Even though we can't hang ten, Surfer Girl showers us with praise
2. EGO...trip: MTV News' big dog (and Vs. Mode punching bag) weighs in on RE5
3. POD...Yesterday's "Big" thinker Chris Dahlen guests on a podcast
4. RND...What's a little psyops between the U.S. military and its citizenry?