The Cube Club finally hit Minneapolis. Geeks, chicks, and dudes who wish they were geekier. Impressions of night #1, just moments after it happened…

I’ve sat at home for the last 2 rounds of the Nintendo Cube Clubs, and it was finally my chance to see Nintendo’s US Marketing strategy up close and personal. It was also a chance to get my hands on some later builds of games and, well, just have a good time gaming. At about 5:30 pm I left for the Mall of America to see if Nintendo could persuade me to purchase a Nintendo GameCube…or something like that. Crap! Too late… err… I mean, I don’t wanna be a fanboy now do I? So what if I was there from the beginning to the end!

Jonny and pals go to the EA Sports 500, watch fast cars, eat much junk food, film an Xbox commercial, and just generally create trouble.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m no follower of NASCAR racing, and much less an expert on it, but I did have quite an enjoyable adventure at the very first EA Sports 500. I expected the day to be something like my journalism experiences at E3 and the Cube Clubs, despite the obviously different environment. What I got was something totally different, yet memorable in its own way.

The night and morning before leaving were pretty stressful for me, since the entire trip was planned literally two days before it happened. I didn’t even know for sure if I had tickets until Saturday evening...and the race started at noon on Sunday. But, those came through, and I set to work rounding up traveling companions, getting directions to Talladega, figuring out what and what not to take, etc. It was a mess, but it all came together at the last minute, and we were off to the races, “we” being myself and two other guys from my dorm, Taylor and Kellen.

So, you've heard people say that GameCube's architecture is efficient, and clean, but what does this really mean? Perhaps it's time you found out.

Most people compare specs and screenshots of a system without any real idea of what is actually going on inside the box. In all the spec-mongering that goes on, one thing that is almost always overlooked is the RAM (Random Access Memory).

Why? I don't know. I imagine it's because the only thing anyone can really latch onto is the size of the RAM. And in the case of CPU cache (fancy name for a specialized bit of RAM) the fact that GameCube's processor has twice as much as the Xbox's processor doesn't seem to stick with most people. It's just a tiny processor cache after all, it can't be that important... can it?