What do you get when you combine a video sharing site with the 実況 jikkyou boards (where people post while watching TV shows and such) on 2ch? Nico Nico Douga, a mashup that was started earlier this year, is what you get. Instead of just plain comments, Nico Nico Douga lets users leave comments in real-time which scroll across the movie while it's playing, and -- this is the important part -- also scrolls messages from other users at the point in the movie when they left them, making it almost like you're watching the video together with everybody else that's posted a comment. That feeling made Nico Nico Douga very popular very quickly, and soon all of the bandwidth used apparently earned the ire of YouTube, which cut off Nico Nico Douga's access to movies on their servers last month, marking the end of the public beta test of Nico Nico Douga. However, the development team worked quickly on a new version of the site, and in just one week they established their own video sharing service (with much better video and audio quality than Youtube), SmileVideo, and brought the site in back a limited gamma test open to 100,000 users (about 20% of the average number of users per day during the beta test, according to the developers' blog) on Monday. I quickly got hooked on Nico Nico Douga during the beta test, so of course I signed up as quickly as I could for the gamma test and ended up being number 62227, luckily. Now that Nico Nico Douga is back up, I'll give you a quick rundown of some of the more popular videos on the site after the jump.

Let's Go! Onmyouji! This rather ridiculous song sung by an onmyouji and some monks is easily the most popular video at Nico Nico Douga. It's from the Neo-Geo (and ported to PS2) fighting game Shin Gouketsuji Ichizoku: Bonnou no Kaihou (Power Instinct Matrimelee). Here's what the actual game looks like.

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(added March 8, 1:46AM): Seems the guys at Shaft like "Let's Go! Onmyouji!", too -- it's made it into this week's episode of Negima!?. どーまん　せーまん！ Do-man se-man!

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Idolm@ster Xbox360 - Ami sings "Agent Yoru wo Yuku" Otherwise known as tokachitsukuchite since Ami and Mami, the 12 year old twins, have trouble pronouncing "shi", so it ends up sounding like "chi". For the endless brainwashing loop, watch this. And for a "loli enka", watch Ami sing "relations". From what I've read, Ami and Mami weren't very popular among fans of the arcade version of the game, but since these videos and others have been posted they've gotten very popular on Nico Nico Douga -- the site's top idols, I guess you could say. Idolm@ster Xbox360 - Touch Miki (14) Miki (14 years old) asks her producer to play the role of a pervert trying to touch her so she can learn some self-defense. I suppose this is the reason the Xbox 360 version of Idolm@ster is selling so well... seems Namco put in a bit extra effort into putting these kinds of scenes in there. Now why isn't there a DS or Wii version of the game? Super Mario Brothers 1 Hack - Falling Mario A very hard hack of Super Mario Brothers 1. There's plenty of other videos of people playing games on Nico Nico Douga, some "super plays", others not quite so good, but both kinds are fun to watch with all of the people commenting. The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross Now for something you probably wouldn't expect to be so popular. The users at Nico Nico Douga are amazed that Bob Ross is able to make beautiful landscapes appear from nothing so quickly. That 2 inch brush is something else. Okkusenman! Some of you might have already seen this video over at Destructoid, but what they left out is that without Nico Nico Douga and the creativity of its users this video wouldn't have been made. Back during the beta test, someone uploaded a TAS (Tool Assisted speed run) of Mega Man 2 and someone added lyrics to the music for each of the stages. Someone else put together clips from the video, the much too serious lyrics to the music from the first Dr. Wily stage, and used an arrangement of the song done by Family Comcert, then someone decided to try singing it, and this what you get. The following version of the song is a bit easier on the ears (nice harmony, too): And that's just a bit of what's on the site now. If you'd like to join, you can register for an account, but you won't have access until they expand the test, so you'll have to wait a bit. It's hard to go back to watching videos on YouTube after watching with everybody at Nico Nico Douga.