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Hilarious or strangely disturbing? I think it might put me off my dinner taking a knife to Pac-Man’s face. On the other hand, what am I saying?

From the Etsy item description:

NOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM! It’s the sound of PacMan chomping away at those little pellets – how could I not be inspired to make a cutting board out of him?

Geek out your kitchen with this end-grain cutting board featuring PacMan and either Blinky or Clyde (he’s kind of orangey-red) racing toward a power-up pellet. Who will get there first?!? Help PacMan by buying this board right away and chopping onions all over Blinky’s face!

This hand-made end-grain cutting board will add a touch of gamer-nostalgia to any kitchen. The board is made of walnut, hard-maple, and cherry put together with FDA approved, water-proof glue, and treated with a mixture of mineral oil and beeswax.

End-grain cutting boards like this one are very durable and will not dull your knife edges like some other types of cutting boards might. Also, while some people worry that wooden cutting boards are not as safe from bacteria as glass or plastic, there have been studies done that actually show that wooden boards have antibacterial properties (seriously…ask The Internets). I don’t know if those studies are 100% accurate, but I do know that people have been using wooden cutting boards a lot longer than plastic, and have not all died of food-borne illness, so I figure it’s probably ok (though I won’t hold it against you if you decided to cut poultry on a separate board).

I’ll include a set of care instructions with any cutting board that I sell.

This board is approximately 18 X 12 X 1.5″

This is the opposite of a discount game!

$165 at 1337motif’s Etsy shop!

Game: Audiosurf
Purchased from: Steam
Price paid: $9.99
Platform: PC

Audiosurf is a kind of strange animal. It’s part rhythm game and part puzzler. You take your ship and pilot it down a course that’s generated by analyzing whatever song you chose. There are different colored ‘cars’ on the road that you have to try to hit and collect to fill up a grid on the bottom of the screen. When three or more of the same color line up you clear them. It actually sounds more complicated than it is… sort of.  The hook is, though, that you’re not limited to whatever songs the developer thought you should play with (and could afford the license to put in the game), you get to actually pick and choose songs from your very own music library  to generate the tracks. So the amount and variety of the levels is really up to how many songs you have stored away on your computer.

Which means that the game already has the best soundtrack ever, so it’s got that going for it.

The song you choose affects more than just how the track looks. You pick a slowish song and the track goes up at a leisurely pace. Pick a fast song with a lot of action, and the track goes down and it really starts to look like a roller coaster.

Of course, some songs work better than others. I actually had pretty bad luck playing chiptunes, which made me kind of sad. But that’s a pretty minor concern, really.

And that’s about all there is to it. Do well enough and you can become ‘champion’ of a particular song and get your score posted to the Audiosurf site for all to see, and if you get dethroned, you’ll get an email prodding you to try again.

But that’s it, there’s no overarching goal, no princess to save, and no country to rescue from oppressive, corrupt, government. It’s just you, your music, and your reflexes competing with yourself (and the world, if you want) for a high score.

Even better is that this is the kind of game that you can play for just a few minutes at a time. There’s something to be said about the ability to do a song or two during some downtime to take your mind off whatever task is at hand without having to worry about trying to make it to the next save point is actually pretty refreshing.

The only downside is that the demo only allows you to play four songs, and that’s it. Even if you have to stop the songs in the middle, you get four songs, and that’s it. If you want to play more than that, you’ll have to pony up for the full version. But, really, four songs is really enough to decide if this game’s for you, so that’s not too big a deal.

Sony’s Playstation Network offered only one demo freebie this week: Lost Planet 2 (Read “Lost Planet Squared”). Having not played the first installment of what I’m pretty sure was a game whose primary focus was a single player campaign, it seemed logical to pick apart this 360 MB multiplayer demo for this week’s installment. Bearing that juicy little nugget in mind, proceed at your own risk, this could be a bumpy ride.

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Upgrade Complete is a top down arcade shooter with a twist.  Your goal is to not only beat the game, but fully upgrade it as well.  You have to upgrade everything, and i mean EVERYTHING.  You start out with a simple black and white screen telling you that you need to buy the menu screen before you can play the game.

From there you then have to go upgrade your menu buttons and buy a proper game preloader to load the game.Once you do that  you will finally be greeted with a menu, and you can start playing the game from there.

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Most people today play games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3. But a lot of you people will read this and say something along the lines of “Ome-ga, no dude!? I play games that are different and a lot of people don’t really play like Fallout 3 and Oblivion.” Oh really now? That’s cool, and different, seeing as they were being hyped up and discussed about all over the internet and video game magazines starting when their development was first announced, even now that they are both released talked about all over the place. They are definitely not unheard of. On top of that, they are both sequels to superior games. Morrowind is better than Oblivion. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 are both better than Fallout 3. Don’t get me wrong though, people. These newer games are great games and very well made, and people who like them aren’t wrong. It’s just a matter of personal of preference. My only point is that nowadays it seems that developers sacrifice content and/or creativity so that they can focus on stunning HD visuals and/or great online multiplayer.

In general the newer games are, it seems the less hours of single-player game play it has. Even games that don’t have multiplayer seem to have less game play hours compared to older games. Sure, there are DLC’s for newer games, but this seems to just give developers an excuse to make a the initial game at release not that long and also the DLC’s are just more money for the gamer to have to spend.

Call it old fashioned, but the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis era was the best era in the history of video games. Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, Phantasy Star IV, The Lost Vikings, Earthbound, Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past, and Super Metroid. All these games had either deep immersing plots or fun quirky ones, and sometimes both. The characters on these games were memorable and unique, not cliché like so many of the characters from today’s games. The villains on these past games too are great. They were evil, cunning, and sometimes hilarious and goofy. Other than the SNES and Genesis era, we have the NES era and the PSX and N64 era (no, my order of discussion here is not chronological). The NES games were all games that you could just pick up and play. Mario, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and Zelda all have their roots in this system. The PSX and N64 have some of the most highly praised games to this day. If you were Final Fantasy VII and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are both receive praise from countless games as perfect.

I can go on about this for days, but at this point all you readers are probably feeling like my ranting is some kind of cruel punishment for that piece of bubble gum you stole from the grocery when you were five. If I were to go on with this, you will probably feel like you are in Hell with Satan telling you about his tastes in video games while you are there waiting hours to relieve yourself by unleashing the most voracious piss in your life. My rambling is done!

Lately, I’ve been feeling very nostalgic for Ms. Pac-Man.
I spent a decent amount of time in arcades when I was little. I liked most games but Ms. Pac-Man was always my favorite and playing it is how I spent most of my money.

For awhile, my Mom and I would play it at the convenience store near our house after school every day.

Years later, we’d play it at the laundromat every week and I never got sick of it.

Someday I’d love to have a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine but for now all I have is a gameboy version to play which is entirely too tiny on my ds screen to truly be enjoyed.

Inspired by my love of Ms. Pac-Man, I’ve assembled an image post that features the work that others have made in homage to one of my favorite games.

Enjoy!

Game: Samba de Amigo
Purchased from: Toys ‘R’ Us
Price paid: $5.00
Platform: Wii

Samba de Amigo has a kind of convoluted history. It went from arcade game (that I could never find) to Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to re-released Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to Wii game (which I kind of forgot about). The manual to this game has a kind of a backstory, but it’s completely inconsequential. It stars a monkey that plays maracas, and that’s really all you need to know about that.

The premise is really simple. You hold either a Wii Remote and Nunchuk or two Wii Remotes kind of like you would hold maracas. Each ‘maraca’ has three positions, up, middle, and down, detected by which direction the Remote is pointing (ceiling, straight ahead, or floor). Each direction is indicated onscreen by a colored circle, and balls will flow from the middle of the display to the outside. When they’re in their respective circles, you give the ‘maracas’ a little shake. It’s one of those things that’s easier to show than it is to explain so…

And it’s really as simple as that. On the tougher difficulty levels you get alternating ups and downs, wacky dance moves you have to do, and that kind of thing, which is one of the big reasons I recommend playing with two Remotes instead of a Remote and a Nunchuk: that tether that keeps the two pieces together tended to get in my way and get snagged on things. Both could be detrimental to your experience.

The variety of songs in the game is actually pretty impressive, they run the gamut from the above ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ to ‘Low Rider’ to ‘Tubthumping’ to even ‘Pon de Replay’. 48 songs in all, which is a huge step from most of the other rhythm-based games that end up on Nintendo platforms, DDR Mario Mix had a paltry 29, Elite Beat Agents had 19. So that’s a plus.

I won’t lie, I looked around the Internet to find out what other people had to say about this game, and they all were pretty positive, but one issue kept coming up, so I should probably address it here: the accuracy of the motion detection.

This game came out before the Wii Motion Plus accessory did, and that really would have helped with the accuracy. But, by and large, it’s unnecessary. I only ran into problems with the controller not knowing which direction I was pointing in four specific situations:

1. The batteries in my Wii Remote were running low
2. I was sitting down instead of standing up (you really need to stand to get the full enjoyment out of this game)
3. The action got fast and furious and I forgot that you have to orient the controller vertically to hit the ‘up’ beats and instead just raised my arms over my head, but kept the remote level and
4. I tried to go from ‘Down’ to ‘Up’ too fast and the controller couldn’t keep up, this was usually in conjunction with #3

So, yeah, Wii Motion Plus would be nice, but not needed.

I should also note that there are three ‘download packs’ of songs available for this game, each containing three more songs. Each of the packs costs 500 Wii points, which at current exchange rates is $5, so I haven’t downloaded them. I have a mental block about paying triple the cost of the game to get all of the extra goodies (though, ‘The Rockefeller Skank’, ‘Mickey’, and ‘Love Shack’ should be fun songs to do).

It kind of makes me sad to buy an actual good game on the cheap, well, for this cheap. That usually means that the game didn’t sell very well to begin with for whatever reason. And that means that there probably won’t be any sequels, no remakes with the Wii Motion Plus, and no more song packs (the last one came out around 18 months ago). But on the flip side, it’s probably the best $5 I’ve spent in weeks.

Having lost track of Sam and Max for the past few years, I was excited to see Episode 1 of their new series, The Devil’s Playhouse, pop up on this week’s PSN demo list.  Try to imagine my delight when I read the title of the first installment of this five part game: “The Penal Zone”. Indeed, the cartoon free-lance police that I first met in a mid 90s point-and-click PC game haven’t lost their edge when it comes to adolescent, anatomical humor.

Unless bodily humor is a sin, don't read too much into the title.

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Well its Monday again and if you’re anything like me you could use something a bit relaxing to start your week with.  So today i present you:  Small Worlds.  Small Worlds is an award winning  8-bit style exploration game that is quite beautiful in its simplicity.

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