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Game: Pipe Mania
Purchased from: Big Lots
Price paid: $4.00
Platform: PC

If you haven’t caught on by now, Big Lots is pretty much my go to place for last season’s games on the cheap. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or dollars in my wallet for me to play all the games that I want when they make their first trip through the retail channels. But there are also games there that I’ve never seen outside of my local stores, so that’s a plus, too. One such game is Pipe Mania.

Pipe Mania has existed in one form or another for a number of years, and (very briefly) seemed like it was going to be as ubiquitous as Tetris, but for one reason or another, it seems to have nearly fallen off the face of the planet. If you’re not familiar with this game, it features you as a plumber of sorts presented wth a series of levels featuring a spigot and a drain. After a few seconds a slow flowing liquid called Flooze (not to be confused with Flooz) will start to flow. Your job is to take the random selection of pipe pieces and construct a winding path to the drain. The more pipes you use, the more points you get. Easy! Of course, most real plumbers that I know would go for the most direct route possible, but they also don’t have a selection of parts raining down on them from on high, so that’s a plus, I guess.

So this game is the same as that game. Yeah, there’s been stuff added: fancy-pantsy graphics, some cartoony characters (including a pairing of a lazy cat and a fastidious mouse, what fun!) and some of the levels have obstacles that you have to work around, but it’s nothing too earth-shattering.

The real draw is that this is something that you can pick up and play for a few minutes in between… well, whatever it is that people do on a computer when they’re not playing games.

Well, that and it cost less than one of those $5 footlongs, and lasted way longer.