So, while we were on-location working on Chalice this last week, The Donut Boys neglected my contract and decided not to provide me with at least one console or even a competent PC. They did, however, lend me Mickey C's nearly useless iBook G4 laptop. Let him know what a waste of space it is for me later. Right now, I wanted to share with you this free online game I found with it in my downtime.

Music Catch is an independant game made by some company called Reflexive. It's a flash-based game, so you can run it on just about any web browser. The screen's completely black, except for your cursor, at the beginning of the game. Then, from the blackness, green shapes start flying out, and you're supposed to catch them with your cursor. I'm not sure if I'm just tone-deaf, but I didn't notice any correlation between what I was catching and the music that was playing. Anyway, the music's pretty soothing, and the game's kind of fun. When the yellow shapes come out, you want to try to catch them, too, to get a multiplier and a bigger cursor. The more yellow shapes you catch without accidentally catching one of the evil red shapes, the larger your cursor will get, and the bigger your multiplier. Red shapes are nasty, though, they'll cut down your multiplier and your cursor size by about half every time.

So, if you're ever bored, away from modern conviences like a good ol' PS3, or too poor to get a copy of a real game, go check out Music Catch. It's good for at least 5 minutes worth of free entertainment.

I've managed 815,588 points. What's your best? Comment below.

EDIT: Yeah, that score was done on a crappy Mac laptop. I got back home from the set today and decided to see how much easier the game was with a real mouse. I can now proudly say my high score is 2,006,804. Beat that, kiddies.

By now it's old news, because it's been news since Thursday, but Blizzard released the opening cinematic for Wrath of the Lich King. It's really not all that impressive when you think about it in comparison to, say, the Burning Crusade intro. There aren't any really quotable lines from Arthas, and the only thing that makes you go "Oooo" is the giant dragon. Sorry, I probably should've warned you about that spoiler, but if you haven't seen this yet, that's your fault, not mine. The one thing that I can't ignore here is the fact that this is the opening cinematic for the game. What could this mean? My money's on a BlizzCon 2008 release party. I got 6 copper, who wants in on this?

Blogspot apparently hates me. I tried to give you an in-post view of the video. Looks like you'll have to click on the link.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/intro.xml

Universe at War: Earth Assault (Xbox360: March, 2008) Listen to this post

I tried really, really hard to ignore my initial doubts and finish this game. From the moment I turned it on, I was stifling the urge to kill myself in order to escape the torture, but, unfortunately, I caved after about four or five levels and promptly lifted the Xbox360 from the TV stand and hurled it off a cliff. I then cackled gleefully as I watched the massive piece of machinery tumble and transform into a fiery hunk of wreckage. Okay, I added the fire myself, but it did the rest all on its own.

Universe at War is a blatant ripoff of Blizzard's legendary StarCraft, however, SEGA decided to change things just a little by putting the game on a console. At least, that's what I thought, until I realized the console version is a port from the PC, originally released in December of 2007. Apparently they weren't paying attention to the fact that Blizzard tried to do the whole port-a-PC-game with the original StarCraft years ago and failed miserably. History repeats itself, ladies and gentlemen.

This game deserves nothing more than to burn in hell for all eternity. That's putting it mildly. Sega took the three races from StarCraft, kept the same basic unit types, and changed the aliens to robots. They didn't even come up with a new name for the humans; they're still Terrans. But, even their blatant theft would've been acceptable if they had made a decent game. Instead, they created a nightmare: a self-indulgent pile of crap that makes little attempt to even tell you what you're objectives are with a difficulty curve that starts out at the boring tutorial level and by the second or third mission has already reached infinity and beyond.

The biggest flaw in this RTS is the same as any RTS that's ever existed on a console: the controls. An all-purpose button doesn't really do much for you when the cursor is guided by a joystick. I can't wait until the day comes that developers realize the hard truth that RTS games and consoles don't mix. Sorry, Halo Wars, but all I'm gonna say when you suck is "I told you so." You can't compete with the power of a two-button+ mouse and a full-size keyboard. That silly little thing that Microsoft calls an Xbox360 controller just isn't capable of doing things like simple little micro-management.

If you ever get possessed to try this game, do yourself a favor: take a cigarette, light it, and jam the lit end into your left nostril. That will bring you less pain in a fraction of the time than Universe at War.

Overall score: 2 out of 10. It gets that much because had I tried this on the equipment it was intended to be played on originally (a PC), I might have actually been able to play through more than half of it.

Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None (Wii: February, 2008)

I can proudly say I didn't play enough of this game to give it a real review, but don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of first impressions to get the job done.

It's a point-and-click adventure, which in my mind is an oxymoron, not a game genre, ported to the Wii from it's original 2004 PC release. I'm amazed it managed to make it to the Wii, honestly, because the only place it should've been ported to was the dumpster.

If you had the patience to beat this game, you should give yourself a pat on the back, right after you finish bashing your head against the wall and asking yourself, "Why?!" Hell, if you had the patience to play this game for longer than the 10 minutes I spent on it, you deserve something. That 10 minutes was longer than I would've liked, but I had to give it at least 5 minutes of gameplay after the 5+ minutes of worthless cinematic at the opening.

The Wii version of this game takes it to an even more meaningless level than before. It's a mystery game, and they openly tell you at the beginning that part of the "mystery" is figuring out how to tell your character what to do with the Wii remote. Then they give you this example: if you want to open a door, instead of just pointing and clicking as usual, you have to point, click, and twist the Wii remote like it's a door knob. Seriously? I've heard of meaningless control concepts with the Wii remote, but nothing this ridiculous.

The story was neither engaging nor readily apparent to me at the start of the game, which, coupled with the stunningly boring activity of pointing my remote at everything on the screen, clicking on it, and hearing my character say things like, "It's a painting of a purple water lily," left me feeling no guilt when I almost immediately removed the game from my console and set it on fire. All I can say to those of you willing to sit through this one is, "good luck."

Overall score: 0.3 out of 10. Yes, that’s a decimal in front of that 3.

In the first intelligent decision they've ever made, The Donut Boys decided to give me, Tickelbur, a blog. What shall I blog about, you ask? Read the title at the top of the page, dumbass. This blog's gonna be all about video games. I'll fill it up with reviews, news, and anything else worth wasting your time with. So keep coming back, there should be something new here for you ever couple of days.