This month's issue of OPM has a demo of Lifeline. I've been tracking that game for a while now, because I adore the concept. Rio - your regular ol' hot video game heroine - is stranded inside an wrecked space station. You're also stuck there, but locked in the security command center, with camera-eye views of everywhere she happens to be. So the game revolves around you actually telling her (via the PS2 headset) where to go and what to do. You're supposed to work together - you instructing, she following - to get her out alive. And I assume there's some kind of Resident Evil / Disaster Report plot conspiracy behind it all; there always is.

"Run." "Shoot!" "Go to the table." "Look under the sink." Almost like an old King's Quest game, just with your voice instead of typing.

With a game that runs on voice recognition, it's pretty obvious where it will live or die: how well it reads your voice. And guess what, it's spotty! At least, the demo was... and every review so far has been rather cruel about it.

Action figures + game = Something I almost certainly will buy. Although nobody seems to know how to do it well. A couple Origins ago, I was really psyched to demo Z-G, a tactical combat game with robot figures and a zingy anime style. The demo did not enthrall me: the robots were too loose to pose (or even stand once weighed down with their ridiculous oversized weapons), the combat system involved matching color stripes on cards, and there was this whole complicated range-measuring thing that instantly annoyed me.

Then came WizKids' Shadowrun game, which basically applied a x4 growth hormone to their own Mage Knight style of clicky base games. The action figures here were classically unposable and just about immaterial to the game itself. The only aspect they added was the ability to hold different weapons and gear, which would then give varying abilities and effects. Yawn.

I've seen a lot of techo-savvy weblogs adding "Listening To:" squibs to their pages, usually pulling the latest tracks played out of iTunes or whatever iTunes equivalent people choose to run. Seemed like a neat idea, but I never put much thought into how I could pull it off. The trick, you see, is to make it as automatic as possible, because who wants to hand-code "I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys" everytime they update.

There's a fine edge where I fall off in my understanding of programming, and most of the iTunes-to-HTML scripts seemed to be on the far side. But I figured I'd give it another go last night. I started here, which led me to here and then finally to here. (On an unrelated note, I also started out here and ended up here.)

A couple of weeks ago, Mike announced that he wanted a bolo tie. Initially I was skeptical. He lives in Maryland after all, hardly a bolo tie sort of state. And this is the year 2004, hardly a bolo tie sort of year. But we're still into Doomtown, the Wild West / Horror card game that doesn't even have an official website for me to link to, so I'm ready to help. I'm a sucker for immersion.

Although Mike had to confess that his interest in getting a bolo tie wasn't due to any kind of desire to play cowboy dress-up at this year's Doomtown Tournament, he's mainly looking to make his daily grind of playing career dress-up a little easier. A bolo tie, despite the name, does not tie at all. It merely hangs and holds a brooch. At this point I envision Mike like the dad from "Cheaper by the Dozen," timing himself doing buttons up or down to decide which path gets him out the door fastest and away from his screeching kids. Except Mike, being a teacher, is actually heading to the screeching kids.

I finished Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly last Saturday night. In the interests of keeping this spoiler-free, I won't say much about the game's ending... except that it was horrifying.

You can definitely feel the ending coming on; your final walk takes you through an underground tunnel where you get jumped by high-level ghosts every couple feet. Then you have to confront the Kusabi himself, a spectre even more gigantic than the mega-corrupted Kirie of the first Fatal Frame. If you haven't finished the game yet, I wouldn't call the Kusabi's appearance a surprise. He's the massive nasty roaming in the Great Hall of Kurosawa House back in the middle of the game. When I met him back there, I ran.

I played through on Normal mode (got the "good" ending) and had quite a bit of film left. I would even guess that I defeated 80% of the game's ghosts on the cheap, infinite film. I'm sure this did nothing for my overall score and rating (E) since it made the fights last longer, but I felt like I was playing smart and saving the really powerful film for the end of the game. Apparantly I over-saved.

Puzzle games, like Tetris, are addictive right up until the point where it dawns on you that there’s no point to getting any better. Once you’ve satisfied the learning curve, without any reason to keep pushing that boulder uphill, the desire to do it fades. Puzzle Pirates attempts to put several reasons why you should continue – fame, fortunate, and the excuse to say “Arrr, me buckos!” when swordfighting against other players.

After reading Boris's review of Puzzle Pirates, I decided to give it a go. I was all set to not like it; how much fun can a bunch of Tetris clones be? And I hate all those stupid PopCap cheapo website games anyway. But Boris made it sound interesting, and the trial period is free, so avast me hardies. (Hearties? Harties? Heardies?)

But it's pretty damn cool. I think it fills a huge void in online computer gaming: online multiplayer that isn't filled with teen shitheads. Who's going to grief on Puzzle Pirates... it's just people playing Tetris for cryin' out loud.

It's pretty high-concept, given the boring, solo precedent for online puzzle games. Instead of just setting up a bunch of dopey games and connecting them with chat lobbies, Puzzle Pirates has the puzzles act as parts of a larger game. A bunch of players are all positioned at different puzzles on the ship (and visually, it is an actual ship with separate duty stations, so the immersion factor is complete.) Crew members in the Sailing game make the ship move, fast if they're doing well. The Carpentry game repairs ongoing wear and tear plus damage from incoming cannonball hits. If the damage goes beyond the ability of the carper, water starts rising in the Bilge Pumping game, which also slows down the ship if it isn't cleared up.