You spin me right 'round baby, right 'round

I discovered a neat little game aptly titled "Spin the Black Circle".

The game breaks down thus: you spin the world (enclosed in the titular black circle) to move a ball towards a goal. Along the way there are spikes and fires and other nasty sorts of things you need to avoid or you die and you'll need to restart the level. The levels themselves are very well thought out and make good use of the game's physics to give the levels that perfect frustrating-but-not-impossible difficulty - and it's incredibly satisfying to complete a tricky level. Top it all off with some catchy background music, and you're likely to spend more time than you realize on this little gem.

http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/cm/g/744/spintheblackcircle.swf

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Anachronism: rewriting history for the sake of entertainment

Have you ever wondered who would win in a fight: Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan? Me neither, but fortunately I don't have to anymore.

There's a now-defunct collectible card game called Anachronism originally put out by the History Channel (THE History Channel) and TriKing games that allows you to select heroes and warriors from all different cultures and time periods to have them fight each other. The mechanics of the game can be found out on Wikipedia if you're interested, but I was sold on the game because a) the games are short (10 minutes, max) and b) it's free... kinda.

It's free in the sense that the game has been abandoned by the distributing companies and at this point being supported entirely by the fans. So a few of my friends went out to one of the game's major fan sites, Dystemporalia, and downloaded the image library for all the cards in the game and we printed out our decks. For the price, you can't beat it.

Nerd musings aside, this game does get my imagination running wild on some of the other historical matchups that the game missed out on. I would pay good money to be able to have:

• Joan of Arc v William Wallace
• Atilla the Hun v "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan
• Aaron Burr v Alexander Hamilton 2: this time, it's personal
• Ivan the Terrible v Ivan Drago
• Danny Larusso v Cobra Kai
• Captain Ahab v Cap'N Crunch
• The Jolly Green Giant v The Staypuft Marshmallow Man

And that's just to name a few off the top of my head. History Channel, MAKE IT HAPPEN!

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Spy's sapping my post!

I owned a Nintendo Entertainment System when I was 4, and since then video games have been something of an obsession a pastime of mine. Seriously, if I devoted even a tenth of the amount of time I spent with Italian plumbers and blue hedgehogs to something productive, I could have learned 12 different languages or cured cancer by now.

Then I leveled up my real-world avatar and things like "responsibility", "finances" and "pants" were things that I could no longer avoid. Between the demands of a day job and something that resembles a normal social life I had little time or energy left to play video games. Most of the time, I was only able to dabble in this, or dabble in that. Everything seemed like more of the same. This was especially true of the first person shooter (FPS) genre, which came in three flavors: tactical, Counterstrike-esque shooter; futuristic, frantic Halo-esque shooter; and World War 2.

Suddenly, along comes a game called Team Fortress 2, and totally recaptures my attention and free time. I'm not the first person to talk about this game, and as God as my witness, I'm not going to be the last. You join a server, pick one of two teams fighting each other, and pick one of nine classes of characters (pictured above). Brief summary: it's a game that favors teamwork and group tactics over "lone-wolf" mentality to accomplish the particular goals of a map.

I could wax poetic about the amount of polish, class balance, and addictability (that a word?) this game contains, but what really hooked me was the personality. Each of the nine aforementioned misfits- er classes, have their own set of weapons, strengths and weaknesses and personality. This personality is palpable, and oozes out of every detail.

The demoman is a drunk Scottish explosives expert with one functioning eye and can slap people around with an alcohol jug. The Heavy, that big slow brute, laughs maniacally when he fires off a few hundred rounds. The German-accented Medic is a really weak combatant but will still try to put up a fight with a syringe gun in a pinch. And nothing, I repeat nothing, in the game is more satisfying than as a Spy getting behind an enemy rush and stabbing as many of them as possible in the back.

Valve, the game's creator and apparently not content with merely representing the classes' personality in game, also developed several short videos for each of the classes in the "meet the" series of videos. They don't have all of the classes represented yet, but to get an idea of the personality I'm talking about:

• Meet the Scout
• Meet the Engineer
• Meet the Demoman
• Meet the Soldier
• Meet the Heavy

This is one of the few games in recent memory that has been able to not only hold my attention for so long, but genuinely continue to excite me every time I play. I could go on and on... but I think I'd rather get back to playing.

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