Zuma for PS3 (PSN)

I guess I'm a little late to the party, but I'd never played Zuma (from PopCap Games) on any other system. I love it! It's one of those action puzzlers, which I'd compare to Tetris, where you have to match up pieces that are coming at you, making them disappear, before they stack up and bury you.

You see, while I spent my wasted college leisure-time playing NetHack, kids these days play games with graphics and sound. So if you're a thirty something, you'll find Zuma to be plenty of fun, just like Tetris was, and you'll play it compulsively until your eyes bleed. But the *real* treat is to kick back with a beer and watch a twenty-something play it ... they totally go matrix-mode. And it's a trip to watch them actually apply strategy rather than just shooting madly until the game ends in disaster.

Hey, spectacular cut-scenes and multi-million dollar production budgets must look really impressive when you present them to the executives, but maybe with a couple extra supporting charts and graphs (and executives with some vision) you could get the management to greenlight more of these types of games. Please?

Flower for PS3 (PSN)

Wow! Flower is a very pretty game ... it's like art that you can play. You see, you're the wind, so you breeze around fields, and then flowers open as you blow past them. But it's not all visual -- there's chilled-out music playing throughout, with the opening of each flower adding a percussive note of a chime, or guitar pluck, or harp strum. Plus, the sound folks added awesome ambient sound, so there's rustling grass, rain, thunder, water swishing, a subtle but pervasive aural environment rendered in very nice stereo everywhere you wander.

Mister and Miss Achieveypants will immediately notice that nothing's keeping score, there's no timer counting down, there doesn't seem to be a high score list. You just drift around, opening flowers and enjoying the sights and sounds. At least you progress through "levels" -- that might be on a quiz at the end.

This was ten bucks well spent, especially when compared to the cost of a massage or talk therapy or a tasty Barbera. Now, can I get a screensaver this attractive, too? Please?

ILFORD Inkjet Photo Paper

Oh ... mygod. Remember when you were in High School photography class and you had a really artsy looking print, like with contrast and texture and stuff, and you'd dip into your stash of ILFORD paper to make it look extra fancy?

Yeah, well they make inkjet paper now. No, really.

The image is totally smoother and cleaner than the crap you get from office supply stores. And the paper holds up when you abuse it by, say, spray-epoxy it onto your laptop. This stuff is totally top shelf!

Cuboid for PS3 (PSN)

Cuboid proves once again that the future is inexpensive, downloadable, casual games. It's a puzzle game, played on a track of one-by-one tiles. You have to topple a one-by-one-by-two playing piece around the board, and its oblong dimensions make it tricky, some directions progressing by one tile, others by two -- it's hard to explain, watch someone play.

It's totally addictive. Screw with your friends; invite them over and let them try it. If you partake on your own, without a buddy, be careful!

Mirror's Edge for PS3

On the ground and inside the skyscrapers of the city, cameras watch every move you make. The only way to keep secrets is by sending private couriers who deliver your data without asking questions. It's a surveillance state, and dissent is not tolerated. This is also the basis of the beautiful "first person platformer" game Mirror's Edge, from EA.

You're a roof-running courier, jumping from rooftops to zip-lines to steel plates on cranes to small thermal exhaust ports ... the whole time avoiding the "blues" who keep shooting at you. I love that the training mode shows you how to grab one of their guns, and the very next thing it shows you is how to empty it of bullets and throw it away.

The visual style of this game is a total win ... grab the free demo and see what you think. It's definitely worth full price!