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For those who haven’t followed the canine fun, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show – arguably the most influential event in American dogdom, rather like a fuzzy Oscars – has been held every year since 1877. That’s 132 years, in which dogs of all shapes and sizes have paraded around the ring in hopes of glory, bits of steak, and a scratch on the ears. And yet somehow, in all those years, the top honor has not once gone to a beagle. I can’t begin to imagine why, but Snoopy’s brethren have been overlooked from the start.
All that changed this year, when one enthusiastic little hound stole the hearts of crowd and judge alike, and snagged Best In Show. And better still, his name is Uno! I know, I know, it’s probably because his registered moniker is “K-Run’s Park Me In First”, but my little geeky heart nonetheless hopes it’s because his owner also has a passion for the card game.
What better for Valentine’s Day…
…than chocolate? I said last month that I was just itching to play Chocolatier 2, and I finally had the chance to cozy up with the game for an evening. (Not Valentine’s Day evening, though; a certain special someone had dinner plans for us!) By and large, the sequel is much the same as its predecessor – even continuing the same storyline a few years later – but one new element mixes everything up, so to speak. As you explore the world and complete quests, you’ll also discover secret locations where you can purchase even-more-secret ingredients.
Of course, they’re all so secret that no recipes exist. So if you want to use them in your chocolates (and you do), you’ll have to take them back to your testing lab. Yes, indeed, your very own laboratory. I know I’ve always wanted one, muahahahahah. Instead of creating monsters, though, you’ll be combining ordinary chocolate ingredients with the exotic ones to build new recipes for your factories. The price of secret ingredients is often cringe-worthy, but ohhhh, the profits are sweet.
If you liked the first game, this one is also for you. If you thought the first one was a little too easy, this one is definitely for you. And if you can’t play a game about chocolate without feeling hungry, make sure you’ve got some leftover Valentine’s candy around before you get started! It’s a good thing I’m not on a diet…
Sneezing cacti, commando ladybugs, and gnomes with guns
Okay, so I may not have a yard of my own, but my mother loved to garden while I was growing up, and I’ve seen her try many devious methods of repelling pests. Not all of them were pleasant – the saucers of stale beer come to mind, but are immediately overridden for grossness by the spray bottle of wolf urine… ewwww – but they all seemed to be somewhat effective. Emphasis there on “somewhat”. Nothing ever worked well enough to keep all the different bugs and varmints away, so it was a constant battle of Mom Versus The Natural World as she tried to grow un-nibbled dahlias and hostas without holes.
Which is why I just bought her a copy of Garden Defense. I can only imagine how much more successful she’d have been (and how much more amusing my childhood would have been) if she’d had access to some of the pest-control methods in this game. Remember that scene in the movie “Over the Hedge”, after the exterminator guy has turned every item in the yard into an implement of destruction? Oh, yeah. It’s like that. Garden gnomes with rocket launchers, cherubs with deadly aim, fire-breathing dragonflies… I swear, half the fun of this game is wiping out the insect hordes, but the other half is just seeing what sort of verminating hardware you’ll be able to unleash next!
Garden Defense has officially nudged out Plantasia as my favorite garden game of all time. And I never thought that would happen.
It looks so much EASIER on the computer!
So at the end of January, the MSN Games uber-manager announced that our team would be going on a “morale event” this week; she declined, however, to specify exactly where we’d be going or what we’d be doing. Now, I know that the whole point of a morale event is to raise office morale, but I have to admit that I spent the next few days worried to distraction. I mean, sure, it could turn out to be an afternoon at the movies. It could be a trip to Gameworks, or Whirly Ball, or mini-golf. It could be any number of things that would make a gaggle of game geeks very happy indeed, and it probably would be. But still… well, even five years later, the memory of the Most Evil Morale Event Ever still haunts me, and so I look upon any further expeditions with a mixture of suspicion and fear.
Luckily, it turned out to be bowling. Wheee! And I’ll be upfront about this: to borrow the currently popular term, I positively suck at bowling. But that certainly doesn’t stop me from having a great time. The way I see it, if I hit any pins at all instead of gliding down one gutter with the first ball and the other gutter with the second ball, I win. And I’m not alone among my colleagues, apparently; even though I bowled a whopping 71 (my best game of two, heh), I didn’t have the lowest score. Yay!
Hey, if I want to bowl and not look like a total goof, I’ll play Gutterball 2. If real-life bowling was like that, I might actually have a chance!
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