You invested in the night-scope. Things paid off… With a minimal amount of confusion and half-cockedness you’ve managed to persuade that member of the opposite sex to come back to your bedsit. Now what? Perhaps an hour of COD4 on multiplayer? Some suggestive conversation about substitute rumble packs for the SIXAXIS controller?
NO! Did the cavemen need a wireless controller? Then nor do you… Of course, they had the benefits of wearing only a loincloth and the gentle play of firelight across their dusky bodies, so clearly what you need is to get old school… What you need to do is put out the overhead, drop the wall bed and get some of these badboys on the go. Mathmos have been helping create an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and romance since 1963, which is practically prehistoric. They’ve succeeded for a reason. That reason is illustrated here, by Jane Fonda.
Now. You can go the ambient route, with the Space Projector, which throws light through glooping discs part-filled with coloured oil to create an effect like this:
Or you can take the more direct approach and set up a couple of these little beautys:
If a gently glowing, scintillating phallic symbol all up in your inner sanctum doesn’t make the right statement, then you’re going to have to reach for the Barry White, close your eyes and hope for a miracle.
One of the things that often impinges upon my enjoyment of life is the limitation of the human eye. If only I were able to really get definition on the grain of my desk, thoroughly examine the surface of my lunch, or go to the next level in navel-gazing. If only I could switch modes, like Brave Starr, and see whether that is actually my bus coming, or only a number 172, which only goes to the other end of the one way system before heading back to Clapham, and is therefore not worth running for.
Well now I need suffer no longer. The for those very small things, particularly those that you just have to put up on your flickr account, there is the Veho VMS-004 a USB pluggable microscope that sits in a little stand on your desk, and those spare minutes will fly by as you examine just exactly how snugly the ball fits into the end of your biro, count the hairs on your knuckles, or torture an aphid in glorious 400 x magnification.
At the far-away end of the scale is the Bushnell Prowler – a double function night-vision monocular and telescope ideal for confirming your opinion of that member of the opposite sex that is just a little too far away in low-light conditions to be sure of. Are they truly attractive, or merely fine from afar, and actually far from fine? Now you can find out without having to ostentatiously throw your pencil across the room. It would also make a fine gaffer-tape addition to any gigantic gas powered paintball cannons you might have lying around in your basement arsenal.
So I’m invited paintballing for a friend’s birthday, and while I consider myself a pretty well reconstructed man – it’s ages since I last bled on a kebab shop floor – nothing fills me with joy like the prospect of inflicting epidermal trauma upon my mates. I think it’s probably delusions of proficiency induced by too many FPS games (like that paintball one James blogged about) that make me want to don a boiler suit and prostrate myself in a field, and once I’m there, something even stranger happens, and all other priorities fall second to expending the maximum of physical and fiscal effort in an effort to cover people I usually have nothing but affection for in paint, bruises and shame.
Knowing how easily enthusiasm turns to merciless bloodlust, I was somewhat perturbed to be told that my friend is planning to hire a [expletive deleted] tank. A paintball panzer, to be precise.
So in the best traditions of one-upmanship, I was hoping you could tell your friends about this blog, so we make some money, and I can buy one of these:
Or perhaps that you could all pray very hard to Robot Jesus and maybe he’ll get me one of these:
A chaingun and a Spartan APC should do the trick… On the other hand, the steampunk in me wants something I could wield in a darkened labyrinth – more along the lines of this basement built cannon:
Having had a little negative feedback on ‘The Majesty of Colors’ (you know who you are, you philistines) I’ve got a more traditional offering for you to start the week’s distraction. Angelico looks like it’s been ported straight from the Neo Geo – the cartoony graphics and exotic-cheroot vividity of the colours fairly make my palms itch for the feel of a joystick; I hear the tinkle of copper into the tray of the Penny Falls and wonder when I’ll have the courage to face the zombies in Altered Beast again…
Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes – so you’re Eros, or Cupid running your little winged butt off to get everybody together and making a little love before the sun goes down, by shooting them with arrows from your little bow. I was almost convinced by making the mad doctor fall in love with the jiggling nurse, but as so often before, it was the goat that clinched it for me.
Something for everyone here – you get to control a hugely betentacled undersea monster, and decide whether to feed plump little boys to the sharks or give them a hug and a balloon and send them back home. Will you crush humanity, make some new friends, or just have a nosebleed? Whatever the case you’ve got to appreciate the artistry of this lovely little 8-bit style gem.
How appropriate for this website is this game? It features both bunnies and inappropriate amounts of violence, death and other jollity. Buy guns, upgrades and generally pimp yourself out in the face of a long-eared, twitchy nosed apocalypse.
This is one of the best and smoothest RTS games that I’ve seen in a while – reminiscent of Homeworld, if you stripped it down to a tower defence game. You have no mobile units, but build a resource collection and base defence network, all hooked in to your power generation and storage grid. There’s nothing crazily innovative about this game, but it’s such a well executed iteration of this type that it really deserves playing. There are bonus modes available if you register over at the Casual Collective website, and they have some other quite slick looking projects up there. Missile turrets are a good bet until the little yellow ring ships turn up, when you’ll need big lasers… Enjoy!
Complex and involving flash game from Brain Juice Games (programmed by a chap called Lars from Fadupinator) in which you attempt to build an efficient power generation complex, before giant frickin’ zombie eyeballs with lasers on their heads come and blow the crap out of it… Don’t start playing this unless you can afford to waste an hour or two!
Game after the jump – click the title or here to play.
One of the things that often impinges upon my enjoyment of life is the limitation of the human eye. If only I were able to really get definition on the grain of my desk, thoroughly examine the surface of my lunch, or go to the next level in navel-gazing. If only I could switch modes, like 
At the far-away end of the scale is the 
