Sandbox

N.B.: This review was of Minecraft in its earliest outing; see here for a more recent (and favorable) take on the game

Back in the day, I entered Habitat and played around with it. And I remember Chip Morningstar telling me that it "wasn't just a game," and thinking "Too bad! It could be a pretty good game!" That is, if you bolted on some, you know, actual gameplay. Something to do. An objective.

James Silva could be the Quentin Tarentino of videogames. I can't remember right now, but I've probably laid that on a few other developers. Forget about that, this guy is it. He's coming out with The Dishwasher for XBLA later this year, after having won a contest where Microsoft deigns to work with you. He's a one man army, and while Dish looks pretty tight, Survival Crisis Z is a long-buried classic.

Do you remember the last time you fully geeked out? You are about to. Universe Sandbox takes the joyous freeplay of Powder and such into 3D. Astronomical scales are laid out for you with a fully zooming and rotatable camera, trails tie knots and stream like ribbons, light waves pulsate at remarkably slow speeds, time is at your command. You can throw a star through the asteroid belt and see what happens. It brings out the awed child in all of us.

Easter is the celebration of our divine ancestry from the lizard-people, Quetzalcoatl, Tammuz, etc., and their thirst for the blood of bunnies and other reptoids. Science seems to indicate that some dinosaurs, like these feathered raptors, did evolve into birds, but did you know they also evolved into mammalian hybrids, and that these hybrid bloodlines of shapeshifters now rule the world? Ergo, Off Road Velociraptor Safari is probably the best way to celebrate Easter - ever - because it taps into the reptilian consciousness of predation that drives our totem sacrifices, in the form of a jeep, driven by a raptor, mauling other raptors for mad points.

Sure, we all complain about the periodic gluts of movie licensed games that hit the market, but how often have you seen one based on a film by a director like Andrei Tarkovsky? This isn't exactly what you would call a mainstream inspiration or a quick cash-in opportunity. The film was made in 1979, and was in turn based on a short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.