loonyblog.

Amidst all the iPhone hysteria, here’s an entertaining little story…a woman (who clearly didn’t read the rules in advance) showed up at a Dallas AT&T store with $16,000 expecting to buy out the entire stock. She paid the guy at the front of the line $800 for his spot, and then once she got inside was told they were limiting sales to one per person.

Oops.

Good for the dude at the front of the line though…he still got an iPhone, but of course, that $800 covered it nicely. Check out the video to see the genius behind this plan to get rich quick.

A simpler time.

For some time now I’ve quietly hid an addiction to a PopCap game called Peggle. I don’t say this often, but Peggle is a nearly perfect game. It’s not perfect (Tetris is the only truly perfect game, and even that varies from version to version), and it’s not even remotely one of the greatest games ever made, but it is extremely well made, and hideously addictive.

What’s so great about Peggle is that it sucks you in by making you feel like you’re really good at the game, when in fact it’s all just luck. The game is basically just a spruced up pachinko. You drop a ball at the top and watch it go down. It takes this concept and throws all kinds of bells and whistles in, so right out of the gate you feel awesome. You feel so awesome, in fact, that you can’t help but keep playing. And that’s when the actual depth of the game comes in. Eventually the levels become much harder, you gain new abilities, and eventually you learn how to exploit it all. But even when you’re doing poorly, you feel great, because stuff is always happening on screen. Oh, and when you successfully complete a level, you’re rewarded through the rousing chorus of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

The funny thing about Peggle is that at first glance, it looks so…pansy. I mean, there’s a unicorn on the main menu! And then there’s the rainbow, stars and purple backdrop. If ever there were a game that was the antithesis of manliness, this is it. But once you get past that, there’s pure, pure gameplay underneath.

As I said, I’ve been addicted to Peggle for some time now. But the gameplay is so perfectly compacted that I haven’t been sitting at my computer playing it for hours at a time. You can fire it up, play a few levels and get back to whatever it was you were doing after just a few minutes (although I will confess to a few “one more ball” moments). There’s no story, there’s no multiplayer, just pure ball dropping madness.

Peggle is such a weird puzzle game that it’s meaningless for me to compare it to anything else. I’ll just say that it’s a game that will attract anyone willing to get past its less-than-manly exterior. Incidentally, it’s on sale on Steam for $10 this week, so now is as good a time as any to pick it up.

Anyway, just try it out. Alas, there’s no Mac version, but it does run pretty well in Parallels (albeit without 3D acceleration, as it doesn’t recognize the GPU in Parallels 3.0). You may feel a little silly when you start playing it, but after a few levels you’ll feel awesome.

Nicole Kidman is doing ads for Brain Age 2 in the UK. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be buying this.

I probably would have anyway, but…you know.

Update: Here’s the commercial.

Just in case you were wondering, the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on idiocy. A recent survey in the UK (linked from Gizmodo) showed that one in three people wouldn’t give up their mobile phone for a million pounds (~$2 million). What? I realize I’m not a swinging British chap, but come on! I’d totally give up my Blackberry and cell phone for two million bucks.

I’m assuming they mean give up for good, not just give up the phone you have now. If all I had to do was give up my current phone, I’d do it for half that. Or a quarter of that. Any takers?

(And no, I’m not saying Chris is a British moron. I just like the picture)

Courtesy of Kotaku, I give you this year’s scariest movie:

That’s right, the tag-line is actually, “Can Christmas be spared?” Ugh. Shoot me now.

The IMDB lists it, so it’s probably a real movie. All I know about Elf Bowling is that the GBA version is one of the lowest rated games in GameSpot’s history and that it’s creepy as all hell. I intend to avoid this movie at all costs. Also I won’t slow down if I see it in the street.

There’s an AP article at Yahoo News talking about one of those fun facts I’ve always known…that Orson Welles’ last performance wasn’t particularly dignified…it was Transformers: The Movie. He was good as the planetary Unicron, but as he said, he was playing a toy.

But if we’re talking about the indignities of Orson Welles, I’d be lax if I didn’t point to this infamous video:

“What is it you want? In [the] depths of your ignorance, what is it you want?”

Classic.

It naturally has to be paired with this clip, one of my favorites from The Critic:




On a slightly more positive note, Citizen Kane was named by the AFI’s critics survey as the greatest film of all-time…again. I freely admit that in my mind I associate him equally with Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and…Transformers (to say nothing about his various commercials). But I like to think I’m laughing with him, not at him. He took those roles to bankroll his personal projects…he had to know the absurdity of it all.

OMG.

Update: Looks like it was yoinked…that was the trailer for the final cut of Blade Runner that’s coming this fall on DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

WARNING: This post violates the rules (but it’s really cool, so I’ll let it slide this one time).

It took a while, but Civilization IV is finally available legitimately in China. Localizing it brought with it a number of problems…there were several gameplay changes that were necessary to get it past the governmental censors (I won’t go into them here, but if you play Civ, it’s not hard to guess what they might be).

In any event, as a way to steer people towards the legitimate version of the game, the Chinese edition is really, really cool. For the low, low price of 元139 (that’s about $18), you get the game, a soundtrack CD, a tech tree, manual (slimmed down from the original English version…a fully translated Chinese language manual would probably have been enormous), a t-shirt, and a statue. Yeah, a statue. And it’s a really nice one, too. It’s hand painted, and has some really nice touches, like the string on the warrior’s crossbow. Anwyay, I’ve put some photos up, so check ‘em out. It’s really cool.

Although you’d never know it from this headline:

BBC News: FBI tries to fight zombie hordes.