We, at PushButton Labs, have officially announced our acquisition of rights to publish The Incredible Machine and use its intellectual property! Awesome! The game is now available for purchase/download from Good Old Games (GOG.com).
For those of you unfamiliar with the title, it was released back in the 90’s as what is now toted the predecessor to physics puzzle games. I’m anxious to get my hands on it and start building some Rube Goldberg goodness.
Considered by some to be the grandfather of the Physics & Puzzle game genres, The Incredible Machine pitted players against a series of Rube Goldberg style devices which were composed from a wide range of objects such as ropes & pulleys, bowling balls, and even cats and mice.
The Incredible Machine was the winner of several prizes due to its innovative style and simulation abilities. A spin-off of the series, Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons earned Jeff Tunnell and Chris Cole a patent for their game design concepts.
The series is available for sale at the time of this release and can be found online at: http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_incredible_machine_mega_pack
For my wife, Becca’s birthday, we decided that a fun present would be to adopt a beautiful female Basset Hound from the Greenhill Humane Society here in Eugene. We had found out that she was in need of a home via their website. After contemplating adopting her for a couple of days, we decided to pull the trigger. The biggest factor in adopting her was not so much whether or not she would be a good fit for her (we knew she would because she appeared to be such a sweetheart), but rather how our existing dog, Oscar the dachshund would feel about her. Read the rest of this entry »
In our kitchen, next to the stove, we have this vast cabinet that didn’t really make much sense to us. Because it is so deep, a shelf wouldn’t really be functional as it would be a huge pain to reach all the way back. Becca decided that she’d like to have a nice roll out shelf because that would make it perfect for storing her cooling racks and various baking and cake pans (she loves to bake.)
Upon making a stop at the local home improvement store, we found out that you can’t just buy a kit to throw one of these into a cabinet. And besides, why would you want to? Most projects like this in kit form are of cheap construction and the hardware is usually a joke. In addition, I figured by choosing the right wood and finish, I would be able to get it to match the look and feel of our cabinets. So, I decided to do the DIY thing and buy the materials and bust out the tools to do this thing right. Also, with Rob’s help and Alex’s plans for inspiration, I had built a new workbench in the garage a couple weeks ago, so this was a perfect opportunity to put it to use.
I’ve been meaning to check out the WordPress iPhone application ever since I got my new gadget weeks ago. This is a really useful tool for starting—in this case finishing—blog drafts on the go (I usually start my posts in Evernote.) this application makes great use of the WordPress XML-RPC API and also has built-in support for sharing images from the iPhone camera. I’m sure I will find that camera feature useful. One complaint though, I can’t type in landscape mode with this app.
On that note, I was resistant to the iPhone keyboard as a method to accomplish a lot of typing originally but I find myself getting increasingly faster.
I haven’t really found too many applications I couldn’t live without so I would be curious to hear what peoples favorite apps are. The games all appear to be one trick ponies.
There’s always that one guy in the crowd, the heckler. He goes to game after game loaded with a copy of the opposing team’s roster annotated with all kinds of clever mockery and word plays on visiting player’s names. I had a friend in college who had a voice that could pierce the entire crowd. In fact, at one Michigan State basketball game he got the referee’s attention and received a hand motion for what was perceived as a warning. No longer does my friend need to be such a die hard attendee at real life sporting events to pursue his dream as a heckler. Nope, Sony is going to bring the action home in next spring’s installation of MLB: The Show. Read the rest of this entry »
With the chaos of the Thanksgiving holiday, it was a little hard last week to keep in the blogging frame of mind. With a little bit of a turkey hangover, I am guilty of not recovering until now. What was I doing instead of blogging? Well, I chose to engage in a number of other activities… Here’s some random things I did over Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »
Speaking of whack-a-mole, I ran across this awesome series of images on Flickr from a fellow Spartan showing Sparty playing a little himself. Not to ruin the surprise, but the mole that Sparty is going after is actually the mascot from University of Minnesota (who are the Golden Gophers.) Read the rest of this entry »
I use the website Yelp.com pretty frequently, thus I‘ve been looking to get more active in writing reviews on the site. This past weekend I went to Hole In The Wall Barbeque here in Eugene with Chuck. We were both pretty satisfied with what they had to offer. Read the rest of this entry »
I find it mildly humorous that Dell is still shipping all of the PCs on their home store with Vista that other Windows operating system installed. In fact, they want you to use Vista the lame OS so much that they only offer XP Professional at an add-on of $99.
Irontically, I feel that they should be paying me for keeping one more computer off the streets with Vista that filthy, other OS installed.