Last week I mentioned this Golden Tee Golf CrunchDeal and said that I’d even buy it for myself. Well you may have thought, "That Doug, he’s all talk — sitting up in his mansion atop a pile of free gadgets, he’d never stoop low enough to buy a plug-and-play TV game for ten bucks."

I’ll have you know that I did indeed purchase the game and I’m happy to report that it’s a perfect gift to give to someone that you HAVE to get a gift for but want to spend the absolute least amount of money possible while still making it look that you put some thought into it.

So, on to the review…

Price:

It’s $9.94 at Target. You’d spend more than that on a $10 gift card, which is widely thought to be the smallest socially acceptable denomination to give to someone as a gift.

Look and Feel:

It’s solid. Bigger and more substantial than I thought. It doesn’t feel cheap — well, it doesn’t feel $9.94 cheap. It feels more like it should be in the $50-$60 range. The controller is a near-exact replica of the Golden Tee board you’d find in your local bar, just shrunk down to about a fourth of the size. It’s got little hand grooves underneath it on either side and the bottom-middle of the thing is molded perfectly to sit on your leg.

The trackball is quite a bit more stiff than the big-boy bar version but, who knows, maybe it’ll loosen up if I were to replicate some real-bar scenarios like spilling beer on it and rubbing pizza grease all over it. Ewww.

Graphics:

Imagine your Gameboy Advance blown up to your TV screen. Maybe your Gameboy Color, actually. No, it’s better than that, actually. Calling it akin to PGA Tour on the Sega Genesis would be a stretch but it’s a little better than 8-bit graphics. Everything’s top-down, no in-flight ball cam or anything like that. Maybe we could agree on TurboGrafx-16 quality – not actually true 16-bit, but an 8-bit CPU with a tricked-out GPU.

I don’t know. Don’t buy it for the graphics. Buy it for the love of golf.

Gameplay:

The swing mechanics are identical to the bar versions, which is a good thing. You can hit the backspin button before your backswing and apply fades, hooks, draws, and the like by pulling back and pushing forward on the trackball in different directions. You can even pull of the no-backswing swing. Just push the trackball forward and you’ll hit the ball.

You don’t get the behind-the-golfer view like you do in the bar versions. Instead, you get a view of your golfer in a little window in the upper right hand corner of your screen superimposed over a top-down view of the course. It feels a little different, but it’s not bad.

People with no human friends and/or people who are almost 30 years old and still play plug-in TV games (me) will find that, while a table for one can be fun, there’s something missing when you can’t even play against a CPU opponent. You can play together with up to three other human players, so keep that in mind if you indeed foster face-to-face human relationships.

Course Selection:

It’s bad! There’s only one course. It’s nice and varied, but I can see it getting old quickly. My secret is that I bought the game and had it sent to my parents’ house, where I’m currently visiting for the holidays. I’ll leave the game here – brilliant! – and just play it whenever I visit, so it’ll seem new to me because I’ll forget all about it between trips.

Recommendation:

True Golden Tee addicts have so-far scoffed at Radica’s attempt, returning lukewarm customer reviews. But that was back when the thing cost around $50. For under $10, it’s hard to find too much to complain about. These little guys might not last long and, again, they make pretty good last-minute gifts for the marginally-important people in your life.

Radica PTV Golden Tee Golf [Target]

Quick Version: Mail-based role-playing for those who love the sound of many-tentacled hellbeasts in the darkness.

I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons, and a variety of other role playing games.  It’s always been fun to exercise my imagination, and to explore a game world in the way that I want, rather than to passively watch such a world unfold, which usually leads to disappointment — like when Jeremy Irons talks to dragons.  There is no shortage of role playing games available, but most involve coordinating a meeting with a group of people and spending several hours committed to the task.  Not everyone will have all the necessary books, there will be all sorts of arguments over rules interpretations, and any number of other issues will conspire to spoil the fun of the game.  You could try something a little lighter, like Risus, The Anything RPG, but that still requires a group of people.  Notably lacking from the role playing genre is the one-player pickup game.  Enter De Profundis, “a game of mind-warping horror in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.”

At $7, this is an easy-to-justify purchase for yourself or the gamer in your life. It strays from the traditional path of role playing games by being, essentially, a one-player game.  There’s no GM, no formal rules, and no specific campaign.  The “player” runs the “game” as he or she sees fit.  To “play” the game, you merely write letters and mail them to someone.  Hopefully the recipient of your correspondence is in on the “game”, though that’s not strictly necessary. You can compose letters whenever you want, making this a relatively easy game to play in your spare time.

The De Profundis rule book serves as an example of play.  It’s written as series of letters, each explaining a little more of the goal of the game system.  The example uses eldritch horror themes like those from H.P. Lovecraft’s works, and encourages the player to use the same.  You can easily apply the format of the game to just about any theme, though.

I’ve composed and written a few letters in my own De Profundis “campaign”, and I found it fun and easy to do.  I followed the rule book’s suggestion to hand-write my letters, rather than to type them on my computer, in order to really get into the mood of the game.  After the first couple of letters, it was easy to look at the everyday world through the lens of the game to highlight the weird and the bizarre.  It took no effort to find a couple of hooks for my game, and I’ve got the basics of a long-running plot that will slowly unfold through the course of my letters.

This is a terrific opportunity to leverage your creative abilities.  Manipulate photos and include them with your letters.  Send an audio CD of something you heard.  You can spend as much time and energy as you want to bring the game world to life.  This will make it more fun for both you and the recipients of your letters.  If your recipients are in on the game, you might work together — thruogh correspondence and shared research — to uncover some ancient terror.  Or you could eschew the book’s advice and play online, utilizing hyperlinks and multimedia to explore the mysterious world around us.

De Profundis should make a fine addition to any gamer’s collection!

Short and sweet: Kidz Gear Headphones for Kids are just that: headphones for kids.  The cans fit little ears, and the swivel mounts allow for comfortable positioning.  Volume control on the cord, reasonable sound quality, and an affordable price make these a pretty good buy for Junior.

Of course the Snowball Blaster should hit the scene when I’m damn near thirty and too old to go get in snowball fights with the neighborhood children. “It’s that creepy blogger!” all the parents would yell. “Don’t get into snowball fights with him! He works out of the house! That’s not normal! He’ll try to kidnap you and teach you to type!”

Ah, but here I sit wishing against wishful-ness that the Snowball Blaster would have been available twenty years ago when I was in prime snowball fighting form. For today’s youngsters, assuming they still go outside once in awhile, the Snowball Blaster can be had for $29.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer.

It’s made of “durable, cold-resistant plastic” and “is powered by elastomers (?) instead of batteries,” so you’ll never run out of shooting power. Simply pack three clumps of snow into the “forming chamber” and the gun will produce perfect snowballs for you to slingshot up to fifty feet “during neighborhood snowball confrontations.”

Neighborhood snowball confrontations. Nice.

The 50’ Snowball Launcher [Hammacher Schlemmer via RGS]

Bonus points for identifying where the quote in this post’s title came from.

As my brother said, “this is an tendinitis nightmare” or something like that. It’s quite addicting but it takes a bit of effort to actually get the fake bubbles to pop. I don’t see little kids over the age of 8 having the finger strength to play with this for very long. The texture of the bubbles is surprisingly similar to that of bubble wrap, though. And who doesn’t love a fake fart? It’s a perfect stocking stuffer for the little ones or even the big kids.

Why do you need a pig-shaped iPod dock? I don’t know, but it exists and it’s a sensible little device. The pig blows out some thin music but it’s nice and heavy on the bass and it looks great in a kids room. It is audiophile quality? Absolutely not, but it comes with a mini-remote that controls most iPod features and it costs about $150 – probably less when it comes to retail stores. Best of all, the website encourages you to make your neighbors jealous:

This speaker can be placed anywhere: on a shelf , a desk or any place you want in your rest room, study, sitting room……it will never makes you disappointing, but the only thing you should care is your neighbor’s jealousy.

Bottom Line
Great iPod dock for kids, the porcine inclined.

It flies like a real butterfly! I was actually quite surprised at the build quality on this thing. Usually these sorts of things blow into a million pieces on the first day but the Flytech butterfly withstood quite a few crash landings during our trials. The dog also bit it a few times, which is usually the kiss of death for toys like this.

Dear Satan:

Thanks for thinking of us this Easter. We purchased your Imaginarium Spiral Train Set on sale at Toys R’ Us and our wee one — you’ll feast on his soul soon enough, my old friend, just as you did on his mothers and mine — opening it this morning. Let me tell you about the fun we’ve had trying to keep it together! The tracks rarely stay put, the motion of the trains over the rails knocks it out of alignment, and the spiral “situation” as we’re calling it makes the entire thing as stable as a starlet on a speedball binge — you just never know which orifice is going to squirt blood or which rail will fall off and make everything else fall down with it.

I’m down with the tracks being compatible with Thomas the Tank Engine but Tom is all like “No WAY am I going on that” and his friend Percy won’t even talk to us. It’s just your cheesy, potentially lead-paint free knock offs on those tracks this joyous holiday, and since the wheels don’t really turn well pushing them on the rails is a crap shoot. After all, we have all day to keep rebuilding the damn thing every time the train makes a rotation instead of relaxing on a holiday weekend, right? Anyway, we’re not going to recommend this toy to other parents of train obsessed younglings but we’re forever in your debt for killing the Czar and his ministers, making Anastasia cry in vain, so I guess we’re even.

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It’s so rare to actually have actual child-like fun with the gadgets we get in that I had to put together this silly video. The Jasman toys are laser-tag-alike weapons with targets and a shot counter. When you run out of ammo the weapons pop open — the rifle shoots out its overheating fins and the top of the pistol pops up. You can recharge your weapon by pressing a button on the top and you take a few hits before your target stops registering and you lose like the loser you are — that means you, Mike!

Here we see my friends shooting each other while my son cowers in the corner and the dog enters the fray. Good times.

The rifle is $139 and the pistol is $59. I strongly recommend these for a little inter-office laser tag Covenant action.

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