As I was perusing my hand-picked collection of websites that may or may not contain wonderful gadgets to write about – a ritual I perform Monday through Friday after breakfast and before my 10AM “good, healthy cry” – I came across this game on Hammacher Schlemmer’s site: Skittle Pool. What in the hell is Skittle Pool?

The year was 2002. Two friends and I had just finished moving into a swanky three-bedroom affair a block away from Lake Calhoun in the trendy Uptown area of Minneapolis. Upon waking up after a blowout house warming party with what seemed like 500 of our closest friends, I found my SNES, Genesis, and Dreamcast covered in beer and orange juice. I haven’t felt complete since that very moment. If you could punch someone’s soul, that’s how it feels.

Now it appears that Sony’s “currently in discussions to bring a number of Dreamcast titles exclusively to PSN,” according to MCV.

Last week we brought you news of Direct2Drive’s 5th birthday sale-stravaganza wherein various direct-download action-themed games were going for $5 each.

The five-week sale is in its third week, and today kicks off a bunch of RPG and MMO titles for just five buckaroos apiece.

You guys sitting down? Bad news from The Internet!

Rare, the company behind GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64, basically said that the game will probably never be available for download on the Wii or Xbox 360.

After finally adding some drummy goodness with Guitar Hero World Tour and then issuing the video game equivalent of a greatest hits album, the newest installment of Activision’s wildly popular Guitar Hero series has hit the market.

Many may look at Guitar Hero 5 the same way people look at popular sports games like EA’s Madden series: the core game hasn’t changed that much at all but there are some new features here and there, plus 85 new songs to play and a slightly redesigned guitar controller.

Diehard fans of the series will likely go out and buy Guitar Hero 5 without much convincing, while people who are slowly (or quickly) growing weary of the near-endless crop of music games aren’t likely to find much here to change their minds. So let’s focus on those of us (myself included) in the middle – people who like music games enough to keep playing them but need some good reasons to keep shelling out $60 to $100 every other month (or so it seems).

Whoa-ho-ho there, will you look at this? Game downloading service Direct2Drive (like Steam, sort of) has now been around for five years and to celebrate, they’re giving away various games for $5. Good ones, too. A new bunch gets made available every Monday.

If you really think about it, it makes sense that future installments of Guitar Hero and other games like that could basically come packaged like those Jakks Pacific plug-and-play TV games. It’d eliminate the need for a console altogether. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick realizes this, and says that his company is considering the possibilities.

Cast your memory back to late March of this year and you may recall news of an on-demand, internet-based gaming service called OnLive (here’s the original post). Think of it like GameTap (remember GameTap?) except that nothing actually gets installed on your computer. All the games can apparently be streamed at up to 720p resolution over a 5Mbps connection, or standard definition over a 1.5Mbps connection.

Nintendo has officially announced Wii Fit Plus, a somewhat incremental upgrade to its wildly-popular Wii Fit exercise program. The price of the Wii Fit bundle, which will include the new Wii Fit Plus along with the Balance Board apparatus, will remain at $99 while the standalone version of the game will cost $19.99. It’s set to release here in the US on October 4th.

Great article over at Edge Online for anyone interested in the early days of EA’s John Madden Football franchise. Did you know that one of the first versions of the game was initially 7-on-7 due to memory limitations? Madden himself put the kibosh on that one right away, saying, “What’s this seven-on-seven? This isn’t football. If my name’s going to be on something it’s got to be 11-on-11.”

So this is a weird thing. It’s kind of like an electronic camp counselor and it’s called Swinxs. Kids wear RFID bracelets and then the box tells you to do stuff like run around and play hide and seek. You check in with the box by moving your RFID band near the box.

There are 25 games so far, most of which involve running around and then coming back to the box for further instructions. Parents can also make their own games including, presumably, my Dad’s old favorites, Go to the Store and Get Me Some Beer and This Is What You Get When You Spill Paint in the Garage.

Whether you love the Sims franchise or not, the PC version is $30 (today only). That’s $10 off just about everywhere else. My particular household is in a love/hate relationship with the game. I hate that I get sucked into it and my wife loves to make fun of me for playing it.

I had a lot of fun playing Syndicate back in the day. I still have it installed on my D: drive (right between Starcraft and Tribes), and the concept and execution of the game is really as fresh as it was 20 years ago. Even the graphics still stand up pretty well. In fact, I’m very near convincing myself as I write this that a remake of this game really isn’t necessary at all. But if it’s the kind of loving, careful remake we saw with Bionic Commando: Rearmed, I’m all for it.