Arcade

The Crave video podcast returns! Donald Bell and Jasmine France review a weird and wonderful week of posts from CNET's Crave blog, highlighting a new robot from Honda, a vintage video game sound box, a Kug, a cooler, and a privacy helmet that should come with its own spit valve.

Artist/nerd Steve D'Angelo calls this a sculpture, but we think it's more than that. It's an awesome sculpture.

It's called Action Buttons, and that's exactly what it is. Steve, a Crave reader in Pennsylvania, has put a collection of arcade game buttons on the surface of a small plywood box and wired them up to old-school audio samples downloaded from the Web that play when the arcade-like buttons are pressed.

The sounds aren't from specific games but sound like they could be, with titles like "energize," "fire laser," "… Read more

StarCannon is a remake of classic arcade shooters of the past, with 2D shoot-'em-up action and challenging boss fights. The graphics are smooth even on the older iPhone 3G. The controls are mostly effective, but can sometimes feel sluggish using a touch-to-move system rather than an onscreen joypad. Your ship fires automatically as long as you are touching the screen so you can play the game using only one finger or your thumb.

You can acquire three different weapons as you play and, just like top-down arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon lets you upgrade each weapon with more … Read more

Earth Vs Moon is a fast-paced, well-made, and often funny arcade game that bears a close resemblance to the Atari classic Missile Command, along with quite a few homages to other beloved old-school video games.

The setup is similar to Missile Command: three stationary bases along the bottom of your screen that fire missiles up at incoming targets with a limited ammo supply. Earth Vs Moon makes great use of the touch screen (you tap to target), offering an improvement over the original game's trackball controls and the Atari 2600's joystick. Many of the game's levels play … Read more

Air Assault is a relatively unremarkable arcade game in which you fight "invading Russian/Afghanistan forces" in Afghanistan with "Anti-Air and Mortal" (presumably "mortar") guns.

Every game begins with a slowly scrolling text introduction set to "Flight of the Valkyries," which you can thankfully skip. It outlines a muddled, quasi-historical backdrop with dubious references to "September 11" and Operation Enduring Freedom (which isn't helped by later appearances of apparent suicide bombers and oil-production fields, something that Afghanistan is not particularly known for). The game's wide-screen interface has you … Read more

Mario & Friends Lite is a soundboard app--that is, a sound-effects player--featuring over a dozen sounds from popular, old-school Nintendo games like Super Mario and Legend of Zelda. Unfortunately, the App Store currently lists this app under Games, not Entertainment. Make no mistake: it is not a game.

This is the Lite version of the full Mario & Friends app (which has more than 60 sounds), so you get just a handful of sounds, some just a second or two long. Examples include fun, iconic effects like Street Fighter's classic "Hadouken!" or the bouncy Mario 1UP trill.… Read more

It's a good week to be a gamer. We've rounded up five just-released titles that offer a little something for everyone: 3D platform action, a space-themed take on Facebook fave FarmVille, havoc-wreaking airborne zombies, and more. Take a look:

Assassin's Creed II: Multiplayer Created exclusively for the iPhone and free until March 3, ACII: Multiplayer looks nothing like the third-person action-adventure games that preceded it. Rather, it's a top-down, online-multiplayer game of kill-or-be-killed. It requires Wi-Fi, but Ubisoft's servers automatically link you with up to three other live humans. I found the game a little … Read more

Every couple of times a season, it seems, we're due for another well-crafted downloadable indie gaming sensation on either Xbox Live Arcade, PSN or Nintendo's WiiWare. Last year saw quite a few memorable download-only games, many of them inventive and weird enough to simply be unbankable as a disc-based release. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is just such a game, available now on Xbox Live Arcade for the MS Points equivalent of $10.

Long discussed at indie gaming events such as GDC, the Odd Gentlemen-developed game has been published by 2K Games, makers of normally far more … Read more

The Zune forums are alive with complaints that a bunch of music has suddenly disappeared from Zune devices. The reason: it appears that Microsoft has pulled a bunch of music from the Zune Marketplace. If users downloaded this music to their devices via the subscription-based Zune Pass service, then it apparently disappeared when they synced their device. (I'm talking about subscription-based "tethered" downloads, of which users get an unlimited number per month. The Zune Pass also offers 10 permanent MP3 downloads per month, and those downloads have not been affected.)

I'm not a Zune Pass subscriber, … Read more