Parade of Awesomeness

Pandora is the world’s best internet radio website. You decide what kind of music to listen to by giving it the name of a song or artist that you like. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to select a set of songs that sound like the artist/song that you picked.

As you listen to each song, you can give it a thumbs up if you like it, giving Pandora a better idea of exactly what kind of music you’re in the mood for, or a thumbs down to stop the song immediately and skip to the next one. You can also bookmark a song or artist so that you can come back later and buy that song from Amazon or iTunes.

Their iPhone app is really impressive as well. It feels very much like the built-in media player, but it gives you access to all the functionality from the website. The streaming quality is excellent, with gaps being rare to non-existent.

It’s an amazing free service. Give it a try if you haven’t already; you’ll almost certainly find something you like.

In Railroad Tycoon: Rails of Europe, it’s your job to build railroads and to ship goods from city to city.

You start with no money; the only way to get starting capital is by selling shares, which give you $5,000 immediately but cost you $1,000 per turn for the rest of the game. You spend money on laying railroad connections on the map, on upgrading your train, and on urbanizing small towns to accept new goods.

You earn money by shipping goods from city to city. You move up the score track one space for every link you move a good: move it next door, and you get a point. Move it three links over, and get three points. As you get more points, you get more money at the end of each turn—until about forty points in, when the money you earn starts to go down as your points go up.

It’s a game that’s all about careful expansion. Since you can’t pay back shares, they are a permanent drain on your cashflow. If you take too many shares, you can actually get to the point where it’s impossible to make money any more. And if you don’t have enough money when your cash flow starts to fall off near the end of the game, you can be forced to take a lot of shares.

The game ends after a certain number of cities are emptied of goods. You take your points, subtract the number of shares you took, and add any points for Tycoon Cards (which give you a bonus if you completed a certain condition by the end of the game, like “have the most money” or “have the best train.”). Whoever has the most points wins.

The European map has a lot of tiny chokepoints where only a couple of train tracks can get through, so there’s a lot of competition for space. (By comparision, the American map is wide open and not as well balanced, or so I’m told.)

It’s a fun little game, definitely worth giving a try.

The Michelin Challenge Design has a lot of really neat concept car designs. The above is one of my favorites, a really neat-looking ovaloid car called “Flexible.”

The other really neat one is called the Metro Cell Vehicle, pitched as a replacement for public transport. They’re one-person vehicles designed to be picked up and dropped off at different stations around a city.

Lots of neat designs to look at here; I’d love to see the Metro Cell Vehicle come into its own someday.

Eternal Silence is a neat Half-Life 2 mod that combines a space combat simulator with a first person shooter. Defend your own battleship while attempting to board the enemy’s battleship and destroy it.

There are different classes of ships, from bombers, which are a bit fragile but good at taking down enemy defense ships, to interceptors, which are good at taking down other player-controlled ships, to gunships, which are personnel carriers. You can also choose from a half-dozen soldier classes, with your choice of machine guns, flamethrowers, ion cannons, or remote-controlled railguns.

It feels a bit like someone took Tachyon: The Fringe and mushed it together with one of the Battlefield series. I’ve only played it a couple times so far, but I’m enjoying it a lot, and it’s free if you already own Half-Life 2. Which you should.

Kayla Kromer of Austin, Texas loves hamburgers. She loves them so much that she made a bed in the image of a hamburger. It’s 8 feet in diameter and apparently very comfortable, in addition to being the most awesome bed ever designed.

La Havre is the latest board game from the designer of Agricola. This time, you play as businessmen on the harbors of France.

The game mechanics are simple: The board consists of seven different piles of goods (money, fish, wood, clay, iron, grain, and cattle), a track with seven spaces (to mark who’s turn it is and what goods need to be added to the different piles), three stacks of building cards (available for purchase or construction), and several buildings owned by the town (available for use immediately).

Each turn, you move your boat marker to the next available slot on the track and put the two goods marked on that space onto the piles. Then, you choose to either take a pile of goods or to move your person marker into one of the available buildings.

One such building is the Building Firm, which lets you spend goods to build one of the buildings on top of one of the stacks of building cards. In addition to being worth points, buildings that you build can be used by other players—for a price. The abbatoir, for example, costs a coin to get into so that you can convert cows into meat and hides. If you own the abbatoir, other players have to pay you to use it, and you don’t have to pay anything to use it.

Every seven turns, you have to feed your workers an ever-increasing amount of food. You can lower this amount of food by building ships at a wharf, but wharfs and ships are expensive.

The game is all about efficiency: you can’t afford to waste precious actions. Spend too many actions getting food for your workers, and you won’t be able to grab the piles of construction materials you need to build buildings. Fail to feed your workers, and you’ll have to take out expensive loans to pay them instead.

At the end of the game, the player with the most value wins (money + the values of buildings and ships).

It takes a couple of games to really get into, but it’s a lot of fun for the serious gamer. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Germany and Australia at the moment for some incomprehensible reason, but if you can import it or hold out until the US release, you’re in for a really good time.