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Everybody plays Sudoku, but I can never remember how to spell it. I suppose it's inevitable that variations on this popular game will come into being, and one of the more interesting ones, visually at least, is Crystal Sudoku.

Rather than keeping track of numbers, with Crystal Sudoku, you are tasked with filling grids with images that don't repeat—little "crystals", I suppose. See how quickly you can complete the puzzle, and save your time to compete against yourself. There are four difficulty levels, so you can keep things interesting as you get better and better.

Crystal Sudoku is a Mac application. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on either PowerPC or Intel Macs. It requires OS X 10.4 or later.

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Okay, the truth is out: we all love Legos! There's always been something very satisfying about the look and feel of those little plastic blocks. From the simplest construction–look, I made a cube!–to complex animated beasts, everything just kinda' looks cool when it's made out of Legos.

In fact, the only real drawback with these little Danish blocks is when you step on them in the middle of the night. There is nothing in the world as sharp as those little plastic corners at 4:30 in the morning when you've just GOT to go.

Logo Digital Designer protects you from that danger, while giving you much of the fun of the Lego experience. Whether using a pre-built model as a starting point, or just starting with a blank screen, you can build just about whatever you want. The Camera Control lets you rotate your virtual model, and to zoom in and out, getting a better view of your handiwork from all angles. You have an unlimited number of bricks, so you'll never run out. Once you're done, you can check the Price Window to see how much your project would cost if constructed with real Lego bricks. Heck, you can even click through to the online store to buy them right now.

Lego Digital Designer is available for Windows (XP) or Mac (OS X 10.3+).

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Are you an air guitar aficionado? Do you lust after that sunburst Strat hanging in the music store window? If you've got a computer keyboard, this may be your lucky day.

Frets On Fire is a keyboard-based guitar playing game. Using a combination of Function keys and the the Enter key, you play along with individual notes and chords to rack up a big score. You can start at Easy level to learn the moves; graduate to Medium as you gain confidence, and eventually you'll be at Amazing, shredding with the best of them. There are tons of songs available, or you can import from Guitar Hero, or even create your own songs.

It may not be time to quit your day job yet, but with Frets On Fire, you'll feel like that big recording contract is just around the corner.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux, Mac (x86 processors), and Windows.

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The story goes that an early prototype of PONG was set up in a Northern California watering hole and became so popular that people would line up before opening for a chance to play. After a short while, the big console broke down and the bar owner called to have it removed from his establishment. Upon further examination, it was found that the reason that the machine stopped working was because it was too full of quarters. Pretty popular. The folks in line thought that PONG was a good thing, and that it was worth the wait.

Good things indeed come to those who wait. For those of you who have waited since our last review of Plasma Pong for a Mac version, that time has come. Recently released is the OS X port of this mesmerizing game, available for both PPC and x86 machines running 10.4+.

Plasma Pong is PONG with a twist: not content to just move paddles back and forth to bat the "ball" around, players operate in a plasma environment. The game field comes complete with swirling colors and fluid dynamic principles are the order of the day: squirt plasma into the environment, create a vacuum that attracts the ball, and even generate shock waves to keep things interesting.

In addition to the Mac version, there is a new version available for XP and Vista, so there’s plenty to go around.

Download PlasmaPong for Mac

Whether you're a Human or an Alien, you'll enjoy Tremulous, an exciting multi-player first-person shooter that incorporates elements of real-time strategy. Based on Quake 3, the goal in Tremulous, of course, is to wipe out the opposition. This is accomplished not only through killing them, but also by destroying their "spawn structures," effectively keeping them from replenishing their ranks.

Humans advance by receiving credits that allow them to purchase new weapons and upgrade their arsenals, while Alians evolve into new classes of beings, each more powerful than the last. Start as a Dretch and do your job well and you may soon evolve into a Basilisk, Marauder, or Tyrant. The game ends when all players on a team have been killed and all of their buildings have been destroyed.

Tremulous is a free, open source project that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. With a large support community and an active forum, there is a lot of interest in this exciting, award-winning game.

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Neverball is a fun game with an odd name. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Neverball can be enjoyed by Mac, Windows, and Linux users alike. This is a game truly trying to build bridges within the gaming community.

At its most basic, Neverball is a game where you roll a ball around obstacles by tilting the floor around it. The game is controlled by either your keyboard or mouse. More than that, though, it's a game of stunning and unusual graphics, as the game seems to take place in some three dimensional alternate universe. The colors are bright, full of reflection and movement. As you try to move your ball around obstacles, you'll encounter coins that you need to collect in order to progress to the next level. There are 75 levels total, so you might be playing this game for the next few years. If you do a web search, you'll find a few sites which keep track of high scores and maintain "The Neverball Hall of Fame".

The Neverball download includes another program called Neverputt, where you use the same principles from Neverball to play miniature golf.

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So you like DOS, do you? You really miss all the crackpot memory issues with UMB’s and expanded memory and extended memory and TSR programs? Well, here you go: DOSBox is a DOS/x86 emulator which has been ported to all sorts of systems: Windows, BeOS, Linux, Mac. It also runs 286 or 386 emulation, both in real and protected modes. It includes support for all manner of sound and video cards, such as Tandy and Hercules. Truly the past revisited! It’s true that when we upgrade from one system to the next we likely lose things that worked well and that we’d really like to keep; DOSBox is a solution to those losses, although it was primarily developed so that old games could be executed under more advanced operating systems.

DOSBox was written by four Scandinavian programmers. There is a lively user community hosted on Very Old Games on New Systems and the on-line support is extensive and complete. It’s totally free and is Open Source software.

Really, you’ll either be tickled or turned off by the whole idea of DOSBox. But in defense of those who do like it – there’s no shame in working with what works!

Get DOSBOX

I've written about StepMania, the very fun, free Dance Dance Revolution clone, here before. Dance games are fun and are great exercise. Kids love them, and I know adults who have cancelled their gym memberships to play 20 minutes of StepMania each day instead.

To play StepMania the way it was meant to be played, you need a dance pad. It turns out that Kraft is giving away dance pads for free: you just pay $6 for shipping. The pad is intended to be used with the four free games that you can download from Kraft's Active Gaming web site — there's a dance game, a soccer game, a "whack-a-mole"-type game, and a martial arts game. All four of the games are pretty good (for Windows only.)

But the cool part is that the $6 dance pad works perfectly with StepMania — and not just on Windows, but on MacOS X, too. (I haven't tried it with StepMania for Linux, but have no reason do doubt that the pad will work fine with that version too.) The pad has a standard USB connector — just plug it in and it works. All I had to do was configure the pad one time in StepMania's options page.

I received my dance pad about a week after I ordered it. (And although Kraft says there's only one pad per household, I've just ordered a second one, because StepMania has a two-player mode.)

Think it's a no-brainer to work in the fast-food industry? How about running the fast food industry? In this highly addictive, easy to learn, but very challenging program, you become the person responsible for all aspects of the McDonald's corporation.

From hiring employees, making sure that customer service is efficent and smooth, making sure land production for cows is available, and marketing the product, deciding whether or not to use genetically modified products, to how you process the beef, this entertaining game allows you to see beyond the fast food counter. It's clear even before you download the game that the makers are not fans of McD's. Despite (or perhaps because of) their bias, it's an interesting game.

This game is available for PC and Mac download, as well as being playable online.

Download McDonald's Videogame

Even if Playstation and Xbox are the rage, there are still some old-style games that can keep the game adventurer in you more than interested. Scorched3D, a turn-based strategy game based on the DOS game Scorched Earth, is a perfect example.

The objective is the same: blow up the other players who are equally armed. However, this modern day battle takes place in a 3D environment and probably as a sign of the times, a trove of weapons are available at your disposal (after you earn them). While you still can't actually move your tank (a holdover from the game’s DOS origin), Scorched 3D allows some room for strategy. After each successful round, you can purchase new missiles and weaponry with money earned from your battles. To give you a semblance of real battle, you will have to deal with a variety of changing environmental conditions and terrains. Best of all, you have an option of playing the game over a local area network or on the Internet with up to twenty-four other players.

This classic “blast-‘em-up” game is available for both Microsoft Windows and Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris etc.) operating systems, giving you no excuse for not downloading it.

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