Free games are always good, but they’re even better when they’re a high quality fan project. That’s exactly what Dan Fornace’s Super Smash Land is. With his free PC game, he imagines what it would have been like if Nintendo had first released an entry in the Smash Bros series on the Game Boy. The result is a pixelated release that’s surprisingly detailed and quite fun to play.

It’s incredibly easy to start getting your smash on…

In the October 15, 2008, issue of Wine Spectator magazine (p. 44), contributor Matt Kramer wrote an opinion piece tiled “Why Wine isn’t art – and why that matters.”

Inspired by a party argument where someone suggests that wine is art, Kramer argues that “fine wine is, at best, a high craft” and that, to call it art is “self-aggrandizing.” He suggests that by getting people to accept that wine is art, winemakers’ “salaries will rise, and producers, for their part, will start pricing wine as ‘art.’” Instead, wine is simply an “amplification” and “refinement” of the existing attributes of the grape that happens to include the grape’s upbringing (“all the forces that create ta particularity of the site”). Lafite Rothschild, for example, is not created, but the result of craftily refining grapes grown in a specific area in a specific way.

Using wine-lover Kamer’s argument, videogames are then a creation from a blank slate, which makes any game art. Even if you have a…

In reading through the February 2008 issue of Wine Spectator magazine (what, you think gamers only drink Bawls and cheap brews?), I noticed that basic rating scale for wines looks pretty damn similar to videogames. That basic scale is essentially the same as the gradeschool system, where anything below a failing grade is pretty much not even worth putting to paper. A failure is a failure and it’s really not worth even looking at the actual score.

Now I’m not saying this is how all game ranking work but, really, how most people treat game reviews…