WEBSITE: Word Bubbles Game

Facebook blocked at work? Getting sick of Solitaire? Then mark today as one of the best Fridays of your life! Luminosity has a game that will eat up hours and hours of your time in a blink while improving your word skills! Word Bubbles is an addicting vocabulary game in which the player is given three letters that conceivably begin many words.

Players earn points by completing as many words as possible using these three starting letters as possible in the alotted time. Points are awarded for the number of letters in each word and when a number "bubble" reaches the surface and pops, that score is cashed out. The more bubbles the player can "pop," the better the score. Each complete game goes for three rounds for a total score.

Plurals, past tense and action verbs, and making adjectives are great ways to get the most out of one stem. For example, if the game gives you P-A-R as the starting letters and you come up with "party," you could also score big with "parties," "partied," and "partier."

Game on!

Sergio del Limonar

YOUTUBE: Minesweeper

As a kid I used to get an unhealthy amount of anxiety playing video games. Dual mode on the James Bond inspired "GoldenEye" gave me veritable heart attacks and "Mario Cart" wasn't much better. Basically any game with a timing aspect stresses me out to the extreme.

If I play any type of electronic game, I prefer to keep it to Solitaire or Pinball on my computer at work. Even the fairly tame Minesweeper is out of the question, although I have tried my hand at it enough in the past to be convinced victory is more or less a combination of luck and if the PC likes you rather than skill.

Either way, this (oldie but goodie) video from College Humor is classic. Poking fun at Hollywood's attempts to make cinematic versions of video games, they have come up with a mock-trailer for "Minesweeper: The Movie".

Satirizing such a simple game might seem difficult but tie it into the obvious war-flick genre and the melodramatic possibilities are ripe. In the discussing strategy, the situational "8 Box" comes up, to which the response is "8...God help us all."

I just wish playing these games was as much fun as watching this video!

Sergio del Limonar