Did you ever do those experiments in high school chemistry where you lit the Bunsen burner, and then used an eyedropper to see how many drops of water it would take to extinguish the flame before the teacher caught you goofing off? Or, better yet, college chemistry class, where things exploded if you dropped the wrong type of liquid on them? It might end in serious consequences, but the point is, you proved that liquid is not a state of matter to be messed with.

This brings me to 'Puddle', a new game for Xbox Live Arcade. Simplistic controls and challenging physics platform puzzles makes this is good game to play in small doses. The controls are the left and right triggers, used to tilt your screen in either of those directions, as you guide the liquid of the level through varying environments, all with their own challenges to the type of liquid. It's very basic, yes, but it is fun once you get into the flow (sorry) of the game.

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Upstairs, Lana walks out onto a catwalk and is immediately spotted by the guard, despite the fact there is a solid metal surface breaking his line of sight. The guard runs up to the catwalk and positions himself below Lana, raising his gun into the air and bringing it down as if to strike someone standing directly in front of him. Despite the three feet of empty space separating the gun from Lana--not to mention that solid metal surface we were just talking about--the young woman crumbles to the ground, dead.

When Lana awakens from her temporary demise, she is standing in a hallway she last saw over half an hour ago. When she tries to sneak past the guards this time, it's likely that Amy will bump into some unseen surface and let go of Lana's hand at the most inopportune moment. Amy could run out in front of one of the guards for no good reason, or the camera may simply stop following the duo altogether.

Popping up sporadically, these sorts of technical hiccups are easily forgivable. In the survival horror genre, they can even be downright lovable; a wonderful piece of camp value fans can laugh about and reminisce over. But when these sorts of bugs infest every moment of gameplay and are coupled with horrendous design choices, they become downright insulting.

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Flash forward to today, and here I sit playing Invizimals: Shadow Zone for the PlayStation Portable, searching my home with the included camera for mythological creatures that can't be seen with the naked eye.

It's not the glamorized version of the gig I imagined all those years ago but, still, it's pretty neat. If I could travel back in time and deliver this game to my younger, more innocent self, I'd probably consider it one of the greatest games ever made. For this grown up incarnation, though, there are a few too many technical issues and dead zones to warrant such a ringing endorsement.

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The short-lived StarCraft comic book series took its gaze away from the main players for the most part (though Mengsk and Raynor play minor roles) to focus on the War Pigs, a rag tag group of mercenaries, and in the process, gives the reader someone to root for. The War Pigs aren't saints, but you want them to succeed, or at least survive.

Writer: John Shirley

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon and Shuster

Switching things up this week, I thought I'd take a look at the world of prose video game tie-ins. Like comics, they seem to be popping up like crazy. Just this year, Rage, The Elder Scrolls, Homefront, Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and BioShock have all had novelizations or prequel stories lining the shelves at your local Bord- er, Barnes and Noble.  John Shirley wrote the BioShock book, a prequel set during the fall of Rapture, but for the purposes of this article we'll focus on his recently released book Borderlands: The Fallen.  God knows, Gearbox's great playing but ludicrously undercooked tale of the lost planet of Pandora could use some literary punch-up.

Veteran sci-fi author Shirley, who is considered one of the progenitors of the cyberpunk movement after exploding onto the scene in the 80s with books such as City Come a Walkin' and the Eclipse series, is an ideal choice to explore the world of Pandora in further detail. The Fallen isn't perfect- at time it's awfully conventional, but it does manage to be while not the Borderlands story we all want, but a Borderlands story we may need.

Holy Frijoles- the Blue Bomber is a quarter century old! Capcom's Mega Man franchise. Eleventy billion games strong,  (how many of you have played Mega Man Soccer? Scratch that- how many of you are willing to admit publicly you have played Mega Man Soccer?), full of crazy, easily marketable characters, has had middling success in other media in the past 25 years.. Old fogeys like me, who have been playing the series from the beginning, still remember his television debut, on Captain N: the Game Master. A middling animated series in the mid-90s failed to catch on.