There’s a real dungeon in Italy. Not a dismal little room with a rack and an iron maiden. Rather, it’s a giant underground temple, Dwarven in its scope and ambition, and clearly doomed to unleash an ancient evil that has lain dormant inside the earth for thousands of years.

It’s called the Temples of Humankind, and you can view it in this extensive Flash gallery. It’s breathtaking to see what people can create when they get inspired, or crazy, or both.

I’m upgrading our TV, and one thing that comes out of having 1080p is the ability to hook up a computer.  It’s not something I’d do all the time, but I already enjoy browsing from the couch with a laptop (it certainly makes on-the-fly six degrees easier).

Given that a couch isn’t the best mouse surface (though it’s been working for the past 6 months), I took a look at the Phantom Lapboard.  That’s right: I sincerely looked to see if a real product was produced by Phantom Entertainment, creators of perhaps the largest vaporware money sink ever seen in gaming history.  I’ve been dubious since its announcement, but the attitude of all the coverage I’ve read has been, “Well… we’re sure they can at least ship a keyboard and mouse combo.”.

Here’s the shocker: you can actually purchase the Lapboard at Phantom’s store.  Though they don’t mention it, however, all indications are that it’s a preorder.  The only review I’ve found is an old review of the prototype.  There are some hopeful articles about Alienware planning to bundle them with their gaming rigs, from 2006.  The Wikipedia article mentions that they were unavailable as of October 2007, though the last public update I found about the release date states that the Lapboard was delayed until January… 2007.

Phantom Console: a ghost.  Phantom Game Service: a spectre.  Phantom lapboard: a… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh, that’s right.  An apparition.

I just gave Froogle Google Product Search a try, and was surprised to find that it’s been overrun by scammers. It doesn’t have a seller verification system, so it’s only useful as a quick search for scam sellers. Plug in any popular consumer electronics product and sort by price, and Google will helpfully display a number of obvious scams.

A quick search for the Sony KDL-52XBR4 (their latest 52″ HDTV) turned up a few gems. They’re obvious: the whois records are days old, and after any attempt to order with a credit card they make an excuse and request a money order. Some of the frauds are even well documented.

What’s surprising about these shops, though, is that they’re fairly comprehensive. The perpetrators can’t come up with a believable brand (”Shopping Shop: Welcome to Our’s Shop”), but online store software has become advanced enough that it’s a fairly small endeavor to make an entire fake electronics shop. Choose your software, pick a template, throw in some stolen graphics, and then input the products– in the ideal case, you can automatically parse this information from another site and upload it to your store. It’s non-trivial, but a couple fake $1500 TVs will pay for the work in no time.

Google’s developing a reputation for shotgunning beta products, and shutting down Froogle is a good first step towards fighting that image. The quirks of some beta products are merely annoying: GMail remains quite usable, despite its infinite beta status. On the other hand, Froogle is helping to facilitate massive fraud. Shut it down until it’s ready for prime time.

UPDATE: I did a bit of digging around on other price comparison sites.  Most have a lot fewer money-order scammers, but are instead full of 5-star-rated fraudsters who will ship a foreign gray market product without telling you, send you products you didn’t order and charge you for them (then attempt to charge a restocking fee when you return them), and claim your product is out of stock if you refuse to buy their overpriced extras.  MySimon and PriceGrabber list the scammers alongside reputable merchants; EveryPrice.com specializes in listing only scammers.  It’s hard to tell if they intentionally manipulate their own rating systems to keep ratings for the rip-off artists inflated, or if employees from the “companies” manipulate them.

While the “Game of the Year” discussion has already been pointed out as ridiculous (especially without having played Massive Loading Time Effect and Assassin’s Crossing Creed), I’ve found the range of suggestions interesting. Here are the games I’ve been hearing the most GotY talk about:

• Bioshock: This is the clear favorite in official awards, and for good reason. Tts thematic and gameplay elements are wound tightly together, each informing the other. The Little Sister/Big Daddy relationship is central to the story. It’s also the primary path to character advancement, it’s the core player choice, and it’s the primary combat element. Bioshock shows the power of picking only a couple core themes, and relentlessly iterating on them.
• Portal: I’ve heard a lot of developer support for Portal as GotY, while others have accused me of being “on crack” for making the suggestion. (Or, perhaps fairly, the “on crack” statement was referring to my mention of Zelda: Backtrack Hourglass.) Portal is much more relentlessly minimalist than Bioshock, and the result is limited in scope but almost flawless. Which makes this a surprising developer favorite, given that it makes their favorite pastime– bitching about the best games around– quite difficult.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: This was a huge surprise to me, after hearing about the game’s early beta-quality release (and subsequent patching that brought it up to… late beta quality). In spite of this, I’ve heard quite a few people say it was their favorite game they’ve played this year. (In a strange twist, an acquaintance just tried to play through the extensively fan-patched Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Even the hot vampire chicks couldn’t get him all the way through. So either STALKER is less buggy, or it has something even better than V:tM:B’s core mechanic of running around as a sexy vampire, seducing everyone in sight.)

This isn’t the post to go into it, but it’s also been a strong year for indies. Everyday Shooter and Dwarf Fortress have grabbed a lot of buzz, even if people probably clocked in the most time on Desktop Tower Defense.

My last few unproductive trips to EB Gamestop have led me to the same conclusion as Penny Arcade: Gamestop is now solely a used games store.  You can also preorder games there, so it’s like they’ve combined their used games business with a limited Amazon.com that you have to walk to.  (I prefer the magical Amazon.com that lives inside my web browser.)

I still forget to order some games that I want on launch day, and Best Buy has been surprisingly helpful in this department.  No, they won’t sell you a PC game– I think that’s illegal now– but there’s a much higher chance that I can find a new game at Best Buy than Gamestop.  Plus, as a limited time bonus, the staff won’t call you back a few days later asking you to sell the game back to them for $10.

Clearly, my best bet is still online.  If I can wait until a week after release, GoGamer usually has the game on sale at a significant discount.  (Many PC games go for $35. )  It probably won’t be too long before all this unpleasantness with boxes and discs is a historical curiosity.  Until then, I still have to find someone willing to exchange one of their game boxes for my $60 and a chance to advertise GameInformer or a new credit card at me, much like a timeshare presentation.

Do you still buy games retail?  Or have you learned the hard discipline of waiting for the Amazon box?

Damion Schubert certainly thinks so. After getting past my reservation about it being a three hour (not counting bonus modes) pack-in with a few much larger games, I think so, too. Strikes against it:

• It’s three hours long. Actually, that seemed about perfect. Halo 3’s single-player campaign was around 10 hours, and while great, it could have been streamlined by a couple hours (and probably would have been if people didn’t still feel like they have to aim for at least 10 hours of play time).
• It’s not a totally new concept: the first 3D portal puzzler was Narbacular Drop, whose creators joined Valve to help create Portal.

In favor of it being game of the year? It’s perfectly paced, with perhaps the smoothest learning curve I’ve ever seen. Like a star athlete or a virtuoso performer, Portal’s player education seems effortless, but check out the developer commentary to get a feel for just how much work went into making the experience so smooth. Beyond the gameplay, Portal has one of the best nemeses in recent memory, plus some endearing (and less fleshed out) bit enemies.

Zelda: Twilight Hourglass is a reasonable contender: it’s the classic Zelda formula, with your arrow puzzles and bomb puzzles and so on, with all the neat little combos that keep your mind cranking away. It also adds some great new twists, and uses the DS in rewarding and innovative ways. (Blowing out torches? Awesome.) I enjoyed Halo 3, Bioshock, and TF2 quite a bit, I’m probably missing a number of titles from earlier in the year, and I haven’t played Assassin’s Creed yet. It’s been a strong year. But I don’t think there’s another title that surprised, excited, and entertained me quite as much as Portal.