VANCOUVER TRENDZ [THURSDAY]

Good Eets

March 15, 2007

The primary reason videogames exist is to put a smile on your face. That's why Eets, the debut title from local designer Jamie Cheng's Klei Entertainment, is such a great game. As long as you're playing, you're smiling.

Eets will definitely remind gamers of Lemmings, the early 1990s classic in which you try to lead a group of the infamously suicidal rodents away from certain death. In Cheng's game, you place items and characters on the screen that will stop Eets, a sort of cutesy alien-rabbity thing, from blindly jumping to his doom and grab the puzzle piece that finishes the round.

The smiling comes from the game's gorgeous cartoon art design and the bizarre cast of characters you'll use along the way. Just try to name another game featuring exploding marshmallows, pigs that sneeze miniature pigs out their butts, fez caps that hide chocolate-chip-firing cannons and radioactive ginseng that glows in the dark!

You also get smiles from that delicious feeling of cleverness that comes each time you figure out how to pass a level. And with 100 levels to take on, you'll be busy! Plus, the game comes with an easy-to-use puzzle creation tool that lets you build your own levels and share them with the eager fan following that's clustered around the Eets website.

Download a free demo version from www.eetsgame.com. And the full version only costs $9.95! What a steal! So far, Eets is for PC gamers only, but an Xbox 360 version is in the works.

Have you entered this week's contest yet? It's for a great big basket full of pampering products for mums and their babes. And did you see the balmshell we dropped yesterday in Brand New?