That’s why. The open Apple logo gets deformed while cooking in the oven. So she thought her pie needed an engineering twist to be perfect.

This supposedly historical shot was pulled from the 1997 documentary Area 51: Alien Interview. According to the film, on November 4, 1697, the citizens of Hamburg, Germany spotted “two glowing wheels” in the air. To some, it was just further proof of another civilization visiting Earth.

But to modern historians (that would be me, browsing UFO sites when I was bored one Sunday afternoon), these glowing wheels are proof not of future alien technology but of current Microsoft technology. Clearly the company has some sort of time travel machine that resembles a giant Xbox 360 logo. Wait, scratch that. According to this sketch, they have two such machines. And they’re probably running some sort of advanced NXE with really fantastic avatars and Netflix streaming in 4K.

Touchgrind is pretty great, but it’s not without its annoying quirks. The basic premise, that your fingers act as feet on a skateboard, is beautifully executed. It takes a few minutes to get used to controlling the board (I actually prefer using my thumbs to the two finger method they suggest), but it’s incredibly responsive and the graphics and sound effects are top notch. Performing tricks becomes pretty intuitive after a little while, and just fooling around in the park when you’ve got a few minutes to kill is great.

The problem is that the skateboard takes up most of the screen. You’re in a skate park full of jumps and tabletops and rails, but you can’t see them until you hit them. You can zoom out to see the whole map, but you can’t control the board when you’re zoomed out, as the board is too small for your fat fingers to control. There are also symbols that point towards the different elements of the park, and they flash when you’re supposed to execute your jump, but the timing feels off. Also, you often run right into the side of a jump, as the icons don’t differentiate what direction you’re supposed to come from.

Overall, however, it’s a fun time waster with a seriously high level of polish. Due to the limitations of the iPhone, I’m not sure how exactly to solve the issue of not knowing where the hell you’re going, but if they do come up with a solution you’re looking at one of the best games available for the platform.

Several years have passed since Guitar Hero first made expensive music peripherals ridiculously popular. Every iteration of the game brought better controllers, more realistic note tracking, and progressively impressive setlists (with the exception of Rocks the 80s). But the music genre’s gotten crowded in recent years, and to keep up with the growing popularity and multiplayer appeal of Rock Band 2, World Tour is a necessary evolution of the Guitar Hero franchise. While World Tour delivers a “rock experience” that’s similar to Rock Band, it does have some issues that keep it from trouncing its competition completely.

The core game delivers on the same “feels like you’re making real music while pushing buttons on a plastic guitar” experience that you expect from Guitar Hero. World Tour finally fixes Guitar Hero III’s punishingly steep difficulty curve, which went from middlingly easy to roundhouse groin-kick difficulty in the space of a couple of songs. The venues, as always, are superpolished and full of tiny details that make them interesting to watch. Whether it’s a massive stadium or a college frat house, I was consistently impressed.

Guitar Hero definitively one-ups Rock Band in one respect — avatar customization. Going beyond just hairstyles and costume changes, you can alter everything from the size of your skull to the angle of your chin. It’s hard, at first, to make a character that doesn’t look hideously deformed, but with a little tweaking, you can make impressive semblances of almost anyone. You can even choose the dances your character does at the beginning and end of a song, though you can’t make your own choreography. All of this strengthens the connection to your avatar, but my favorite part is the instrument customization. Body, colors, strings, heads — you can alter every minute layer of your instrument, making the entire presentation that much more personal.

But I can’t talk about the game without discussing the peripherals. Provided you pick up the full instrument bundle, you’ll notice immediately that the drums are awesome: They’re easy to set up and adjust, the drumheads give easy bounce and excellent rolls, and the raised “cymbals” give you plenty of room to maneuver. It’s nowhere near as nice as a real electric drum kit, but for a videogame peripheral, it’s damn impressive. But Guitar Hero isn’t prejudiced against Rock Band converts — the game automatically detects whether you’re using a four- or five-pad kit (if you’re sticking with the Rock Band drums) and adjusts accordingly.

The guitar is basically the same as previous iterations, with a loud, clicky strum bar and large, raised buttons. The touch-sensitive pad on the neck, however, is new. It’s a gimmicky addition that always throws my playing off when I try to use it, especially on expert. That said, tapping on the touch pad instead of strumming can give your hand a much needed rest during long play sessions. The best addition is a separate button for activating star power, which is under the heel of your strumming hand (though it’s a little too close to the start button, making it too easy to inadvertently pause the action).

Bass, while not a separate peripheral, does spice up the gameplay a little. Fans of Rock Band will still face the same uneven difficulty levels (either intensely difficult or lull-inducing), but an extra “open” note has been added. A vertical line, just like the drum foot-pedal indicator, instructs you to hit the strum bar without holding any buttons. While it doesn’t really make the parts any harder, it’s an intelligent addition. And anything that makes bass a little more fun is a plus.

“Guitar Hero” is in the title for a reason, though. The majority of the songs are definitely geared toward hardcore guitar players and people who love extended ax solos. But that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of great popular tunes. From Michael Jackson to Modest Mouse to Willie Nelson, World Tour brings in a little something from a wide range of genres. I would prefer a little less metal, but there are plenty of songs — like Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” — that I could listen to every day without getting burnt out.

Guitar duels from GH3 return, but only in the solo guitar career mode. This time, instead of throwing obstacles at your enemy until someone fails, you just have to hold your own in a tug-of-war. It feels much fairer, since you’ll win as long as you can play the song decently…even if it doesn’t make the meandering solos any more enjoyable to listen to.

With the wildly eclectic mix of music, most players probably won’t take advantage of the game’s solo singing career mode. The karaoke is just something to let your rhythmically challenged friends join in with while you jam, anyway. But when playing with friends, GH’s not quite the party game that Rock Band 2 is. If you’re doing poorly, you can pull from a shared star power/overdrive meter, but it doesn’t allow you to bring your friends back into the fold if they can’t keep up — if one person fails, the whole band goes under. It gives the game more of an arcade feel, where you’re just struggling not to fail. Like the first Rock Band, the band is completely divorced from each instrument’s solo career. To really “complete” the game, you’re forced to play through all of the same songs over and over again with each individual instrument — and then all over again in full-band mode. If they didn’t want to copy Rock Band 2’s superior model (where all career paths and instruments are grouped into one overarching progression), couldn’t Neversoft at least have made separate songs available in each career track?

The big new feature is the ability to create and share songs with other users. Spore and LittleBigPlanet have shown that, given the tools, players will create content that not even the developers could have envisioned. (They’ve also proven that, given the freedom, people will make vulgar shapes — look forward to scrolling penis marquees aplenty.) But unlike those games, GH’s music creator is unwieldy and difficult to use. It’s easy enough to record a freestyle track, but editing it and creating something really high quality is very challenging. The tutorials aren’t deep enough, and even worse is the inability to use the controller as a master input device — you’re stuck using the guitar or drums, which are serviceable but not comfortable. For our review purposes, Neversoft uploaded a few custom tracks to test uploading and downloading on the system, but no user-created songs were available. However, I have faith that some players will put in the time and suffer through the interface to create some really good music, eventually.

Maybe if I squeeze my Rock Band and Guitar Hero together and leave them overnight in the same case, I can come back the next morning to find that they made an über-game that combines the best of both. But until then, Guitar Hero delivers exactly the things I want out of a rhythm game: great peripherals and fun-to-play music. It’s not perfect, but I have a great time whenever I turn it on — and that’s what’s most important.

The tech is known as DDA, and it comes with “online extras” to go with the physical product. Albums are identified by a card attached by a piece of string. On top of that, each stick comes with the proprietary DDA media player you’ll need to activate files from the USB, although the music can be transferred into iTunes easily and comes in both MP3 and WMA formats for your portable music player of choice.They’ll be available through HMV, Sanity and Virgin music stores.

But the biggest question of all around this new format is “why”? Sure, CD sales are sagging, but do music companies seriously believe that consumers want to buy hundreds of USB sticks to listen to music they can buy cheaper online? If MiniDisc - a format that had the potential for greatness - failed, why the hell do they think something like this will work?

What about you? Would you buy your music on a USB stick for the same price as a CD?

While we don’t expect it to be the type of interface that’ll replace touch screens anytime soon, Bandai is certainly forging some interesting new ground with its so-called Tuttuki Bako device, or “poking box,” which actually lets you stick your finger right into the device to control the on-screen finger. That’s apparently done with the aid of some motion sensors which, as you can see in the video after the break, seem to work at least reasonably well. In addition to boasting various “games” like poking a panda, poking a face, or poking a stick figure, the device also doubles a desk clock, and it’s available your choice of red, black or lime green. As you might have guessed, however, it’s not available ’round these parts just yet, though you can apparently pick one up in Japan now for the rough local equivalent of $30.