Home Sheep Home, you're no Angry Birds—at least not when it comes to value. You may be a handsome, amusing diversion for the iPhone and iPod touch, but there's just not enough of your sheepish, physics-based puzzle solving to go around.

Home Sheep Home, based on Aardman's Shaun the Sheep and an online Flash game of the same name, recently graduated to iOS game status. The goal, if you're not one of the millions who have already played the game online, is to guide a trio of sheep from the left side of the screen to its right.

Those three sheep—Shaun, Timmy and Shirley—each sport a different size, shape and weight. Using them to knock down bridges, cross obstacles or leap over platforms of various heights requires some thoughtful puzzle-solving. Who's the best sheep to push a plank across a gap? The hefty Shirley. Who's best at burrowing through a tiny tunnel? The wee Timmy.

Choosing which sheep to use when and accurately control him or her with touchscreen controls is where the enjoyment of Home Sheep Home comes in.

Sadly, this iOS game is too short-lived to recommend. Even at the standard bite-sized asking price of 99 cents, Home Sheep Home offers little more than 30 minutes worth of gameplay over the course of its meager 15 levels. Sure, some puzzles may briefly confound you for a few minutes or more, but many can be quickly solved in 60 seconds or less.

Home Sheep Home is handsome and sharply produced. I can recommend it for its adorable art style and inventive physics-based gameplay. But know that you're getting the thinnest of games for your dollar, iPhone users.

Perhaps you'd simply be better served playing the free version online and finding your barnyard thrills elsewhere.

Home Sheep Home [iTunes]

GUN HAZARD | TOKYO, JAPAN: To celebrate 15 years of Resident Evil, a Tokyo airsoft gun bar is being turned into a RE shooting range. (Photo: Capcom)

Controversial Game Brought to Life With Tight Rubber, a Nice Lady and Fake Blood Thrill Kill, a violent S&M-themed fighting game, was too much for the PlayStation 1. It's not too much for Metal Gear cosplay queen Omi Gibson.

Classic Movies Look Better as Pixel Art Artist Andy Helms has been going bananas these past few weeks, churning out amazing pieces of movie-inspired pixel art at a breakneck pace.

Can You Handle All This Badass Plastic? Namco Bandai doesn't only make video games. It's Bandai arm has toy and game licenses for iconic Japanese institutions like Gundam, Kamen Rider and Ultraman, as well as new favs like One Piece and Haruhi Suzumiya.

Inside Japan's Largest Cosplay Theme Park At any geek event in Japan, you'll see them: cosplayers. Convention centers are not ideal backgrounds for the fantasy of fancy costumes. Amateur photographers who aren't happy with the shitty con setting even rent private spaces and hire cosplayers for more professional looking photos.

The HD Console Game From…1993? While most people would peg the beginning of the high definition era around the time of the PlayStation 2 (some games able to run in 1080i), here's one game that was running in HD nearly twenty years ago.

At a retail event today in Japan, Nintendo gave more Star Fox 64 3D details.

The game sports a "64 Mode" and a "3DS Mode". In the 3DS Mode, players can control the spacecraft by using the 3DS' internal gyroscope sensor. That means, moving the 3DS right causes the spacecraft to go right, moving it left causes it to go left, moving it up causes it to go up, and so on.

There is also a Battle Mode that supports up to 4 players, through downloadable local play. All four can play using a single cartridge. There is no online mode.

Players can also take photos of their faces with the the 3DS' internal camera. The pictures are used as icons to denote each player's craft.

完全新作！3DS『NEWラブプラス』この秋に発売決定 [インサイド]

For decades, the term "youge" (洋ゲー) or "Western game" was pejorative. In Japanese, "you" (洋) is used to denote Western things, whether that be "Western music" (洋楽) or "Western clothes" (洋服). These words are not pejorative—not like youge has been.

"Even now, there have been people in Japan using the label youge- (Western games) with a terribly discriminatory meaning," Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said in 2009, while playing Modern Warfare. "I'd like them to try it once. If they play it once, they'd realize how incorrect that label is."

It looks like that label is changing—slowly, but surely.

Japanese game magazine Famitsu recently published the results of its 2010 reader poll for the best games of 2010. Number one was not a Japanese game, but a Western game: God of War III. Number four was Red Dead Redemption. Number seven was Halo: Reach.

The poll ranks the favorite games of Famitsu readers, not necessarily the best selling.

As discussed on the 8-4 podcast, number two was Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, which you'd think would be numero uno given the game's popularity in Japan. These are not your typical Japanese gamers, though. They're the kind of people who respond to Famitsu polls, so they might not be representative of Japanese gamers as a whole. They do shed light into trends and emerging mainstream tastes.

The rest of the top ten is peppered with what one would expect—games like Tales of Graces F (number 3), Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (5), Super Robot Wars OG Saga (6), Yakuza 4 (8), The Legend of Heroes: Zero no Kiseki (9) and Wii Party (10).

This isn't exactly a new trend, but an increasingly consistant one. God of War II broke the top five in the 2007 survey. That same year Gears of War and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas broke the top ten—something they didn't do the previous year. In 2008, Fallout 3 cracked the top five, and Grand Theft Auto IV broke the top ten. In the 2009 survey, Gears of War 2 came in at number one, while Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was number seven.

In Japan, Western games do not sell anywhere near their hometown rivals. One day, however, that will change.

The recently revealed Dragon Ball Game Project Age 2011 (temp. title) is an upcoming fighting game for the PS3 and Xbox 360. It'll be out fall 2011. This is what it looks like!

Artist Andy Helms has been going bananas these past few weeks, churning out amazing pieces of movie-inspired pixel art at a breakneck pace.

A Fistful of Dollars, The Goonies, The Lord of the Rings, Inception...all covered, all recreated in adorable pixel art, all here for you to enjoy with your morning coffee.

While some are fanciful recreations of scenes and characters, others bear the inspiration of iPhone game Sword & Sworcery, with its trademark pencil-thin limbs and obscured faces. There might even be a video game-related piece in there somewhere...

If the name sounds familiar, that's because Andy was also the guy behind the great "Dude-a-Day" project, where he...drew a dude a day.

These are some of my favourites, but there's plenty more to be found at the link below. You should go there anyway, because many of them are animated .gif files, and they mat not play so nice with our galleries!

Andy Helms [OKTOTALLY]

British studio Creative Assembly, best known for its work on the Total War franchise of PC strategy games, is currently developing a game based on Ridley Scott's original 1979 horror masterpiece.

Aside from the fact it's being developed "for consoles", there's little other information available at this time, though more details should pop up later in the day via an official release from publishers Sega.

While CA is renowned for its expertise in strategy games, it has made a few action titles, including 2005's Spartan: Total Warrior and 2008's Viking: Battle for Asgard. Though hey, this could be a strategy game! Marines: Total War!

Total War dev making Aliens game [Eurogamer]

Thunderbeam is an upcoming indie adventure game for the iPad that blends 70's science fiction, 70's anime, a rad soundtrack and Prince of Persia. Which sounds great.

Actually, let's back up. It uses the rotoscoped animation style of Prince of Persia. In terms of gameplay, the dev team cite influences like Maniac Mansion, which is born out in the "send kids out on concurrent missions" mechanic the game features.

These kids can die. And you have to bring their bodies back to the ship. Which sounds horrible, but looks quite literally groovy.

The game has a Kickstarter page you can visit to help the team (who are making this in their spare time) get the cash together to make it, while the video above is so full of great (and by great I mean terrible) sci-fi TV and animation (oh, and footage of Thunderbeam) that you should probably watch the whole thing.

Fun fact: one of the developers is Wiley Wiggins.

I promise you. This is not a trailer for a new Burnout game.

It is instead a trailer for Ridge Racer: Unbounded, due out next year on the PS3, PC and Xbox 360. Remember: Ridge Racer. Not Burnout.

Why, you'd play video games on it, just like NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. did at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. As website Joystiq points out, it took 57 workers four months to complete the 332.5 ton, 720p screen, which is comprised of 9 million LEDs.

Dale Jr. Takes World's Largest HDTV For a Test Drive at Charlotte Motor Speedway [Charlotte Motor Speedway via Engadget via Joystiq]