Buy Adam

It’s pricey, but it makes great coffee, and there’s nothing like having a fresh pot ready when you wake up. It grinds with a burr grinder immediately before brewing, so you get the freshest cup possible. It really makes a difference, and I find this far preferable (cheaper and more convenient) to going to a coffee shop every morning.

Before settling on this one, I also tried the Cuisinart auto-grind model, and was unsatisfied with that, to my surprise (I’m very happy with most of the other Cuisinart tools I have). It used a blade grinder, and wound up with a lot more fine coffee dust. It was harder to clean, but most importantly, it made a much weaker cup. The Capresso succeeds in being able to make a full pot that’s almost as strong as I like it (and it’s perfect if I do 8 cups of water to 10 cups of coffee).

I was recently reminded of just how much I love this machine, when I was separated from it for a whole five days (the heating coil burned out after about six years of everyday use, and the entire machine was replaced by Capresso very quickly for a nominal fraction of the cost). Thumbs up to Capresso for stellar customer service.

Buy the Capresso Coffee Team Luxe from Amazon.

I have this juice machine, and I like it a lot.

It makes short work of most fruits and vegetables (you can juice pineapple without removing the skin), works very fast, has a very wide feed tube and has a pulp ejector for continuous jucing. The pulp ejector also lets you save the pulp if you want it for cooking (carrot cake) or composting. It is a very good value for a powerful juicer.

There are two drawbacks I’ve found. The seal on the pulp container isn’t perfect, so after long usage, there’s a small line of very fine pulp spray on the back of my counter. Also, it sounds like a jet engine taking off. Very powerful, but this sucker is loud.

Buy the Breville Juice Extractor from Amazon.

Wow.

You play Kratos, hired gun of the ancient Greek gods, trying to get the horrid dreams of your tortured past to go away. By doing in Ares. Okay. The plot doesn’t really make much sense to me yet, but that’s really not the point.

While it’s very similar to Prince of Persia in many ways, the game mechanics are subtly different. I’ve only been playing for a few hours, and already I’m addicted. The action is fast. Blazingly fast, but still easy to control. The weapons are beautiful and natural. I suppose I should not be surprised to find that it’s fun to fight with whirling flaming blades on chains. The fight system is reasonably complex. There are a LOT of combos and powerups, and several types of enemies (including bosses) have their own kinds of finishing moves, which breaks up the button mashing monotony a LOT. There are several different views as well, which blend seamlessly - sometimes you’re up close, sometimes in a wide landscape, and wall climbing and ropes have different move sets.

It lacks the sense of desperation that defined Prince of Persia - it’s more about sheer carnage and revenge.

It is the most violent game I have ever played, and it seems right at home. It is common to grab enemies and just rip them in half. Unlike most games, there’s also nudity, which does seem appropriate - topless slave girls, medusas, and probably more.

Really, it’s just a ton of fun.

Buy God of War from DVD Empire.

God of War is being released today, so this seems like it might be my last chance to link to this and honestly say “This is the best platform action puzzle game I’ve played in a long time”.

Building on the liquid gold game mechanics of the first Prince of Persia game (The Sands of Time), this game is faster, harder, smoother, bigger, better, and bloodier.

It’s all good.

They did one thing exactly right that I’ve never seen done to this extreme in any other game. Because of the nature of the game, you’ll find yourself exploring huge spaces with a lot of backtracking over the same area (but it’s new each time - you’ll see). I frequently found myself completely lost when trying to consciously figure out where to go, yet I almost always just had a “sense” of where I was supposed to go that lay right beneath the surface - which turned out to be the right way. The environments are lushly designed, and they use subtle visual cues to nudge you in the right direction. “This seems like the right way to go” - and it is.

Buy Prince of Persia: Warrior Within from DVD Empire.