It’s the Geek Pumpkins, Charlie Brown!
Also: Halloween partying for less than $10, Sam’s a smash and Kirby’s a killer.
Halloween isn’t just for kids. Sure, it may be inappropriate for you to throw on a sackcloth mask and try to shake down your neighbors for candy – once you’re over five feet tall, it stops being cute and starts being restraining-order inducing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t scare up some fun. Here are four things we plan on enjoying:Jacked-Up Lanterns – Simple triangular eyes just don’t seem to cut it, or get cut, these days. The pumpkins that impress us today have to be more smashing than a band fronted by Billy Corgan, and we’ve collected a selection of the best, from ones that use the round shape to their advantage (that’s no moon – it’s a large orange squash!) to those that simply show off elaborate carving skills (even ugly SOB’s can be beautiful in the right artist’s hands). You don’t have to be a pumpkin king yourself, but we bet you’ll be saying, “This is Halloween!” after you see them.
Indie-Cation – Let’s say you’re afraid to go out trick or treating in the real world, either because you heard stories about razor blades as a kid, or, pragmatically, you don’t want to go outside in hurricane season. Experience the fun kind of fear at home instead, with Indie Royale’s five-game Halloween Bundle download. For less than ten bucks, you can follow a large bunny and dog as they investigate evil toys, enter a plague-filled village to cure the population by any means necessary, uncover the mystery of a strange house you woke up in, cure yourself from being a werewolf, or play a classic fantasy RPG as the bad guy. All the fun of role-playing in different costumes; none of the effort of leaving your couch.
All Tricked Out – If even mashing buttons is too exerting, however, there’s always TV. And in what has become a tradition, it turns out that A Christmas Story is now no longer the only holiday-themed flick featuring a cute li’l kid and the “gifts” of his choice that gets played on cable for 24 hours straight. FEARnet is once again giving Trick ‘r Treat the full VIP treatment, but beware – this movie’s adorable moppet won’t settle for merely shooting your eye out.
Marshmallowy Malicious – Movies have given us evil spins on just about everything nice – psychotic Leprechauns, evil gingerbread and deadly snowmen are but many. It took Machinima, however, to give us evil Nintendo: in Kirby’s Dream House, the second episode of which debuts online today, the cute pinkish puffball gets a monstrous makeover, as watermelon no longer satiates his appetite for red squishy stuff. We’d like to see this trend continue – there’s no telling how much damage Pikachu could do if he got rabies and went all Cujo on our asses.