I hadn’t heard anything about the game Overlord until its demo was released on Xbox Live a while ago. Now that’s how you do a game release: under-hyped to the point of obscurity, then a wide-release demo that builds buzz, and the full release a month later.

The game itself (I’m playing the Xbox 360 version; it’s also available on PC) is the best I’ve seen in a long while. It’s frequently described as “Pikmin meets Dungeon Keeper“, with character design like Fable and some game elements like Sacrifice. That should make it clear that you’re not seeing something that’s completely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. But the game stands out on its presentation, if not its innovation, and the fact that people just don’t make games like this anymore.

The premise is that you’re basically Sauron from The Lord of the Rings; an evil overlord defeated by a band of “heroes” at some time in the past. At the beginning of the game, you’re brought back by your imp-like minions and tasked to rebuild your dark tower. To do this, you explore the countryside (with a gaggle of minions in tow at all times), ransacking villages for treasure, finding pieces to improve your tower, and doing odd jobs for the locals. Or killing them; it’s really your call.

There are plenty of problems with the game. The camera is clunky and frustrating (and yes, I do know about the camera controls, and it’s still clunky). It’s easy to get into a situation where you just can’t see what’s going on. The game feels like you should be able to just think tactically and not require super-fine control over your minions, but then keeps putting you in areas where you need to have fine control. As a result, the game feels very indirect, as if things are generally happening around you and you’re a semi-involved bystander.

But what Overlord does right far outweighs the criticisms and frustrations. It’s just plain fun, more often than not. It’s full of nice touches; when the Overlord summons his minions, there’s the perfect sound of an otherworldly battle horn. When the Overlord dies, he collapses and sends out a shockwave much like the witch-king in Return of the King. Your minions pick up weaponry and random items from their pillaging and use them for armor; other times they bring back useful things for the Overlord and present it to you, calling out “For you!”

And allowing the player to choose between good and evil has been attempted in a lot of games, like Black and White and Knights of the Old Republic, but it’s never been really satisfying. Overlord avoids that by letting you choose between evil and more evil. It doesn’t often lapse into obvious parody, or attempts to be all edgy and subversive. It doesn’t get all its laughs out of pointing out how funny it is to be killing hobbits and elves; it assumes that the audience is already in agreement that they want to kill hobbits and elves, and then lets you do that in funny ways. And setting fire to a field full of hobbits just never stops being satisfying.

I was surprised to see that the developers are based in the Netherlands, because it feels like a British game: not just because of the dialogue and voice acting, or the art style and character design, but because as you’re playing it, you spend half the time thinking, “That’s really clever.”

When I said that people aren’t making games like this anymore, that’s exactly what I meant. It just exists to be funny, and it works. It’s not a perfect game (but it deserves much higher reviews than it’s been getting), but it’s so overwhelmingly charming that I’m enjoying it better than any other game in recent memory. And for the first time in a very long time, I’m compelled to actually finish it.

This is going to be the last I’ll talk about the iPhone on here, at least until the next major software upgrade. Frankly, at this point, talking about it anymore would be just like, well, cuddling.

My buying advice, for what it’s worth: if you don’t already have one, don’t buy one. You’ve already survived the opening weekend hysteria, so you’ve got the willpower to wait until all the kinks are worked out. There will be a slew of point releases, followed by hardware releases, and version 2.0 will undoubtedly be better.

I still think the thing is plenty cool, and I don’t regret getting it at all. But I had the perfect storm of buyer incentive going on: the Apple monkey on my back, it came out a couple days after my birthday, the price worked out to be 7 shares of Apple stock, my contract on my old phone just ran out a couple of months ago, the battery had already run out, etc. If none of those apply for you, I suggest you wait.

This is definitely a version 1.0 device. “It just works” doesn’t ring true like it does with Macs; there’ve been plenty of occasions when it just doesn’t. The iPod and web browser and mail app crash pretty frequently — it doesn’t harm anything, it just stops playing music, or takes you back to the home screen. When you sync up again, iTunes presents your crash logs and the now-standard “would you like to send valuable feedback to Apple?” dialog box.

You can’t use it for more than a couple of hours without coming up with a list of improvements. It’s neat, but it would be even better if….

And have I mentioned that Apple doesn’t support third-party development for it? Because they don’t. One trivial app that is far from necessary but would be really convenient to have: an equivalent of Vince Lee’s LunchMaster, that could bring up a list of restaurants in a neighborhood, filter them by price and food type, and even choose a random one for you if you wanted. With the iPhone, it could even jump to the corresponding yelp.com entry if you wanted more info, let you call the restaurant, and get a map. But to do any of that, you’d have to have an internet connection, and it’s just not worth it.

On every single one of the ten billion blog posts, message board discussions, and articles written about the iPhone, there’s always, always has one of these comments:

My [existing cellphone type] didn’t cost that much, and it does everything the iPhone does! It’s not as pretty, but it’s functionally the same. There’s nothing revolutionary about this!

Which is completely missing the point. My RAZR phone had a web browser, camera, and media library. I never used them, because they were such a pain in the ass to deal with. A feature that never gets used is not a feature.

That’s why Apple keeps winning and gets away with charging so much for their stuff: because they’re one of the few companies that understands that. It’s not just translucent window borders, and it’s not a GNOME or KDE front-end on the UNIX filesystem, and it’s not Windows Mobile or, God forbid, the Motorola cell phone interface. It’s knowing how people use a device and then making that easier.

When you go to the settings menu on the iPhone, there’s a button that says “Phone.” Press it, and there’s a screen that says “AT&T Services”. And then there’s a screen that shows you all the different kinds of billing and usage information, as well as the corresponding dial code. Apparently I could find my used minutes at any point, even back when I had a RAZR, by dialing *646#. I never knew I could do this, so I never did it. That’s exactly where Apple wins.