cartoons

Blowfish is a free arcade game with cartoony graphics and sound, as well as a simple, silly, and surprisingly engaging schtick. You tap the screen to place and inflate blowfishes (which you can move while you're inflating), and your goal is to fill two-thirds of the fish-tank screen with gently floating--and often cutely expressive--blowfish before the timer runs out.

You have a limited number of fish per level, and each fish is vulnerable to fast-moving, spiky sea urchins while you're inflating it. The inflated fish bounce off each other and the urchins, but you can tilt your iPhone … Read more

Crazy Penguin Catapult Lite is a free game with cartoony graphics and sound effects in which you pilot catapulted penguins onto their cruel polar bear overlords. In the Lite version, you only get access to a few levels from the full version of Crazy Penguin Catapult, but that's enough to get a good idea of the gameplay, in which you navigate a map (by tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch, or by using your touch screen) and face off against the hated polar bears in progressively tougher battles. Each battle is essentially divided into two parts, with a simple … Read more

Crazy Penguin Catapult Lite is a free game with cartoony graphics and sound effects in which you pilot catapulted penguins onto their cruel polar bear overlords. In the Lite version, you only get access to a few levels from the full version of Crazy Penguin Catapult, but that's enough to get a good idea of the gameplay, in which you navigate a map (by tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch, or by using your touchscreen) and face off against the hated polar bears in progressively tougher battles. Each battle is essentially divided into two parts, with a simple one-tap … Read more

Our guest today is Stone Newman from Go!Animate, enter The 404 animation contest, Spore porn, pay per sick note, GTA copycat killings, geeks as better lovers, and TV shows on the big screen.

Stone Newman drops by the studio today to tell us about an awesome Web site that allows you to create your own custom Flash animation without all the tech nonsense! Go!Animate is all about simplicity. You can choose from a variety of locations and a ton of different characters, or even upload a picture of your own! Very cool, I can't imagine how many … Read more

Amtrak doesn't care how much you paid, there's no way you're getting on this train. Plus, CNET's Caroline McCarthy is one of the sexiest geeks alive and Rana Sobhany joins us from Aux Interactive.

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I guess you could say that SpongeBob Squarepants is about as close as the U.S. gets to having the equivalent of Japan's Hello Kitty, in the sense that you can plaster its frighteningly cute face onto anything and it's more or less a guaranteed hit. (Full disclosure: I used to keep my pet goldfish in a SpongeBob aquarium. And that was, um, in college.)

So yeah, here's this SpongeBob radio and CD player, which retails for $45. It kind of reminds me of a twisted version of the old boom boxes that the "cool kids&… Read more

Old-school Mac users might remember a little application called HyperCard. Originally a database application, it doubled as a casual animation tool--letting users create fairly basic cartoons, frame by frame. This morning I've been playing around with AniBOOM's ShapeShifter, a Web-based animation creation tool that brings back those old feelings of black-and-white computing, with a new social bookmarking twist.

ShapeShifter is pretty simple to use. There are four shapes to choose from, and you can place them wherever you want on the canvas. Each shape can be rotated, resized and grouped together to make new forms. When you're … Read more

"Does your dog bite?"

Just the thought of those four little words has sent me laughing ever since my mother introduced me to the genius of Peter Sellers.

If you know the rest of that routine from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, then you can imagine my delight at seeing the Coolest Gadgets write-up on a Pink Panther car.

Unfortunately, upon reading the seller's description on eBay, I found that the car is the MGM studio car from The Pink Panther Show, the cartoon series featuring a pink panther, available for about $146,000.

It is not … Read more