Hasta La Gadget!

Crave veers toward several drool-worthy–and a couple cringe-worthy–topics this week. In fact, we can’t seem to shake the curse of our food-friendly moniker as we check out eye-catching cereal boxes that light up on store shelves, a bus stop decked out to look like a toaster oven (complete with a people-warming electric heater), and an AT-AT that some intrepid soul turned into an ice cream truck piloted by Darth Vader himself.

Also, a ridiculous business offer leads to robot dinosaurs, and a game bows to mind control. Teetering on the edge of acceptability is a gaming urinal by Sega, with the boys finding it more relevant than Jasmine. What’s not to crave? Whiskey in a can and BK’s new jalapeno and cheddar BK Stuffed Steakhouse burger–ick.

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Episode 30

–Light-up cereal boxes

–Chinese robot dinosaurs

–Toaster over bus stop

–Sega Toylet

–Mindflex Duel

–All Terrain Ice Cream Transport

This is why you’re fat (or drunk)


–Whiskey in a can

–Burger King’s jalapeno and cheddar BK Stuffed Steakhouse

Today’s preGame demo is for mature audiences only.

This week on preGame we’re very pleased (and terrified) to bring you a live demo of Dead Space 2 a week before it hits store shelves. Isaac Clarke finds himself up against a horde of Necromorphs, this time while aboard the space station Titan.

But before we get into the gory details of Dead Space 2, we’ll have first looks at two trailers for games about to hit, Mortal Kombat and Bulletstorm. We’ll reveal the special surprise inside the Mortal Kombat trailer, a treat for PlayStation 3 owners.

All this plus our very special guest host Wilson Tang on this week’s episode of preGame!

Want to be a part of our live taping? Make sure you head to http://cnet.com/live/pregame every Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET.

Got an idea for preGame? E-mail us! pregame [at] cnet [dot] com.

Be sure to subscribe to the show: RSS (video) | iTunes (video)

LittleBigPlanet 2 opens up the world of user-generated content more than ever before by giving players a robust set of creation tools and an ever-evolving interactive community.

Bad news for all of you Sprint-subscribing, bandwidth-hogging data gluttons out there: The company will soon implement a new $10 monthly data-plan fee for smartphones activated after Jan. 30. And it applies to all Sprint smartphones, including those capable only of using Sprint’s 3G network.

Sprint announced the upcoming change in a press release Tuesday. But in a leaked memo sent to third-party retailers, the company more narrowly defined the types of phones and customers affected by the new fee. It includes “all smartphones operating on the CDMA, iDEN and 4G networks,” where a smartphone is defined as “a device that supports a robust operating system including: Android, BlackBerry, Instinct, Palm and Windows Mobile.”

The $10 premium-data charge currently applies to all HTC EVO 4G, EVO Shift 4G and Samsung Epic 4G smartphones in the Sprint network, so now 3G smartphone users will feel the same financial burn as 4G users, but without being able to access the 4G networks’ faster speeds.

For those of you that already have 3G phones on the Sprint network, fret not (or at least not yet), as you won’t be dinged with the new charge unless you either upgrade your existing smartphone or activate a new smartphone on your existing account. If and when you do decide to upgrade or change your plan, however, even those of you that aren’t packing the latest 4G phones will still have to pony up another $10 bucks a month.

Sprint claims a “wireless data explosion” in smartphone user growth and network popularity have necessitated the company’s fee expansion. Complaints about fees first circulated in June, when Sprint debuted the HTC EVO 4G with a mandatory $10 data fee for 4G. The company’s initial statements made the fee seem a necessary counterpart to 4G access.

Before griping, we should remember that giving Sprint that extra 10 bucks a month gets you unlimited 4G data with no tiered pricing structures for different monthly caps. (Sprint does cap its 3G data plan at 5 GB monthly, however.) That means there are no overage fees for exceeding your monthly data-plan limits, either. AT&T currently offers a tiered system, with a $15 fee for a 200-MB monthly limit, or a $25 fee for a 2-GB monthly cap. AT&T ceased offering an unlimited data plan in June 2010.

Verizon may follow AT&T, but for the time being maintains a $30 monthly unlimited-data-plan option. We may see that change, however, with the company’s recent iPhone 4 deal. Verizon also offers a $15 monthly plan for 150 MB of data.

So, after looking at other pricing models, the $10 monthly option from Sprint doesn’t look half bad. But with Gartner’s report that smartphone sales in the fall of 2010 were up 96 percent over the same period in 2009, we’ll wait and see if Sprint’s pricing model is sustainable.

Photo: Samsung Epic 4G/Samsung

See Also:

• AT&T’s Data Limits Rein In Cloud-Based Media Services
• Verizon to End Unlimited-Data Party
• Samsung Launches 4G Phone on Sprint

Edited at 8:33 a.m. for a clarification on iPhone network capability

After our original Bonecraft post piqued the interest of some of our readers, I asked the game’s designer, D-Dub, if we might be able to post a safe for work trailer on the site. Of course, it should come as little surprise that we’ve got different concepts of what precisely what qualifies something as “safe for work.” That, after all, largely depends on where you work.

I watched some of this trailer at my desk, but after the words “An Erotic Fantasy Quest, Somewhere in Some Galaxy” dissolve, things heat up pretty quickly. There’s probably nothing on here that couldn’t be show on, say, Comedy Central after midnight, but the subject matter may well get you a stern talking to from the boss.

For those who missed the first post, Bonecraft is a World of Warcraft/Starcraft parody from the folks who gave the world the erotic fighting game BoneTown. I spoke to a rep from the company who told me that it fancies itself something of an adult version of South Park.

There’s a link to the trailer (we opted not to embed the thing on the site) and some relatively clean screen caps, after the jump.