If you've already conquered the many-floored mania of last week's waste of time then you're either pretty quick with a mouse or fired. Here's to hoping it's the former.

This week we turn it down a notch (actually, a couple of notches) with a decidedly less intense experience. In fact, Daniel Benmergui is a self-proclaimed experimental game designer – a phrase that is the commercial kiss of death. If his games have goals it's to achieve the happiest ending possible. Simple controls, 8-bit graphics, a dash of poetry (sometimes visual, sometimes textual), and a bit of sociological experimentation make for a unique and addictive experience.

Benmergui's latest creation, Today I Die, is his most textually interactive. Move objects around, find new words and change your character's situation until you find a resolution that suits you.

Click here to play.

There's something about the simple graphics and imagery that imbues a simple premise with a longing in the player to ensure the character's happiness (A common thread in his Benmergui's other games: I Wish I Were the Moon, Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans, and Storyteller).

Enjoy.

Our full review for Angels & Demons will be up tomorrow, but after watching A&D – which isn't exactly a sequel to the filmed-first/written-last The Da Vinci Code but rather a discrete, "further adventures in code-cracking" installment – we were rather struck by its international flavor. Despite a location set almost entirely in Vatican City, very few of A&D's leads or supporting players were portrayed by any actual Italians. Cases in point**: Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as an Italian physicist; Swedish Stellan Skarsgård as the head of the Swiss guard; and American actor Dave Pasquesi (of Chicago improv duo TJ and Dave) as a Vatican lawyer doing his best with lines like, "What is word? Formi-dable". (How come in the movies whenever someone says, "How you say..." it's always for a word that translates almost exactly the same in English? Just once I'd like somebody to puzzle over how to translate defenestrate. Or xerophagy.) But our favorite non-Italian player would be Danish actor Nicolaj Lie Kass, who plays a bespectacled assassin. We didn't recognize him at first – in fact, we lost some time wondering if Dan from Real World: Miami had gotten into acting – but when we put two and two together, we realized he was the awesomely talented and brooding star of Susanne Bier's Open Hearts and Brothers (see clip below). ** Wait, we forgot one: Tom Hanks plays a guy who speaks largely in the ancient language of gibberish.

Actually, that's the seat doing the shocking. In the grand tradition of Smell-O-Vision and The Tingler, D-BOX Technologies will install "motion-enhanced" seats at the Galaxy Highland Theatre – the first theatre in Texas and only the third theatre in the country to feature the technology. Starting on May 21, audiences will undergo a "customized immersive cinematic experience" (at a a premium price, of course) at screenings of Terminator Salvation. Not sure what exactly a customized immersive cinematic experience entails? Us either, but damned if we aren't curious now.

Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen has had a pretty spectacular run; it feels like there's always news of some new screening or award. Lo and behold, up cropped in our in box this weekend word that Dunn's Barton Springs doc is now available to view on iTunes. You can buy it online for $14.99 or rent it for $3.99 – and hey, minimal carbon footprint!

We'll have a proper tribute to Bud Shrake in our Thursday print issue, but in the meantime, we point you to our archives – most particularly to this interview conducted in 1985 by Chronicle Editor Louis Black. In it, a funny and forthcoming Bud Shrake talked about his career in the movies, from taking Hollywood actor Cliff Robertson to court in Travis County ("He showed up looking like somebody who had gotten dressed at the Salvation Army discard barrel") to Dennis Hopper's run-in with revolutionaries on the Mexico set of Kid Blue.

If you haven't seen the new Star Trek yet, THEN FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T READ AFTER THE JUMP.

Fans of Austinite Ben Steinbauer's Winnebago Man will recognize hosts (and founders) of the traveling Found Footage Festival Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher as the guys behind the California FFF screening of Jack Rebney's infamous Winnebago commercial outtakes (a viral sensation that earned the onetime actor the title of "The World's Angriest Man") – a screening that turned out to be a redemptive, even triumphant evening for Rebney, who was in attendance. Of course, most of the footage screened at FFF isn't gonna make anybody feel warm and fuzzy – not unless you get sentimental over cable access and Eighties workout videos – but there is some very funny stuff to be seen. Prueher says there's a local angle to this year's lineup, too – a clip from Austin public access TV show Citizens Live, "a call-in show from the 1990s in which the husband and wife hosts are bombarded by a series of prank calls." The show takes place Sunday night (5/10) at 7:30pm at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Buy tickets here.

Call them what you will – browser games, flash games, time sucks, marriage destroyers – the popularity of simple games for nongamers is a huge market. In an attempt to save you time searching for a way to waste your time, I've started a weekly series of web-based games that, god willing, won't get you fired from your job.

First off, Cursor*10. Created by Yoshio Ishii – who made a name for himself with the beautiful and repeatedly surprising Hoshi Saga (write me if you can figure out how to finish stage 21, I'm stumped) – Cursor*10 blends stark simplicity with true innovation.

Cursor*10 offers few instructions but claims that you will "Cooperate by oneself?!" (the interrobang is his, not mine). What starts as a simple race up stairs halts when you come to a spot where another player is necessary to proceed. Frantically looking for another option, your cursor's painfully short life span ticks away. Upon dying, cursor 2 springs to life, accompanied by the ghost of cursor 1 doing everything you did on your last turn the same way. The trick is not necessarily to survive but to die in the most advantageous way to ensure that the next cursor in line can ascend more staircases. By the end things get a bit frantic as 10 cursors are flying around all trying to help lucky number 10 get to the top. The controls couldn't be simpler, and the "game over" model of play couldn't be more upended.

Click here to play.

Ishii created a second session of Cursor*10 for the people who can't stop playing with themselves.

Enjoy.

Film distribution titan Harvey Weinstein spoke via satellite with John Pierson's Master Class at UT-Austin on Monday. Asked for comment about Quentin Tarantino's new war movie Inglourious Basterds, which will premiere in Cannes in a couple of weeks, Weinstein quipped: "There are gonna be a lot of happy Jews out there." Brad Pitt stars in the film as the leader of an American unit of Nazi killers. The film opens nationally on August 21.