You can play alone or in online tournaments. The company that makes this also makes an app that turns your iPhone into a TV remote control. More info at newpotatotech.com.

The game will be in retail stores this fall, but you can play an hour for free at iplay.com. To download the whole game costs $10 if you buy a game a month for two months. The price is lower if you join the game club for a longer period. Or you can get it alone at pogo.com for $15.

Speaking of browsers and search engines, an odd one we never heard of before is Springo.com, which is number two in Israel, right after Google. Their search results are more visual than Google, which just delivers text, and the home page is nifty. The home page offers immediate links to about a hundred popular sites.

Not to be out-done by the radical makeover of Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo! got a facelift and added new features.

You don’t have to start in a Yahoo! email account to see what’s new. Their new site, Pulse.Yahoo.com, aims to be your starting place for everything you do on the web. The home page looks something like Twitter, with short comments from your Yahoo contacts in 255 characters or less. But unlike Twitter, it has links to just about everything, including email and news.

If you give the site permission, you can view your Facebook friends there. Click “apps” and watch the video of the day, play poker, find gas prices in your area, etc. Click on “blog” to start a blog, or “photos” to share photos. “Trending topics” at the top of the page tell you what’s hot right now. There are also links to email, news and sports. Search “apps” to add other games and news sites to your page.

We were surprised to see a long list of comments from friends who use Yahoo mail. These are people we normally don’t hear from.  We learned that an acquaintance named Ellie was playing bridge in the online “Intermediate Lounge” and we clicked to join her there.

The site is getting kudos because you can set privacy settings to be sure you don’t share more than you wanted. (Go to pulse.yahoo.com/privacy.)

• Da Vinci HD: Leonardo’s paintings fill your iPad screen in this 99 cent app. Looking at “The Last Supper,” we found it hard to believe we never noticed that there are 11 male disciples and a woman next to Jesus.
  

  

  You can save the paintings to your iPad photo collection, email them, or read about them.

• The Elements is a 1.8 gigabyte app, so we had to download it to our computer first. But it’s visually stunning. You get to see all the elements that make up our earth, in pictures, video and live data. The live data comes in from Wolfram Alpha’s mathematical search engine. Not cheap at $14, and we have a few criticisms.  The write-ups are jazzy but lacking substance. They rely on old information and leave out important characteristics like chemical valence, the ability to give up an electron or accept one. This of course is crucial information in determining what kinds of compounds the element can form. You can see the elements in 3D, if you buy $5 glasses.

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• Sudoku Soccer from Avanquest.There are free versions available but this one, for $2.99, has a World Cup theme. Fans cheer as you move the ball into a slot and give it a number. Choose your team and your rival from among 32 countries. You can cheat and take a time penalty. Also available for iPhones and Android phones for 99 cents.

The study involved dozens of players, ages 50 and older, to explore the effects of the games on their short-term sharpness. Those subjects who played Bejeweled or Peggle for 30-minute periods showed an 87% improvement in speed and a 215% increase in accuracy in a later “connect the dots” test.

The connect the dots test is part of the U.S. Army’s testing of an individual’s general cognitive ability and has been adopted as a kind of standard way of testing many mental skills. The Carolina study took a cognitive leap itself and suggested that game playing may stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

(It is at this point in the proceedings that Bob feels compelled to note that he first pointed out the connection between computer game playing and an increase in mental skills more than 25 years ago. It became obvious from watching kids play games on the old Apple II [there was no Apple I, by the way] that they soon developed a lot of skill in pattern recognition and were able to accurately predict what the program – and hence the programmer, would do next. Unfortunately, Bob did not have a University grant for this research, so no one paid attention.)

– The U.S. Mint has a game site to teach kids the value of money. Find it at usmint.gov/kids/games.

– The PBS site pbskids.org/read has a new link, “The Great Word Quest,” an online scavenger hunt that uses characters and video clips from the TV shows “Electric Company,” “Martha Speaks” and “Word Girl.” The site is aimed at kids 6 to 8, but doesn’t talk down to them. Many adults like playing along if their language skills need a brush-up. “Martha Speaks,” is a cute show about a talking dog. The site also has “mad lib” type games, hangman, refrigerator-magnet play, and lots of other fun stuff. A progress tracker lets parents know what skills their child is developing.

Start by putting down words and clues. (It’s best to choose words that are in the same subject area.) When you’re finished, the puzzle is generated automatically. Take your choice of an interactive version you can play with on the screen, or the kind you print for people to fill out later.

In the interactive version, the user is prompted to click on any word in the puzzle to start. Up comes a clue, and you type in your best guess. When finished, click a button to check your results and get congratulations if you were correct. The program is at eclipsecrossword.com.