I was surfing the web today when I came across the Cool Tool of the day: Electroplankton. This is a Nintendo DS game that came out some time ago (first exclusively from Nintendo online, and then at select retailers), which was actually more a work of art and music than a game per se. Using the stylus, you drag and arrange the electroplankton which then interact with each other to create sounds. What shocked me was not that this was a cool tool, but rather that Amazon is selling (via third-party sellers) Electroplankton for $60. A glance at eBay shows some ridiculous Buy It Now prices (the most ridiculous being $145 starting bid, with a $185 BIN). The game has very little text in it, which made this a popular import before it became available in the United States. While production of the U.S. version of the game appears to be discontinued, the game is still available in Europe and Japan, and gamers looking for this hard to find title should be prepared to pay import-like prices for this game.
The cheapest copy of Electroplankton I could find was with Play-Asia, for $53.10 (including shipping) for the Japanese version, but it's still a good $10 less than Amazon once shipping is applied.
Electroplankton also recently won the British Academy Video Games Awards in the category of Audio, as well as a nomination from the MTV Video Music Awards for best video game store.
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