Saturday Trivia

Amazing Adventures: The Lost Tomb is definitely not a casual game that everyone is going to enjoy. It's one of those find-the-image games, where you must locate a list of specific objects in a room crammed to the rafters with random junk, which for some players amounts to little more than eyestrain. Others may find its simple challenge to be oddly relaxing, despite the ever-present timer.

The rooms of The Lost Tomb are all related to the game's Egyptology theme, but that aesthetic largely ends with the backdrop for the scenes you'll search. The objects you have to find have little to do with tombs, lost or otherwise, unless King Tut stashed a fire extinguisher, high heels, and a harmonica in his sarcophagus and I just don't know it.

Turquoise and gold: An Egyptian moment
International Herald Tribune

From the vivid turquoise prison bars in a colorful "Aida" to the gold-striped funeral mask of the boy king Tutankhamun, this is an Egyptian moment.

An exhibition opening this month in London and a new version of the opera's doomed love triangle, as seen by the designer Zandra Rhodes, have put Egypt back in style.

Not since Verdi's tragic opera was inaugurated in Cairo in 1871 and the design world exploded with excitement over the original discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 has the Pharaonic seemed so fashionable.

"It was such a wonderful civilization," said Rhodes, referring to the cult of Isis and Osiris, to the pyramid shapes that shift across the "Aida" backdrop and the bold hieroglyphics worked with a fashionable flourish. In her striking design for the English National Opera production, the prison gates, wrought into an "evil eye" in lapis lazuli and turquoise, are a backdrop to priests' gilded pleats, floating capes and Cleopatra hairdos that illuminate the somber story with imagination and flair.

Warhol's hoard a treasure trove
Sydney Morning Herald

Andy Warhol had a phenomenal foot fetish. The weirdest thing he owned was a mummified human foot from ancient Egypt. It was probably from a tomb-robbing, a victim of the Tutankhamen craze of the 1920s. Who knows how Warhol acquired it.

This was just one of 400,000 objects he collected in the last 15 years of his life. He became a compulsive hoarder. Restaurant bills, newspaper clippings, unpaid invoices, pornographic pulp novels, airline tickets, supermarket flyers, postage stamps, Chubby Checker LPs - you name it, he kept it.

Game: Cleopatra, A Queen's Destiny
Adventure Gamers

The title actually proves to be misleading, as Cleopatra herself is quite tangential to the story. Luckily, in her supporting role she adds greatly to the time period and historical setting. The events of the game all take place before her stint with Caesar and Mark Antony, in the city of Alexandria (the then-capital of Egypt). Due to Cleopatra’s rivalry with her husband-brother Ptolemy, the city is in the middle of a civil war. You play the game as Thomas, an astrology student during Cleopatra’s rise. Thomas’ mentor, Akkad, is said to be busy with a commission, but Thomas walks to the observatory to find nothing but blood (and, of course, a few clues). This begins a search for Akkad and his daughter Iris, with whom Thomas is quite smitten. Starting only with a toga, sandals, and his wits to guide him, it’s up to Thomas (and you) to uncover the mysteries behind their disappearance.

Tutankhamun movie to be filmed in Malta
di-ve.com