The 9th Robo-One competition held March 18, 2006, had a robot named King Kizer, developed by the Maru Family from Osaka, demonstrating its ability to jump rope and to track and hit opponents. King Kizer is one of the best robot competitors in Japan and usually places among the top in the Robo-One, Robo-Fight, and Robo-Gong competitions.
This video, originally done in flash by Paul ter Voorde in 2004, envisions the infamous Neo vs. an army of Agent Smiths using Mario & Luigi sprites. The animation stays true to the movie's fight scene, including a princess turning into an agent mushroom, who's invected with agent Luigi.
Sushi Samurai is a cute Flash remake of arcade classic BurgerTime, except with sushi. If you ever played BurgerTime you'll pick up Sushi Samurai in no time, here's how it goes down: You control a little samurai who must walk across the sushi ingredients to make them fall into the dishes below. However, you're hindered by evil food-themed enemies including tofu, radishes, and the evil puffer fish. You can shoot wasabi to immobilize the enemies and you can pick up other bonuses like soy sauce (for extra lives) and miso soup (which freezes all enemies). Sushi Samurai is just as fun as its predecessor, and even a little more forgiving, and its controls are solid and the graphics (in particular the enemies) are adorable.
IGN's Matt Casamassina has gotten his hands on the most recent technical specs for the Nintendo Revolution, compiled from a few "extremely reliable" sources. Here is what developers will be working with:
* The "Broadway" CPU: 729MHz (approximately the same speed as the original Xbox) * The "Hollywood" GPU: 243MHz (again, very close to the power of the original Xbox) with 3MBs of texture memory * RAM: 88MBs, which breaks down to 24MBs of main 1T-SRAM and 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM, which one developer notes "can be accessed as quickly as the main RAM, which is nice." The original Xbox, in continuing with teh comparison, had 64MBs of total RAM.
These numbers are not official, but they do make sense with what Nintendo has been saying all along that their focus was more on innovation than pushing the graphical limits--a philosophy which has worked with the Nintendo DS to great success. Slightly more powerful then the Xbox is still a major improvement from the GameCube, but technically inferior to both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Made by Rasterwerks, Phosphor is a multi-player first-person 3D shooter that runs in your browser, thanks to the Macromedia Shockwave browser plug-in.
The game is currently in beta, but looks pretty darn impressive when you get it up and running. Understandably, it takes significantly longer than most browser-based games to load, but considering what it is, it's not that long.
Obviously, as with any beta software you may run into issues. But honestly, isn't it worth it to be able to frag at work - not that we'd suggest or condone that sort of behavior.
Building off of the success of the murse (or "man purse"), Sony is launching its PS Pictogram Series, a lineup of bold, trendy PSP purses. Trust Sony, it'll be the most worthwhile $115 you've ever spent. After all, you can't put a price on being hip.
Guitar Shed 2, is the $18 shareware guitar suite for Mac and Windows. It's got too many cool features to list: a metronome, a chord library, a chromatic guitar tuner, a tab organizer, and other more. It's makers, Astoundit, say Seal uses it, so it must be good.
The second bit is Audio Hijack Pro, the venerable $32 Mac audio capture package, revved to version 2.6. This package allows you to capture audio from any application--digitally and losslessly--and save it in the format of your choice. Very cool, especially if you're trying to figure out an easy method of defeating iTunes' copy protection scheme or recording an Internet radio station.
The folks at Dual Screen Wallpaper provide desktop wallpapers that are optimized across multiple monitor systems. Be for warned though they have integrated the advertising in their site in such a way as to try to trick people into making false clicks; the titles and descriptions of each wallpaper are formatted exactly like the text ads that they display at the top of the screen, and they even display an image beside the text ads so that they blend in perfectly with the rest of the site. So, for now just be careful of the top two links on the site. The wallpapers are gorgeous and work beautifully on dual-screen setups.
The 360Sata adapter, connects your 360 drive unit to a SATA drive so you can plug right into your PC. Unfortunately they're all sold out at the time, so get your name on the backorder list (they were asking $15 for the first round of parts) to get yours as soon as it's back in production.
Yakamoov is a simple little tool with one purpose: convert Quicktime-compatible video into a format and resolution that's ideal for the iPod video. Since it's Quicktime-based, it even supports third-party codecs like DivX. Once converted, just drop the videos into iTunes and they'll sync to your iPod. For less than ten bucks, this is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to convert video for use on your iPod. Check it out at Yakasoft's website.
Nintendo's Revolution games to be cheaper, vows Iwata
Speaking with CNN, Nintendo's Satoru Iwata revealed his company's plan to undercut the $60 price tag carried by standard Xbox 360 titles (and expected for PS3 games). "I cannot imagine any first party title could be priced for more than $50," says Iwata. However, Nintendo's president was careful to note that the company could not control the retail values suggested by 3rd party publishers of other Revolution titles.
Iwata also added that in-game advertising will not significantly influence Nintendo's future revenue (and likely, its games), and therefore, does not affect the decision to maintain the $50 price tag for 1st party titles.
Currently 1st party 360 titles also retail for $50.
Email Battles has a post about two free Windows utilities that will help you escape the locked file menace and let you get rid of the stupid things. The first is Unlocker, which gives you a context menu item that displays a list of locking processes and lets you kill the process or just unlock the file. The second is MoveOnBoot, which might be handy when you're actually not sure whether you should forcibly delete that locked file. It lets you schedule a move, copy, or delete action for the next time you reboot.
Check out Host Broadcast Services official website for more details on how they plan to showcase high definition this summer (whether or not people in Europe have HDTVs to watch it on), Also be sure to take a look at thier Widescreen HDTV FAQ. With a minimum of 20 high def cameras on each match producing the action in 1080i/50, we should finally have a good reason to watch the other football.
It was only a matter of time until the classic Beowulf was given the full 3D hack and slash treatment. And if the story was good enough to inspire Tolkien, why not a video game from 4HEAD Studios and 3D-IO.
Based on the thousand-year-old epic poem about the hero of a Germanic tribe and his Scandinavian adventures the collaboration will be an action-RPG title. All of the narrative elements are in place here for a storyline with three big bosses of increasing difficulty, and 4HEAD CEO Tobias Severin is promising to deliver an innovative fighting system. However, his team may have to exercise some creative liberties with the classic text to make that first battle with Grendel a little more interesting, lest this should turn into a wrestling title.
Beowulf is in the early stages of development and is expected to be released on the PC and one or more next gen consoles.
The new VCDHD (Versatile Compact Disc High Density) standard from Ukraine and Russia might not be exactly a contender in the Blu-ray VS. HD DVD battle, but at 4.7GB it does hope to give DVD a run for its money. The new disc is compatible with current DVD players, but doesn't require the expensive DVD license to be produced. The first title for the new format, "Prorwemos," is a Ukrainian action movie and goes for a mere $4.50. The discs are also cheaper to manufacture than their DVD counterparts, and are half as thick. The next step is bringing blue laser technology to the discs to enable 15GB capacities, which doesn't even bring it into striking range of China's EVD and VMD hi-def formats, but at least it's a start.
We all should really drop what we’re doing and take note of the arrival of Korean pop sensation Rain on Japanese PSPs from Bandai Namco. Slated to arrive in two versions: a standard package at about 50 USD and a limited edition pack at around $85.
The upcoming PSP game is predictably light on details (after all, elements like game play, depth, and quality of graphics aren’t really that important in the grand scope of video games), but what is somewhat revealed is that players will be allowed to shop, listen to music, watch videos, play a quiz, and read their “Dairy Horoscope”; and this all with the impressively coiffed Rain at their side.
ASAP-Utilities - Excel scripts to make life easier
ASAP-Utilities is a package of over 300 macros and scripts (commonly called 'utilities' by the creator) to automate common tasks and make difficult processes in Excel much more manageable.
Incredibly, this huge library of helpful additions are provided for free. There is a 110 page PDF file available for instructions on how to get the most out of the utilities provided, and there is even a blog in support of ASAP-Utilities and Excel in general.
Experimental Gameplay Competition: internship open
The Experimental Gameplay Competition asks you to design and create a game in two weeks, but there's more, the top five games will get an interview with THQ's Heavy Iron Studios, with an internship going to one lucky coder. The competition will announce a theme on April 1st.
It sounds like a hyped-up way to select an intern, but this company clearly knows that many gamers thrive on competition, and it is a good opportunity for people interested in getting a foot on the ladder in the games industry.
Lazybase is a web-based database app that's not flashy (or even AJAXy), but clean and easy to use, and works. It's a registrationless service, so to create a new database by just giving it a name and e-mail address. When you create a database you're given two URLs, one that lets people edit the database and another that's just for viewing. Though simple, Lazybase has a few nice advanced features like graphs and maps, relationships (like books to authors), import from Excel, RSS feeds, and bookmarklets. It also has a feature that lets you embed a live database view into any web site. If you're looking for an easy, free way to keep structured data online, Lazybase is worth a look.
Six Apart has launched the TypePad Widget Gallery full of "blog widgets," or little modules you can add to your TypePad blog's sidebar that do things like display your Pandora stations, Squidoo lenses, or Rollyo searches. Until now, customizations like this for TypePad were only possible by hand-editing HTML templates, but widgets can be quickly installed with a few clicks.
The website is able to open any Microsoft Project file smaller than 400 kb in size, and for files larger than that they have a Windows client available for download that will allow you to view the file. Amazingly, the format output online is almost exactly what you see when using Project itself. This URL is certainly a useful tool to have on the tool belt of any project manager.
One of NEC's HD-DVD HR-1100A internal HD DVD drives, is being offered on CDFreaksing, which reads HD DVD discs at 2x, for a mere $120. That seems like quite the deal, given that the first home HD DVD players are clocking in at about $500 -- and won't be available until at least next month.
-Lytir1
