This smooth looking arcade game appears to be a type of RFID /playing card / arcade game that has been out in Japan for about a year now. This source appears to be only speculating at the actual functionality of the game but it does look like some type of RFID technology is being used here.
Each player lays down and moves cards on his playing surface and watches his own viewpoint on a monitor, while a larger monitor (out of sight of the players) shows the overall action to observers
This actually makes me a little nostalgic for both my RPG days and the glory days of American arcades. Console and PC gaming is great, but it just doesn’t feel the same unless you’re feeding quarter-hungry machines your week’s allowance in the span of a few minutes.
As a commentary on contemporary art and video games, Michael French, a Los Angeles based graphic designer, has created an exhibition of “projected video game graphics, gestural interactivity, and cartoon-like sculptural elements in a piece that explores the novelty in art, consequence and inconsequence, as well as power and subordination.” Interested yet? ‘Wrathmaster 3000′ is actually a video game, of sorts, that has no beginning, end, or winner. However it does have a really creative user interface and gives you a quite a god complex. The gameplay revolves around a massive army of soldiers that endlessly drone across the screen. Your mission? Kill as many as you can by hitting, slapping or otherwise interacting with a giant ‘hand shaped’ pressure sensor.
from WMMNA:
The controller is a yellow hand with built in sensors that responds to your gesture of hitting or smashing it. A giant god-like hand appears then on the screen obliterating the soldiers in mass (with the audio to match) only to be replaced by countless more men. A death-count allows you to mark your participation in the presentation and outcome of the piece.
What commentary is this game is making? I’m still thinking about that one, but it certainly looks fun to try.
(…otherwise known as “My Ugliest Hack Ever”)
I’ve always wanted to use my old-school NES Zapper with my computer and have often thought of the best way to go about this. The original functionality of the Zapper used light detecting technology. When the trigger of the light gun was pressed, the Nintendo console would detect this signal and send a corresponding signal to the TV to blackout the entire screen. Then a white square would be drawn around the target that the gun was to be aiming at (in the case of Duck Hunt, a small white square would be drawn around the duck). If the gun detected the white light coming from the TV, then that meant that you had hit your target and the Nintendo would react accordingly. All this happened with a very fast flash of the screen and was often undetectable if you weren’t looking for it. This method worked fine for a TV but for a CRT computer monitor, or even worse an LCD monitor, it would be nearly impossible to recreate the flashes that the gun is able to detect. So, in order to recreate the functionality of a gun that can control the motion of a computer cursor, a workaround had to be used.
Based on the Powerglove Mouse project previously posted, I decided to use a gyration mouse to translate the motion of the gun into cursor movement on the computer. I found that others had this same idea and were going to great lengths to create their own gyrometer sensor circuit for just such a purpose. However, I thought that since the gyration mouse currently does all the hard work for me, why not just hack it and wire the left click of the mouse straight to the trigger of the gun? This would provide all the functionality that I would need in a NES Mouse Gun and it would be extremely easy albeit terribly ugly. So, for this simple mod, I wired the mouse to the NES Zapper, allowing for both free range motion sensing and trigger happy left-click action. This is a very easy hack, as long as you are comfortable soldering on a $30 gyration mouse, and will give you a fully functional (yet ugly) motion sensing mouse gun fashioned out of the old-school NES Zapper - a must have for any hipster kid from the 80’s.
The first step to accomplish this is to, of course, take everything apart. Above you can see the innerds of the NES Zapper. Most of this is completely useless to us as we are going to bypass the light-sensing circuit and focus totally on the trigger.
Above you can see the leads that connect to the trigger. Whenever the trigger is clicked, these leads connect. This is the mechanism we are going to exploit to give us the left-click functionality of the mouse. I soldered a wire to each of these leads for later connection to the mouse.
The next step is to hijack the left-click button from the gyration mouse. The disassembly picture tutorial for the mouse can be found here. Once the mouse was completely dissected, I soldered the two wires coming from the NES Zapper trigger to the two connections for the left-click button [shown above]. This essentially allows the trigger of the gun to control the left-click of the mouse. After this was done, I put the protective piece of plastic covering the circuitry back on, but didn’t completely re-assemble the mouse. All that was left to do then was attach the mouse to the barrel of the gun to give the desired effect. Yes I used duct tape and I know it looks ugly but I’m an engineer not an artist - insult me if you absolutely have to. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy the video of this baby in action.
Not shown in the video is how I navigate my computer with this. There is nothing quite like opening Firefox with a double-tap to the head icon.
Floor It! is a revolutionary cross in toy genres. This game revolves around radio controlled toy cars that sense and react to their surroundings in a never before seen way. You can layout different “course conditions” which are actually plastic mats that the car can detect. When the car interacts with one of these road condition mats the appropriate action occurs - an ‘oil slick’ causes the car to spin out of control, a ‘water hazard’ drastically slows the car, and the ‘power up’ gives the car and extra boost in speed. These mats can be placed anywhere to provide a never ending amount of courses. Also, to further immerse the player, the car is controlled with a steering wheel that the user holds. Any tilt in direction will direct where the car is to go.
This game/RC car looks like it is currenly being developed for Mattel and was intended to be targeted towards 7-10 year old boys. While I understand the marketing strategy, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to purchase one (or several) of these for myself if these products ever make it to store shelves. In fact, with a little help from a friend of mine, we may be able to develop one ourselves .
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