#March2011
Press Start!: Drinking With Video Games and Drug Binges.
Prepare thyself for the newest iteration of Press Start! The column where I puke up the top five things in the gaming world that caught my eye this week. It’s a democratic column, I want your input. Hit the comments box with your findings. True Believers! Gaming scientists!
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#1: Drunken NES: A Breathalyzer and 8-Bit Game In One.
This is one of those concoctions that fucking staggers me. It sends me into a spiralling moment of quasi-stoner amazement. Someone had to think up this brilliant piece of minutiae. Imagine this, if you can. Enterprising video game mechanical programming wizards had a dream. Their dream was simple. First, they had to make a breathalyzer out of an original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. No small task! I have it on good authority many a modern day Prometheus has been felled by such a challenge.
Then, they had to craft a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System – yes I’m typing it out to be awkward – that could interface with this creation. By blowing your disgusting Oats and Hops stink-rot-gut-breath into the cartridge, the game would then calculate the level of your drunken stupor and rate your inebriated ass in 8-Bit glory.
It’s fucking radical.
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#2: Uncharted 3’s Villainess Revealed; Wrinkled Old Hottie.
Fuck yeah I like my gaming occasionally in the form of a megaton zillion-dollar production value big blockbuster. Fuck yeah! You disagree. Oh okay! You go have fun shaving in Heavy Rain or playing Limbo and waxing intellectual about how it’s totally ambient and deconstructs the medium and blah, blah, blah. I’m fucking amplified for Uncharted 3. Boom. Can’t wait. I say deliver me from boring fetch quests! I say deliver me from conversation wheels. Just for a bit. Throw me into the comforting bosom of gaming entertainment excess.
And in relation to this excess, this week Naughty Dog revealed the villainess behind Nathan Drake’s woes. Meet Katherine Marlowe. She’s a bit of a hottie for an older women, isn’t she? She’s voiced by Elizabeth Hurley, but she gets me tingling like Helen Mirren. Some cavernous old cleavage and wields power to boot. Is it November 1, yet?
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#3: Microsoft Sells A Shitload of Kinects; Gets Punked.
It was an up and down week for our buddy Billy Gates’ company. Though I have to say their good news far outweighs the little bit of hacking righteousness that they were subjected to. You see, when you can lay claim to having the fastest selling electronic device ever, I’m sure everything glows.
This week it was announced that the Microsoft Kinect has sold ten million units. As well, Microsoft has moved ten million Kinect games. Wrap that shit around your brain-piece for a second. Since its release on November 4, 2010 it has averaged 133,333 units sold a day. Fastest device ever. More than your Apple iPhone, iPad, iMac, iThing, iMinimalist Swag.
However, it wasn’t all fucking roses for Microsoft this week! No sir. Hackers cracked the algorithm that generated the seemingly random numbers on the back of MS Points cards. You know, those cards you buy so you can spend the equivalent of $5 on a lightsaber for your avatar. Or so you can download that fucking shitty Dead Space 2 DLC (not that I’m bitter).
Being the benevolent hackers that they were, they used this algorithm to generate over 1 million dollars worth of points. Fantastic! It was short-lived as Microsoft said they killed all those points generated, but still, man! Lock that shit down, Microsoft! I paid good fucking money for my Mass Effect M7 t-shirt for my avatar. No fucking freebies!
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Microsoft: 10 Million Kinects Sold, 10 Million Kinect Games Sold. Evil Cackle.
The Microsoft Kinect is the Juggernaut, bitch! Oh shit, old school internet shoutout! Seriously though. Microsoft has announced that they have sold 10 fucking million Kinects as well as 10 fucking million Kinect games. That’s a lot of Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers.
Gears of War 3 Gets An Official Release Date!; September 20, It’s Fuggin’ On.
Get your dick nice and hard! Adrenaline-pumping, adolescent chainsaw death raging fuckery! Gears of War 3 has a release date. This son of a bitch is dropping September 20, 2011. I can’t fucking wait. It’s been too long since I suited up as a nice meatheaded HGH-looking motherfucker and taken out some locuts with my giant raging bladed phallus.
Get some!
Kinect Hacked To Create Superman VR Simulator. A Man Can Fly!
Throw a fucking rock! If you don’t hit your nana, a small child, an animal, or a building, you’ll probably hit a fucking Kinect hack. They’re like, totally blasé at this point. Not this one though. Three dudes at the University of Amsterdam got together and hacked the Kinect to make a fucking Superman VR simulator. Hell yeah. That’s right. The dudes with fucking stunning names – Daniel Karavolos, Sicco van Sas, and Maarten van der Velden – just upped the game.
You throw on some fucking goggles, and control Superman with your body gestures. Tapping the VR goggles in according spots will trigger Heat Vision and Frost Breath. It’s dope as fuck.
Hit the jump to check it out in motion.
Duke Nukem Calls Master Chief A Pussy In Duke Nukem Forever.
Enlarge. | Via.
Brian Crecente is a lucky man living my dream. Working for Kotaku, he’s currently working through the early portions of Duke Nukem Forever. A kind lad is he, sharing his experiences through the internet article circulation pathways. Today he dropped this outstanding parcel of information regarding the Duke calling Master Chief and his band of Spartans a bunch of pussies.
Conan O’Brien Was Almost On Xbox Live! Wut?
Well, all right. He wasn’t almost on Xbox Live, but Microsoft and Conan’s team were discussing the possibility.
Joystiq:
During the “Hollywood Creative Masters” session at CES last month, the executive producer of Conan O’Brien’s show, Jeff Ross, spoke on last April’s short-lived rumor of talks to relaunch the show on a proposed Xbox Live channel (before the deal was made to bringConan to TBS), reports Gamasutra contributor Chris Morris (who moderated the CES session). While Ross said it was “interesting to sit and look at it,” Microsoft’s proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that “a lot of the conversations were, ‘Well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes — it’s this,’ and nobody really knew what it was.”
“So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know,” Ross said, later reiterating that “we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing].”
Imagine if this shit came to fruition? My asshole would have burst out of its confines, splattering the walls in confusion.
Play World of Warcraft With Kinect? Uh! Yeah! [No. Srsly. No.]
Finally the dream I’ve been waiting to become reality. I don’t want to just feel like a retard while I’m playing World of Warcraft. No. I want to look like one. Alright, you got me. More like one. Now I can with this Kinect hack. Who doesn’t want to waggle their arms, lean forward, lean back, and other things to control their WoW character? Probably everyone! We’re fat, and gelatinous. By and large. We like the sitting.
Hit the jump to see a dude play WoW with Kinect, which makes it look a lot like aerobics.
Kinect Used To Control Self-Aware Flying Machine! [Video.]
Goddammit! Haven’t we learned anything. I was pretty sure that all this fucking around we’re doing with the Kinect is going to bring about the robot apocalypse. And now I’m getting more sure. The mad scientists over at the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley have used the Kinect to construct an autonomous flying machine.
Kotaku:
Instead of being hooked up to an Xbox 360 to play games, Kinect is sending visual data to a Linux box onboard the mini-copter, letting the quadrotor fly autonomously, detect its own altitude and avoid obstacles. A back-up motion capture device provides other data–lateral and yaw–and provides a safety back up for altitude detection, should Kinect fail at some point.
It seems cool now, but when they’re used to fly over cities and drop nuclear caches, we’re going to be seriously displeased with these guys.
Hit the jump for the video of it flying. It’s amazing. And terrifying.
Use Kinect To Control A Robot! Proxy Robot Geek Wars Are Imminent.
So, despite my distaste for Kinect, I continue to chronicle the odd shit that the device is being co-opted to do. We’ve got lightsabers, and now we’ve got it being used to remotely control a robot. Oh good lord! Haven’t we all learned from Terminator? Next thing we know, this son of a bitch is going to go sentient, and then begin using the Kinect webcam to cyber robosex other mechanical non-organic beings.
It’s happening!
But no, seriously. Hit the jump to see Kinect as a means to remotely control a robot.
The apocalypse marches forward.
Dude Hacks Kinect To Create Realtime Lightsaber On A PC. 100x Cooler Than Kinect On Xbox
This is the sort of dorky, bonerfying bullshit that makes me want a Kinect. The ability to act like an asshole, and total techno-wankery. I stipulated in the past that geeks hacking the Kinect are going to pull off some impractical, useless, but cool things. Case in point baby! Case. In. Point. As many have said, now we can all act like Lightsaber Kid in the glory of our own home. A real time tracking and rendering lightsaber on your computer monitor.
Dorky. Cool. Useless. Wankery. Well done.
Hit the jump for video.
