Ever wonder what it would be like to actually run as much as your character in WoW does? Well, a couple of WoW fans created an interesting way to enhance their experience of the game, and get some exercise out of it at the same time.

Essentially, they hooked up a couple of monitors to treadmills and with the aid of joysticks can synchronize running in real life with the running in the game.

I’d love to try this!

Via | Teche Blog

Modding and homebrew certainly has become a form of art, and perhaps none more so than Jens Anderssons Colors!, a home-cooked Painter style program that allows anyone with a microSD and an imagination to create masterpieces of their own.

Taking full advantage of the touch sensitive Nintendo DS screen, Colors! mutates the popular portable into a sort of drawing tablet, like Wacom’s not-so-free, fancy versions. Users can make use of the following features, with plenty more to be added as the software is still in development

• Hard and soft circular brush
• Pressure-sensitivity can affect opacity and brush-size
• 512×384 image resolution with 2 stage zoom
• Replay the whole painting process of an image
• Hue-circle and luminance and saturation-triangle style palette
• Load and Save to memory card
• Send painting as e-mail using Wi-Fi

The great thing about the DS homebrew is its portability. It’s like a good old paper sketchbook that allows you to immediately begin sketching when an idea, or inspiration strikes. Wired has a helpful tutorial on how to get it up, running, and creating some art. Who knows, if you get good at it, maybe you can create something like this:

This awesome drawing “Polar Bear With Cub“, was done using Colors! by the very talented otavio. Be sure to watch the playback at the bottom of the drawing’s page to watch the picture unfold step by step. Very cool.

Via | Wonderland

Unreal Engine 3 developer Epic Games has teamed up with Intel to put some serious cash on the table for aspiring developers. The competition’s name: the ‘$1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest, states pretty clearly what’s involved. All you have to do is use your mad modding skillz in one of a wide range of categories to create add-ins for UT3. Whether you’ve got a map, a weapon, or a full gameplay overhaul, Epic and intel want to see what aspiring devs have up their sleeves. The products of this competition will be available for download for UT3 players worldwide, so even if you don’t claim the grand prize, it’ll be a great whack of exposure.

Just what is the grand prize? A hard to come by (ie. extremely costly) Unreal Engine 3 developer license. Oh yeah! Can you think of a better tool to help launch a design career? Other prizes include Intel merchandise and cash.

Head on over to the Epic Games site to read the full press release and get more details at the official site if you’re interested in taking part. An Unreal Engine 3 license is certainly nothing to sneeze at, so good luck to you all!

Via | Epic Games

Image Courtesy of Midway Games Inc.

Okay, something a little more light-hearted that I came across while looking at the Analyzing the Analysts piece….a keyboard modded into a veritable schmorgasbord of soft core animated porn. If chicks in white panties is your thing then maybe you should get together with the creators of this little wonder. Who knows, maybe they’ll even make you a customized keyboard consisting of only up-skirt shots.

Apparently the images are from an erotic series called Beat Angel Escalayer. The premise of the series? I’ll let you find that out at the link above, it’s …well typically sexually charged. I feel I should give the obligatory “life…get one” comment, so there, I have, and now I’ll just let this gem fade mercifully out of memory.

Neta Michelin Via Kotaku

The British watchdog organization Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) has made some pretty strong, fairly stupid comments of late regarding the high percentage of North American DS owners that surely, thanks to its powers of deduction, must be pirates. Like most consoles, a user modded DS system with an R4 chip allows players to skirt authentication protocols on the system and download illegal game copies at will. Bad news? Well sure.

Just how many N. American gamers are contributing to the DS piracy problem? How many, out of the 8.5 units sold in the U.S. last year, are breaking the law? ELSPA estimates put the figure at a ridiculously astounding 90%. Yes, nine zero percent.

ELSPA rep John Hillier had the following to say to the Sunday Post:

Legitimate business is at serious risk from the R4… The R4 in effect blinds the console and makes it think it’s seeing a genuine game…

The implications are massive. In America it’s thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s. Takings from Nintendo DS games in the US are lower than any other console and no doubt it will have a similar impact here…

The R4 has shifted balance of power in the piracy industry to the consumer — and that is hugely worrying. That’s why we intend to stop trade in these chips wherever we can.

First off, do you even think that 90% of the DS owners in the world even know what a mod chip is, never mind how to get it to work and what to do with it? I’m guessing not. Out of the people I know that own a DS, I doubt 90% of them could properly program the date/time on their DVD player, never mind be a super I337 DS HaXxOR in their spare time.

Via | NextGen

Since never in a million years would I be cool enough to make my own mod, I can’t say much about this person’s attempts at a GameCube one. I mean, sure it’s not seamless or even attractive, but it does seem to work, which is more than I could say for anything I attempted to do.

I’d be really interested to see the sorts of looks this person gets in public places when he whips this out and starts playing with it. It very much reminds me of something learned from an engineering schematic in WoW. Only there it would come with a warning like, “Might blow up in your face if played too long.”

Via | Geekologie

Starting on October 8th, and through the course of three days, Nintendo seized over 10,000 devices used to copy or otherwise modify Nintendo products. The Hong Court Court backed Nintendo up during this raid of the Supreme Factory Limited facilities, where these devices were recovered, along with documents regarding further similar operations. Supreme Factory Limited was found to have ties outside of Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Court ruled in favor of Nintendo, forbidding these companies to continue the distribution of their illegal devices, as they clearly violate Nintendo’s copyrights.

Via | Gamasutra

An iPhone Nintendo Emulator has been created for the distinct pleasure of playing NES games on today’s must-have new gadget.

Coolest thing evAr.

Via | Trend Hunter

Call it serendipity, but when I accidentally stumbled across Benjamin J. Heckendorn’s site earlier this month and posted about my astounded tour around this master modder’s creative genius, I had no idea that he’d come across my virtual desk a second time, bearing news of a competition and a new consumer product.
The man behind BenHeck.com has linked up with eDimensional, the company behind “the most robust 3D gaming platform ever created…”, to develop and produce a new consumer gaming product, only they’re not telling what it is. You have to guess, based on clues posted at the site for the “What The Heck” contest. More clues will pop up as the product gets nearer and nearer to release, and visitors are encouraged to email their guesses (limit 1 per day) to eDimensional. The first person to correctly guess what the new eDimensional product is, will receive a free copy of it signed by Heckendorn himself.

Thus far the clues are as follows:

1. it’s a gaming accessory… [duh]
2. it’s under $100

eDimensional’s current portfolio of products covers 3D experiences, voice recognition and motion tracking, among others, so the potential scope for this new creation, even if it follows along the line of a previous idea, is quite broad. Any guesses?

Via | GamesPress

Sony may not be able to get gamers to buy the PS3 in droves, but folks from other walks of life have taken a real interest with the powerful Cell processor that provides the computational backbone to the next-gen system.

Initiatives like Folding@Home, which I posted about previously, are cropping up as more and more researchers realize the invaluable contributions that these “entertainment” (say with appropriate sneer) devices can offer the scientific and medial communities.

The Mayo Clinic has been chatting it up with IBM to harness the chip’s tiny might to improve medical imaging technologies such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and CT (computed tomography) scanning. Thus far they’ve been able to improve the quality and precision of the images, and bump the object recognition speed during scanning. How’s that for a professional mod job?

Via | Wired