New tiny Wii controllers, with sweets

No, not these ones here, which are about 2/3rds the size of a normal controller. These ones here, that I saw in Adsa this week – that are less than half the size: The best thing is that they’re a bit like a Pez dispenser – letting you fill them with sweets, so you can encourage kids to put their real Wii remotes in their mouths. Hurrah for Nintendo!

Build a video encoder “drop box”

Isn’t Windows Movie Maker amazing? All that video editing fun for free. Unfortunately, it only accepts a handful of file formats (on Windows XP at least), none of which are those used by most video cameras or internet video downloaders. This causes a problem in school as people need to convert the files before they can use them in Movie Maker, and that takes time, effort, and training. Yes, training. Really. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a folder …

Let’s Play! Castle Master

Over on That Newsgroup Wot I’m In, we were talking about whatever the first proper FPS game was. Back before Wolfenstein, before Doom, before Faceball 3000. I think we pretty much established that if you widen your definition of “First Person Shooter” enough, then Atari’s Battlezone was one of the very first. Apparently there were older, but none that many people really remember. Anyway, part of the discussion threw up the old Incentive Software “Freescape” games. Although technically adventure, puzzle, …

A £20 confession

You know the £20 Rule? That one where I pledged I wouldn’t pay more than £20 for a game? It’s great, isn’t it? It used to be a £25 Rule, but I made it harder. I’ve spent three years sticking to it too, and I’ve done really well – only breaking it once (but thanks to Game screwing up my payment for Fallout 3, I ended up not breaking it). But now I have a confession. On Thursday last week, …

Let’s Play! Eskimo Capers

Embarrassing fact: This game was one half of a compilation tape I got as a kid. You can see a copy of the original inlay over there. Thing is, I didn’t know that Bouncing Berty and Eskimo Capers were, in fact, two different games. I always referred to the Eskimo game as “Bouncing Berty in Eskimo Capers”, and hated my poor gaming skills as I was seemingly never good enough to get to the “pyramid level”. Then, one day many …

Someone make these games, please

These mock-ups of some recent games as they might appear in the 80s and 90s are amazing. And not just amazing – in many cases they’re actual games I’d really want to own. I also like how they’ve been imagined – Bayonetta as a bullet-hell shooter, and Brutal Legend as a point-and-click adventure game. I’d like SNES Pikmin and Super Mario Sprint  made first, please! See the rest here.

Let’s Play! Zolyx

Pete Cooke was one of the “heroes” of 8-bit game programming. He had a talent for slickly presented games, and many of his creations also had some sort of Easter Egg built-in. In the case of Zolyx, the best Qix clone for the Spectrum, he included an entire Game of Life routine. For no reason. You can play with that if you like (pick Freebie from the menu), but I suggest you get stuck in to the game proper – …

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

Who doesn’t like piloting expensive war planes, weaving through buildings and shooting missiles up the backsides of other expensive war planes? Nobody, that’s who. Here’s a trailer for the latest Ace Combat game from Namco Bandai. Which does all of the above: Press release: Fighter fans, now is your chance to marvel at the latest in the ACE COMBAT series www.acecombatassaulthorizon.com ‘ACE COMBATTM ASSAULT HORIZON’ PREPARES TO TEAR THE HEAVENS APART NAMCO BANDAI Games Europe kicks the tires, lights the …

Adding XP printer drivers to a 2008 print server

We’re currently in the process of migrating servers from Server 2003 to Server 2008, which is proving a right old pain for various reasons. This morning’s headache was reinstalling a load of network printers on the new 2008 install that worked perfectly well on the 2003 install. 64-bit 2008, by default, only installs printers with the 64-bit 2008 and (for some printers, it seems, but not others) the 32 and 64-bit Vista/Windows 7 “User Mode” drivers. The old-style 2000/XP/2003 drivers …

Let’s Play! Action Biker

Derided in the magazines, KP Skips adver-game Action Biker (starring one-tip corn snack shill Clumsy Colin) was actually pretty good. Well, I played it a lot anyway, which is sort of the same thing. Unlike the more action-based C64 version, the Speccy game had you visiting houses looking for items to make your bike better. Items that let you drive through the mysterious “Dark Area”, prevent you from skidding on oil, and so on. Oh yeah, and you have to …

New Xbox 360

Apparently, it’s smaller than the old one. And a different shape. And shinier! It’s also Kinect-ready. As the thing says: “250 Hard Drive, Built In Wi-Fi & Ready for KINECT. Here Today, Ready for Tomorrow.”. But tomorrow never comes! Or is that dies?