Bones3D

Hmm... Not sure I like this. Is this brick supposed to supplement the Wii Remote / Nunchuck controller, or replace it? That thing looks extremely uncomfortable... in a DS Phat-but-heavier sort of way.

So here's what I want to know... what is this controller bringing to the table that an iPod Touch with buttons wouldn't? Also, why not make the 3DS the controller rather than creating a controller with seemingly better display specs for 1/4th the price? Are we getting ripped off by underspecced 3DS systems at $250, or are we about to be ripped off by an overspecced controller undercutting what we already spent on a 3DS for a paltry $59.99? (I doubt nintendo would be crazy enough to sell a mere controller for over $60.)

Sadly, it'll lack the one thing that made the Carmageddon series truly great... the modding community!

I remember the excitement of a new car design being uploaded to one of my favorite Carmageddon sites, downloading it, then going to the tedious process of modding my data files to add it to the lineup. A lot of them we're pretty crappy... but a few were just freakin' great.

Not quite so much of a modding community for Carmageddon 2 or TDR, but the original was a hoot!

Actually, I'm surprised PC sales haven't gone up due to how easy it is to enter the hackintosh community versus where it was a couple years ago. (In fact, I just *built* my first PC from scratch to create a system that is both faster and cheaper than even Apple's highest end Mac Pro desktops... something I would never have bothered trying for windows or linux.)

It'll be a sad end to an era when hackintosh building is no longer practical, much like it was when we saw companies like Power Computing stop producing Mac clones at the end of the 90's. (Aside from my hackintosh setup, the PowerTower Pro was easily the highest quality system per dollar spent on a Mac OS system I've ever owned...)

Accordian Hero? Anyone... Anyone?

The optoma projects work pretty well. In fact, a company recently used a series of these projectors aimed at a transparent cone to create holograms that can be viewed from any angle and updated in realtime.

Places like Tiger Direct carry the 101 for under $100. You get two rechargeable battery packs and an iPod Docking Port adapter that lets you use pretty much any mini-plug video adapter.

The show is okay, but not the best thing to come out of MoA. (The current series in the Ben 10 franchise has been one of the most promising...)

Also, the merger of man and machine in this manner isn't really all that original in the cartoon universe. A short lived series from the early 80's, called "Turbo Teen", featured a character that would transform to and from a sports car based upon how warm or cold he got. The series has been parodied in a couple of more recent shows like Futurama (The Honking) and more literally in Robot Chicken in which the character turns into the car, has his interior defiled by his two best friends, gets taken on a joy ride and trashed, has the tires removed (which are his hands and feet in his human form), followed by having a wrecker drag the remaining body to a junk yard to be crushed.

I bought this one for the Wii months ago and found it pretty enjoyable. It bears some similarities to games like Kirby's Canvas Curse on the Nintendo DS. You're penstrokes become full-fledge 2D objects with their own physics. You can actually create a lot of unusual rube-goldberg style machines to help Max through the level, such as a see-saw by drawing a triangle as a fulcrum and a line to act as the lever. Drawn objects can also have different densities based upon how much ink is used to draw them, so you can create things like a small but super-heavy rock-like weight by scribbling tons of ink into a small circle, which you can then use with your see-saw to launch Max high into the air. Strokes can also be used to create large bubble shields that max can run inside of to avoid contact with enemies or to get across tricky gaps, and on top of to reach hard to reach locations.

Finally, ink is reusable, so don't forget to collect it back up after passing an area to use it in other areas.

Overall a fun game that's a lot different from most games out there.

Wasn't Atari's "Night Driver" arcade game causing scares that it would turn children into homicidal drivers well before technology was good enough to display anything beyond a few white blocks to create the illusion of a 3D "road" and tail lights? If I recall, it even had a steering wheel and pedals.

wow, you'd almost think the entire nintendo fanbase has completely forgotten about Super Paper Mario, which was practically a launch title on the wii console. Not that it was necessarily a great game, but it had it's moments

It's not necessarily all bad news...

A few of these tablets are based on x86 processors under the hood, allowing for dual boot options, such as Android and Windows 7. Or for those crafty few out there, these could be modded just enough to run Mac OS X. (Though maybe not with all the multi-touch stuff intact...)

I'd certainly be among the first to tell you just how capable Mac OS X can be when running on a touch display. Given how deeply interwoven into desktop publishing and the media arts the Macintosh is, it amazes me that Apple hasn't been making such features standard on their systems, yet it's practically flooding the Windows platform to the point that it's more of a fad than anything.

One of these days though, I'd like to see the Mac and the iPad converge into a single device. I've already experienced some of this using AirDisplay to make some of my mac apps more iPad like. I've also experienced the opposite as well, using software that allows me to control my iPad from my Mac (though that involves jailbreaking...)