Your Watch Roids Pong

You know those times when you're sitting at the train platform or in the movies just wishing you had an old 1970s video game to play? Yeah, neither do I but apparently these guys misinterpreted Nintendo's old "Game & Watch" systems and thought it'd be a great idea to whack Asteroids (or 'roids to the cool kids) into a watch.

Now, that's no ordinary watch there as it doesn't actually display the time but it does have a tilt sensor so the little triangular spaceship points downwards to aid in targeting. There's also a Pong version in case blowing up polygonal asteroids isn't "your bag, baby". Check the video out below and thanks to Engadget for the tip.

Carcade: Play As You Drive

Remember the good ol' days when you'd be driving along in the backseat of the family wagon on a hot day bored out of your brains. You'd have the window down and every now and again you'd stick your hand out into the oncoming wind just for something to do. My older brother took it one step further and would often "surf" a two-fingers hand-man on an icy-pole stick.

Well, some German students have taken this idea and made a video game out of it. Carcade is the name of it and using a webcam and laptop it scans the view out your car window. It then converts the view into a landscape for you to navigate your spaceship over as you pick up good stars and avoid bomb-stars.

Going by the video (below) it detects obstacles that are too big to fly over and gives you a portal of sorts so you don't come to a firey death. It even adjusts game play speed according to vehicle speed.

Check out the video to see what I'm rambling on about...

Fallout 3 Is Go For Aussie Release

The Fallout 3 saga continues but hopefully this is the final chapter. The news today is that the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has given Fallout 3 an MA 15+ rating for the slightly modified version of the game.

The rating was given for "Strong violence, drug references and coarse language". Originally it was these "drug references" that caused the ruckus as the use of them in-game was too realistic. Word on the street is that when you used morphine in Fallout 3 your character felt better. Weird hey... so the OFLC refused classification on that basis. Now you get a "health pack" in-game which makes your character feel better. The whole game has changed!

EB Games says Fallout 3 will be in stores in October (nice and precise there EB!). Anyway, read a little more about it over at Kotaku.

Meet The New Lara Croft

We've seen quite a few iterations in the overall design of the lovely Lara Croft in either digital form as seen in the many games starring her or live-action form via the models used to promote said games and Mrs Smith Pitt in the feature films.

Well to promote the new game Tomb Raider: Underworld Lara has undergone yet another transformation and she is now wearing a Batman-inspired singlet and looking generally darker. To do all the public appearances for the "real" Lara we now have 23-year-old Alison Carroll, a professional display gymnast from the Croydon area of London, who has performed in front of Prince Charles himself. Miss Carroll beat out hundreds of applicants for the role of Lara Croft, the new position allowing her to quit her day job as a receptionist.

Make sure you get a good look at Lara's many design changes over the years in this series of not-quite-in-game renderings and hit up Kotaku for a potential NSFW shot of Alison Carroll doing her knock-your-block-off high kick.

Your 30" Monitor Sucks

Kotaku has a little story today about a guy who installs computer systems for the US government. Said guy recently set up this behemoth then proceeded to thoroughly "test" it by playing BioShock and World of Warcraft on it.

In case you have the money lying around under your mattress here's what you'll need to get started: 27 HD panels that equate to a display that's 40 feet wide (12.2 meters) and 15 feet high (4.6 meters), with a desktop resolution of 12,600 x 3,150. You'll probably need to get some serious graphics hardware to push that many pixels at once too.

Game Ratings In Oz: Yes, We Suck

Kotaku put me on to a great post on abc.net.au by Tom Crago on the current Australian games classification system. Tom is the chief executive of Tantalus and president of the Game Developers' Association of Australia (GDAA) so you'd hope his words carry some weight.

Tom mentions that there are 2,000-odd game developers living and paying taxes (we hope) in Australia yet some of the games they work on can't be sold here due to the lack of an R rating (18+) for games using Fallout 3's effective banning as a good example.

One interesting quote is "Australia's absence of an R18+ category, and the financial imperative of getting a game onto store shelves in a timely manner, means that many games intended for adult audiences (and rated 18+ in other countries) are inappropriately shoehorned into the existing MA15+ category in Australia. Far from protecting minors from adult content, our uniquely incomplete classification system has allowed them, in many cases, to legally purchase and access such content.".

Read the entire thing, it's not long and points out how stupid our government (yes, even you KRudd) is in the eyes of the world.

Get That Last Guy

Man, I love the way the Japanese come up with whacky and wonderful new ways to play games. Take this online version of the upcoming PS3 game The Last Guy. The idea is to save everyone on screen by running around and letting them join your group. When you have enough followers take them to the Escape Zone but don't go too close to the bad guys or the little people will scatter or worse, you'll die.

What makes this fun is that you can choose pretty much any website to use as the play field. The whitespace acts as areas you can travel through with images and dark areas blocking your way. To get a feel for the game I recommend running around on Google or even my blog here.

There's a table of the most played sites on the front page of the Japanese site. Some of them are pretty hard.