This is for the 5 people out there that are not completely sick of seeing new Angry Birds merchandise. Feast your eyes on these cute USB 2.0 8GB flash drives in the shapes of your favorite video game characters. They are priced at $19.99 from Staples.

Filed in categories: Miscellaneous, News

Tagged: Video Games

Oh look, more Angry Birds stuff… originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 24, 2012 at 2:30 pm.

The Dingoo A380 is a handheld gaming console that will let you relive your favorite games from years gone by. It has built in wifi that supports 2 player gaming and wireless controllers. It also has AV out so that you can play games on a big screen TV. The Mini Game King can play ROMs from quite a few old systems such as GBA, Mega Drive, Neo Geo, CPS1, CPS2, GBC, Master System, Game Gear and more. It has 4GB of memory built in and offers a MicroSD slot to add even more games. The A380 is priced at $125.95 and is available from I Share Gifts. What is your all time favorite handheld game system? I loved the original Gameboy and was also a big fan of the Atari Lynx.

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Video Games

Dingoo A380 Mini Game King – Is it the Ultimate Retro Handheld Video Game System? originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on October 26, 2011 at 8:27 pm.

It seems like upsizing is flavour of the day at the moment.  First there was the 23″ Android Tablet and now there’s the giant Game and Watch hack. Seems appropriate since we did an article on the original Nintendo Game and Watch recently.  The unit is capable of playing the games found at Pica Pic.

I suspect if we had one in our reception area, most of the staff wouldn’t actually make it to their office

See more details at House4Hack.

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Video Games

Game and Watch – It’s Huge originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 28, 2011 at 10:30 am.

Oh, Kratos. Why can’t he escape all those memories of his past? Kratos might possibly be the angriest game character I have ever seen; I mean he did accidentally murder his wife and son after all. God of War Ghost of Sparta for the Sony PSP is a third person action adventure game set somewhere between God of War and God of War II. This game starts out with Kratos sitting on his throne which he had just acquired. But why does he look so grumpy? Well, I would probably look the same way if I keep having memories of my past. As I said, the game starts out with Kratos sitting upon his newly acquired throne, while a vision of a person we have never seen before appears. It’s an old woman lying sick on a stone slab. Kratos is convinced he can change the vision he has seen. After all, he is a god. So he sets off for Atlantis on a quest that eventually leads him back to his home of Sparta and then into Thanatos, God of Death’s Realm.

The game is beautiful, probably one of the best games I have seen on the PSP system for a while. The graphics are breath taking. Between the constant rain, cascading water and lava backdrops, it really feels and looks like you are actually inside of the game.

The controls for the game have not changed that much. Sine they have already honed the controls to perfection in previous versions, why change them. The analog stick allows you to walk, run, climb and swim.  The X button allows Kratos to jump and if you hit it twice he will do a double jump.  The main fighting action is done with either the square button for light attacks or the triangle button for heavy hitting attacks.  As usual, with any main fight sequence, the use of the circle button for when the icon flashes on the screen allows Kratos to do some heavy damage to his enemies.

The controls take little time to master. You start off with the Blades of Athena, but by unlocking the ability to add fire to the blades, known as Thera’s Bane, then your attacks become even more powerful. Thera’s Bane has a meter which lets you know when its power is diminishing, but it replenishes itself over time. The other weapon that you acquire over time is the Arms of Sparta, which is a spear and shield combo. This weapon serves as both a ranged and melee weapon. The spear can be thrown or used to jab enemies and the shield can be used to charge into enemies as well as to block oncoming assaults.

The game also features two new magical attacks – the Eye of Atlantis and the Scourge of Erinys. The Eye of Atlantis is a so called lightning attack, and the Scourge of Erinys is a ball of energy that can pull enemies into it. As is true with any God of War game, this game is filled with all the blood and gore one comes to expect, even on the PSP system one can’t help but notice this.

I have been a God of War follower since the game first came out. This game has enough gigantic bosses to encounter which is one of the reasons it is so enjoyable. There is plenty of action to keep players immersed in game play for hours. Upon beating the game, challenges open up which allow for more game time. There isn’t too much load time for this game either, I did notice a few times when I would be in the middle of a gigantic battle and the game would pause for a few seconds while it loaded, but this didn’t happen too often and it did not affect gameplay. The game is rated M for Mature, there is some bad language in the game, and between the blood and gore, there is even a mini sex game scene, which I was surprised to see. Please keep this in mind when buying this game for younger players.

Ghost of Sparta is a must for any die hard God of War fan. With all the blood and gore and beautiful cut scenes, to the most impressive fight scenes, Ghost of Sparta will surely impress upon you. I know I am impressed, I started the game on Normal difficulty and am now trying to beat it on difficult level, so we will see what happens.

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, Reviews

Tagged: Video Games

Sony PSP Game – God of War Ghost of Sparta Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 5, 2011 at 11:51 am.

UK based Liberty Games has launched a cool new home-market focused multi-game arcade machine, which can be completely customized from the look of the cabinet, display size, controllers, sound system and more. The PC based system is powered by a Dual Core processor with 2gb of RAM, 160gb Hard Disk and an optional Nvidia video card. The Frontier comes pre-loaded with over 200 legally licensed retro arcade games, from Space Invaders to Asteroids to Street Fighter 2. You can request specific games to be pre-loaded on the system as well. All this custom gaming goodness is going to cost you though… and cost you big. Prices for the Frontier Arcade system start at £1,995.00 (that’s $3,110.38 for those of us here in the US).

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Frontier Arcade Machine – A gift for the person that has everything? originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 27, 2010 at 11:05 am.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm will be out on December 7th. Are you ready for it? You’re not considering playing it with a standard run of the mill keyboard are you? Come on, what kind of MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game player are you? If you want a leg up on the baddies, you need the Anansi keyboard from Razer. Razer is known for their gaming mice, but the Anansi keyboard will put even more game playing tools at your fingertips – literally. There are 7 thumb modifier keys below the spacebar, along with 100 programmable keys that have on the fly macro recording capability. The Razer Anansi is priced at $99.99 and is available for pre-order, with shipping in December.

Filed in categories: Desktop Computer Gear, Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Keyboard, Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Razer Anansi – Specialized keyboard for MMO gamers originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 1, 2010 at 8:00 am.

Blik’s line of peel and stick wall decals will let you relive your favorite retro video games in life size detail. They have self-adhesive and removable decals for games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pong, Super Mario, Centipede and more. Prices range from $25 up to $75 depending on the design.

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Turn a Room into your favorite Video Game with Blik Wall Decals originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on July 28, 2010 at 9:00 am.

ION Audio hopes you will with their new Drum Rocker Pro drumset controller for Rock Band. Available later this year for the holiday season, Drum Rocker Pro will be compatible with Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 versions of the popular Rock Band video game. The set includes four drum and three cymbal pads and a fully configurable metal drum rack. It also includes a professional-grade electronic kick drum pedal. The price has yet to be determined, but the previous version of the Drum Rocker controller was $299.99. Wow, I guess Rock Band players are serious about their ‘playing’ if they are willing to fork over that kind of cash. Full press release after the jump.

ION ANNOUNCES DRUM ROCKER PRO PREMIUM DRUMSET WITH NEW DRUM ROCKER PRO PEDAL FOR ROCK BAND

Award-Winning Drum Set Enhanced and Ready to Rule Rock Band, Again

Cumberland, R.I. (June 29, 2010) – ION (www.ionaudio.com), a leader in consumer audio and entertainment technology, proudly announces the new Drum Rocker Pro Official Premium Drum Set for Rock Band. The latest member of the Drum Rocker family (which includes Drum Rocker and Drum Rocker Core), Drum Rocker Pro is compatible with all versions of Rock Band®, including The Beatles™: Rock Band™, the recently released Green Day Rock Band® and the forthcoming release of Rock Band 3®. Drum Rocker Pro will be available for Playstation 3®, Xbox 360® and Nintendo Wii® gaming systems.

Expanding upon the success of the original Drum Rocker, ION’s Drum Rocker Pro adds the impressive Drum Rocker Pro Pedal, which further enhances the authenticity of the most realistic music gaming controller available. Drum Rocker Pro Pedal is a professional-grade electronic kick drum pedal that delivers uncompromised kick drum performance to the Rock Band® drumming experience. The Pro Pedal’s steel base plate and all-metal construction gives a solid, stable foundation. The dual-chain drive, adjustable beater and rubber trigger assembly identically replicates the physics and rebound that drummers demand out of an authentic kick drum pedal, while an adjustable spring assembly allows for customizable feel. While the Drum Rocker Pro Pedal is included with Drum Rocker Pro, it is also available separately for existing Drum Rocker, Drum Rocker Core, and Rock Band Drum Set owners.

In addition to the new Pro Pedal, Drum Rocker Pro includes four drum and three cymbal pads and a fully configurable metal drum rack. The drum and cymbal pads are the same super-quiet, highly responsive pads that have made the Drum Rocker family a hit with music gamers. In addition to traditional 4-lane drum gameplay, Rock Band 3 also includes Rock Band Pro, which recognizes each drum, cymbal and pedal as a unique input to the game and requires the player to hit specific cymbals at the right time, resulting in a tremendous increase in realism. Best of all, every Drum Rocker kit ever produced is compatible with Rock Band Pro, so both existing and new Drum Rocker owners can take full advantage of these new features.

The Drum Rocker family was developed in partnership with Alesis, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electronic percussion instruments. When the gamer is ready to start playing for real, the addition of an Alesis drum module like the DM6 turns any Drum Rocker drum set into a real professional electronic musical instrument.

“Drum Rocker Pro raises the bar yet again for drum performance in music games” says Fred Galpern, Product Manager, ION Gaming. “The new Pro Pedal helps gamers build kick drum skills that translate faithfully to professional acoustic or electronic drums, and experienced drummers will be able to apply their playing skills to Drum Rocker Pro without missing a beat.”

Drum Rocker Pro will be available Holiday 2010, coinciding with the release of Rock Band 3®.

Developed by Harmonix, the world’s premier music videogame company, published by MTV Games, and distributed by distribution partner Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), Rock Band 3 will ship simultaneously worldwide this Holiday 2010 in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other territories for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, the Wii™ system from Nintendo, and Nintendo DS™. Rock Band 3 will be compatible with all Rock Band and The Beatles: Rock Band peripherals, as well as most third-party instrument and microphone controllers.

For more information on Rock Band 3, art and video assets, please visit http://www.rockband.com/press.

Rock Band®, Rock Band 2®, Rock Band 3®, The Beatles™: Rock Band™ and Green Day Rock Band® are trademarks of Harmonix Music Systems, Inc

Playstation® is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

Xbox® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Wii® is a registered trademark of Nintendo of America, Inc.

#  #  #

About ION Audio

ION Audio manufactures a full line of consumer audio and musical instrument products. By leveraging its strengths in digital, analog, semiconductor and transducer technologies, the premier brand provides audio and music consumers with revolutionary product solutions. For more information, visit www.ionaudio.com; images are available at www.ionaudio.com/media.

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, News

Tagged: Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Would you spend 100′s of dollars on Rock Band instruments? originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on July 13, 2010 at 8:00 am.

Ever have a yearning for those 80′s-style arcade games, but still want to stay on the cutting edge?  Enter the iCade iPad Arcade Game Cabinet.  Invented by those clever gadgetophiles at ThinkGeek, the iCade is a handcrafted, wooden, desktop-sized gaming console that allows you to slide in your iPad, launch the free iCade app (available April 3 in the App Store) and kick it old school with your long-lost pals Donkey Kong, Q-Bert, Dig Dug and more (games available separately).  With full-sized joystick and buttons, it also includes an integrated 30-pin Apple dock connector for charging and a 10W USB power adapter for juice hookup.  $149.99.

Sorry… this was an April Fools day post….

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear, iPhone, iPad, iPod related, News

Tagged: Gaming, iPad accessory, Video Games

Old school iPad gaming with the iCade originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 5, 2010 at 8:00 am.

Motherboard has a great video interview with Ralph Baer. Who the heck is Ralph Baer you ask? He’s the father of many interactive games including some classics that gadgeteers of my generation remember fondly. Remember Pong? Simon? Yes, Ralph and his team invented them. The wonderful thing is that Ralph is still building games today!

Filed in categories: News

Tagged: Video Games

Ralph Baer – the inventor of Pong and Simon is still kicking originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 21, 2009 at 10:20 am.

The iPhone certainly is a unique gaming platform.  Combining a reasonably powerful graphics processor, a very accurate accelerometer and a built-in camera, the iPhone offers opportunities for creating games that were just not possible before.  Felwig Software’s Snap ‘n Tap is one of these games, but is it fun?

The idea behind Snap ‘n Tap is pretty simple.  Draw shapes on some white paper, take a picture and Snap ‘n Tap will treat the shapes as real objects in a simple physics-based rolling ball game.  The astonishing thing is that it works!  It not only works just as advertised, the nature of the app encourages experimentation and creativity in a way I haven’t seen with any other iPhone game.

I want to start off with the company’s official demo showing the INTENDED purpose of the game.

As you can see, the interface is very simple and the concept of hand-drawn game design works like a charm.  I spent about 30 minutes constructing ramp and labyrinth type designs and got quite good at figuring out the best shapes to ensure long Rube Goldberg style courses that could keep the ball going for quite some time.

After success with the basics, I pulled out my secret weapon – my six-year-old son.  He immediately grasped the concept and decided that what was missing was points!  His first attempt looked something like this:

We took a picture of this baby and spent a few minutes playing it until he realized that 20,000 points for the easiest goal was a bit easy.  A few other designs followed.

This one was hard to start, but by double tapping the screen at the top of the first ramp, I could get it to go just perfectly about half the time.

Ever use a hula hoop?  Get this one going and it would keep going for almost a minute after setting it down.

How could I resist?  A basic ramp that never failed to put the marble in the cup and some nice holes in the letters above to let one play around inside “THE.”

If you need to, you can change the ball size and physics in the applications settings menu:

Why stop at pen and paper?  My son really wanted to take this picture:

The real world pictures illustrated need for one of the improvements I would like to suggest to Felwig: in game contrast control.

See, the edge detection built into the application is very, very good when dealing with high contrast subjects like the pen and paper courses that were drawn earlier, but even against a white wall there were problems with using real life photos.  Changing a setting in the game allows us to see behind the scenes and view the edges that were found during image processing:

I feel that if I could change the contrast of the image, I could make this a more fun picture to work with.  Changing the contrast would help prevent the built in edge detection routine from finding edges all over a grayscale image.  Instead, the ball can essentially stay wherever it was placed because of errant lines.  Fun for posed shots but could be MORE fun.

In all my son has put several hours into this game and I’ve shown it to folks at work at least a dozen times.   It is one that will certainly be sticking around for a long time to come!

Filed in categories: iPhone, iPad, iPod related

Tagged: iPhone, Video Games

Felwig Software’s Snap ‘n Tap for iPhone review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 9, 2009 at 12:08 pm.

ThinkGeek has just posted the Pocket Retro Game Emulator on their site. This pocket sized device has a 2.8 inch screen (320×240), 4GB of internal memor and can be expanded via miniSD. The great thing is that you don’t have load emulator software to use it. Just load your favorite 8-16 bit ROMs from NES, SNES, GBA, Sega Genesis, or Neo Geo games and start playing right away. It’s only $99.99. Fun stuff

Filed in categories: Gaming Gear

Tagged: Retro, Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Carry a bazillion retro games in your pocket originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on June 3, 2009 at 4:56 pm.

I predict that the Xtensor Gamer Hand Exerciser from ThinkGeek will elicit one of two reactions. For the hardcore basement dwelling gamers it will be “Yesssssssssss!” and for the basement dwelling geeks it will be “Yessssssssssss!” Come on, who can resist this strange contraption that claims to “…perform with true biomechanical correctness, able to stimulate muscles and tendons in the hands, wrists and elbows that have been virtually off limits to all other devices.“

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Health, Spotlight Gadgets, Video Games

Spotlight Gadget – Xtensor Gamer Hand Exerciser originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 20, 2009 at 9:18 am.

I just received word of a new series on VBS.tv called Motherboard. They are featuring a 3 part piece on Richard Garriott (aka Lord British). He earned $150K on his first video game as a teenager and went on to create the Ultima video game series in the 80′s. I remember playing Ultima on my C64! These videos talk about his latest game, his mansion and his trip into space (for reals, not virtual). Check it out, fun stuff.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Gear Diary, Video Games

Lord British of Ultima Fame Then and Now originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 23, 2009 at 4:31 pm.

When I was a kid, I loved playing with an Etch-A-Sketch. The popular drawing toy has been techified (a new word I just made up) into a video game. Check out the Deluxe TV Etch A Sketch. It’s a handheld controller that plugs into your TV. You can even shake the controller to clear the image on the screen. How cool is that?  The price is crazy cheap at less than $7.

Filed in categories: Geek Toys

Tagged: Spotlight Gadgets, TV, Video Games

Spotlight Gadget – TV Etch A Sketch originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 5, 2009 at 10:28 am.